The Austin Meyer Podcast

Paul Bessenbacher, or PB, is an esteemed composer for film and TV, and also the lead of the band Opus Orange. His music has been featured on TV shows like Broad City, Grey’s Anatomy, and The Detour, national ads for Apple, Google, and Samsung, feature films and documentaries, and is the theme song for this very podcast! In this conversation PB and I talk about the musical and life lessons he learn...

Seamus Harte is the cofounder of Only People Media, a media company that helps people working to change our world by making media to share their story. Seamus also teaches story at the Stanford Design School, where he has taught classes such as creative gym and movie design. In this conversation, Seamus and I talk about how he is found his unique voice as a storyteller, how working on the John Len...

Forrest Gander is a poet, novelist, and essayist based in Northern California, whose most recent book of poems, Be With, was awarded the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. In this conversation, Forrest and I discuss the life changing moment that made him forego a safe and stable career to pursue life as a poet, what he thinks makes a poem not just good, but great, and why poetry continues to be such...

Charlie Phillips is the head of video at The Guardian. Before working at The Guardian, Charlie was deputy director at Sheffield DocFest and an editor at FourDocs. In this conversation, Charlie and I discuss the trends shaping the documentary industry, what kind of access and consent lead to great films, and what qualities make a film stand out from the crowd as one that The Guardian wants to commi...

Trapped in Qatar Benjamin Best is an award winning investigative reporter, filmmaker, and author whose reporting focuses on the dark side of sports: illegal betting, match fixing, corruption, organized crime, and the human rights violations that are often a byproduct of major sporting events such as the World Cup and The Olympics. In 2011 Benjamin Best was awarded CNN's journalist of the year awar...

Kate Grant is the CEO of The Fistula Foundation. An obstetric fistula, the kind that occurs in many developing countries, is a hole between a woman's vagina and bladder, and it is caused by many days of obstructed labor. It leaves women incontinent and often abandoned and ostracized by their communities. As the CEO of the Fistula Foundation, Kate is tasked with telling the stories of this stigmati...

http://austinmeyerfilms.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Dan-Klein-Social-Promo.mp4 Dan Klein teaches improvisation at Stanford University where he is on the faculty of the Theater and Performance Studies Department and the Graduate School of Business. His beginning improv class is one of Stanford’s most popular courses, and he has been awarded Stanford Teacher of the Year by the Student’s Associati...

Josh Estey is one of the world’s top humanitarian relief and development documentary photographers. His work for UNICEF, CARE, USAID, World Food Programme, World Bank, Mercy Corps, and others captures moments of dignity and spirit without ever sacrificing truth or context, and has helped lead the transformation of non-profit photography and videography over the past two decades. Josh is a Pulitzer...

Lauren Gunderson is one of the world’s most prolific playwrights. At 37, she is the most produced playwright in America and has taken home many of the most coveted awards in the business. In 2017, The New Yorker wrote a profile on Lauren and titled it, “You’ve Probably Never Heard of America’s Most Popular Playwright.” Well everybody, it’s about time you heard! . In this episode Lauren and I discu...

David Zinn's Art: www.instagram.com/davidzinn . David Zinn is a world renowned street artist based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. David’s temporary street drawings are composed entirely of chalk, charcoal and found objects, and are always improvised on location through a process known as “pareidolic anamorphosis.” This technique makes his chalk art appear three dimensional. . In this episode, David and I...

Link to Maja Ruznic’s artwork: http://bit.ly/MajaPaintings Maja Ruznic is a prolific artist currently based in Roswell, New Mexico. Primarily a painter, her artwork often explores themes related to trauma. A graduate of UC Berkeley and the California College of Arts, Maja has exhibited internationally and is a 2018 Hopper Prize winner. In this episode, Maja and I talk through the step-by-step proc...

Jonathan London is a children’s book author who has over 100 publications to his name. Jonathan is best known as the author of the Froggy series, which has sold over 20 million copies and has been translated into 7 different languages. The first of the series, which was published in 1992, is called Froggy Gets Dressed, and now there are 29 others. In this conversation, Jonathan and I discuss how h...

