Origin Stories

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 subjects to narrowing in on the four men at the center of the book. He describes the level of access required to tell stories that are both deeply personal and broadly representative, the challenge of getting people to open up over long periods of time, and the process of shaping a large body of material into something cohesive. He also reflects on how his approach to writing has evolved, and what it means to better understand what he’s actually good at.“I do think with any kind of talent there’s a ceiling. I know that I have a ceiling on my talent,"" he says. ""But I do think I’m getting a little bit better at maximizing that.”See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 decades later, the show has been revived with Yo Gabba GabbaLand! on Apple TV+, bringing a new generation into that world.In this episode, they talk to Matthew about how a creative partnership that started with skate videos and homemade projects eventually led to Yo Gabba Gabba. They describe the early days of experimenting with cameras and editing, the transition into music and performance, and how their experience as new parents reshaped the kind of work they wanted to make. They also reflect on the scrappy process of building the show from the ground up and what it took to get people to see their vision.“We shot a little demo of it. It’s super low budget. You had to have a really deep imagination to go like, I get it,” Jacobs says. Schultz adds: “No one was more surprised than us that it went to Nickelodeon. That was never the intention.”To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠joincampside.com⁠. You can also find us on ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ & ⁠Youtube⁠. Have a question, guest recommendation, or just want to say hi? Email us at [email protected] Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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, he talks to Matthew about the differences between written and audio interviews, why podcast conversations can feel more revealing, and how trust is built with guests. He also reflects on what it takes to create an environment where people are willing to open up, and how his approach has evolved over time.“I’m taping for the listener,” he says. “I’m thinking about someone in their car, at home, walking their dog and going, is this going to land?”To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠joincampside.com⁠. You can also find us on ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ & ⁠Youtube⁠. Have a question, guest recommendation, or just want to say hi? Email us at [email protected] Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 weight loss drug and the ways that experience reshaped his sense of identity, style, and self-perception.In this episode, he talks to Matthew about how the story came together, why he wanted it to go beyond a straightforward account of weight loss, and how he approached writing something deeply personal while still treating it like a reported piece. He also discusses his writing process and how he thinks about structure and rhythm. “Every word, every sentence, every paragraph has to really be earned,” he says. “If you don’t, readers can tell. And that’s the stuff of nightmares.”To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠joincampside.com⁠. You can also find us on ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ & ⁠Youtube⁠. Have a question, guest recommendation or just want to say hi? Email us at [email protected] Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 Us. Her latest project is The Redefector, a ten-part investigative podcast about the strange Cold War case of KGB officer Vitaly Yurchenko, who defected to the United States in 1985 before unexpectedly returning to the Soviet Union.In this episode, she talks with Matthew about how she first stumbled onto the story while researching another spy project, the unusual challenges of reporting inside the secretive world of intelligence, and why trust becomes the central currency when you're trying to report on spies.“If your source trusts you, they’ll recommend you to another source who trusts you. It’s like a very slow-motion domino. Your flashlight gets a little bit wider every time you meet someone new in the story.”To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠joincampside.com⁠. You can also find us on ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ & ⁠Youtube⁠. Have a question, guest recommendation or just want to say hi? Email us at [email protected] Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 senior producer at 99% Invisible and the host of Service Request, a new podcast collaboration between 99% Invisible and Campside Media.In this episode, she talks to Matthew about the origins of Service Request and the challenge of turning complex infrastructure, things like electricity, city services, and the systems that power everyday life, into narrative stories. Hall explains how the show looks for the human perspective inside systems most of us rarely think about, often by talking to the people who build and maintain them.“If you look closely enough at anything in the world made by human hands,” she says, “there’s a really interesting drama behind how it came to be.”To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠joincampside.com⁠. You can also find us on ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ & ⁠Youtube⁠. Have a question, guest recommendation or just want to say hi? Email us at [email protected] Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 classic novel The Outsiders into a Broadway musical, which opened in 2023 and went on to win multiple Tony Awards.In this episode, he talks to Matthew about the decade-long process of turning a beloved coming-of-age novel into a stage production. Rapp describes how the show evolved through years of drafts, workshops, and creative experimentation, and how the team worked to balance the story’s emotional extremes while honoring the spirit of Hinton’s original book.