Working with Ira Glass

Hello! It’s been a minute since I released an issue of the newsletter as I wanted to spend some time figuring out what exactly I want this to be going forward. And I decided that I would really love to just gush about podcasts and talk to interesting people in the industry. I’ll still get nerdy and talk about editing, mixing, etc. more in depth too, it just won’t be the sole focus of the newsletter.

So today, we’re kicking things off with an interview with my friend Mike Comite about his job at This American Life (which has been edited and condensed for clarity). Enjoy!

Deanna: Once you wrapped up with Dead Eyes at Headgum, how did the This American Life opportunity come about? Because I know that timing sort of worked out fairly nicely for you, if I remember correctly.  

Mike: Yeah, sort of. There wasn't a clean finish. Ultimately, there was a point where one road tapered off and I was able to jump to the other, but they were overlapping for probably too long for everybody involved. 

So in Fall of 2021 a lot happened at once. We were getting ready to launch a third season of Dead Eyes, trying to get Tom Hanks on the show. I’m sitting on my couch one day,scrolling through my Twitter feed, and I see a job listing for This American Life saying, “Hey, are you an audio engineer? We're looking for a mix engineer.” 

My favorite part of Dead Eyes is mixing and putting music to it, and making it sound pretty. And the stuff that was really stressing me out at Dead Eyes was trying to make it make sense, like the words and writing, outlining, producing. Whereas the editing and mixing was therapeutic in a way. 

And my now-wife was like, “You have to apply for this.”

I'm like, “But we're doing Dead Eyes! We're about to start the third season. Say I did get this job. I'd have to stop in the middle of Dead Eyes, and I'm not done with it yet!” I felt like the ending point for Dead Eyes was gonna be getting Tom Hanks on the show, and that was not on the horizon. 

So I applied for This American Life, got an initial call back to do a mix test, and then within a week or two, we got an email from Tom Hanks—A personal email from Tom Hanks, not his agent. It was actually Tom Hanks for Dead Eyes, just being like, “Hey I'd love to be on the show!” And I was like, “Oh my god, the end of the show just fell into my lap!” 

So while I was interviewing for This American Life, I flew to California, did the Tom Hanks interview, and put that on the back burner, but I knew that I had 10 episodes before that of Dead Eyes that I had to make. We hadn't even launched the season yet by the time we had done that interview. 

And so with This American Life, I got through the mix test, I got through the round three interviews. I talked to everybody that I needed to at the company, and they invited me to come on board full time. And I was like, “...I got this other thing happening. And I can't say exactly why I need to finish it, but I just need to finish it.” 

And they were like, “...Okay, I don't know what you're hinting at…” They did not care about Dead Eyes. This American Life is way too busy doing their own thing to listen.Basically, I worked it out so that they said, “Okay you can finish.” 

So [the release of the Tom Hanks interview] came around, and I silently took the off-ramp from Dead Eyes and just merged into, “Okay, This American Life is my life now.” 

And so it was a weird transition period, but that's how it happened. It was just doing too many things at once—balancing way, way too much and driving yourself a little bit crazy doing two full time jobs. Knowing that there's an end in sight, but knowing that up until you hit that off-ramp, it's going to be a really, really rough ride. 

Deanna: Yeah, I can't even imagine trying to balance those two things at once because Dead Eyes was so immersive for you. How were you able to actually do that?  

Mike: Setting business hours, and also absolutely destroying my home life, not making time for the people that should have been important to me, like my wife. A lot of nights of getting out of This American Life at 7pm, getting home at 8pm, jumping into editing and mixing and doing those 5am [Dead Eyes] releases. It was working really unhealthily, and the only way I could have done that is just knowing that there was an end in sight. I've come to think of it as, I got to do this thing I really wanted to do, and do this other thing I really wanted to do at the same time, [but it] came at a great price. Which was my sanity, sleep, quality time with my wife, and it's not a way to work that I would ever recommend to anybody who wants to have personal relationships. It wasn't ideal.  