Kat Zdan studied theater at UCSB and got her MFA in ensemble based physical theater from Dell’Arte International school of physical theater. Kat has been performing, teaching, and directing professionally in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond since 2009. Not only does Kat work in scripted theater, she is also a member of Improv Playhouse, one of the top improv troupes in the Bay Area. . Off the...

Aaron Huey is a National Geographic photographer who has contributed dozens of cover and feature stories to the magazine. His photography stories are on a wide range of topics from Sherpas on Everest, to life on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, and most recently, Aaron detailed the fight to preserve America’s national monuments like Bears Ears. Aaron is also the founder of Amplifier, a design la...

John Branch is a sports reporter for The New York Times. He won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 2013 for “Snow Fall,” a story about a deadly avalanche in Washington State, and was a finalist for the prize in 2012 for his series of stories about Derek Boogaard, a professional hockey player who overdosed on painkillers. . John’s work has been featured in The Best American Sports Writing; a...

Latif Nasser is the director of research at Radiolab, where he reports, produces and creates stories on a range of topics. In 2018 he created stories on everything from life at the southern border, to the blue blood of horseshoe crabs, to voting laws, to National Hockey League All-Star games. . In this episode Latif and I discuss how he went from a theater kid with playwriting aspirations to creat...

Jennifer Kingsley is a National Geographic Explorer and a fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. She is a winner of the National Outdoor Book Award for Paddlenorth, the story of her 54-day canoeing expedition across the Canadian Arctic, and her writing has appeared in various outlets including National Geographic, the BBC, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Her radio docu...

Jane Ferguson is a Beirut-based Special Correspondent for the PBS NewsHour. She reports from across the Middle East, Africa and beyond, often working in conflict zones. Some of her reporting highlights include front-line dispatches from the war against ISIS in Iraq, an up-close look at Houthi-controlled Yemen, and reports on the war and famine in South Sudan. On top of her work at the PBS NewsHour...

This week my guests are Susan Milstein and Andi Brady. Susan and Andi a cofounders Personal History Productions, a company that helps an individual capture their life story and family memories as a legacy for future generations. Writing a life story can be daunting, so Susan and Andi come in and make it easy. They handle everything from interviewing the individual, to writing the narrative, to cre...

This week my guest is award winning radio journalist, Jake Warga. Jake is a contributor to NPR, Public Radio International, and American Public Media. His stories have been featured on programs such as All Things Considered and This American Life. On top of making his own stories, Jake also teaches storytelling as a lecturer at Stanford University. In this conversation, Jake and I discuss how one...

Happy New Year! In today's episode I am reflecting on my life changing 2018. 2018 was a year in which I quit my job, moved out of California for the first time to go live in Zambia, and went 100% all in on pursuing my dream of becoming the best documentary filmmaker I can be. To help guide my reflection, I sat down with my good friend and fellow documentary filmmaker, Joe Alexander-Short, who inte...

This week on the podcast my guest is Xandra Clark. Xandra is an actor, writer, documentarian, musician, performance-maker, and all-around storyteller. Xandra is currently a 2018-19 Queer|Art Fellow in Performance, a member of The Bats Company at The Flea, a company member of Poetic Theater Productions, and a performer and experience designer with immersive performance company Odyssey Works. As an...

This week’s guest on The Austin Meyer Podcast is Annalisa Quinn. Annalisa is a contributing writer, reporter, and literary critic for NPR where she created NPR's Book News column and covers literature and culture. Annalisa also writes about arts and culture for the New York Times and the Financial Times, and is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine section First Words, which includ...

This week my guest is Daniella Zalcman, a documentary photographer based between London and New York. She is a multiple grantee of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a fellow with the International Women's Media Foundation, a National Geographic photographer, and the founder of Women Photograph, an initiative working to elevate the voices of female and non-binary visual journalists. Her ongo...

This week's guest is Lauren Goode, a senior writer at WIRED. Lauren is an Emmy award winning journalist who covers all things tech. Before arriving at WIRED, Lauren was the senior technology editor at The Verge, Managing editor of reviews and consumer tech coverage at ReCode, and a video producer at the Wall Street Journal. In this conversation, Lauren and I talk about her career path, and the les...