Ira Glass and Alex Gibney - Summer Staff Picks

by the unmatched abilities of Ira Glass. Before Everyone and their Brother had a podcast, and even before Alec, Ira Glass has been weaving incredible stories on public radio as producer and host of This American Life since. With his unmistakable voice and natural, winsome delivery, Ira Glass makes it look easy as he presents tales that can make you giggle as they break your heart, that prove the truth is indeed stranger than fiction, and that just might teach

you something along the way. Here's Alex two thousand fourteen cover station with Ira Glass. Ira Glass caused a revolution in public radio, and he is now its primary kingmaker. Glass wasn't the first to share well crafted stories about so called ordinary people, but his show This American Life connected with a younger generation of public radio listeners, and

they became fiercely loyal. Ira Glass has become so popular that the winner of this year's Halloween contest in Fort Green, Brooklyn was a dog, the small, white, fluffy type, dressed as Ira. This is a level of fame I didn't quite know existed. Is this what you bargain for? No? Has this happened to you? I've never won the Fort Queen Pupster Halloween custom event. You've got me there. I mean,

I'm I'm I'm a little jealous. Yeah, yeah, I'm not sure jealousy is exactly the right word, but it's something. It's a weird thing to have happened. Um, how do you feel about? I mean, I listened to Fred Armison do the episode with you where he's doing you, and I try to do you all the time because you fit into a category all those yours works. Yours is yours is of a style of announcer, host, journalists, broadcaster,

or whatever you want to call it. I mean, I hear so many people now on the radio who are the opposite of what I grew up with, and I think it comes down to, like, what do you think authority comes from? And back when we were kids, authority came from enunciation, precision, delivery, and a kind of gravitas

that you are bringing to the character you're playing. And I think that you know, not just me, but a whole generation of people feel like, well, that character is obviously a phony pretending to be this like cartoon, sort of like the newscaster on The Simpsons with a deep voice, having gravitas, And so I think a lot of us

just went in the other direction. And for me, I felt like, you know, any story hits you harder if the person delivering it doesn't sound like some news robot, but it sounds like a real person having the reactions a real person would have and be surprised and amazed and amused the very thing I'm talking about you were aware of when you were doing your show and conscious of,

you know. And I mean I started off at MPR when I was nineteen, at MPRE and Washington doing what First it was an intern, and then I worked on a documentary series where I learned a lot of things. By the time I was I was I was a production assistant, and all things considered does that mean I've been between college basically, go to project to come back. I went to Northwestern for two years and then switched

to Brown. Graduated from Brown in semiotics, which is a field of sort of pretentious literary theory, but actually is all about how to structure a narrative. So it's enormously practical training. And there are things that I learned in school that I use every day to this day. But anyway, then we go back and forth between college and working

at MPR. And at first when I tried to be on the radio like most people like, I tried to be the official thing, and then at some point I trained myself out of it because I thought it's not as effective. Ut yeah, yeah, exactly, And are obviously has like a tradition of people going back to the seventies who talked not like normal announcers, but like people. Susan Stanberg was the host of All Things Considered, which I

think people today might not even remember. This lady who really set a tone where she she just seemed like some Upper west Side New York lady, like leaning into the microphone mentally talking to you over the radio. Did you just say mentually the adverb mentally, you don't get it. You don't get that doesn't get that's that's that's an advert that's only on the oper But I got she was mentally leading into the microphone yes and talking like a person. So there were other people doing it. I

heard people doing it. I was just like, that's the direction I gotta go in. I mean, when I think about your show, I wonder what it's like for you editorially in terms of do you sit there and you consciously try to take out of any political point of view? I mean, the kinds of stories we're doing, I think, you know, when we take on something that's in the news, you know, what we're working for is a story with characters and scenes and emotion and and looking for a

way to to show something new that people don't know. So, for example, when we did an hour in Guantanamo, like, we didn't go into it advocating Guantanamo should be shut down or it shouldn't be shut down, you know, like we don't. We don't have an agenda that way. Like when we did an hour on it, we did an hour because it had been a couple of years into Guantanamo existing, and we read that I can't remember the number of people, the number of detainees, like a couple

of hundred detainees had been released. We had discovered, like you know, the US did determined like you guys aren't enemy combatants. You guys, you know, go back to Pakistan or wherever. And we had noticed that nobody in America interviewed them just to ask like the normal things, you know that like you want to know, like how were you treated? Do you want to kill us? All on? And then so like you go into that, like you the question of like what our stand politically on Guantanamo is.

It doesn't know. I appreciate that, but I'm warning to people sometimes view you as being liberal. Of course they do because we're because our public radio, which is seen as liberal. Though though when you look at the studies of like what actually gets covered on the news programs in the way it's covered, I feel like the numbers bear out the fact that it is not more liberal

than other news sources. That said, there's a tone in the way certain things are covered that conservatives here, and from talking to conservatives, like I know like that, I think that's a real thing. Um, I think at one point there was a show that we did on one of the elections, and it was about how people voted

them why they voted the way they voted. And I had a long series of discussions with these people who are like swing voters, because I was fascinated with it, Like, Alec, you just think about like an election of like Carry versus Bush, and you're coming down to like the last three weeks before the election. Who are the people who haven't decided? Like how can you like like whatever you say, like those are two very different Yeah, Like what do you have to know? Like you know them both really well?

Like what exactly? Especially people who are following the news, like like what is there to wonder about at that point? And I think in that show I came out and said, look, I'm a Democrat, just said to the audience, because I

felt like there was a point in the discussion. In my interviews people were identifying as Republican or Democrats, and I felt like, why pretend anything but this like usually about democratic that said, like many Democrats, I find them to be the most annoying party and so not representing what I believe on so many issues, and so lacking in so many ways, and so not doing what I would have them do. So even saying that I usually about democrat, I feel it doesn't even get near what

my actual politics are. But if I have to pick, I make that choice reluctantly. It's the same thing as like we've done so many stories about God. At some point I've went on the air and said, like, look, I don't believe in God. Like, I'm just going to put that out in front, So take everything you're about to hear with the grain of salt that you should. Right,

it's just truth and packaging. And I think that it's different for me as somebody who's on once a week, you know, doing a documentary show that's coming like a bunch of different stuff. It's different for me than it is for like the hosts of All Things Considered, or Brian Williams or you know what I mean. Like, it's just my role is different, and so I think I have that freedom. When did you realize you don't believe in God? How old were you a teenager? Did you

grow up in a religious household? Up? It's weird. My parents, we were Jews in the suburbs. So I went to I went to Hebrew School and then went to the high school version of that, Like I continued past my environmentsvah, and at some point I realized I didn't It just didn't add up from it, like you know, you're in

love or you're not in love. Like it's just like there's another explanation for everything around me, which makes more sense than there's a big dad who created this all you know, and just you know, universe have been here. There was like some sort of something happened, Yeah, something

like you know, people climbed up on the shores of Yeah. Actually, when I was thirteen and fourteen, Like one of the things that was a huge influence on me was you remember remember these books Eric van Daniken was the author Chariots of the Gods. Oh my God, I love this, And I remember being in Hebrew College, bottom of Hebrew

