A note from Wild Card host Rachel Martin: I met Ilana Glazer exactly 10 years ago. Ilana and their co-star Abbi Jacobson were riding high on the success from their hilarious web series Broad City, which went on to become a hit TV show. I interviewed both of them, but I was just back from parental leave for my second kid and I have to tell you, I was so deeply exhausted at that moment.

What sticks with me from that interview to this day is Ilana’s energy. Like capital “E” energy. They were just bursting at the seams with ideas and stories and potential. And I share this because the tired new mothers out there often feel sort of alone and separate from the well-rested, creatively fertile people.

So when I saw Ilana Glazer’s new comedy special on Hulu, Human Magic, which is about the bonkers part of life that is early parenthood, part of me was selfishly glad that they have crossed the Rubicon and get how exhausting it all is. But then I watched Ilana’s special and I saw the same “big E” energy, even though they’re now the parent of a toddler, and I realized this person is just built this way.

From where I sit, it looks like Ilana Glazer’s default setting is energy and enthusiasm, and I’m going to add joy to the mix because whenever I watch them perform, I come out happier than I was an hour or two before. Which is why I wanted them to join me for a game of Wild Card.

Michelle Buteau and Ilana Glazer in a scene from the film Babes.

Gwen Capistran/Neon

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Gwen Capistran/Neon

Michelle Buteau and Ilana Glazer in a scene from the film Babes.

Gwen Capistran/Neon

This Wild Card interview has been edited for length and clarity. Host Rachel Martin asks guests randomly-selected questions from a deck of cards. Tap play above to listen to the full podcast, or read an excerpt below.

Question 1: What was your form of rebelling as a teenager? 

Ilana Glazer: I didn’t quite rebel very much as a child or a teenager. I was very good and I was focused on achieving. And my rebellion came later. Honestly, I was not secure in rebelling against my parents until a few years ago. L-O-L. I’m 37 years old.

It was really in the process of becoming a parent that I was like, “No. I am separate from my parents.”

But of course, I had some rebellion; it finally came in the form of having sex and smoking weed in my senior year of high school.

Rachel Martin: I mean, that’s pretty by-the-book rebellion.

Glazer: Yeah, standard – I would honestly say patriotic. So finally it came, as well as myself.

And then I feel like, really, becoming a parent has helped me feel like “I don’t care.” Do you know what I mean? I don’t care about being accepted. I care more about discovering who I am and what I need. I care about that more than crossing a line and being accepted back.

Martin: Wait, I need more on that. How does having a kid make you rebellious?

Glazer: Like, as long as I’m focused on fulfilling my needs and the needs of my family and child, then I can be unlikeable. I don’t have to fill the supportive role I was hoping to fill before.

I have found the limits of parenting really helpful to the rest of my life. It has forced me to draw lines that I never wanted to draw before. I want to be everything for everybody. And it’s so important to my health and my kid’s health. And it actually serves the world at large to give it the healthiest kid I can. So it’s been such a helpful reorganization.

Question 2: How comfortable are you with being alone?

Glazer: I’m going to buck the binary with this answer and I’m going to say “increasingly.” Ooh — is your mind blown by all my therapy, Rachel Martin?

But that is the accurate answer — increasingly. But it’s tough. I really feed off people. I love people. I love intellectual intercourse. I love connecting and engaging, but I’m increasingly comfortable alone. And also, having such a high-needs, tiny individual needing me so often — it’s become more of a relief to be alone.

Martin: Yeah. Whereas before there may have been anxiety associated with that, and now it’s just in such scarce supply.

Glazer: Yeah.

Martin: I am someone who craves alone time.

Glazer: Yeah. Are you tall?

I don’t know. I think I’m 5’7″. My husband insists that I’m 5’6″ and 3/4.

Glazer: Oh, copy that. I don’t know if it’s changed, but in the early 2000s — I was a teenager at that time — the toxic messaging that I got was, for some reason I know, that modeling you have to be 5’7″. So you’re model height, babe.

Martin: [Laughs] Wait, is this just a random interstitial?

Glazer: I don’t know — I just feel like craving alone time and being tall, like I’m imagining you gliding through the streets of D.C. and like popping your collar and not wanting the bottom half of your face to be seen. I’m like, “Yeah she likes to be alone.” I’m like short and I’m like, [gremlin voice] “Hey everybody. Anybody want to hear a joke?” I don’t know I just wanted to picture it.

