This story originally aired on Jan. 14, 2017. Ira Glass, the host of This American Life, is headed to Seattle later this month to give a talk. We grabbed a few minutes with him to ask what it is that keeps him from sleeping. As a child, Ira Glass spent nights considering his own mortality. “I would just lie in bed, trying to get my mind around the idea that I would be dead and everything in the world would continue without me,” remembers Glass. After he witnessed an uncle ship out to Vietnam and saw coverage of life there as a soldier, Glass concluded the same fate must await him. “I was kind of a fat kid ... I knew that whatever it was that I would be called on to do in Vietnam would involve a lot of running ... and being outside in the heat,” said Glass, “And I just knew I was going to be bad at that; and I knew that people die in Vietnam; and I knew that I would die in Vietnam.” Years of obsession, of dwelling on death with no distraction, passed before repetition made him tired of