“It was important for [The Outsiders] to be as brutal as it was tender, as funny as it was grim,” he says. “Tragedy and beauty — they both have to speak equally.”To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠joincampside.com⁠. You can also find us on ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ & ⁠Youtube⁠. Have a question, guest recommendation or just want to say hi? Email us at [email protected] Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 African country. “Even though I had very little experience,” Shaun says of his early efforts, “I still felt in my gut, I could take this really amazing story and put it on paper in a way that people would appreciate.”To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠joincampside.com⁠. You can also find us on ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ & ⁠Youtube⁠. Have a question, guest recommendation or just want to say hi? Email us at [email protected] Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 religion, ethics, and identity he’d been waiting his whole life to have. Years later, he returned to the idea of turning those conversations into a podcast, launching More Muslim with support from the Al-Mujadilah Center and Mosque for Women, where Siddiqui now serves as executive director and host of the show.In this episode, they talk to Matthew about building the podcast and the challenge of telling stories about Muslim life without flattening them into familiar narratives. They discuss the balance between universal themes and cultural specificity, and why each episode aims to capture a different slice of experience.“There are universal experiences that bind us together and connect us — that’s what makes storytelling across generations and people and religions compelling,” Siddiqui says. “But there are also moments of difference, and those are important to touch upon.” Khan adds: “There’s some part of my brain that’s been hardwired to be like, maybe I need to explain this thing to you.”To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠joincampside.com⁠. You can also find us on ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ & ⁠Youtube⁠. Have a question, guest recommendation or just want to say hi? Email us at [email protected] Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 businessman walked into a mortgage office, wired a shotgun to his hostage’s neck with a so-called “dead man’s wire,” and held a mortgage executive captive for nearly three days. Van Sant explains how he stepped into the project after another director dropped out, how the film’s tight schedule forced him to shoot the movie in less than three weeks, and why the story interested him less as a conventional thriller than as a portrait of desperation.“I’m imagining that something’s interesting to me,” he says. “And I imagine that it’s interesting to other people.”To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠joincampside.com⁠. You can also find us on ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ & ⁠Youtube⁠. Have a question, guest recommendation or just want to say hi? Email us at [email protected] Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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-century lawyer, newspaper publisher, and politician who envisioned Oklahoma as a Black-governed state. Gayle breaks down how he followed McCabe’s paper trail across archives with almost obsessive intensity, why he intentionally gets “lost” in research before finding the story, and how he learned to let narrative carry the theme. He also reflects on the discipline of structure and what it takes to make history feel urgent.“Beautiful prose is the ball game for me,” he says. “The only thing I have in my arsenal is to render their story with some relative beauty.”To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠joincampside.com⁠. You can also find us on ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ & ⁠Youtube⁠. Have a question, guest recommendation or just want to say hi? Email us at [email protected] Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 explained itself.When Reply All ended, it left behind not just a devoted audience, but a real absence: a space where curiosity about technology, culture, and human behavior could unfold. In this episode, PJ and Sruthi talk to Matthew about building their follow-up show, Search Engine, and what it means to start again. They get into why they chose to go independent, how they think differently about scale now, and what they’ve learned about curiosity, ambition, and sustainability in podcasting.“There’s a kind of intellectual space I like to be in,” PJ says. “Warm and curious... where you’re feeling the workings of a mind you enjoy riding shotgun with.” Sruthi reflects on the pressure that came with growth: “I want to feel like any size we’re at is a good size.”To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠joincampside.com⁠. You can also find us on ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ & ⁠Youtube⁠. Have a question, guest recommendation or just want to say hi? Email us at [email protected] Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 two wildly funny and deeply moving seasons, Mo follows a lightly fictionalized version of Amer navigating family, work, and love while stuck in legal purgatory. In this episode, Amer talks to Matthew about concluding the series’ second season, building a show that’s both a meditation on belonging and a sharp commentary on what it means to be American