College and arguing with the teachers. They are these old rabbis about like, but this passage in like Exodus or Genesis, wouldn't this be better explained by these paintings on the ground, you know, like that we were actually visited by the whole theory of a For people who don't know what this is. It was like this series of books and there was TV specials and stuff that if you actually looked at it, it seems like what they're trying to tell us is people visited us from outer space and

that's that's what they witnessed. Scientology really is closer to what we've been exactly. Scientology has a good point on to it. I remember arguing that in Hebrew College with my professors there, and they were not They did not buy it. Are you an atheist? No, I believe. I don't know what I believe in terms of the specific. I had a Catholic priest once say to me, listen,

I believe in a piece of many religions. The Jews have something to say, and the Muslims have something to say, and the Buddhists have something to say, the Hindus have something to say. He says. Sometimes I think I'm a Catholic because they just own the nicest real estate and have the nicest places to hang out in. And I mean, this is a priest that said that to me. He says, you know, and I'm I believe in a god. I

believe in. I mean, I believe something had to be responsible for this, and I also believe, oddly enough, as a result of some stories I've heard on your show, you know, you know, life itself and stories that come to me make me believe there must be some God behind this is my belief on a fact. Obviously, my atheist message is not coming through the Subliminally you fail, failing hard for one thing. You fail exactly. Are there some shows? Having said that, I have to say, like

we do a lot of shows and religion. We do a lot of shows on faith because I think it's it's not covered very well, like if it's it's a sort of an area of opportunity if you're if you're a reporter or documentary producer, like in America, it's one thing that's actually the media do is a terrible job with and it's gotten better over the last fifteen years, but still like not so great of covering people of faith and covering them in terms that are that actually

document people's relationship with their faith, like generally in the media. Like there's a whole phase of our show where where this was like a big thing we were doing a lot of because my feeling like looking at the way people who were religious were covered, there would be these cartoon characters, right like there you know, you see them like these right wing inflexible like Doctrineaire and their beliefs.

And when I compared that to the actual Christians who were in my life, they were super thoughtful and way more compassionate and way more just just the way they lived their religion was so radically different, even though they were very devout, radically different from what I was seeing. I was like, we need to document this because this

is a whole territory of stuff. And so we did a whole set of stuff where I went out with kids on their mission trip and we did this thing about this minister named Carlton Pearson, and just we did a lot of stuff because it seemed like an uncovered territory and obviously like doing that without and he I wasn't trying to bring anybody over to my side. That would be boring. I wasn't interested. And I had a friend of mine who was an actor who I worked

with once. He was very devout, very observant jew me and his wife, and I once said to him what does it mean to you? And like, what what is Judaism to you? And he said to me, it's the study of how we as human beings distinguished ourselves from the animals. And when he said that it has leveled me. I'll take that. I take all these little pieces and I say to myself, my dad died and I just had this such an incredible emotional connection to my father.

The President of the United States were shot in nineteen sixty three. Their energy was such a force in my life, in the in the world at large. Where did they go? Does that energy that is the human soul and the human essence just dissipate? And is it, you know, like the light switch, like when you think when you die, it just over. It's over. And I do think that,

though I'm always given pause by this. A Billy Collins poem called it the Afterlife, where the thesis of the poem is that each one of us goes to the afterlife that he believes in. And I'm always scared of like, oh no, if I believe that that's what I'm going to get. It's funny I thought the same thing. Someone said to me, what do you think is the afterlife? And do you believe in that idea? Maybe they based

it off this poem. They said that when you die, it's as soul in your imagination, and they said, what do you think happen in the afterlife? I said, mine's pretty mundane, mine's pretty sad. He said why. I said, when you go into a room and it's a screening room and God is there. We sit down and it gets you some iced tea and of a sandwich, and

he's like, so, what do you want to know? And you look at me and you know where he knows he's got and you're like, you know, He's like, okay, Larry roll the film and they showed me what really happened in Kennedy's assassination. I want them to start to tell me the truth. One can you also in that version of it, be like okay, So on this date in the year, my wife and I got into an argument. I swear she said this, and then I said this,

and then she said this. She swears mine is very cinematic, and I say, they say, okay, show me the movie. Who was the girl that really loved me the most? Rolling see, you get your answers, you find out, you get your answers. You want your answers, You want your answers. What a shame you don't get to do anything with that information. You know, like as a film, Like if this were to be a film, the thing you're describing it needs a third act. Observing that my Afterlife of

Fantasy requires a third act comes instinctively to Ira. He can't help but think about a conversation as if he's the editor, marking these structural strengths and weaknesses of each anecdote. More of my conversation with Ira Glass coming up. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. In January of two thousand twelve, This American Life Friend excerpts of performer Mike Daisy solo show The Agony and

the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. The episode featured segments from Daisy's Peace, in which he visited a factory in China that made iPhones. Two months after Daisy's Peace aired, a reporter discovered discrepancies in his story. Mike Daisy had made things up. This American Life retracted the story, and Ira and his team had to ask themselves, how did this happen?

