Ira Glass on how important it is for young artists/writers/creatives to push through the stage where what you're creating isn't as good as you want it to be. 
In the video, he plays a piece that he did after 8 years of working at NPR, and then he tears everything he did in it apart. 
Great stuff. 

...and not have to say much about it. That being said:
Things of Note
1. It's B&W
2. Voice-over which either was recorded pre-1900s (or was made to seem like it was) 
3. The typography 
4. Sound design

Those three things bring three very different sets of feelings to the table. The typography is very hand-made, very real, human, but it also seems very new, very hip, fresh (which I think is because the advertising industry has decided that's what it means and continuously formed that connection between that kind of typography and that meaning). Of course, the B&W is very retro. Connotes early days of cinema, nostalgia, the past, blah blah blah. 


Then you've got the voiceover, which sounds like it's playing on a Victrola (It also seems like it's a recording of this person giving an important speech at a large event around 1900. I could really get going on these different levels of time, and what it means that it's most likely been made to sound the way it does and the different symbols the track uses to acquire different events). The speaker has almost a Transatlantic accent, which gives lends a very regal feel to his words. It is obviously important There's also a lot of interesting things going on with the soundtrack of this commercial. There are really two main tracks besides the voice-over, one being stringed instruments and the other the sound of a train on tracks. Both build slowly over the course of the commercial. The musical notes ascend the scale; the train picks up speed. And both grow louder in the mix. The sound of the train is first introduced diegetically, with the image of a person riding on a train of some sort. The camera is inside the train as well, riding along with the girl, and so the view outside the windows of the train passes by from one side of the screen to the other. Interestingly enough, many of the rest of the shots in the film are ones that move from either side of the screen, so as the sound of the train continues with the subsequent shots mimicking the movement of the view outside the train's window, the viewer is made to feel as if all of the images are from one long train ride. 

I could talk more about the soundtrack, like why some shots have diegetic sounds and others don't, the choice to end with just the diegetic, etc. etc. Could talk about the shots and get really, super side-tracked by the whole "America" thing, like glorious, notions of how Americans felt about their country after WWII, or at least how we feel like they did because of all the artifacts from that time. 

To summarize, this video shamelessly (and unapologetically) exploits the viewer's nostalgia for the past, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is why this is a really good commercial!

*dusts hands off*