right now, and carrying the emotional weight of telling a story so close to home. He reflects on the reaction from audiences who see themselves in Mo for the first time and from others encountering a character like him for the first time at all. “People walk up to me everywhere,” he says. “They feel seen.”To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠joincampside.com⁠. You can also find us on ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ & ⁠Youtube⁠. Have a question, guest recommendation or just want to say hi? Email us at [email protected] Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 narrative journalism and audio storytelling. In this episode, he talks to Matthew about his new Campside show, "David Greene is Obsessed," which delves into the strange and wondrous fixations of guests like Paula Poundstone and David Arquette. You can find more of David Greene is Obsessed on ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠, ⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠ & ⁠⁠Youtube⁠⁠.To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠joincampside.com⁠. You can also find us on ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ & ⁠Youtube⁠. Have a question, guest recommendation or just want to say hi? Email us at [email protected] Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 situating them inside a larger cultural moment — part journalist, part historian. In this episode, she talks to Matthew about Meet Me in the Bathroom, her oral history of New York’s indie scene in the early 2000s, and the 2022 documentary inspired by the book. Goodman explains how she organized hundreds of interviews around events rather than timelines, treated New York City as the central character, and documented a scene where no one agrees on what actually happened. “It’s like filling out a crossword puzzle that’s moving,” she says. “I kind of built these individual narrative blocks and then you have to weave it all together.”In this episode, she talks to Matthew about Meet Me in the Bathroom, her oral history of New York’s indie scene in the early 2000s, and the 2022 documentary inspired by the book. Goodman explains how the project took shape voice by voice, why oral history was the only form that made sense for a scene with no single truth, and what it means to document a moment where memory, myth, and experience are constantly in conflict. “It’s like filling out a crossword puzzle that’s moving,” she says. “You’re building this narrative, and then you have to weave it all together.” To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠⁠joincampside.com⁠⁠. You can also find us on ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠, ⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠ & ⁠⁠Youtube⁠⁠. Have a question, guest recommendation or just want to say hi? Email us at [email protected] Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 decades-long fight to understand why justice never came. Lichtenstein breaks down how the film’s extraordinary archival footage shaped the story from the start, what it took to earn the Jackson family’s trust, and the ethical decisions behind filming trauma without turning it into spectacle. He also reflects on collaboration, perspective, and what it means to make investigative work in an era when funding and time are running out. “You watch a lot,” he says. “And it’s just a big mess until it’s not anymore.”To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠joincampside.com⁠. You can also find us on ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ & ⁠Youtube⁠. Have a question, guest recommendation or just want to say hi? Email us at [email protected] Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 this episode, Coe talks to Matthew about how she discovered that no woman had written a full biography of Washington in more than forty years, why so many presidential histories have hardened into myth, and what happens when size and seriousness are mistaken for authority. She walks through her research process, her decision to focus on Washington off the battlefield, and the risks and rewards of writing history that refuses to sound reverent just because it’s old. “It tells me to trust myself creatively in the same way that I trust myself intellectually,” Coe says. “And that’s such a lovely feeling.”" To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠joincampside.com⁠. You can also find us on ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ & ⁠Youtube⁠. Have a question, guest recommendation or just want to say hi? Email us at [email protected] Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 the Forest. In this episode, Andres talks to Matthew about The Eyes of the Fighter, a two-part story he hosted and produced for Sports Explains the World. It begins with a home invasion in the middle of the night and turns inward, as Andres tries to understand how Jermaine Thompson, a former wrestler and amateur MMA fighter, ended up inside his Atlanta home. The search takes him through wrestling gyms, MMA, and a spiral of addiction and pain. He also reflects on what it’s like to report on your own life, how body-camera footage challenged his memory of what happened, and the discomfort of turning someone else’s lowest moment into a story. “Did he fully know this was going to turn into a real thing? That’s a scary place to be,” Andres says. “Because you start asking yourself: did I help this guy or did I hurt this guy? The whole point of the piece is I’m rooting for him. And then you wonder if you just used him to get a story. That extractive feeling makes me uncomfortable.” To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠joincampside.com⁠. You can also find us on ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ & ⁠Youtube⁠. Have a question, guest recommendation or just want to say hi? Email us at [email protected]. