Wild Card Podcast With Rachel Martin: Play The Game Of Questions…& Answers

Wild Card With Rachel Martin is, on one hand, a typical NPR podcast — restrained, thoughtful, reflective — and, on the other hand, different, playful, probing to the point of noisy, and roguish.

Part-interview, part-existential game show — Wild Card from NPR has an interesting premise. Host Rachel Martin rips up the typical interview script and invites guests to play a game about life’s biggest questions. Martin takes actors, artists and thinkers on a choose-your-own-adventure conversation that lets them open up about their fears, their joys and how they’ve built meaning from experience — all with the help of a very special deck of cards.

In the first episode on May 1, 2024, Wild Card host Rachel Martin chatted with senior producer Lee Hale about why they wanted to make an existential interview-game podcast and how they came up with the Wild Card questions. It’s a smart way to begin the podcast with an inside peek into the thought process surrounding the formation of the podcast.

NPR was smart to pick Rachel Martin for this assignment. Martin is sharp, funny, inquisitive, bold, and engaging. While listeners and critics can throw stones at the NPR podcast model, it has produced a slew of talented podcast hosts — Audie Cornish, David Folkenflik, Brooke Gladstone, Liane Hansen, and Sam Sanders, to name a few.