Martin: I want you to always think of me that way. It’s completely the opposite of how I am.

On Broad City, Abbi Jacobson (left) and Ilana Glazer play two single, 20-somethings living in New York City with dead-end jobs.

Walter Thompson/Courtesy of Comedy Central

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On Broad City, Abbi Jacobson (left) and Ilana Glazer play two single, 20-somethings living in New York City with dead-end jobs.

Walter Thompson/Courtesy of Comedy Central

Question 3: Are you good at knowing when something should end?

Glazer: Yes, I am. With Broad City, we had signed our contract of seven seasons, and then we both came to the decision to end it after five — Abbi and I. Comedy Central was like, “Huh?” But yeah, that’s something I would say is elegant about me — knowing when things are at their end.

Martin: That’s an admirable quality because it’s not the same for everybody. And especially if you got something good going on and there are people telling you, “It’s good, just keep going,” and to have something tell you that it’s time to stop.

Glazer: Whew. Yeah. And like being able to trust that I am generative beyond this moment, whether it’s a creative project or anything — that I am secure, that I will keep generating new layers and like, do without thinking. That was something that the experience of pregnancy was so incredible. I’m such an overthinker and a planner. Creating a person without thinking about it was, like, “I’m not even thinking about this and my body knows what to do.” And when we get a scrape and, and the skin grows back. It’s just trusting in my own humanity.

Martin: Is it just a gut feeling on ending things? You’re just like, “I just feel we should stop?”

Glazer: Yeah. I was a drummer for many years. I miss it. I just loved percussion. For a time I was like, “I’m going to be an orchestra percussionist.” Can you imagine me on a timpani, like “dun duh-duh dun duh.” And I think it’s like a rhythm thing. You know what I mean? It’s a larger-scale rhythm thing of, “This is over,” you know, and accepting the loss too.

Before me stands a glistening silver box — sleek, elegant and with boldly defined protruding vertical lines, giving it an ever-so-slight vintage Art Deco look. A golden vent rests at its top, the figures on its grille appearing like alien hieroglyphics. This, I am asked to pretend, is an elevator, which will take me from Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade and into Earth’s orbit.

I step inside and stand on an assigned number. Four windows surround me, and one sits below me. They are, in actuality, OLED TVs, sitting inside oval, astronaut-white frames. Soon, I am awash in ambient, serene music. An air conditioner pumps in a cold breeze — partly there to offset the heat from the television sets, partly there to mitigate any effects of motion sickness — and then the simulation begins. Southern California disappears below me, and in moments I am gliding above Earth, enveloped in stars and the twilight-blue hues of our planet’s horizon.

Typically, the experience of simulating a trip to space is the stuff of theme parks or NASA training facilities. This space elevator, however, resides inside a pop-up arcade from Two Bit Circus, which earlier this year shuttered its 40,000-plus square foot play space in downtown’s Arts District. In the precarious world of location-based entertainment — recent years have seen buzzy, game-centered, virtual reality-focused startups such as the Void and Dreamscape Immersive come and go — it was safe to assume the worst when Two Bit closed.

Had its mix of coin-op arcade cabinets, future technologies and immersive theater-inspired games joined the likes of DisneyQuest, Star Trek: The Experience and a host of other promising-yet-failed experiments? No, insists Two Bit founder Brent Bushnell, who is confident Two Bit will rise again with a permanent space. First up, however, is multi-week pop-up experience on Third Street Promenade, opening Saturday and currently slated to run through Jan. 5, although Bushnell believes an extension is likely — “we’re going to be a month-to-month kind of decision,” he says.

Space elevator at Two Bit Circus. (Todd Martens / Los Angeles Times)

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Two Bit, says Bushnell, was never able to recover from the pandemic, for which its downtown business dug too deep of a financial hole to rebound from. “We brought a quarter-million people down there in 2019,” Bushnell says of attendance at the initial location, which opened in 2018. “It was literally millions of dollars. In 2020, we were doing 20% better than we did in 2019. I wonder sometimes the world we would be living in. I was closing $30 million of investments to open five more of them.”

All those plans evaporated relatively quickly. A Two Bit location in Dallas, for instance, opened in 2023 but closed in just a few months. Downtown’s Two Bit locale followed relatively suddenly in April, but Bushnell says it was clear in January that the company was going to have to regroup.