We were pretty good fact checkers, I thought before Mcdaisy and and uh, you know, I worked at MPR News and we were at the level whether we were at an MPR News wake. We looked into it as well as we could. We talked to over a dozen people who had either been those factories or human rights groups that monitored those factories, and you know, people confirmed everything that he said in the story as things that really

happened in these plants, with one exception. He said that he met a fifteen year old going into work at a factory making apple products, and all the human rights workers everybody we talked to said like, actually apples like super great about that, and like would be very hard for a subcontractor to have underage workers, and has been a leader in this so if that happened, it was a fluke. And in the original show we did with him, I confronted with that and he's like, oh, yeah, I

don't know what to tell you. Anyone to know, show me a picture of the person, which isn't really telling, but he said, you know they you know, they gave me proof, and we sort of put it all of that out there. Did that make you angry? Well, then we found out like the one thing that we didn't do is we didn't talk to his translator, and he said, look, I got this phone number, but when I call it

it doesn't you know. It's some lady in China I met at the hotel and like, and so we you know, we we we gave up, you know, we didn't do that, which at that point we should not have put the thing on the radio. After we broadcast, another reporter found that translator and she said basically, she was with him his whole time, and all these things that he says happened did not happen. And so did that make you angry?

People trust you, they admire you, and no one, no one falls you for that obviously, And I don't know, you're not gonna say this. This is me say this. Mike Daisy may be gifted, but he's full of shit. But the thing is, when that happened, did that piss you off? Did that make you angry? I wish him, I mean maybe at some level. Like honestly, like my first reaction was not being mad at him. Um is an atheist thing. No, yeah, we've just given up on life,

alec no um. I mean, I mean honestly, like the main thing I thought is like I just wondered if we were all going to keep our jobs, you know what I mean? Like I really wondered, like, is this it is the radio show over? Like that was the main thing. I thought, I don't know, I just I just it was a mix of things. Mad was in there somewhere about definitely was not the biggest part. Other people in my staff were definitely like, way matter at

him and we're mad. But I had worked with him so closely and adapting the thing for the radio I felt very close to him actually, and I just felt like, like, like, your friend did something. I mean, what you know, I just made him do you had a bit of a relationship. With that relation, I said like, oh no, like what have you done? And that was a way bigger part of it. But but you were asking like they have things changed around the radio show since then? And the

answer is is yes. And now, in addition to doing like all the stuff we did back when I worked on Morning Edition and all things considered to like, see the stories are true, we have professional fact checkers like the New York or something, and so every script has gone through by fact checkers who we hire, and they go back to all the sources in the story and they go back to everything and it's just like it's a huge it's a lot of work, but I have to say it's been glad Way, it's been awesome. What

does Ira Glass do in his private time? I mean when you're not working, when you have downtime, When I have downtime. Honestly, I don't have a huge amount of downtime like usually on the sliver of it you have, Um, I walk my dog, try to spend a little time with my wife. What She helps run a website for teenage girls with Tommy Givenson. This now, I think she just turned eighteen year old girl who's starting on Broadway,

but has this website called Rookie mag dot com. And basically Tavy decided that there should when she was fifteen years old and in high school. She thought, as a teenage girl, there was all this culture being marketed to her, and none of it accurately sort of described the world that she saw it or seemed to capture the things that were most interesting to her. And so she decided she would make that herself and organized kind of an army of young women to do it. It's three posts

a day. It's really funny writing and just like it's it's wonderful. And so my wife helps her, helps her. I find it incredible that even with the slightest prompting, you can give me the bio or the story. You can tell everyone's story about your own. You can tell everyone can tell my story. You only gave us the dog walking, and you said, and I love that. I spent time with my wife. What other what do you watch news? Do you watch TV to like films? Music?

I mean, honestly, like, I have seen so little of anything in the last probably a year, just because um, we have the radio show we started the second show.

I've been touring with a dance show all over the country and so on the weekends and either going and making a speech to earn enough money to live in New York City because I still work at a public radio salary and live in New York City, or I go out with this dance show where I tour with this professional dance troupe where I tell stories and they dance in this way. Whose idea was that? That was me and the choreographer. It was the choreographer of the

dance company. We were trying to figure out a way to work together. She's like, well, let's do a thing where we combine our things, and I was like, yes, you're the speaking. Yes, you must be dancing very fast choreography sometimes sometimes yeah, must be flying through the air. As a matter of fact. Yes, when you say trying to make a living on a public radio salary, I mean you you could pay yourself. I'm not saying this to embarrass you, but you could pay yourself X and

you don't you fold it all back into the show, correct? Yes, I mean you decided to do that because I go on the radio and ask people for money, and I thought that it's unseemly to be making a crazy amount of money. If you had more time, what would you do? I think I would just consume more culture. I would I would go to more movies and read more. Like I still have never seen, you know, half the TV shows that I hear about, and I know that I'll like, but I haven't seen like in a few months ago.

I watched all of Game of Thrones at some point, you know, a year ago. Yeah. I liked it a lot. Yeah. And are you saying that in the tone of like, no, you did not like it? No, no, no, no, no, I never cast any judgment or what people like it entertainment? Yeah, no, And I watched all of Louis, you know, like I hadn't caught up on the light. I can watch old episodes of the match game on the Game show Network. I mean that's where that's my comfort zone when I

was a kid growing up. Love it. But anyway, so so no, I do no watching of anything. Like basically I'm working. I'll see a friend maybe for food, see my wife walk the dog, and then that's that's it. It's midnight, and then I'll go to the gym. It's not so super glam and if I had more time, I would just basically, you're working, consume more culture. I feel like, if anything, it's it's a problem the way I'm doing this because I'm not consuming enough. Do you

think it's gonna last forever? I don't know. I don't have another plan besides this like this. I like this so like I like making stuff. I like editing, I like writeing to share in people. Yeah, I like like people love the show and and it's secure, like it just feels like, oh my god, it's it's there are enough people who like it that it's a totally solid business. And then also it does well enough that we can experiment.

I put on a movie with Mike Barbiglia, you know, a couple of years ago, and we can um, you know, and we do these events where we do them on stage and beam them into movie theaters around the country.

And we did a show at BAM where we had you know, somebody wrote a musical for it and opera and all this stuff built out of real stories about journalism turned into like a Broadway musical with real Broadway you know, performers, you know, and so like it's big enough that we can kind of do anything we want with that, and that's just you know, it's just lovely, Like I don't know what else the person could want.

