Think about the most fascinating conversations you've ever had. And then think about getting to have those kinds of conversations over and over again.
If you're as lucky and talented enough to be longtime NPR host and journalist Rachel Martin, you get to do that in the new podcast, Wild Card. The first episode is out Thursday, May 2.
On the show, guests answer questions by choosing at random from a deck of cards, and the conversation gets to some pretty deep places pretty quickly.
Main Street’s Ashley Thornberg caught up with Rachel to hear how she navigates these conversations. Listen to the segment above.
—
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Ashley Thornberg
It's a great idea. I won't lie a little bit of professional jealousy that I didn't get myself here. Where did the idea come from?
Rachel Martin
Oh, I mean, to be honest, I have to give a lot of credit to my producer Lee Hale. He and I have been thinking about a way to have meaningful existential questions and meaningful existential conversations with people in a way that wouldn't feel heavy. You know what I mean?
Because a lot of times those questions can go to places that might feel really serious, profound, and beautiful, but too much of it can be tough. And so it was his idea to think about what is a way that we can make a game out of this.
Ashley Thornberg
Yeah, it's funny because the word existential, in my mind, immediately the next word is crisis.
Rachel Martin
But a lot of this came out of my own process where I'm out in my life and I had hosted these NPR news shows for a long time and needed a change, to be perfectly honest. Talk about heavy. The news has been heavy.
I don't know if anyone's noticed. And then I had a personal loss. My dad died unexpectedly and my mom had died a long time ago and I felt unmoored and I found myself as the parent of young kids thinking about these big existential questions. How do I explain this stuff to them? You know, what happens when we die? What is our purpose on this earth? What does it mean to be a good person and lead a happy life? And so that was my take on existentialism. I wasn't in crisis, but it felt like these were the questions I was really stuck in.
And I wanted to think about them with other people. And when I talked to friends about this stuff, I found that they were swimming around in the same existential goo, you know? And so I thought, well, maybe we're not alone. Maybe other people. And whether it's post-pandemic and we were isolated from each other for so long and still haven't really recovered from that psychic wound and the relentlessness of the news, I just thought, let's create a different place in the NPR ecosystem in particular, where it's about something different. It's about interior lives.
It's about questions that to some degree or another, I am convinced all of us wrestle with.
Ashley Thornberg
It's a really fascinating premise. And one thing that really stuck out to me was the option for the guests to make you answer the question first. I want to talk to you, Rachel, about this role of doing something that you are asking other people to do, which in this case is to be intensely vulnerable.
Not something you're usually doing, at least not in your former roles on the air. Why was that so important to you for the success of the show?
Rachel Martin
I have several answers to that question. One, when you're doing an interview on a news show, it's not a conversation. We like to call them conversations. They're not. Because there's a power imbalance. The interviewer has the power.
And it's also not the interviewer's role to make themselves part of the story. And I'm doing this thing now, this game, and asking people to be revealing and honest. And it only seems fair that if I'm asking our guests to come and present that way and be that way, that I should do the same thing. So I really did long for some kind of equity in that way. And I wanted to be a player. And it also makes it surprising. I don't know what's going to come up, Ashley. I have to be prepared for any question in the deck to be flipped on me. And it feels a little scary sometimes and intimidating.
But it also feels kind of liberating to be able to do that. And I come out of these conversations, I mean, it's just crazy. It's a person I've never met before. And we have this talk. And we go to these crazy places and deep places. And I'm sharing and they're sharing. Yeah, so fast. It's like a shortcut. But that's the point is that often in an interview, you know, set aside the news interviews on the news magazines, but like an interview you would do with a musician or an artist or a person, just a human who's gone through a thing.
You're looking for this one connection, right? Like, it's all in service. It's all in service like this. Oh, man, that one moment, that driveway moment we say in public radio, right? I just wanted all of it. I want all those all the time. And so this format is a way to just go, go, go get there quicker, get there quicker. And so I'm having a great time.
Ashley Thornberg
Well, the format of the show, Rachel, it can be a slippery slope to have a premise and a format and a gimmick. Talk about the show development and how you came to a place of landing on a premise and and do you worry about it sliding into that territory of kind of gimmicky?
Rachel Martin
I don't even care! Like, I'm so into this idea that I don't even care. Like, let's just try it. Right? Like, let's just try. Sometimes you just have to take a risk. And I will, I will admit to you, when, when my producer first came to me with this idea, I was like, really? Can I just talk to people? Like, all I really want to do is talk to people. Do we have to do it in this? Can't we just do it straight? And I was convinced, like, after the first time we tried it out, something magical happened.
We did it with a friend and colleague, Felix Contreras of NPR Music. Felix is a friend of mine. We brought him on to do this to see if it would even work. And it worked better.
I'm telling you, it was better than if I had just sat down to talk with Felix about his life. It gave me permission. Instead of working your way rhetorically up to certain places, like, what are the exact words that I need to use to get to this emotional place? I just get to go. I just draw another card and we're there. So it feels like cheating. And I'm into it.
Ashley Thornberg
Yeah, permission is such a funny word. Do the guests know the premise when you're booking them?
Rachel Martin
Like, you have to be... Or you are not. And by all means, I am not interested in plumbing anyone's trauma or going through any door you do not want to walk through voluntarily. That is not my game. And that is not what this is. But if you are into this idea, and you're working through things, and you are into the...
If you buy into the premise of the show, which is my premise, that talking out loud about stuff helps people feel less alone. When you talk through issues or problems or your beliefs or how you see the world and the muckiness of it, and you're not afraid to put that out into the world. Not everyone's going to do that. Are you kidding? I've talked to some people who are like, this is horrible. This is my worst nightmare.
I don't want to share that stuff. That is okay. Because you can listen at home and you can ask these questions of yourself. No one's asking you to say that into a microphone. But there are a lot of people, professional storytellers on the whole, who are asking these questions of themselves, and they're willing to come on and do this and share these conversations with me. And I think it's to our collective benefit when people share. It makes us feel less isolated.
Ashley Thornberg
Do you think the show might have hit differently in a pre-pandemic world?
Rachel Martin
Yeah. Hard to know, but I think so. I don't think I would have come up with it.
I don't know that I would have. Again, it's hard to engage in a thing that didn't happen, but I think the pandemic really had a lot of bearing on it. And where we are in our culture, I mean, we live in a time when everybody is broadcasting all their feelings, right? There's so many feelings, and everyone's on Instagram, everyone's on the things. And there's some oversaturation in that department, and overly confessional. So there's a line to walk, for sure. But this is an NPR show, and I felt really strongly that NPR needed this. Because we, as an organization, claim to represent and help you tap into your 360 degrees of humanity, of what it means to be human, through news and music and culture. And we didn't have anything that really tapped into our interior lives this way. And so, you know, let's try it.
Ashley Thornberg
Professional risk-taking.
Rachel Martin
Yeah, why not?
Ashley Thornberg
Rachel Martin, thank you so much for your time today.
Rachel Martin
It was such a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you for having me.
Ashley Thornberg
NPR's Rachel Martin about her new podcast, Wild Card, which launches on Thursday.