On Rachel Martin’s podcast, Wild Card, celebrities from Michelle Obama to Bowen Yang to Margaret Atwood answer questions chosen from cards in a variety of categories. How big of a role does fear play in your life? Was there a moment when you started seeing your parents as people? When do you feel most like an outsider? The guests—and Martin herself—are often disarmed by the direction the conversation takes. When young-adult author John Green spoke of his obsessive-compulsive disorder, Martin mentioned someone close to her with OCD: “It can be debilitating. But it is who this person is. . . . And this person is wonderful.” “Oh, that’s so beautiful,” Green said. “I’ve never had that [said to me] before. That’s such a gift to me. Thank you.” Martin previously was a reporter covering everything from religion to foreign affairs. For six years, she also cohosted NPR’s Morning Edition. Here she reflects on how her journalism helped shape the conversations she has on the podcast today. “I was a temp freelance reporter at NPR [at first]—I was asked to fill in on the religion beat for a year. Covering religion was a shortcut to the most important things in a person’s life: What do you think happens when we die? What feels like praying? I was like, ‘This is awesome, they just tell me this stuff that’s so central to their being.’ “I went off to pursue a bunch of different news-oriented jobs. One conversation [during my reporting career] stays with me: It was in Baghdad in 2007. People were dying so often that we had a whiteboard in our bureau in the Green Zone and we kept a death tally from the car bombs. Our reporting was really circumscribed, we couldn’t go out a lot. I remember casting out for stories: How am I going to get anything? I can’t go anywhere. “I ended up in a conversation with one of the house cleaners in our bureau, a local woman. She’d lost family in the war. She talked to me about all the death around her—she was forcing herself to compartmentalize it. We were sitting in the stairwell, and it was one of the most powerful stories I’ve ever done. There was no ambient sound in the piece—and I’m a radio reporter, so that’s first and foremost. It felt like important work: to be a person who someone would feel safe sharing the most intimate parts of their joy and grief with. “I was an ambitious journalist. When you get to the top of the mountain, you’re like, Now what? My ‘now what?’ ended up being this podcast. A lot of the same questions I was asking as a religion reporter are the building blocks of our show. “The word ‘empathy’ gets a bad rap these days in the culture, but that is my driving truth in the journalism I’ve done, the show I’m doing, and my personal life. It’s about trying to get people to understand how different people live and how they see the world.” This article appears in the February 2026 issue of Washingtonian.The post Podcast Host Rachel Martin on Why Empathy Is So Important Now first appeared on Washingtonian. ...read more read less