Hello, you're listening to Culture Call, a transatlantic conversation from the Financial Times.

I'm Grizalda Murray Brown, in my house in London.

And I'm Lila Raptopoulos in my apartment in New York.

Coming up on today's episode.

From W.EZ Chicago, it's today, whatever.

I'm Ira Glass.

Where we talk about whatever, today.

But we do talk about whatever.

That's actually not, yeah.

It's not untrue.

Today's guest is Ira Glass, the host of the long-running seminal and wildly popular radio show and podcast This American Life.

This American Life has more than 4 million listeners per episode and was the birthplace of two other little shows you may have heard of, Serial and S-Town, both of which went absolutely incredibly insanely viral.

Ira does these seven things I've learned live performances across the U.S., and he was planning

to go to London and Manchester, but it's been delayed due to coronavirus.

But keep an eye out, I've seen him live once, and it's been delayed due to coronavirus. But keep an eye out. I've

seen him live once, and it's a really cool experience. Ira is the last person I met before the

coronavirus restrictions started going into place. So you'll hear in the interview that it's sort of

a line in the sand moment, kind of the day where it all turned. But before we get into all of that,

we just wanted to take a moment to say a big thank you to everyone for all the stories that you've shared with us of what you've been doing and thinking about through this pandemic. Yeah. There's a lot to process. There's a lot to talk about. So we've given you some extra content this week. It's a full episode and we hope you enjoy it. Yeah, you know, we're adapting right along

with you to this very new reality, which means that our programming might shift slightly as our new

normal shifts and it feels like our new normal is shifting every day. And we also wanted to say that,

you know, it's not easy. For me, it's been a really horrible feeling, honestly, to watch friends and loved ones

...