Ira Glass

At 65 years old, Ira Glass has this physical status:

After his freshman year, 19-year-old Glass looked around Baltimore for work in television, radio, and advertising without success; meanwhile, he was employed in the shock trauma unit at a medical center. After someone at the local rock station recommended that he seek out Jay Kernis at National Public Radio's headquarters in Washington, DC, he found work as an unpaid intern editing promotional announcements, before becoming the production assistant to Keith Talbot. At the end of the summer, he chose to stay with NPR and abandon medicine, a decision that disappointed his parents. When he graduated from college, they placed a sardonic ad in the classified section of their local newspaper that read, "Corporate office seeks semiotics grad for high paying position."

Glass worked at NPR for 17 years, where he eventually graduated to being a tape-cutter, before becoming a reporter and host on several NPR programs, including Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Talk of the Nation. In an interview, Glass recalled that his first show was with NPR's Joe Frank, and says the experience influenced him in a "huge way", adding: "Before I saw Joe put together a show, I had never thought about radio as a place where you could tell a certain kind of story." He has also said that editing for Noah Adams, an early host of All Things Considered, taught him how "to step back from the action and move to some bigger thought and then return to the plot", a technique that he still uses to structure This American Life. As he approached 30, he tried reporting his own stories, but said he was not good at it and that he performed poorly on air, took a long time to create a single piece, and did not have strong interviewing skills. During this time, he dated a lawyer for seven years who, according to him, made him feel terrible and did not take his work seriously or love him. He says that while she was away working in Texas, he felt his writing improved in her absence, and their relationship ended by the end of the summer.

In 1989, Glass followed his then-girlfriend, cartoonist Lynda Barry, to Chicago and settled into the Lakeview neighborhood. Although he began producing award-winning reports for NPR's All Things Considered, specifically on school reform at Taft High School and Irving Elementary School, Glass said it was a piece he did on the 75th anniversary of Oreo cookies that taught him how to write for radio. Soon, he and Gary Covino created and co-hosted a Friday-night WBEZ Chicago Public Radio program called The Wild Room, which featured eclectic content with a loose style and aired for the first time in November 1990. By this time, Barry and Glass were no longer a couple, but she initially collaborated on the project, even giving the show its title after she and Glass agreed that Covino's suggestion (The Rainbow Room) was "stupid". The first show aired in November 1990. In Glass's first professional interview (with Cara Jepsen in 1993), he said: "I like to think of it as the only show on public radio other than Car Talk that both NPR news analyst Daniel Schorr and Kurt Cobain could listen to." During this time they spent two years reporting on the Chicago Public Schools—one year at a high school, and another at an elementary school. The largest finding of their investigations was that smaller class sizes would contribute to more success in impoverished, inner-city schools.

Glass eventually tired of "free-form radio" and, looking at other opportunities, began sending grant proposals to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

In 1995, the MacArthur Foundation approached Torey Malatia, the general manager of Chicago Public Radio, with an offer of US$150,000 to produce a show featuring local Chicago writers and performance artists. Malatia approached Glass with the idea, who countered that he wanted to do a weekly program, but with a different premise, a budget of US$300,000, and a desire to make it a national show. He then took two months off without pay to work on the pilot. Glass, however, didn't include his co-host in his plans, assuring him that the deal was unlikely to happen. When the show went on without him, Covino says he felt "betrayed". He continued to produce The Wild Room alone until February 1996.

Early on, the idea was to make a show telling stories of "nobody who's famous, nothing you've ever heard of, nothing in the news". The everyday stories would be placed between works from journalists, fiction authors, or performing artists. Glass invited David Sedaris to read his essays on the program before producing Sedaris' commentaries on NPR and contributing to Sedaris's success as an independent author. The show—then called Your Radio Playhouse—first aired on November 17, 1995; the episode was titled "New Beginnings". It included interviews with talk-show host Joe Franklin and Shirley Glass—who maintained her position that her son should consider work in television because of his resemblance to Hugh Grant—as well as stories by Kevin Kelly (the founding editor of Wired) and performance artist Lawrence Steger. The show's name changed to This American Life beginning with the episode on March 21, 1996, and was syndicated nationally in June 1996 by Public Radio International after NPR passed on it.

Glass devoted himself to the effort by making the daily commute from his North Side apartment and spending 70 to 80 hours per week in the offices on the Navy Pier.

