Here's The Thing with Alec Baldwin

In the glut of comedy that exists today - with hundreds of comedy clubs, sit-coms, late-night talk shows, and podcasts - Patton Oswalt has distinguished himself over his three-decade career by being a talented actor who also happens to be very funny. Patton talks to Alec about the sudden death in 2016 of his first wife, author Michelle McNamara, how it changed his relationship with their daughter....

In 2018, U.S. Representative Katie Porter (CA-45) was the first Democrat ever to be elected in her traditionally conservative Orange County district. Prompted to run by Trump’s 2016 win, Porter quickly made a name for herself with her tough questioning of CEOs and administration officials, often using a whiteboard to lay out the facts. Katie Porter’s no-nonsense approach comes in part from her upb...

Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson talks to Alec about her best-selling book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents . Wilkerson says America’s caste system began in 1619, when enslaved people first arrived in the Jamestown colony. Drawing comparisons between India’s millennia-long caste system and the Nazis’ subjugation of Jews in WWII, Wilkerson says white Americans developed a ca...

Mick Fleetwood is the drummer and a founding member of Fleetwood Mac, one of the most successful rock bands of all time. Fleetwood talks to Alec about how dyslexia led him to the drumming, how supportive parents encouraged his talent and his move to London as a teenager, how his friendship with the band’s founder, guitarist Peter Green, evolved to a life-long friendship, and how Fleetwood Mac bala...

Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean offers a long-view take on what’s needed in this pivotal moment as Joe Biden takes office. Dean talks about vaccines, prioritizing the important while attending to the urgent, and what unity might look like for our deeply divided country. Dean has studied democracies around the world, yet much of his adult life has been rooted in Vermont where he practiced famil...

Actor Kristen Bell (The Good Place, Frozen, Veronica Mars) has a happy marriage that requires a lot of work, and she’s good with that. She considered a life in the theater as a student at NYU, even making it to Broadway before graduation. However, on a whim, she moved to Los Angeles and has been starring in movies and TV ever since. Like her most memorable characters, Bell is plucky, relatable, an...

Join award-winning actor Alec Baldwin in conversation with some of the most dynamic artists, policymakers, and performers working today. This season, Alec will talk with Kristen Bell about marriage and why generosity always wins, former Vermont Governor Howard Dean on the difference between the important and the urgent, and music legend Mick Fleetwood about why Fleetwood Mac has survived for more...

Here’s The Thing is moving from WNYC to iHeartRadio. Over the past several years, Alec has talked with some of the greatest artists, musicians, actors, writers, thinkers, public policy makers, and sports figures of our time. The final two programs on WNYC highlight a compilation of some of Alec’s favorite interviews from the past several years. This penultimate WNYC episode features clips from int...

Today, Alec announces that Here’s The Thing is moving from WNYC to iHeartRadio. For nearly a decade, Alec has spoken with some of the greatest artists, musicians, actors, writers, thinkers, public policy makers, and sports figures of our time. The final two programs on WNYC highlight a compilation of some of Alec’s favorite interviews. This penultimate WNYC episode features clips from interviews w...

Today, Alec plunges into the politics of real estate with two guests. The first is David Schleicher of Yale Law School, whose expertise is Land Use. He gets to the heart of gentrification and continuously surprises Alec with one idea after another through their riveting conversation. Later in the show, Alec talks with Elizabeth Kim, Gothamist Senior Editor and real estate correspondent for Gothami...

As a singer, guitarist, producer, and manager, Peter Asher has been at the center of some of the most important music - and moments - of the rock era. In 1964, he was just 19 when his London-based duo Peter and Gordon released its first single, “A World Without Love.” It reached number 1 on the charts on both sides of the Atlantic -- and was written by his sister’s then-boyfriend, Paul McCartney....

Few actors are as deeply associated with a character as Davis Gaines is with the Phantom of the Opera. When the Kennedy Center honored Hal Prince, Phantom’s original director, they turned to Gaines to perform the musical’s signature song, “Music of the Night.” Gaines’ spine-tingling vibrato shook the risers more than two thousand times in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and eventually Broadway, where...

