All My Friends Have ADHD

Laurel met "Shikata*" (that's his hacker name) a week before this recording, when they shared a sleeper cabin on the overnight train from Warsaw to Kyiv. Within hours they'd worked out that they both have ADHD. Shikata is a 27-year-old professional hacker from Colorado, paid by companies to break into them. He learned to build FPV drones as a hobby, and he's in Ukraine as...

Melanie Alves once invited gallery visitors to shoot an ink-filled water gun at her sculpture — a deer built from thrift-store toy soldiers, for an exhibition about American gun violence. She'd budgeted enough ink for the whole opening. It was gone in ten minutes. The Portuguese-American eco-artist has never been diagnosed with ADHD and never felt the need: when friends and her own sisters st...

Matthieu Paley has spent his career walking — thousands of kilometers through the Karakoram, Hindu Kush, and Pamir mountains, photographing communities on the fringes of the map for National Geographic. He speaks eight languages, lived 13 months in northern Pakistan on a one-way ticket, and built a life around the exact things a classroom once told him he was bad at. What he didn't know, unti...

TW: suicide When Lizzie Tilia was six years old, a doctor gave her father a piece of advice that would define her life: your daughter is never going to do anything she doesn't want to do — so put her in proximity to many things, watch what she's willing and able to do, and let her go to the full extent of it. In this episode, Laurel sits down with Lizzie in Mexico City — on Chinese New Y...

Maddie McGarvey is a documentary photographer based in Columbus, Ohio whose work examines grief, resilience, and the lives of people in the American Midwest — regularly published in the Washington Post, New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, and others. She was diagnosed with ADHD at 30, after years of not understanding why she couldn't get out of her own way, eventually finding the ri...

Dominic Bracco II is a photographer, journalist, author, educator, social practice artist, playwright, occasional actor, and co-owner of Uvas y Hojas — a bookstore, cultural center, and small publisher in Baja California Sur, Mexico. He was just diagnosed with ADHD and autism a week before this conversation, and he's still processing what it means. Recorded at the National Geographic Storytel...

Svet Jacqueline is an American documentary photographer based in Kyiv, covering the war in Ukraine for the Wall Street Journal and others. Before Ukraine, she covered BLM, migration at the US-Mexico border, and wildfires. She was diagnosed with ADD at 11 — more than two decades before this conversation — and has spent her adult life building the systems, workarounds, and hard-won self-knowledge th...

Eniola Mafe Abaga is a force of nature — a British-Nigerian global development leader, co-founder of civic movement #TheNewNigerian, and currently Global Advocacy and Partnerships Director at Fika (formerly known as Bridges to Prosperity), an NGO literally building trail bridges to connect isolated rural communities across Africa and beyond. She's also been diagnosed with ADHD since her sopho...

This week Laurel sits down in Paris with César — French-Japanese designer, ocean technologist, educator, environmentalist, TED Senior Fellow, and PhD candidate — who has never been diagnosed with ADHD, but was diagnosed with dyslexia, dyspraxia, and an epileptic condition after a truly unforgettable childhood head injury. What follows is one of the most wide-ranging conversations yet: shapeshiftin...

In this episode, Laurel sits down with serial entrepreneur Lindsay Jang — co-founder of Yardbird and Ronin, founder of Family Form and Always Joy — and her 17-year-old daughter Lili Jang-Abergel. Both have ADHD, diagnosed years apart, and neither knew the other had it when Lili was first diagnosed. They talk about what untreated ADD looks like when it masquerades as depression, why Lindsay didn&ap...

Mary HK Choi is the New York Times Bestselling author of Emergency Contact, Permanent Record, Yolk and Pool House (now available for pre-order). She was diagnosed with both ADHD and autism in her 40s.  Permanent Record is being adapted for a feature film, while Yolk will become a TV series. Mary is an executive producer and writer for both, because her talents are endless.  Mary is a third-culture...

In this episode, I speak to Fer Ligabue, a documentary filmmaker who works on indigenous issues, and Isa Luz, who works for social NGOs and focuses on gender issues, about getting diagnosed as an adult (or feeling resistant to getting formally diagnosed) and living together as a neurodivergent couple.  Recorded April 23, 2025 in São Paolo, Brazil.  Send us Fan Mail Watch episode videos on YouTube...

Felipe Fagundes, a Brazilian actor and surfer (who also teaches acting and surfing), talks about getting diagnosed with ADHD as a child, the difficulties he had in the Brazilian education system, and finding peace and purpose in acting and surfing.   Recorded in Rio de Janeiro on March 27, 2025. YouTube video: https://youtu.be/e9YVTl6Rkew Send us Fan Mail Watch episode videos on YouTube Follow us...

Alex Kwon Colby is a Colorado-raised Korean adoptee who was diagnosed with ADHD a year before we recorded this episode. From falling asleep in class every day in middle school and getting suspended in college, to finding filmmaking and now running multiple successful content production businesses (working with the likes of Paris Hilton and The Rock), Alex talks about how getting treated for ADHD i...

My very first guest is Anand Varma, a National Geographic photographer and Explorer based in Berkeley, California. With his background in biology, Anand uses innovative photographic techniques – sometimes making his own equipment – to capture the natural world in ways that have never been seen. His photographs have shown the hidden life cycles of bees, lightning-fast hummingbird behavior, and jaw-...