For decades, Anderson Cooper, 56, has been a steady, humane and comparatively calm presence on TV news. But the longtime host of CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360°” has recently entered an interesting and, in its way, fruitful period of emotional and professional flux. It started last year with “All There Is With Anderson Cooper,” his podcast about grief. (When Cooper was 10, his father, Wyatt, died from a heart attack; his older brother, Carter, died from suicide when they were both in their early 20s; his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, died at 95 in 2019.) In doing so, he realized how little he had allowed himself to feel the losses and how much more feeling he still had to do. (Accordingly, a second season will air this fall.) He also spent time writing “Astor,” an upcoming nonfiction book about the storied, dynastic American family, which is a thematic follow-up to his best-selling 2021 book about his mother’s storied, dynastic American family, “Vanderbilt.” (The two books were written with Katherine Howe.) On top of all that, he and his colleagues at CNN underwent the brief and tumultuous tenure of its chairman and chief executive Chris Licht, who was fired in June after only 13 months on the job. “It all makes sense in my head,” Cooper says, about the twists and turns of his career. “Though it may not make much sense on paper.”

So are you thinking about how your kids will understand the story of your losses? Oh, absolutely. I’m building a record for them. [Cooper chokes up.] Excuse me.

It’s OK. I don’t have him, but I had that book. I very intentionally want to leave a full body of documentation, of things my kids can touch base with throughout their lives and that their kids, if they have them, can do as well. God, what I wouldn’t give to have my dad’s dad’s journals. My mom’s mom seemed shallow, and my mom’s dad was an alcoholic and died at 45 — so didn’t seem very deep — but I would love their journals. Even writing “Vanderbilt,” it did, for the first time, make me feel grounded in history. I like feeling rooted, and I want my kids to have that feeling.

In one of the last episodes of the podcast, you say, “For a long time, I chose not to be vulnerable, but I think I don’t want to do that anymore.” How has becoming a dad affected your vulnerability? That’s a really interesting question. What I’ve realized in the last couple of months is how little I allowed myself to grieve my dad’s and my brother’s deaths. I did what a lot of kids do: I buried it deep inside. It’s only doing the podcast that I had this realization of, Holy [expletive], I’m still this 10-year-old kid. In terms of acknowledging grief and sadness and allowing myself to be vulnerable, I don’t know exactly how to do that, but that’s what I’m looking to learn. I used to see this sadness behind my mom’s eyes. I want my kids to not see that behind my eyes. I don’t want it to be behind my eyes anymore.

I think that a theme of your podcast and “Dispatches From the Edge” and “The Rainbow Comes and Goes” is trying to understand how you’ve come to be the person you are. Loss is central to that. I think for a lot of people, their understanding of whom they desire and their sexuality is similarly formative. But in all your books, I think there are only a few pages where you discuss your sexuality. Why is that a lacuna in the story that you tell about becoming who you are? I hadn’t thought about it in those ways. I grew up with a very well known mom who was recognized on the streets, and I didn’t particularly love that as a kid. Once I started to become well known, I realized I wanted to try to hold on to some privacy. But I don’t think I have any particularly interesting story on being gay. Figured it out early on, had crushes, didn’t really want to be gay, then came pretty quickly to accept it and embrace it, and it’s one of the great blessings of my life. The grief and the loss and the impulse to be around people who were suffering was a bigger unresolved driving force in my life than the gay thing.

I was going to say, “unresolved” is the key word. It’s the unresolved things that end up driving us more than things we’ve made peace with. Yes. I mean, the fact that I’m 56 and still realizing I never grieved when I was 11? That’s ridiculous. I could write maybe a little essay about my gay — I don’t know what. The path of it? But I couldn’t write a book.

Can a reporter from a known media outlet be a blank slate anymore? CNN and Fox News mean something by themselves aside from the individual reporters. You’re right that some people view The Times as leftist, view CNN as whatever they view CNN as, Fox as whatever they view Fox as, and that’s going to determine things. I know also there are people who base things more on the individual. There may be people who watch Jake Tapper because they believe he plays it straight and does great interviews but are not going to watch me. There are people who will watch one person on Fox News and not other people. So I don’t think you can paint with quite as broad a brush. Certainly, more so than in the past, people have drawn ideological caricatures of various brands and make decisions based on that.

That’s a problem, right? Yeah, that’s a problem. I mean, I read things in the paper, but I’m not sure what the point of it all was.

If Trump’s team called and said, “We’d like him to come on your show,” would you do it? I don’t know at this point. I’m not sure. I personally would not have chosen to do a town hall. The town hall format is a specific format that CNN has done effectively for a lot of candidates. I don’t think the first time Donald Trump came back on CNN — I wouldn’t have done a town hall, and if he’d said no, I would have said fine, then he’s not on. But that’s not my choice. I wasn’t involved.

You said you play it “down the middle.” Is that approach to TV news an anachronism? This is going to sound like a cop-out, but none of this stuff particularly interests me.

This is the future of your job! How could it not interest you? You’re not going to believe my answer, but I’m going to say it anyway: What interests me about my job is being able to go places and step into people’s lives. The business side of news — I used to worry about this stuff 20 years ago when I first started. I would stay up at night: “Do I have a future? What are my ratings?” That was not sustainable for me. I don’t like that sort of pressure. For me, the solution was to focus on what I had control over: getting better at interviews, improve my writing, stop saying “um.” I get all the business stuff. It just doesn’t interest me. Do I have a future? I’m 56 years old. How much longer can I be doing this? I don’t know. I fully expect someday my services will no longer be required or of interest and, like in a Charlie Brown spelling bee, some voice will go womp womp, and then I will blip off the screen. That is the way of this world, and I’ve been extraordinarily lucky. So I don’t worry about the long-term trajectory.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity from two conversations.

David Marchese is a staff writer for the magazine and the columnist for Talk. He recently interviewed Alok Vaid-Menon about transgender ordinariness, Joyce Carol Oates about immortality and Robert Downey Jr. about life after Marvel.