Glenn Beck was set to swim with sharks.

It was a stunt, the kind local radio DJs dream up to raise ratings or awareness of this cause or that. And at the time, that's exactly what Glenn Beck was: A talk radio host still new to Tampa Bay, about to dive into a tank at the Florida Aquarium, live during afternoon drive time.

What the heck is wrong with me? he remembers thinking. What am I doing? Because I don't like swimming, and I don't like water, and I certainly don't like sharks.

Then, four days before his dive, two planes crashed into the World Trade Center, and everything changed. For Glenn Beck. For America. And especially for Glenn Beck's America.

"It was about a week and a half later that we realized, 'Oh my gosh, we got out of the shark thing,' " he said. "And never looked back."

Glenn Beck came to Tampa a divorced, 30-something recovering alcoholic and radio journeyman, fighting for a foothold in talk. When he left two years later, he was a national star well on his way to becoming a bestselling author, Fox News fixture and one of the most polarizing pundits in America.

Beck returns to Tampa on Nov. 30, speaking about his new book Addicted to Outrage at the David A. Straz Jr. Center for the Performing Arts. It's a homecoming of sorts, an experience the Seattle-area native and Dallas-area resident likens to "going back and thinking about your college days, the things that you really learned, the people who taught you."

Addicted to Outrage is a book about our nation's combustible cultural state, one which owes quite a lot to controversial demagogues like Beck — and especially his time in Tampa, the last place he lived before becoming who he is.

"Perhaps if I would have lived in Tampa and not in Manhattan, I may have taken a different path, because it would have kept me more grounded, I think," he said. "Had I stayed there, I think I would have been a little more connected to people, which would have been good."

Good for whom? Good for Beck? Good for the national dialogue? Good for America?

"I think it would have been good for all of those things."

• • •

Beck's first interview for a job in Tampa radio came in the mid-'90s. He was up for a morning spot on WFLZ-FM 93.3, then known as the Power Pig. Part of the interview took place at a strip club. Not really the atmosphere I want to work in, he thought.

In 1999, while working at a station in Connecticut, Beck got the call to come work for WFLA-AM 970. He and his wife Tania bought a home in Valrico — a long Volkswagen Beetle commute from WFLA's Gandy Boulevard studios — and lived a fairly typical suburban life, eating at Outback and volunteering at their church.

Beck envisioned a talk show that was provocative yet thoughtful, confessional yet compassionate. But he was the new guy in a town run by talk veterans like Jack Harris and Ted Webb and shock jocks like Todd Schnitt and Bubba the Love Sponge. His unusual style, "kind of mocking talk radio," wasn't clicking. He'd left behind two young daughters from a previous marriage in Connecticut, and was feeling like he'd made a huge mistake.

"The first six months or so, they were about to fire me," he said. "I remember the conversation was, 'You have to decide what you are. Are you political? Are you this? Are you that?' At the time, I was a little bit of everything."

In time, listeners got hooked on Beck's irreverent takes on Tampa Bay headlines, like the disappearance of Valrico 5-month-old Sabrina Aisenberg or the Riverview woman who was trampled to death by an elephant.

A turning point was the case of Terri Schiavo, the St. Petersburg woman at the center of a national right-to-die debate. Initially, Beck supported Schiavo's husband, who sought to remove her feeding tube against the wishes of her family, who believed she could recover from her vegetative state. But after taking a call from a listener who disagreed, Beck changed his mind. He admitted on the air — not for the last time — that he was wrong.

"That was the beginning of the relationship with my audience, where they could trust me, and I could trust them," he said. "They would keep me honest, and I would do my best to be honest. And lead with my mistakes."

Since the case was unfolding in his backyard, he visited with Schiavo's family. He broadcast his show from outside her care facility. He took the cause personally. And it changed the type of broadcaster he believed he should be.

"I felt so guilty that I had been on the other side, and I knew that this was a local family that was listening," he said. "It's the only local story in a national career that I have been there till the end and beyond."

• • •

Beck was in the bathroom getting ready for work, listening to the Today show in the other room, when Tania called.

"Honey, you have to turn on the TV," she said. "A plane's hit the World Trade Center."