Do people when when you do the show, do people only the people in the house they pitched the ideas, or do people outside pitch you ideas? Oh my goodness. Yeah. I mean there was a period where I mean people right into our website and there's a place, you know, where you can pitch a story, and then there's a person or two on staff who go through that looking for the stories that might work. And there are faces where there's something on the show every week or every

other week from that list. Like it's not unusual that people will pitch us and those stories will end up on the show. So yeah, I mean the opening of the show that we did at BAM was the story of this girl woman who accidentally locked herself into a closet. She was an opera singer, but she makes her living partly reading books on tape. And she was in a hotel room and she's like, I got to record this book on tape on a deadline. So she goes into the closet and puts you know, like pillows all around

to like cushion the sound. And her computer is sitting in the hotel room and she pulls the microphone because the computer out of worrying sound, and she pulls the microphone into the closet, closes the door. She starts to record, and then she I messed that up and she's going to go out and started over again. Let's started to file and she goes to open the door, and the doors locked, like there's something wrong with the mechanics. You can't get out of the closet, But the thing is

still recording. You hear her all the steps she goes through and trying to get out of this closet, including yelling to people down the hall, some German tourists go by, and so that was just somebody she wrote us, you know, like that that's the opening of the show. That that she told us that story. And at some point in the interview I was like, okay, so if you you're an opera singer, if you were to stage this as

an opera, what would it be? And She's like, I think it would be a minimalist opera, like you know, just this repetitive music. And I was just saying help, help, help, over and over, and I was like, you know, I have the hook up for that. My cousin is Philip Glass. So we had him right. We commissioned that as an opera that we performed on stage at the brook On Academy of Music. Alright, gofred. Ira Glass has a natural

talent for creating compelling radio. I wanted to follow up with him and find out why is his show so successful? We have him? You have me, Hello, I have you? Send it way? Weren't errantic than I met? You have me? Um Hi, this is Ira Glass Glass, They're life. I can't do it. I can't do it. I can't do it because I can't do it. When you try because to do it, it's like it's like a state of mind.

You know, it's like a state of plan but you But you know what's funny is you are someone when I made that comment to you about the announcer thing and people who are front type of radio broadcaster, but you are someone who does not have uh. You know, you've got a good delivery, and you're a great radio broadcaster and everything and the speed of it and the

velocity of it is obviously a signature of yours. But what kills me is your mastery of what you say, Like do you go back sometimes you have to record it again and again, or do you just zip through that thing like you're just shooting down a a louse ride. I wish I could. I wish I could do that. When we record my parts of the show, I'll do more than one take, for sure, but not a lot of takes. No too. Can I say it took me a long time to learn how to perform on the radio,

Like I was so bad at the beginning. I was awful. Like sometimes I play for students, how I sounded not in my first year of my second year, but in year seven, and I could play for you on your podcast if you want to in your show like like I'm awful, like I had not mastered it. I had to consciously set it as a project for myself. I'm going to try to perform on the air of the way I talk. We would you so you wanted to stop doing what I sounded like somebody imitating an MPR

reporter but failing. So again, this is not your one year, two year, three year, four year, five year, six This is years since you last week? Yeah, exactly, this is last weekend. Right. It's not such a long way from the local grocery store to the international debate over whether sorghum and meat production are causing corn to decline in Latin America. Okay, first of all, that makes no sense,

but let's keep going. It's a general air of prosperity here, partly thanks to Mexican imports of US grains, which helped boost our farm economy. I just want to say, if you're going to be an announcer, just don't emphasize every other word random. But what kills me is you are doing exactly what like you know cent of all the NPR radio host too, is hitting that you know, one of the things we realize about the downturn in the stock market today is the revel of the bit and

they're doing exactly what you're doing. It's before I understood that to sound okay on the radio, you should just talk like a person, talks like a human being, talks like you're playing a character, and the character as a human being. Mexico is now one of our biggest grain customers, playing a half billion to a billion dollars worth every year, including corn defeat its people and sorghum defeat its livestock. This helps cut our own trade deficit and benefits everyone

in the US economy. But in Mexico this policy has led to fewer tortillas for the poor and on appetizing tortillas for everyone else. I would just note also that but this makes no sense at all. Like the writing is awful. It's not just that the performance is awful, like literally, like you can't tell what the story is. It's a style. I mean that was you, you were working it out. I mean, it is funny. You do make Kai Wisdal sound like Lenny Bruce. But it's incredible.

I mean, I think there must be an acting version of this because I think when people become reporters, they want to sound like the real deal, you know what I mean, And so you want to sound I wanted to sound like a reporter, and so this is what I thought the equivalent in in in the businesses. I was did a TV show years ago, and in the show there was a woman who was the matriarch of a town and I had the scene with her where I'm kind of shaming her, like well, you know, how

could you do this and turn your back? And we did take one and I was like, you know, how could you do this? And like the tears are rolling down my face. Take two, and finally like take through. The director goes, what are you doing? And I'm sorry, goes, what do you what? Why are you charging it with so much emotional Like you're playing the whole episode in the swan scene, You're putting every beat of the entire He's like, well, you don't got to calm down. We're

gonna get there. When you're a young actor, you emote and you kind of imbue things with that unnecessarily and inappropriately just to do it. You think that's that you do too much? I think that's acting. It's in interviewed Billy Collins, who was the poet laureate who's writing I really love and so idiosyncratic, like he so sounds like himself. And I asked him, like, did you always write like this? He's like, no, At first I wrote like I thought it was a beat poet, you know, like, and I

tried to write like that. I think it's common that people try to do like the official deal that they think it is before they realized like, no, I'm gonna do a version of me in this is the show

reflective of who you are. I mean, this show reflects my taste, but also I have to say the taste of my coworkers, you know, like it's not just mine at this point, like it's something that we all share, and I happened to be the frontman, which in that way it's different than than it was from the beginning, Like I am the frontman for this thing that we make together. Like somebody who's in a band that's been playing for a long time. What tips do you have

for people that are interviewers? Oh? Wow, um, what tips do you have from me? Quite frankly, I think, I mean I've I've heard tons of your shows, and I really like your show. I think you're a very skilled interviewer. Um. And one of the things that you do an interview as a party, and you're the host of the party, and the interviewee will do what you do, what you model is what they do too. Like it's just human nature. And so if you tell a lot of funny stories,

they will tell you funny stories back. And if you tell personal stories, they'll tell personal stories back. And I feel like there was a phase in your show where for whatever reason, you had on a series of people and it was like her Balbert and uh, I don't get a predict to have it was like this, but her Baber was definitely like this, where people who went through their lives and we're hugely successful and then had their hearts broken or had failed and then had to