“We didn’t have the deep pockets of a ginormous corporation to ride that out,” Bushnell says of Two Bit’s COVID-19-induced closures, for which the backlog of bills eventually became too much to bear. “This is a real opportunity to be clear of that, and to start fresh.”

And more modestly. Two Bit’s Santa Monica spot, situated among Third Street Promenade’s cacophony of casual eateries and an oversized chess board, is 4,000 square feet, a fraction of the downtown location’s size. That means some Two Bit originals — digital carnival games such as a balloon-pop challenge that used screens and projections, or a train-racing game built less on speed but on synchronized corporation with friends or strangers — remain in storage. As do its so-called “story rooms,” including one that was inspired by the old tabletop game Operation, only here we performed makeshift surgery on a giant puppet, the game less about precision than silly communication.

Yet it’s clear the Two Bit mission persists.

Two Bit Circus founder Brent Bushnell.

(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)

A center bar, for instance, will sell a drink it calls the “cocktail shooter.” It’s essentially a shot, but participants will then be handed a Meta Quest 3 and asked to play a 90-second game utilizing the headset’s pass-through technology, which allows for digital creations to be overlaid into our real-world surroundings. Essentially, we’ll be firing away at giant, cowboy-hat wearing eyeballs floating around the Two Bit bar area. Similar games will unfold outside Two Bit’s doors on the Promenade, including a fantasy-inspired game in which our Quest controllers will turn into virtual wands and we’ll be wizards flinging fireballs at each other amid the Santa Monica district.

There is space, too, for group games, including a heavily participatory game show-inspired experience. Here, guests will gather around cocktail tables, each player given their own boxy video game controller with large plastic arcade buttons. They’ll compete against other guests in short, silly mini-games, some asking us to frantically press as many buttons as possible, others more quiz-like. A version of this was staged in Two Bits’ Arts District spot.

Then, finally, there is Two Bit’s assortment of stand-up games, with the emphasis, Bushnell says, on multiplayer titles — “Frogger,” “Rampage,” “Joust,” “Zoo Keeper,” “Marble Madness” among the many offerings. The pop-up will charge a $25 admission at the door, and that will include all games for the day.

And the in-demand centerpiece will no doubt be the space elevator, developed by local firm One World Immersive. The company, founded by Chris Clavio, who previously worked for Santa Fe, N.M.-based immersive art collective Meow Wolf, views the device that will rest at Two Bit as a prototype — it is, for instance, fragile, built out of the aforementioned TVs and wood cabinetry. The images in the experience are largely from NASA’s public domain collection, says Clavio, as the ultimate goal for the space elevator is to pitch it to museums and schools.

Chris Clavio, Founder and CEO of One World Immersive, shows his space elevator experience ride at Two Bit Circus arcade at Third Street Promenade.

(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)

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While the floor vibrates, there is no actual lift. Such a detail, says Clavio, will hopefully be found in a future edition, but movement on the screen is slow enough to not be physically jarring and to allow for a momentary sense of disbelief. When I’m inside the space, I feel a sense of calm, basking in the wonder of thousands of twinkling stars and the peacefulness of our planet when viewed from above. The journey lasts but four minutes, yet it’s welcoming, borderline meditative and momentarily restorative.

“The whole point of this originally was to show people the majesty of the planet and how incredible the Earth was and not have it be a cheesy thrill ride,” Clavio says. “We want it to be an opportunity for reflection.”

It also taps into the original conceit of Two Bit, that is merging familiar and unexpected games with immersive experiments heavy on social interaction — the Two Bit calendar, for instance, includes singles nights and gift exchanges. Bushnell, too, is excited to get guests in augmented reality glassware from Snap, as he notes Two Bit has programmed images of dinosaurs roaming the Third Street Promenade.

Ultimately, the space will be viewed as something of a test. Perhaps for a future Santa Monica location and to also see if Two Bit can draw a different audience mix than it did downtown.

Game tech Quantrel Farris works at Two Bit Circus at Third Street Promenade.

(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)

“When we were in downtown L.A., we could get adults and we could get corporate [events], but families and tourists were a little bit of a challenge,” Bushnell says. “I think the thing that’s special about Santa Monica is you could really hit all of it. So this is an exploration for us to test the waters.”

And, of course, to simulate the experience of viewing those waters from outer space.