The show quickly received wide acclaim and is often credited with changing the landscape of journalistic radio in the US. It won a Peabody Award within six months of its first broadcast for excellence in broadcast media. The fictional pieces were gradually replaced with more reporting in a storytelling format, such as in the show's coverage of victims of Hurricane Katrina. Over the years, guest contributors included Dave Eggers, Sarah Vowell, Michael Chabon, Tobias Wolff, Anne Lamott and Spalding Gray. On November 17, 2005, This American Life reached its tenth anniversary and the following week, in celebration, broadcast for the first time outside of Chicago.

The television network Showtime approached the show's production team and proposed to convert This American Life into a television program; the team originally refused, as they did not want to compromise the format and make something "tacky and awful", but agreed to make the program for television after Showtime conceded to various conditions, including a format that did not resemble a news magazine. After viewing the pilot, Showtime ordered six episodes in January 2007 and the first half-hour episode aired on March 22, 2007. Glass had to move to New York for filming, and said in an interview with Patt Morrison on Southern California Public Radio that he lost 30 pounds (14 kg) over the project. The show aired for thirteen episodes over two seasons before ending in 2009 because of the heavy workload needed to produce it.

Chicago Public Media announced it would begin self-distribution of This American Life starting on July 1, 2014, through Public Radio Exchange (PRX).

By 2020, This American Life reached more than 4.7 million listeners each week. Glass can be heard in all but four episodes. In July 2013, the 500th episode premiered. For the 2013 fiscal year, the WBEZ board voted to raise Glass's salary from $170,000 annually to $278,000. However, he requested that it be lowered to $146,000 the following year, and has since asked for it be lowered again, calling the original sum "unseemly". He supplements his income with speaking engagements, which earn him "five figures per talk".

In May 2009, the This American Life radio show episode "Return to the Scene of the Crime" was broadcast live to more than 300 movie theaters.

Outside of radio, Glass has also worked as a print author. In September 1999, he collaborated on a comic book, Radio: An Illustrated Guide, with Jessica Abel. The book describes how This American Life is produced and instructs the reader into building their own radio program. In October 2007, he published the anthology The New Kings of Nonfiction.

Glass has collaborated on several feature films. In the show's contract with Warner Bros., This American Life has first pick options on any films that emerge from stories of that program. By extension, Glass goes to Warner Bros. with any movie idea he may have. In 2006, he was an executive producer of the feature film Unaccompanied Minors, which is based on the true story of what happened to This American Life contributing editor Susan Burton and her sister Betsy at an airport one day before Christmas. Burton had already produced a segment on This American Life about the same experience before the story was adapted to film. In 2007, he and Dylan Kidd wrote a screenplay based on the nonfiction book Urban Tribes about a man who must choose between his friends and his girlfriend. Glass also produced the 2018 Netflix movie Come Sunday.

Glass regularly collaborates with comedian Mike Birbiglia. In 2012, Glass co-wrote and produced Birbiglia's film Sleepwalk with Me and they both went on a country-wide promotional tour for the film to give interviews and visit theaters to introduce the film. On September 17, 2012, Glass made a special voice appearance on The Colbert Report with Stephen Colbert to promote Sleepwalk with Me and invite Colbert to participate in a This American Life episode. Glass was credited as a co-producer in Birbiglia's 2016 film Don't Think Twice, alongside Miranda Bailey and Amanda Marshall. Glass is also the producer for Birbiglia's 2018 one-man Broadway show The New One.

In 2013, Glass partnered with Monica Bill Barnes & Company to produce Three Acts, Two Dancers, One Radio Host and worked alongside Monica Bill Barnes and Anna Bass.

Glass toured Google's headquarters in November 2013 and met the Google Doodle team, who collectively agreed to collaborate with This American Life. Glass suggested that for Valentine's Day 2014 they interview "random" people about their experiences with love. Users in the American market could click on a candy heart that corresponded to each letter in "Google" and listen to a different story of unusual love in the same style as the radio program. Roger Neill composed the music, while Glass, fellow American Life producer Miki Meek, and Birbiglia conducted the interviews.

In 2019, Glass went on tour with the show Seven Things I've Learned, where he talks about the art of storytelling. The titles of the show's acts include "How to tell a story", "Save the cat", "Failure is Success", "Amuse yourself, and "It's war". Two dancers from Monica Bill Barnes & Company, whom Glass had collaborated with before, performed in the show.

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