call their way back. Where in those interviews you talked about yourself in this way that made them talk about themselves more. It's not exactly an interviewing trick, but in interviews, you know, I will talk about myself with the interviewees because I know that if I talk about myself in a way that's real. First of all, they feel safer because I'm also talking about myself, and we'll open up more and then they talk about themselves, and so it's

like a fair swath. And the other thing I try to do is like with Outbert is a perfect example of the first question I asked myself as what are they used to? Herb Albert and his partner Jerry Moss sold A and M records for like hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars back then. And this is a guy that had artistic success as a musician. He was

very admired as an instrumentalist. He had as many hits as like the Beatles, and then and then he has his career as a record producer with all these legendary acts. And then they walk in the room and so many people in the room might go, I don't know who that is, but you have to sit there and go, this person was big time once they were big, you know, and you got to treat them like they're big. Oh,

that's so interesting at one time. You have to treat them with the respect that they once commanded the phrase I always uses what are they used to? And I give it that is so interesting. I never interview anybody that famous like I don't interview anybody who's big. I sort of took myself out of that game because it made me so nervous. And also I think that that's a different kind of interview then I'm especially good at.

Like I feel like interviewing somebody who's famous, you're constantly battling against the fact that they've been interviewed so many times and had to tell their stories so many times, and so you constantly are having to struggle for an angle in on them that will seem alive to them and and no knock against them, Like it's hard to be interviewed over and over and over about your own life and how many stories do any of us have, and how many anecdotes do we have? They're even worth

telling other people, especially a group of strangers. And then the thing that I think Terry Gross does really beautifully, and the thing that I hear you do, is like it's almost like an empathetic act of like, like what is the world to them? And how am I going to angle something in that will get them to say something.

I remember one of my favorite questions I ever heard Terry Gross ask she she she was interviewing Ricky Jay, you know that's right, the magician and um and sort of scholar of magic but also an incredible card magician and m and super smart on Jesus anyway, So so

she's interviewing him, and yeah, she says to him. At some point in the interview of this thing which requires like so going inside his head, she says to him, Um, sometimes, are there ever any magic tricks that you do where the thing that we don't see, that you know is happening, is actually more interesting than the thing that we see. And he totally got excited. He's like, yes, yes, absolutely, And she says, well, can you tell me about that?

And he's like, oh, no, of course you child. Yeah, but for even get to that question means so imagining her way into his life. And I feel like when interviewing goes well, like somebody's just has good taste about doing that, you know, Ira a Glass. Having worked in the documentary genre for many years, I've never seen a filmmaker with the reach and prolific output of director and

producer Alex Gidney. I've encountered many friends with an interesting, dark idea that needs to be made only to realize well, Alex Gibney is already making that documentary, called the most Important documentary of our Time by Esquire Magazine. The Oscar Emmy and Peabody winning Gibney directed the film's Enron, The Smartest Guys in the Room, Taxi to the Dark Side,

and Going Clear, among many many others. His films wrestled with tales of power and corruption, cults and corporate greed, in the public interest and in search of the truth. He's not afraid to ask the hard questions and help shed light on the most complex topics of our time in a way that truly no one else can. Here's Alex conversation with Alex Gibney from two thousand twenty one.

Gibney's most recent film, The Crime of the Century, which he wrote, directed, produced, and narrated for HBO, tells the origin story at the heart of the opioid crisis poisoning our nation. Big Farmas celebrated its marketing muscle, using parties to lure doctors to write scripts. This was a new drug cartel. They were drug dealers wearing suits and lab coats. Basically, here's some money, write scripts. Yes, I'm looking at this

and I'm gone. Clearly, we're breaking the Law Up. Alex Gibney has made more than thirty films in the last twenty years. In two thousand and eight, he won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for Taxi to the Dark Side, his film on the CIA's use of torture. Whether he's taking on scientology or Russian interference in our elections, or iconic figures like Steve Jobs, Lance Armstrong and Frank Sinatra,

Gibney never flinches and his stories stand up. In fact, he can't think of a time when he wanted to reissue one of his docks to make a correction. I can't think of a time when it did happen. And I think about that a lot, because I try to find a moment in time where it feels like we're absolutely right. And sometimes, you know, I'm afraid that things may come out that would cause me to want to redo it. But I I sort of feel like the films represent a certain wisdom at a moment in time,

and it's it's best to leave them. I am kind of following up in a film I did and doing another film to kind of dig a little bit deeper. The film I did, A Taxi to the dark Side. I'm doing a kind of follow up to it, but I've never been motivated to really go back in it's it seems like such a painful process. But I usually do think about, like, if I'm going to end this film here, why are we ending it here? And will it stand the test of time? When the film is over?

Do you ever privately follow up about certain aspects of it? Does you're caring? Does your curiosity? Does your concern end when the film is distributed? No, the ghosts of all my films tend to follow me, and I often keep in touch with sources and interview subjects, and in odd ways, they keep coming back two films I make henceforth, so they kind of reverberate. It's it's a little bit like that moment in in Ghostbusters where they say don't cross

the streams. Well, my streams are constantly getting crossed. It seems like characters from one film are intruding into another. They all stay with me, which becomes a little bit vexing. Sometimes it's hard to keep them straight. In your career, your fabulous career, You've made thirty films or so in the last twenty years. One an Oscar but of course documentary films have become content for streamers and major major broadcasters.

What are your observations about that change during your career, Alma, Was it like in the beginning, Well, in the beginning it was terrible. My wife used to tell me, I want you to go out and get a job, and whatever you do, don't mention that you're interested in documentaries, because they'll kick you right out the door. So I

had to be very cautious. And then there was that terrible era of cable television where every channel had to be branded, which meant if you were clicking through chan nals, as soon as you got to a channel, it had to look like it was the History Channel or whatever, and which meant that as a creator, you were just

cranking out sausages. It was the worst possible thing. But then I discovered, particularly for political documentaries, there was a moment where theatrical films could say things that we're pretty potent so long as you made them entertaining. And that was a huge revelation which changed everything. And because suddenly you weren't operating in a commercial environment where it was the least common denominator and basically we were trying to

sell audiences to advertisers. People were buying the content, that is to say, they go to a movie because they wanted to see the movie, not because they wanted to buy soap. So that was great, and I think that's what helped to explode the moment that we're in now.