Beck watched the smoke drift from the New York skyline and called his producer.

"We're under attack," Beck told him.

Beck got in his car and drove to South Tampa, listening to the towers' collapse live on WFLA. He had to be on the air soon. He had no idea what to say.

"Dateline: New York," he told Tampa listeners. "In one of the most audacious attacks ever, terrorists hijacked two airliners, crashed them into the World Trade Center, in a coordinated series of blows today that brought down the twin 110-story towers. Thousands may be dead. Fifty-eight thousand people work at the World Trade Center."

He recited the unfolding facts of the coordinated crashes in New York, Washington D.C. and rural Pennsylvania.

"That is the news of this day," he said, voice cracking, "September 11, 2001."

Beck had already been in discussions with WFLA's parent company, Clear Channel, about taking his show national. But the week of 9/11, he got a call from Clear Channel's president wondering why it hadn't happened already — and if he could be ready to go live across the country on Monday, Sept. 17.

"I remember all that week, just praying," Beck said. "I mean, I got into talk radio to have fun and to lighten it up and poke fun at all of us. And all of a sudden, it became so real. And I didn't have any answers."

Beck remembers going to Outback after 9/11. Everything was quiet. Planes were still grounded coast to coast. He watched military jets fly low across the water from MacDill Air Force Base, shocked by how suddenly they'd appeared.

The next week, he visited Ground Zero before broadcasting out of New York. He doesn't remember what he said, only "putting my head up against the wall and sobbing from what I had just seen and thinking, I've got nothing to say. I've got nothing to say. I don't know what to do.

"It was a scary time to have access to so many people's ears. And I think it's only gotten worse."

• • •

Almost everything that made Glenn Beck famous happened after he left Tampa in early 2002. His Glenn Beck Program was syndicated across hundreds of stations; he landed wildly popular shows on CNN Headline News and Fox News. He authored multiple New York Times No. 1 bestsellers. He toured with Bill O'Reilly, hosted rallies on the National Mall, built a digital empire called The Blaze.

He also became a self-described "rodeo clown," a Tea Party populist whose intellectual, Libertarian-leaning views grew dicier as the ratings ticked up. He was labeled paranoid, racist, a fearmongering cult leader desperate for attention. Every rambling conspiracy theorist with a whiteboard of bread crumbs and login to Reddit was enabled in part by the pundit Beck became.

Beck has acknowledged some of this. In Addicted to Outrage he expresses regret over the way he's dealt with criticism, writing: "I have failed to listen, and it always creates problems." He has learned to temper his more impulsive instincts on social media: "The delete key has been used more than it ever had, I'll put it that way," he said.

But he doesn't believe he's to blame for the culture of outrage he outlines in his book.

"Anybody who thinks that Glenn Beck, Barack Obama, Donald Trump is the savior or cause of the problem is sadly misguided," he said. "We're all on this train and we've all played a role, and not enough of us are asking, 'Wait, where is the train going?' We just keep shoveling coal back into the furnace."

Knowing what he now knows about America, he wouldn't go back and kick-start his career in Tampa any differently. But there are some things he misses about the window he spent here — the people, the sense of community, "and of course Kojak's, which is the greatest ribs on the planet."

Tampa was the last place he breathed the fresh air outside the toxic bubble of political punditry, the last place he had "a different kind of celebrity than it turned into."

"It's good to be connected to the places in the country that are not media or political headquarters," he said. "You get lost there really fast. And the whole country is becoming connected. The whole country now feels like what it used to feel like in New York and Washington, but not around the rest of the country. But now because of social media and 24-hour news and everything else, we're all just so connected to so much stuff that it's meaningless. The in-fighting and party-positioning and all of this stuff, it's not good for our country."

When he returns to Tampa this week, he hopes it will feel a little like his old show on WFLA. Some humor. Some compassion. Some dialogue with his old local listeners.

"We lost a lot of that, and I miss it," he said. "We're just going to lose ourselves quickly if we don't start to hold onto each other and rediscover those things that made us great neighbors in the first place."

Contact Jay Cridlin at cridlin@tampabay.com or (727) 893-8336. Follow @JayCridlin.