#seth lind

I find myself speaking much softer, more deliberately. You wouldn’t go so far as mistaking it for eloquence, of course, but there’s just something in the air, or maybe some reverence for the place. There’s nothing particularly exception about This American Life’s offices. It’s a fairly nondescript space in a fairly nondescript building, albeit with more studios than your standard Manhattan workplace. There’s a small logo on the door, and should you have to use the bathroom before you leave, you’ll see a fairly amazing document from an 1996 planning meeting, covered in rejected show names like Radiolicious Ira Glass and His Radio Cowboys Glassnosz “This American Life” is scribbled toward the bottom, just under “Speakeasy.” There’s an arrow next to the former, indicating some favor, though at moment of fossilization, “Glass House” seemingly had the early lead. It’s not quite so storied a space as WBEZ, the place of TAL’s birth, located at the end of Chicago’s Navy Pier, to which I’d paid a visit a few years before and gazed upon the Emmy the team had won for the television show that found it moving to New York in the first place. But a script from last week’s episode lies in a pile in front of me as I sit down at a mic across from Seth Lind. And at one point during the interview, lead cowboy Ira Glass begins pacing around pensively outside the booth -- precisely as you’d imagine he’d be doing around 7PM on a workday. I’ve got plenty of questions about the inner-workings of the show, and Lind, a ten-year veteran, has most of the answers, stumbling into a broadcasting career with an unlikely background in filmmaking, eventually finding himself on the end credits of one public radio’s most beloved properties. It is, as our edit Brian puts it, “a good look into how the sausage gets made,” from two people who’ve clearly put entirely too much time philosophizing podcasts.