This American Life - An Update from Ira

Episode Date: October 16, 2025

Ira Glass shares some news about This American Life To sign up as a Life Partner, visit thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners

Hey there, it's Iro. So a year ago, we launched our paid subscription, this American Life Partners, to help fund our show. The economics of making a podcast had changed so much that we felt like we really had no choice. And now it's been a year. And I'm here to say two things. One, this has been a huge success.

Life partners now fund nearly 25% of the budget of our program. People seem to like the bonus episodes are cranking out and the other stuff they get. All of us here at our show are. sincerely grateful to all of you who signed up. Thank you. And that brings me to the second thing I'm here to say, and that is life partners are 25% of our budget right now. We needed to be 50%. That's what's going to protect us from shifts in the economics of podcasting. 50% is our goal. Here is my brief pitch on why you should sign up. I'm guessing that if you're a regular or semi-regular listener to

our program, a lot of what you probably like about our show, is that we're finding these surprising stories, big and small, with feelings and, you know, funny moments and everything else that makes a good story. The thing that you like is surprisingly expensive. For every story that you hear, we burn through so many stories that go nowhere. This very week at our pitch meeting, producers researched and pitched eight stories. Three we said no to. One, we sent the producer back to get more info. And before that we'll have, well, we're going to go out and spend more time and more money on those stories. People will do interviews, and then we'll just see how interesting they really turn out to be. In the end, after many hours of work, if two of

those four stories end up on the air, that would be amazing. But that whittling down process, eight stories become five maybes, become two finished stories. That's our process. Sometimes I meet people who have heard our show. And one of the things that people ask me sometimes is, how do you get the interviewees to open up and just say such revealing emotional things about themselves? And the real answer to that question is you don't hear all the times that it fails. It fails so often. You don't hear the people who don't open up. You don't hear the interviews that go nowhere. And then once we get interviews that are good enough to make into a story, we'll work as a group on draft after draft after draft, revisions are the key to the whole process at our show, making sure

the pacing is right and the feelings and the ideas are hitting just with as much force as they possibly can. And then when we get to a final draft, it is fact-checked by professional fact-checkers who basically re-report the entire story, call the sources, check every reference, and then we make little adjustments then, and then we take days mixing and remixing the final audio with music and sound and all that. This process is very different from most podcasts. If you picture the 400,000-plus podcasts that are being made right now,

most of them are just interviews or conversations without all those extra steps. When you hear our show, what you're hearing is an old-school way of making a show where we labor as a team over every step. And we would like to believe, I would like to believe, that there is still a future for this kind of show in the current media lands. escape, where it is harder to bring in advertising revenue than where the federal government no longer funds public radio. And I just want to pause on that and say another word about federal funding.

Our program didn't get any money from the federal government. But in addition to being a podcast, we are on public radio stations all across the country who pay us for the show. They did get money from the federal government. And now that money is gone, some of them are less able to pay, which then affects how much money we get in. So I'm saying all this just to say, to keep ourselves financially solid, moving forward, to keep making the show with the care that we give to every story right now, we want to double the part of our budget paid for by listeners, by our life partners. If you want us to continue

this way with this level of care, I really hope you will consider becoming a life partner. We try to sweeten the deal with other stuff. You'll probably hear me talking about this. When you become a life partner, you get the ad-free version of the show. You get access to this special Greatest Hits archive that we put together, 250 episodes that I personally handpicked for life partners that shows up right in your podcast feed is right there when you think, what can I listen to right now? And you get the bonus episodes. But you don't have to want that stuff. You just have to want to keep the show going with this level of care and attention and weeding out stuff that is not sparkly and great. To sign up, go to thisamericanlife.org slash life partners. Thisamericanlife.org

slash life partners. That link is in the show notes. You can also sign up right in the Apple podcast app. One last time, it's thisamericanlife.org slash life partners. Thank you for your patience and listening this far.