Deanna: Going back to This American Life, can you explain a little more what your role is? Because I imagine a show like This American Life has quite the large team given the type of podcast it is and just the reporting that's being done and how many different segments there are. 

Mike: Yeah, it's a really big team for a show. I want to say we're in the thirties of how many people are working there, but that's not the audio team. The audio team is five people. Two of them are part time.

So my job specifically, we were joking about this last week, we're called mixers, which sounds like a bartender or something like that. It's basically audio from start to finish: tracking, cutting the tracks, pulling selects, lining it up, scoring it, mixing it, getting notes on that and pumping it back out again. I work with composers to put original music into our show. I'm in charge of rescoring old shows that we don't have licenses on the music anymore. 

Deanna: Yeah. So just out of curiosity, because there are multiple people on your team, what is, if you had to guess, the percentage of a full episode that you actually mix? 

Mike: I think the expected workload from each of our mixers is about 12 to 20 minutes a week. We have just the most compartmentalized show, we're done in acts. And that allows you to have a lot of people kind of chipping in various parts of it, picking up where someone left off if they need you to or shifting a task over to somebody else. Whereas if somebody is just sound designing an hour long show [by themself], it's become so difficult to pass off. 

Deanna: Yeah, like there's a clear delineation of, “Here's a segment.” And even though those segments do flow together, it's like, “We now have a better sense of how we can break this up.” 

Mike: Yeah. The key to being able to excel at anything is being able to compartmentalize and break down your task. Even now, my favorite part is leveling the audio, and, de-essing, EQ-ing, pacing things. That feels good, that feels easy. It feels like I'm painting a wall a single color—this is very objective and there's really only one way to do this. 

Then it comes time to start scoring, and that's where all the objectivity goes out the window. As much as I want to say we're trying to make something for the people out there, I'm actually mixing for my bosses, and for the people that are writing the stories, and recording the stories, and editing the stories, and [mix]noting the stories. And hopefully that translates to something that the audience is going to enjoy. 

But my job specifically, I have to predict who's listening to my stuff, and how to please them. And only in the past six months have my tastes really started to align with everybody else's around me. I've learned how to either adapt my tastes or they've kind of gotten wind of what I'm cooking up. 

Deanna: So with This American Life, what is the turnaround time for the episodes that you're working on? Because obviously, there's reporting going on, so some things are pretty timely, and I imagine you want to get them out within like, a week or two of doing the reporting, right?

Mike: Typically a show is built around what's called an anchor story, and that story is going to be anywhere from like 30 to 45 minutes. Sometimes it'll be the whole show. But an anchor story really solidifies the theme of the show, and you can build smaller stories around it. The last show of 2023 was the show about the Michigan GOP, and that took a year for that to be [reported]. And it all came to a head right as we were putting that episode out. 

And this week our anchor fell through, so we have to kind of just do what's called like a grab bag and take a bunch of the little things that we're working at and that we've been running at and kind of scramble. We're recording [this interview] on MLK day, we have four days to finish an entire show. You know, barely any of it's been tracked. It needs to get mixed, it needs to get noted, it needs to be revised. We're still talking 59 minutes of radio that have to be made in four days versus a year. 

Deanna: I imagine that the deadlines are a little crazy sometimes.  

Mike: I'm sure the producers have their own, but as far as my job goes, the deadline is Friday nights. We have a quick deadline at 8pm where it may not be perfect, maybe some weird stuff you hear in there, but it's ready for the radio, all the swear words are beeped, and it can go over the air for however many people to listen to at 8pm on Friday. 

Then at 10:30pm we turn in the radio show that cycles over the rest of the week. And that's going to be the polished [version], the finalized one, with all the right wording. And then I believe the deadline is midnight for the podcast. Sometimes there are changes that happen over the course of Saturday and Sunday leading up to 8pm Sunday when [the podcast] gets dropped. It can be years to develop a story, and then everything comes down to Friday nights.