Jordan Klepper is a very funny person, and Comedy Central took notice, making him one of their go-to stars: he's hosted his own late-night talk show and two excellent  documentary series  for the network. But with about 90 million views on YouTube and Facebook, Klepper's work as the Daily Show's Trump-rally correspondent is what turned him into a political celebrity. He's been on the beat from the...

The Tribeca Film Festival has launched a new podcast, Tribeca Talks , and we want you to know about it. Here's a conversation Alec had with director Guillermo Del Toro at last year's Tribeca Film Festival, covering Del Toro’s incredible career, the meaning behind his films, and prepping for shoots. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com See omnystudio.com/listener...

Alec looks at the art world from two angles -- from someone in it, and from someone who has observed the world from a distance. First, writer Michael Shnayerson -- his latest book, Boom, gives an exhaustive history of how today’s art market came to be. Shnayerson writes for magazines -- including Time and Vanity Fair -- and has written seven books. He has collaborated with Harry Belafonte, written...

Marc Kudisch is a Broadway staple. With three Tony nominations, he has played such roles as The Proprietor in Assassins , Gaston in Beauty and the Beast , and the sexist blowhard boss in Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5 . On screen, Kudisch has carved out a niche for himself working for some of the greatest directors in TV, including David Fincher in Mindhunter and Barry Sonnenfeld in The Tick . His current...

Today, Alec speaks with two colleagues he’s known for a long time, Brian Delate and Dick Hughes -- both actors whose lives were touched by the Vietnam War. Delate, Alec’s first guest, served in Vietnam after high school. He has performed on stage, in movies and on TV, and he’s also a playwright. His play, Memorial Day , tells the story of a Vietnam veteran on the verge of suicide over a Memorial D...

Writers Kaitlyn Tiffany and Ashley Fetters may be the country’s most astute observers of modern romance. Fetters even wrote the definitive history of Tinder. Alec discovered their jointly written article, The ‘Dating Market’ Is Getting Worse , published in February, 2020, and knew he had to talk to them.  The writers talked to historians and sociologists to analyze the use of concepts like “market...

Filipino-American filmmaker Ramona Diaz says each of her films is a “yearning for the motherland.” She’s in a unique position, as she says, able to “decode” the Philippines for the rest of the world. Her most recent film, A Thousand Cuts, tells the story of Filipino-American journalist Maria Ressa and the struggle for a free press and the crackdown on news media in the Philippines under President...

Alec and Stanley Tucci have only been on set together a couple of times, but they established a rapport deep enough to carry over into a Zoom interview more than a decade later. The two share stories from their families, discuss what they love about working with certain fellow actors, and the difference between working in Hollywood and the UK. Tucci also talks about how he gets into character for ...

Ingrid Newkirk is the co-founder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA. It may be America’s best-known animal rights organization thanks to legal sophistication, scientific seriousness, and off-the-wall publicity stunts like throwing fake blood on models wearing fur, or infiltrating a KFC chicken-supplier to publicize alleged cruelty. They're also famous because a lot of big-name...

Micky Dolenz was a successful child-actor, but he became a full-fledged star at 20 in 1966 as the exuberant singer and drummer of The Monkees -- or rather, as the actor playing that character. At first, the band was a creation of NBC and only existed on the show The Monkees . For the first season, much of the backing music was played by a studio band. Eventually, that changed, and The Monkees' tra...

Woody Allen's new book,  Apropos of Nothing , starts with a portrait of his father, a tough-guy World War One Navy veteran and onetime gunman in a firing squad. It's the first of a series of surprising, fascinating stories from a life that went from working-class Jewish Brooklyn in the 1940s to movie sets in Rome and Paris.  The book also addresses the accusation of an incident of sexual abuse lev...

In the midst of a crisis it can be healthy to think of what comes after. In this episode of Here's the Thing, two of the most influential New Yorkers when it comes to long-term economic planning join Alec to discuss whether the current economic crisis will end quickly when businesses can reopen, or whether instead it's the start of a longer decline. Kathryn Wylde is a veteran of the urban renewal...

Over a 70-year career, Wynn Handman added sharpness and craft to the natural talents of actors including Christopher Walken, Allison Janney, Raul Julia, Richard Gere, James Caan, Anna Deveare Smith, Joanne Woodward, and Mia Farrow. The World War II veteran studied acting on the GI bill and fell in with Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse in 1946, when the "playhouse" was still two floors...