Every week, Glass and his TAL staff scouted for stories and themes. His team in early 2012 included Senior Producer Julie Snyder and Producer Brian Reed. Sometimes, they spent hours following and taping someone, only to abandon the segment because it did not work. In an interview, Glass gave an example of an idea that had to be dropped—but which led to another. TAL had sent out an amateur interviewer to talk to her great-aunt and uncle for a Valentine’s Day show. The young woman had told TAL that in the courtship stage, her uncle at first was stand-offish, but after a year he fell hard and the couple had been married for 22 years.

“And so we send this person out; she's never done a radio story,” recalled Glass. “We show her how to use the equipment. So she talks to them for, like, an hour. And that story turns out to be completely untrue.” ^[13] But listening to the tape she brought back, Glass realized that during the interview, something else had revealed the couple’s mutual love and respect. TAL could still use the material. “To find three or four stories, we look into 10 to 20 stories usually, and then go into production on six to eight stories,” says Glass. ^[14]

On October 26, 2011, Glass went to see Daisey’s monologue on Steve Jobs and Apple. Glass found it powerful, and was moved by the details of Daisey’s story: his conversations with underage 12- to 14-year-old girls who worked at Foxconn for long shifts; an encounter with an old man with leathery skin whose hand was like a claw because it had been caught in a metal press while working at Foxconn; and workers whose hands shook uncontrollably after exposure to a potent neurotoxin used to clean the iPhone screen. As Glass later recalled:

I saw this one-man show where this guy did something onstage I thought was really kind of amazing. He took this fact that we already know, this fact that our stuff is made overseas in maybe not the greatest working conditions, and he made the audience actually feel something about that fact… [Daisey] turns himself into an amateur reporter during the course of the story, using some investigative techniques, once he gets going, I think, very few reporters would ever try, and finding lots of stuff I hadn’t heard or seen anywhere else. ^[15]

Glass wondered whether Daisey’s monologue, which ran an hour and 50 minutes, could be pared to fit within TAL’s format and one-hour time constraint. As he exited the theater, he found himself “editing the radio version in my head.” ^[16] At the same time, Glass thought, “He’s not a reporter, and I wondered, did he get it right?” ^[17]

Glass contacted Daisey and invited him to lunch on November 16. “I came with a whole big speech on why he should do it,” Glass recalled. “My fear was he wouldn’t want to do anything while the play was still up.” ^[18] Glass’s qualms were unwarranted. Daisey was eager to modify his show for TAL.