My only concern about streaming environment is the extent to which some of the streamers begin to start relying too much on their algorithms so that they come to you and say, well, our algorithms says that a you know, minute thirty two, you should really be changing the narrative to this so that we'll keep our viewers. We're hearing

a little bit of that, and that to be a nightmarish. Now, when you talk about your company and you talk about what you're producing and not producing, and I want you to explain, what's the difference between an executive producer and a producer. There's a couple of different types of producers. How do you function as a producer in your company's work.

On the projects where I'm named as a producer or an executive producer, I generally have a creative role and sometimes it has to do with raising the money but often it has to do with having some say or guidance in terms of the overall creative direction. Though you know, we try very hard to empower our directors to do

films the way they want to do them. But sometimes on a series in particular, where you're coalescing around something like I did a series for Netflix for a couple of years called Dirty Money, which I was very proud of. It's all about corporate malfeasance, and you know, we purposefully engaged directors to do things their own way. That said. You know, it came out of my experience on en Ron, which was one where you invest in the wild criminality of the purpose and it's a kind of colorful, kind

of heist like vibe that you engage in. So as executive producer, I'm trying to encourage the directors to lean into that kind of thing without being overbearing about it. So sometimes I'm the beard and sometimes, uh, sometimes I come come out a little stronger than that. You now have what like a hundred or a hundred and twenty people working at Jigsaw, So the company itself, that is

to say, permanent employees, as fairly small. It's like fourteen or fifteen people, but at times we can have as many as two hundred people working in the in the space on various projects. So that's where things get pretty daunting.

Are you ever sitting in your office screaming into a cushion or you're gonna cry and you're telling your staff please don't bring me any more projects to do, because there's the fear you're gonna become the Jeff Coon's of documentary filmmaking, where like you're running from room to room and going, yes, no, change this brightenness. Yeah. Yeah, well I really try. I mean, that would be the stereotype. And I do scream into my pillow, but usually not

because of that. I mean, if if I can get projects made, great, But I purposely tell you know, the other executives at the company, there are many projects here I don't want to be involved in, not because they're bad projects, but because it's important that they run themselves, because otherwise I get spread too thin, and who needs that. Then it becomes a kind of proxy system. The whole idea is to create a company that will run of

itself and last long after I've left the field. Now you have a great volume of work where you are developing material, making films and series and so forth limited series with some great, great writers. So great, I mean, just keep you alone and Larry Right, who I worship because you worked with Larry before and Going Clear, Going Clear in My Trip to al Qaeda, and and also obviously Looming Tower. So what was your first connection with Right? Somehow?

We were put together on My Trip to Al Qaida, which was a play that he had done about a one man play that he started about the writing of the Looming Tower. And we got together on that and I did a doc about it. It's part half of it or a lot of it is the play itself, and then we cut in and out of the play to do various documentary thing and we got on really well, and so then we were determined to do other stuff together.

You know, I have a kind of a shorthand I think with writers because my dad was a journalist, and that's the business I was supposed to go into. It was around me all my life. So in my films, while I make them consciously as films, they also they have what I would call journalistic baggage. That is to say, I'm really invested in in a journalistic aspect of them

that tries to get the facts right. But with somebody like Larry Right, it's a similar process in terms of the storytelling aspect of it, you know, at greater length and the New Yorker pieces or in his books which often come out of his New Yorker pieces. There is at once a kind of fact finding discipline and also a storytelling discipline where you're trying to engage an audience to come along this journey with you, and part of that is investing in the propulsion of the narrative, which

is I mean, that's storytelling, right. So Larry and I got on really well because he's always talking about stuff like that and and devices that he uses in his writing and and so ongoing clear that was maybe the biggest collaboration we had in terms of impact. The Looming Tower was also you know, had pretty broad reach. When you do a Crime of the Century, when you do with something with HBO, the budgets pretty high, correct it is,

relatively speaking. Relatively speaking, though, and on this one it it got a lot higher than the original budget because our original deal with HBO said we were going to do a two hour film, and then when we showed them the material. They said, well, this is clearly, you know, going over the bounds of the two hours. We've got much more material than that, and they let us expand it to a four hour And in the case of Crime of the Century, I mean to be honest with you,

we actually started out working with the Washington Post. There were some journalists there, Scott Higham and Lenny Bernstein and others who had first made me kind of aware of the breadth of this story. And along the way, you know, I decided they had were focusing mostly post Sackler, and I decided I really needed and wanted to tell the sacular part of the story to get the breadth of it.

And that's what led me to Patrick, And in fact Patrick and I ended up teaming up on not only this but also a scripted version of the Sackler story called pain Killer, which is going to start shooting later this fall. When you're working on the Sacler story as well as perhaps other stories, is there ever a fear of litigation? I mean talk about a deep pockets opponent ofview wound up getting litigated. Were you were afraid that

they would sue you? Yes, And that's why the reporting has to be really good, and I give a lot of credit to HBO for being really rigorous about that. But once you have the facts right, being very brave. I mean I learned that on Going Clear. You know, there were a lot of lawyers attached to that film, but we were very good about getting our facts right. And it's not only the stuff that's in but the

reporting that surrounds it. That's what gives you the foundation to put some of the stuff you put in the film. And so with Patrick, because we were working in different media, we were able to share things that we might not otherwise have shared. If he was, say another filmmaker, and he would give me some documents, I would give him some documents. And also we could geek out with each other.

I mean, when you're deep into a project like this, very few people, particularly significant others, want to hear from you about the arcana of the opioid crisis. You know, it's like, okay, Han, that's enough. You know, we got your what's wrong? And like, look at the molecular structure of this active ingredient. Look at this molecule. Have you ever seen a molecule? Now, But when you're doing these projects, you talked about all the lawyers attached to going clear.

We were talking before about how the early days for you because you work so much in unearthing truth and facts, and there's a journalistic stripe to what you do that you've got a staff of people doing research and maybe you have a part time lawyer. I'm kind of joking here, and now your company, the difference is you've got a lot more people on the payroll doing research. You have ten lawyers on the payroll, you know, I mean, like, do you need more of everything to get the facts clear?

