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This American Life is coming to Pandora, and Ira Glass is thrilled. 

The longtime host and public radio personality is bringing his show to the streaming service, which also picked up crime podcast Serial last November. 

Glass, who's also an editorial advisor on Serial, remembers being skeptical when someone from Pandora initially invited him to have a breakfast meeting. 

"It was a little vague what we were going to do," he tells Mashable. "We went to the breakfast thinking, ‘Well, it’s nice that they’re interested, but they’re not in our business.'"

But things went well — and the show is launching on Pandora today, with 10 past episodes stored on the service. Part of the appeal was in seeing the way Serial performed on Pandora. There were 15.6 million streams for both seasons, and about "a million extra listeners per episode," Glass says. 

"Imagine if you work for a magazine or something and suddenly your circulation bumps up by a million — that’s crazy," he says. "That’s like a magic trick, being part of Pandora. I don’t know how else we could have done that."

This American Life currently nabs about 2.2 million listeners by radio and 2.2 million by podcast per week, he says. Don't get him wrong, Glass says, that's a lot of people.

"Most people are not listening to us, and most people haven’t even heard of us."

However, it still means that "most people are not listening to us, and most people haven’t even heard of us." There's a younger demographic out there he's excited about discovering the show. 

Over the past 20 years, TAL has remained a remarkably successful and landmark radio show, scooping up numerous awards, including a Peabody Award just last week for the episode "The Case for School Desegregation Today." 

The series picked up its first Peabody in 1996, its inaugural year. Glass still remembers how the show was "struggling to reach an audience and be financially sound" back then.

"The staff was just four people doing the entire show and all the administrative things you do to run a radio show, like run the budget and get people paid and get contracts done," he says. "I did all the administrative stuff myself ... It took us four years to get to a million listeners per episode."

That's shocking now, he says, compared to Serial.

"Because it’s a podcast and because it could ride on the tail of what we had done, they were at a million listeners in four weeks," he says. 

That show's success was surprising to him, host and executive producer Sarah Koenig, and executive producer Julie Snyder, says Glass. It was also the complete opposite of the group's initial business plan. Originally, the Serial crew aimed to get 300,000 listeners per episode — strategically, enough to cover costs. 

"We really viewed it as our little experiment," he adds. "Like ‘oh, we can do whatever we want, who’s gonna be listening? ... This is gonna be this quiet little show that nobody notices.'"

Last year, Serial became the first podcast to win a Peabody. 

The show's popularity made it difficult — but necessary — to announce earlier this year that Season 2 would be airing every other week, instead of weekly. The team wanted to deepen reporting after finding "more people willing to talk" following the second season's first four episodes, Snyder told the New York Times. 

That move bothered impatient fans, which Glass acknowledges. 

"You know people are watching and, yeah, you don’t wanna disappoint anybody," he says. "We did deliberate about that a lot."

That's just the nature of making sure the best stories get told. Detailed storytelling is at the heart of This American Life's success — but after 20 years, there's still no magical formula for determining which stories will be the "obvious winners."

"I wish that we had either instinct or a rigorous process," he says. "It’s so disturbingly chaotic."    

Only about 10-15% of the pitches they get are on that level, he says, but the other hazy percentage requires guesswork and strategy. The best way to figure things out is to just go out and start reporting. That leads to a pretty high "kill ratio," he says.

"We will kill between a third and half of everything we put into production."

"We will kill between a third and half of everything we put into production,"he says. "We kill a lot ... that’s like the secret sauce to the whole thing, is that to end up with three or four stories, we’ll [pursue] sometimes seven or eight stories."

It helps that the show doesn't necessarily rely on news pegs. Instead, it presents stories that are "so sparkly they deserve to be listened to." 

Glass also doesn't feel the need to revisit stories, or do followup pieces once a story has been sent out into the world. 

"Sometimes people ask ‘well, whatever happened to that person?’ And it’s just like ‘well, who cares?’" he laughs. "I know that’s very callous, but I sort of feel like I don't want to check in. I want to leave them at the end of the movie."

One special case: The 2011 episode "Very Tough Love," about a Georgia judge named Amanda Williams whose misconduct in court was revealed after the episode aired. A government committee heard the episode and investigated her. Soon, she resigned from the bench. 

Now it appears that the government is disbanding this committee, Glass says. It's a rare case for the show, but these developments are so compelling that he wants to do a whole new episode on Williams.

That will likely also require Glass to re-listen to the original episode, something he used to dislike doing when This American Life began. In the early days, he would catch an episode the weekend it would air, but would find himself "producing the show in my head." 

Now he has a much simpler solution.

"I found out a much better practice was to wait three months or six months and then listen to something just to see how it worked," he says. "And usually it would be good to have a drink or two first."

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