JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Each week, a well-known guest draws a card from our Wild Card deck and answers a big question about their life. This week, it's comedian Bowen Yang. Fans of his have been listening to him cohost the popular podcast "Las Culturistas" since 2016, but at this moment, he is being seen more than ever, most notably as a cast member of "Saturday Night Live" and in the blockbuster film "Wicked." He got laughs this past weekend as a presenter at the Oscars, but he does not take this newfound visibility for granted. In fact, he sees it as a chance to live out loud in a way that previous generations of his family in China never could. Here's some of his conversation with Wild Card host Rachel Martin.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
RACHEL MARTIN: Do you think there's more to reality than we can see or touch?
BOWEN YANG: Yeah, definitely - definitely. I am generally a skeptic with things. I read too many Carl Sagan books in college. I feel like I have to, like, have some allegiance to science and empirical things and things that are observable and things that can be, like, represented in data or something. But I feel like there is this meta reality or something that exists that people can tap into because, like, I - I know the question is not necessarily implying anything supernatural, but we had on a medium for the podcast.
MARTIN: Tell me, tell me. We can go supernatural all day long.
YANG: Great. Amazing. This guy was pretty good - Tyler Henry. He's also known to some people as the Hollywood Medium. And it all sounds like - again, like, it invites skepticism because you're, like...
MARTIN: Yes.
YANG: ...How much did he know beforehand? And...
MARTIN: Right.
YANG: ...He said things to me that really were, like, really conceptual and not necessarily, oh, this person is in this other dimension, and they're trying to communicate this to you. For me, it was just like, oh, what I'm picking up from you is that, like, you have this legacy of people who were not able to, like, share their lives or, like, the legacy is a little bit blurred. My dad grew up in a rural part of China where most of his relatives are not really documented. He just - there was just no family tree or history to sort of go off of, and...
MARTIN: Yeah.
YANG: ...No one could read, and no one went to school. And he was the first in his family to even go to college. And so what Tyler Henry was basically saying was, like, you are able to sort of, like, end this cycle of, one, shame and, two, record, in a weird way. Like, you get to sort of, like, through being yourself and being, like, a citizen of this world now where people are, like, constantly tracking things and things are easily recorded for posterity, like...
MARTIN: Yeah.
YANG: ...That gets to sort of be, like, one of your sort of, like, motivating forces in life. And that's something that, like, I kind of loved hearing. Like, it...
MARTIN: Yeah.
YANG: ...Was very meaningful to hear because it was borrowed from this, like, metaphysical space. But at the same time, it applies to something that I can do now, and it is from a reality that is unobservable, which I kind of love.
SUMMERS: You can hear more of that conversation with Bowen Yang on the Wild Card podcast.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.