Origin Stories

Nev Schulman is a filmmaker, photographer, producer, and the creator and host of Catfish. What began as a deeply personal documentary about an online relationship gone wrong grew into a cultural phenomenon, helping introduce millions of people to the realities of online identity, deception, and connection in the digital age. In this episode, he talks to Matthew about the unlikely origins of the or...

David Owen is a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of numerous books about technology, infrastructure, and the hidden systems that shape everyday life. In Where the Water Goes , he follows the Colorado River from its headwaters in the Rocky Mountains to its overburdened terminus, using the river's journey to explore how water, politics, engineering, and geography have shaped th...

Josh Dean is a journalist and the author of The Impossible Factory, a sweeping history of Kelly Johnson, Lockheed’s legendary Skunk Works division, and the engineers who reshaped aviation during the Cold War. Before The Impossible Factory , Dean wrote The Taking of K-129 and co-founded Campside Media . In this episode, he talks to Matthew about the origins of the Skunk Works, why Kelly Johnson’s p...

Ben Bradford is a journalist and the creator of Are We Doomed?, a narrative podcast that explores existential threats through the lens of systems, history, science, and human decision-making. Before launching Are We Doomed? , Bradford worked as a reporter at Marketplace and produced narrative podcasts including Landslide and Of the People . In this episode, he talks to Matthew about the changing e...

Helena de Groot is a writer, audio producer, and the host of Creation Myth, a deeply personal podcast about love, uncertainty, and the terrifying difficulty of knowing what kind of life you actually want. Before Creation Myth , she worked on The Paris Review Podcast and hosted Poetry Off the Shelf . In this episode, she talks to Matthew about the breakup that set Creation Myth in motion, and the d...

Jordan Ritter Conn is a journalist, a senior staff writer at The Ringer, and the author of American Men, a reported book that follows four men over the course of several years as they grapple, in different ways, with the same question: what does it mean to be a man in America today. In this episode, he talks to Matthew about how American Men came together, from reaching out to dozens of potential...

Christian Jacobs and Scott Schultz are the creators of Yo Gabba Gabba , the cult-favorite children’s show that first premiered in 2007 and went on to redefine what kids television could look and sound like. Blending music, art, and a DIY sensibility, the show drew in not just children, but parents, musicians, and artists who saw something new in what Jacobs and Schultz had made. Now, nearly two de...

Sam Fragoso is the host of Talk Easy , the long-running interview podcast known for its intimate, deeply reported conversations with artists, activists, and public figures. Since launching the show in 2016, Fragoso has built a reputation for interviews that feel less like promotion and more like genuine exchanges, shaped by extensive research and a clear editorial point of view. In this episode, h...

Joshua Hunt is a correspondent for GQ and a freelance writer whose work has appeared in publications including The New York Times Magazine and Vanity Fair. He previously worked as a foreign correspondent for Reuters, reporting from across Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas. His latest piece, “ What Ozempic Taught Me About Style and Self-Worth ,” documents his decision to start taking the weigh...

Julie Cohn is a journalist, screenwriter, and Tony Award–winning theater producer whose work spans film, stage, and audio. Her reporting has appeared in outlets like The New York Times and The Daily, and on Broadway she and her sister Marion co-founded The Cohn Sisters , a Tony-winning production company behind shows including Stereophonic, Suffs, Cabaret, John Proctor Is the Villain, and Just For...

Delaney Hall is a veteran producer and editor who got her start in audio journalism at Chicago Public Radio’s Third Coast International Audio Festival. She later worked on State of the Re:Union , the NPR documentary show hosted by Al Letson, and helped launch the investigative journalism program Reveal , where she was part of a team that won an Emmy Award for New Approaches in News. Today she is a...

Adam Rapp is a novelist, playwright, and screenwriter whose work spans theater, film, and fiction. His plays include The Sound Inside and Red Light Winter , and his novels include The Year of Endless Sorrows . He also wrote and directed the film Winter Passing, starring Zooey Deschanel and Will Ferrell. In recent years, Rapp took on a very different kind of challenge: adapting S.E. Hinton’s classi...

Shaun Raviv is an Atlanta-based journalist and a fellow at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation. In 2024, he reported and hosted “ Noble ,” which was named the best podcast of the year by the New Yorker. But in this episode of Origin Stories, he talks to Matthew about the story that got him started in longform nonfiction: “ The Killers of Swaziland ,” which explores a tragic string of murders in the Africa...