You know, we don't operate the company that way. And and actually, while we started to veer in that direction, I think we're going back to baseline to be a

little bit more entrepreneurial. What we do is try to set it up more as units, you know, try to function not as a machine or a factory, but more like a studio where each film or series has its own people and and it's a small but dedicated group, and attached to them are are sometimes lawyers we've freakingly work with, and sometimes journalists we frequently work with, but they're attached to that particular project, so each one is bespoke it's has its own d n A, and that

that tends to work out better because sometimes these things take a long time, like Crime of the Century took close to three years to do. With a small group that really gets intensively into the subject, that's what allows it to happen, rather than a kind of big machine which attempts to crank these things out. They can't be cranked out because the rhythm of them sometimes depends on when you get documents or when you get people to

talk at the pace of their own. But I'm even talking about the creative DNA or biology of the project to project. I'm just talking about resources in terms of when you're first starting out, you might not have everything you need, and as you become this phenomenally successful filmmaker, one thing it affords you to do is to have more people come on and do more research and deepen your research, and have more legal help to protect you. You know, I was in Sundance. I saw you there.

I went to the screening and uh, I'm in that rarefied position where I'm friends with Tom. I mean, he's he's a friend in terms of my career. You know, we don't see each other for long periods of time where we pick up where we left off. He had me come into a couple of smaller parts and two am I movies and so forth. And I've often speculated, and I even wrote in my memoir, so I thought, what was it? What did he need this involvement in this organization and this uh in this faith or whatever

you want to call it. What did he need it for? I wasn't quite sure what its purpose was. You know, he has everything, you know, wealth and fame and legacy and the respect of the community. He has everything you could possibly imagine in a career as as as a movie star. So what did this add to his life? And I I speculated about that in my book. I

came up with an answer. But when you were doing Going Clear, the scientology community, which is diverse, I mean the different people is not all just Tom incorporated maybe, but all those people have been able to in some way chew away any real close examination. And when I watched your movie, I was mildly taken aback by how deep you got. Your film was among the first people from a major filmmaker to say that the the institution is guilty of certain abuses. I mean they abuse people.

Their attitude to me was always like, hey man, we're not hurting anybody. You know, we manipulate people no more or no less than U S military recruitment companies, do you know. I mean, we have a certain kind of thing we do to get people to want to join and sign up with us, But no one's being abused or hurt. And you and what was the genesis of that movie? Why did you decide you wanted to go

further and look into that even further. You know what's interesting about that is that I had been offered to do that movie any number of times, and I had always turned it down because I always felt it was too fringed. There weren't that many scientologists in the world as opposed to say, the Roman Catholic Church. I did. I did a film about the church, and coincidentally or not,

two weeks after it premiered, the Pope resigned. So, um, you know, I was familiar with deep seated religious organizations and also you know the pushback you can get. But in the case of Going Clear, it was Larry who convinced me. Larry Wright who convinced me to take it on. There's a phrase in his you know, subhead of his book is the Prison of Belief, And that idea was really interesting to me because then it was a deep

dive into scientology and indeed the abuses of scientology. I mean that that's the reason to be concerned, is that the prison of belief leads to real human rights abuses.

But the other reason I was interested in it is because people like to demonize scientologists as crazies, and the prison of Belief allowed me to put scientologists in a mainstream tradition of how people invest or get lost in a prison of belief, whether it be religious belief or political belief, and can get out even though the bars of the cell are open. So that's what really motivated me to get there. And then as we dug in, we took testimony and checked facts and found out stuff

that other people hadn't found out before. And and I actually had a pretty big impact on the scientology community itself. There are a lot of people who either left the church or who as ex members of Scientology, suddenly felt empowered to speak up in a way that they hadn't been able to do so before because because Scientology using its threat of litigation, because they had launched the maybe the most expensive lawsuit ever against the media company when

they went after Time Warner. You know, people were afraid, and HBO was incredibly impressive in terms of its ability to back us up once we convinced them that we had the goods. What was the first time you picked up a camera as a child? Were interested in filmmaking as a child. We're a huge filmgoer. I was into it as a kid, and I was always into cinema.

But the thing that I think really changed me or turned me around, were these great film societies at Yale, and there was there was always an interesting film on every night. You know, this is pre video, so you you go to these film societies and sit and watch and and at the time, documentaries and fiction films were distinctions, weren't made. It wasn't like one was up and one was down. They were all interesting. And I can remember

you know too in particular that really floored me. One was Gimme Shelter by the Mazel's Brothers, you know about the Rolling Stones, and the other was Exterminating Angel by Louis Bunuel, and I thought, wow, you know, the possibility for expression in this medium is so enormous. So that's when I started to veer away from what my dad had in mind for me, which was to be a

print journalist. Did you seriously I did. I did. But he lived in Japan for a lot of his life, and I was studying Japanese literature at the time, which meant I was like head buried in these endless character dictionaries. I start to veer away and and found my own direction. But he really wanted me after college to go and take the interviews at Time Life Newsweek, you know, and and and go into the family business, which is what

he had done. Where did you study of Yale Japanese literature? Yeah, and I'm impressed because of all the Japanese documentaries you've made, it's incredible. Well, I did study under Donald Ritchie, the great Japanese film critic who knew so much about Core Sawa. And I'll give you one. I'll give you. I can do one film quote in Japanese, which is Chigo Mateo's it. And that's uh, that's the end of your Jimbo. He says, I'll wait for you at the gates of hell. Oh

my god, my god. Now when you know when you make it. So you're studying Japanese literature Yale, You're not, You're making films at the same time I did, uh, you know, I was studying film with a famous documentary named Murray Learner. He did a lot of those docs about the New or jazz and folk festivals and that in store from now teaches at Columbia, and so she was she was one of my advisors. I mean she

was very young then, as as we all were. So I was studying film, and ultimately, towards the end of my sojourn there, I was starting to to to move into that territory. And then I went to u c l A Film School. So so you go to graduate school and and how many years you were you in l A. Well, I ended up staying in l A for a good many years, like twelve thirteen years. But and I never actually finished U c l A. That they're happy to claim you cling me to their bosom now,

But I loved it there. I just I got a job with the Samuel Goldwyn Company at the time, and I started doing things like cutting exploitation trailers. What exploitation trailers did you cut? Oh? There was one called my favorite was one called shock Waves. It was a film about mutant Nazis who come up from the ocean floor. That's where they went to a secret cat underwater cavern.

