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Ira Glass at Zellerbach Hall on Sunday

Ira Glass: 'This American Life' host will talk about his radio show in Berkeley

Every few weeks, Ira Glass leaves the comfort of "This American Life's" New York studios to give a talk about the nationally syndicated radio show.

Glass, the host and executive producer of "This American Life," has been doing a version of the talk since the show went national, in 1996.

The idea of the talk started as a business decision: The show, which now airs on more than 500 public radio stations in North America and boasts an audience of more than 1.7 million listeners, didn't have an advertising or publicity budget at the time.

"It's a way to remind people that you exist or to introduce people to the fact that you're still there," Glass says by phone. "We needed to figure out a way to publicize that wouldn't cost any money."

Glass will speak at Zellerbach Hall on Sunday.

"It's a combination of why we're making a radio show that's so different from other radio shows, what we're going for, how we do it and why we do it," he says of the talks.

When he first started doing the lectures, Glass would set the stage up to emulate a radio production studio and sit at a mixing console with CD players to stay close to the look of a production studio while mixing himself live.

"Since then the technology has changed so much, I can have an iPad and wander around the stage."

When Glass and his production staff do final edits for the radio show, they play the stories to each other over and over and with their staff, they bring in one person who has never heard the story to get their notes.

"But there's no substitute in the end for 1,000 people or 2,000 people in a room and you're telling a story and can feel just when it goes 10 seconds too long here or too quick there, but you can exploit some moment of it here and there," he says.

His talk is constantly changing, and Glass sometimes tells stories that have yet to air and uses the reaction of the audience to make changes. How does he remember what to tweak for the upcoming program?

"It's such a naked feeling onstage that I don't need to take notes," he says. "It's seared into your heart.

"When you're all alone in a room just talking into a microphone, you can tell yourself it's going great, but when there's a real audience you actually know if it's going great. Which has a good side and a bad side - when it's going great it's an amazing feeling."

If you go

Ira Glass: 7 p.m. Sunday. Advance tickets sold out. Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley. (510) 642-9988.

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Tony DuShane is a freelance writer. E-mail: Twitter: @tonydushane