Dr. Sohaira Siddiqui and Salman Ahad Khan are behind More Muslim , a narrative podcast that explores the diversity of Muslim life through personal stories, history, and culture. The project grew out of a relationship that began more than a decade ago, when Khan took an Islamic law class with Siddiqui at Georgetown’s Doha campus and found himself having the kind of complex conversations about relig...

Gus Van Sant is an Academy Award–nominated filmmaker whose work spans four decades of American cinema, from independent classics like Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho to mainstream hits like Good Will Hunting and Milk . In this episode, he talks to Matthew about Dead Man’s Wire , his new film about a bizarre and largely forgotten 1977 standoff in Indianapolis, when a struggling businessma...

Caleb Gayle is a historian and journalist whose work bridges narrative nonfiction and the academy. A professor at Northeastern and a longtime magazine writer, he has built a reputation for excavating overlooked Black histories and rendering them with literary force. In this episode, he talks to Matthew about Black Moses , his National Book Award–longlisted book about Edward McCabe — the 19th-centu...

PJ Vogt and Sruthi Pinnamaneni helped make Reply All , the rare show that made the internet feel legible. Created and hosted by PJ Vogt and Alex Goldman, and produced by Sruthi Pinnamaneni, the podcast took strange online mysteries and trends and reported the hell out of them. It was funny, accessible, occasionally anxious, and for a certain generation of listeners, it became the way the internet...

Mo Amer is a stand-up comedian, actor, and writer whose work blends raucous humor with serious conversations about borders, identity, and belonging. Born in Kuwait to Palestinian parents and raised in Houston, Amer began performing as a teenager before channeling his own family’s experience in the U.S. asylum system into Mo , the hit Netflix series he co-created, wrote, and starred in. Spanning tw...

David Greene is a veteran journalist best known for his years as the co-host of All Things Considered on National Public Radio. Before taking the co-host's chair, he served as NPR's Moscow bureau chief, during which time he reported widely from regions as varied as Siberia and Chechnya. After leaving NPR, David co-founded Fearless Media, a production company focused on narrativ...

Lizzy Goodman is a longtime music journalist whose work has helped shape how the early-2000s indie rock era is understood and remembered. Over the past two decades, she’s written for Rolling Stone, Spin, New York Magazine, Nylon, and The New York Times Magazine, profiling artists from MIA to Conor Oberst to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. She writes incisively about individual musicians and albums while...

Brad Lichtenstein is an Emmy- and Peabody-winning documentary filmmaker whose work has traced the human cost of American systems, from economic upheaval and gun violence to the ways history keeps resurfacing in the present. In this episode, he talks to Matthew about American Reckoning , his Frontline documentary about the 1967 car-bombing of civil rights activist Wharlest Jackson Sr. and the decad...

Alexis Coe is a historian, TV commentator, curator, and columnist whose work examines how power, myth, and repetition shape the way American history gets told. She is the author of the New York Times bestselling book You Never Forget Your First , a sharp, funny, and rigorously researched biography of George Washington that challenges centuries of received wisdom about America’s first president. In...

Tommy Andres is an audio journalist whose work has spanned This American Life, CNN, and Marketplace, where he spent years as a senior producer. More recently, he’s focused on deeply reported, limited-run narratives, including  Third Squad After Afghanistan , which was shortlisted for a National Magazine Award and won an Edward R. Murrow Award. He also served as executive producer on  We Came to th...

Selwyn Seyfu Hinds is a screenwriter, journalist, and creator whose work spans music, comics, and television. He was once the editor in chief of  The Source , co-created the comic series  Dominique Laveau: Voodoo Child , and has written for Jordan Peele’s The Twilight Zone. In this episode, he talks to Matthew about  Washington Black, the Hulu adaptation of Esi Edugyan’s novel, developed in collab...

Mandy Matney is a journalist and the creator of the Murdaugh Murders podcast, the hit true-crime series that followed the unraveling of the Murdaugh family long before Alex Murdaugh’s 2023 murder conviction. Reporting from South Carolina, Matney broke major stories by leaning on deep local knowledge and a willingness to dig into details others overlooked. She is also the founder of the audio compa...