Ira Glass divulges the big idea

Summer Roberts, a character on Fox’s television show “The OC,” isn’t a fan of Ira Glass’s… Summer Roberts, a character on Fox’s television show “The OC,” isn’t a fan of Ira Glass’s radio program.

“Isn’t that that hipster know-it-all show about how fascinating ordinary people are?” she asks Seth Cohen in one episode.

Glass, the host and producer of Public Radio International’s “This American Life,” spoke Sunday night to a sold-out crowd at Carnegie Mellon University. Sporting a suit and tie and thick, picture-frame glasses, Glass dispensed his wisdom with a dose of self-deprecation – hence the mention of his show’s fictional detractor.

“It was hilarious,” he said.

Like “The OC,” “This American Life” is a current darling of its respective medium. Once a week, 1.6 million listeners tune in to hear compelling and sometimes offbeat stories about everything from amateur spies to a family rift that began over a hunk of provolone cheese.

Distinct from other radio shows that report and comment on the latest news, Glass’s show is designed to examine the details of life that go unnoticed – and try to discern what they mean.

Glass spent much of Sunday’s lecture discussing the importance of stories that are built to keep listeners engaged. “It’s not about logic, it’s about motion,” he said, scrawling the two elements every good story must have on the giant blackboard behind him: “1. Plot. 2. Some goddamn big idea.”

Although Glass noted that the above is a time-tested formula, he said it took him years to figure out. When he finally realized it was the same method most storytellers – like his rabbi – used, he confessed, “I felt so stupid. I really thought I had built it, atom by atom.”

Glass also focused on how not to construct a story. He faulted standard news reports, even ones that appear on public radio, for being one-dimensional.

Their conventional tone often has a “tin, yucky feeling to it,” and the subject matter often isn’t any better, he said. “60 Minutes,” for example, seems to feature one new way something can kill you each episode. According to Glass, “The role of news isn’t to report [just] on what’s new, but what is.”

He must be doing something right; the average listener enjoys “This American Life” for 48 of its 60 minutes, and that figure includes people who tune in late. “You stay with us ’til the end.” If you don’t, he joked, “you’re a statistical anomaly.”

Glass began his career in 1978 as an intern at National Public Radio when he was 19-years-old. Before he started “This American Life” in 1995, he was a tape cutter, a newscast writer, an editor and a producer.

Glass offered advice garnered from his own experience to those embarking on creative careers. “It’s normal to suck for a long time,” he said. To get better, “put yourself in a situation where you have to put out a volume of work- the higher the stakes, the better.”

Despite his success, Glass insisted he was a slow learner. “I was in my mid-30s when my parents stopped telling me, ‘You know, you can still go to medical school.'”

To prove how bad he initially was, Glass played a story he did years ago for NPR about U.S. corn production’s effect on Mexican consumers. The bit ends with, “Ultimately this may result in fewer tortillas for the poor.”

After 10 years in Chicago, Glass is moving his show to New York to film six TV episodes of “This American Life.” While he was hesitant about TV at first – “[Showtime] came after us for a year and a half before we even shot the pilot” – he decided to take a risk when he realized that “seeing someone’s face when they talk from the heart” has potential to be even more effective than radio.

His own amusement about “The OC” incident aside, it’s obvious that Glass hopes most people don’t view his show as being pretentious. The bottom line, he said, is that a successful story “makes us less separate from each other.”