They manufactured a group of mutant Nazis that couldn't be killed, and their ships sank somewhere in the Caribbean, and then one day a fishing boat happened to dislodge it, and up they came out out from the water that I thought they were in Buenos Aires. Peter Cushing. Peter Cushing was in it. Peter Cushing was in it. Brook Adams was in it. Oh God, that was a documentary about that. Well. The other trailer I did was for it was for a TV trailer I think for the First Assault on

Precinct thirteen. And there was one the Nicholas Meyer Rock called Invasion of the b Girls. These were women who were half human, half b and when they'd have sex with you, they'd sting you to death. I know that woman, I know her. Yeah, I went out with her from times I got I got out on stage, but she tried and tried her best. Now I had a small part in Looming Tower. I was very grateful to come and work with you. Guys, and I understand you're doing

more of that. You're gonna be doing more narrative work. Yes, with luck, that's gonna I'm doing a feature this coming year, and this is one that's a real passion project. It's a story I've been thinking about for a long time and it took a long time to get the script right. But I'm really looking forward to doing it. And a guy named Matt Cook he wrote a Patriots Day which was directed by Peteburgh, but interesting to me, he was a in the infantry in Iraq and this is ah,

this is very much of a war story. It's actually Vietnam War, and it's what it's really about is how hard it is to be a hero. And with Looming Tower,

what was your input into that? I mean, you know, Larry Danny Futterman and I were, um, you know, co conspirators early on in terms of coming up with the kind of the overall concept because Looming Tower is a vast book, and so how to contain it and how to focus it And we decided to focus it on this battle between the FBI and the CIA in the run up to nine eleven, and to focus on to

Harraheem's character. Uh, you know, Ali Soufan is the guy in which he was based in and Jeff Daniels character John O'Neill, and obviously you know I mean you played George Tennant, who is a critical character in this battle between the FBI and the CIA. In terms of the overall conceit, I had a lot of input. I think that it's fair to say that Danny and I had some creative differences on it, and I want some and

lost others. But that's the way things go. We'll have more of Alex conversation with director Alex Gibney after the break. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. Alex Gibney is known for his films that challenged entrenched power, but he also has a deep catalog of work featuring musicians, from an early blues series with Martin Scorsese to Jimmy Hendricks, James Brown, The Ths, The Rolling Stones and Frank Sinatra.

When Gibney is working with a subject as lionized as Sinatra, I wondered, is there an expectation he'll put a shine on their legacy? Trust me? As the Sinatra family will tell you about some of the conversations we had. They weren't always pretty. They were of the opinion that I didn't shine the statue enough, though I think I think Tina over time came to to become a much bigger believer in in what we had done, even though she was the skeptic going in. So you know, I had

editorial control, so I could do what I wanted. I was focused in this film, though a little bit more on Sinatra the musician and as kind of gats b s character who kind of represented both the American dream in the American nightmare, and that to me was was interesting because because I have to be honest, I mean, Frank Marshall was the one who who encouraged me to take this project on, and I was not a big Sinatra fan. I knew him as kind of the guy who you know, hung around with Spiro Agnew and I

wasn't that interested. But I became, you know, in doing the film, which is one of the great things about doing docs. You become curious and you learn about a subject. I became a huge admirer of his in terms of his ability to tell stories in three minutes through his voice, but also the tension, the rough and tumble tension between where he came from and and where he was ending up.

And you know, we could have we've gone deeper into the obvious up probably, and but I think that there was enough there to give you a sense of what was going on, and that it wasn't like we skipped it. And one of the things that we got that was

so valuable. I mean, not only did we get this sixteen millimeter film of his first retirement concert in which we kind of used as a structure to tell the story of his life, but the more important thing we got were a couple of audio taped interviews that were done at great length because of the problem with most TV interviews, particularly back in the day, they were either rolling these huge video cameras where you're having to sit under these massive lights and everyone's sweating, or their film

cameras and you're changing the magazine, you know, every twelve minutes. With audio, you could really have a conversation, which is what, of course I try to do when I'm doing my interviews, to just have a conversation rather than ask questions. And it was those interviews with Sinatra, the audiotaped interviews, which I think he was doing to explore whether or not

he might want to do, you know, an autobiography. Those are the gold for us because they were very candid, as well as a few sort of off the cuff kind of Q and A sessions he did, including one he did at Yale, which was wildly fun, you know, because when you got him in a moment where he didn't feel he wasn't kind of prethinking his answers, it was gold. You could feel his pain, his ambitions, his passions. It was It was great and and he's his sort

of profane reactions to everything around him. Now, for you, do you tend to be with the same group of people shooting, you have a you have a crew that you prefer, or have you mixed it up with the people you've used for your cinematic crew? Well I mixed it up a lot. But there's one woman, Marie's Alberti, who shot She shot the wrestler, she shot Creed, but she also shot Enron Taxi to the dark Side and

others and armstrong laws. She was a key collaborator for me early on because she took a weakness of mine, which was cinematography and visualizing the frame. I came up as an editor and really expanded my horizons in that area. She's an extraordinary talent because you bridged the worlds of documentary and and fiction. So Marie's the key collaborator for me for a long period. She was also did a bunch of Going Clear as well. But then the editors

have been I've been just blessed. I mean, and those people I tend to go back to over and over and over again, Alison Elwood and he Grieve, Sloan Clevin, Mikey Palmer. Now people view you, I mean, you're heading off, it seems like into a more dedicated period of making narrative films. People view you as a great truth seeker. You know, you want to go out and I don't want to say catch the bad guy. I don't want

to make it like as a prosecutorial. But exposing abuses of power seems to be a really in my mind, that obviously potent theme in the work you do. Does it have a fade or are you like you describing the chemical molecist You're right as you see are you still walking over the beach of vacation and you're looking at your phone going God damn it, I can't believe these people. Did you know is outrage and indignation follow you everywhere you go? I'm afraid so, and I wish

it wouldn't. And you outline my vacation. I'm about to go on a vacation for two and a half weeks, and I'm sure I'll be consumed with the issue of torture when I should just be dipping my lobster claw and butter. Thanks for listening to this week's Summer staff Pick. Here's the Thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio. We're produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach McNeice, and myself Maureen Hoban. Our engineer is Frank Imperial. Our social media manager is

Danielle Gingrich. Alec Balden will be back next week.