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 collaboration with Sterling K. Brown. He breaks down how the project came together, why he connected to Wash’s journey so personally, and how the show balances the brutality of slavery with a world driven by imagination, dreaming, and flight as a metaphor for hope. “Being a showrunner is as close as you can get to playing God,” he says. “It’s really you and the blank page and it’s Genesis and you’re like, ‘Let there be flying ships,’ right?” To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠joincampside.com⁠. You can also find us on ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ & ⁠Youtube⁠. Have a question, guest recommendation or just want to say hi? Email us at [email protected] Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 company LunaShark and the author of the bestselling book Blood on Their Hands: Murder, Corruption, and the Fall of the Murdaugh Dynasty. You can listen to her new podcast, True Sunlight here. In this episode, she talks to Matthew about how the Murdaugh Murders grew from a planned ten-episode podcast into an ongoing investigation with more than ninety episodes, what it was like becoming part of the story she was covering, and why local journalism is so important. “The fact that I knew enough about the beat to spot a connection most reporters would miss,” she says, “that’s why local journalism matters.” To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠joincampside.com⁠. You can also find us on ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ & ⁠Youtube⁠. Have a question, guest recommendation or just want to say hi? Email us at [email protected] Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

David DiGilio is one of the most prolific genre producers and writers working in Hollywood today. In addition to credits on films like “Tron: Ares” and hit shows like “Crossbones” and “Strange Angel,” he is the showrunner of the Amazon Prime blockbuster “The Terminal List,” as well as a spin-off/prequel called “The Terminal List: Dark Wolf.” In this episode, he talks to Matthew about structuring each season for maximum tension and emotional impact. "We start with a storyboard of episodes but also a character board, with each character’s arc across the season," DiGilio says. "Because ultimately, TV is a character-driven medium. Even more so than film. And so you’ve got to know that the character discoveries are going to inform the story and where it goes.” To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠joincampside.com⁠. You can also find us on ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ & ⁠Youtube⁠. Have a question, guest recommendation or just want to say hi? Email us at [email protected] Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Dana Fox is a veteran screenwriter and producer. The showrunner of the Apple TV series “Home Before Dark,” and the creator of the sitcom “Ben and Kate,” she is best known as the co-writer of “Wicked” and “Wicked: For Good,” two of the highest-grossing (and most popular) movies in American history. In this episode, she talks to Matthew about the art of bringing a beloved franchise to the screen and the expectations that followed the release of the first film. “I was so proud that it touched all kinds of people, and made people feel seen. Like they have a place in the world,” Fox says. “All these things that were so great, so emotional. And then suddenly I became more panicked about the second movie, because I was like, ‘Oh my God, people’s expectations are off planet Earth.’ It’s like, ‘This movie has to be an A-plus plus plus plus plus plus for them to feel like it’s even an A.’ And that was exciting, but scary, you know?”  To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠joincampside.com⁠. You can also find us on ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ & ⁠Youtube⁠. Have a question, guest recommendation or just want to say hi? Email us at [email protected] Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Janet Reitman is a fellow at New America and a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine. A former longtime correspondent for Rolling Stone, she is a two-time finalist for a National Magazine Award and the author of some of the most influential journalism of the past two decades. In this episode, she talks with Matthew about "A Disaster of the US Military's Own Making," her 2024 Times Magazine expose on the Army suicide crisis. All good writing, Reitman says, necessarily involves letting go of material that no longer helps the piece, however painful that letting go may be. "Honestly, you can spend weeks writing a single section, writing it over and over again until it's right," she says. "And then you're told, 'This is going to get jettisoned.' This thing you've spent weeks on. And I mean, it's tragic. But sometimes it's also the best choice. It's the best decision."  To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠joincampside.com⁠. You can also find us on ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ & ⁠Youtube⁠. Have a question, guest recommendation or just want to say hi? Email us at [email protected] Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Lorelei Lee is a writer, activist, porn performer, and activist. A graduate of Cornell Law School and New York University’s MFA program, they write regularly for a range of publications, including N+1, Buzzfeed, and Wired. In this episode, Lorelei talks to Matthew about their groundbreaking essay “Cash/Consent,” which is both a memoir of Lorelei’s time in the porn industry and a reflection on the complicated relationship between their career and their “civilian” life. “I often have to write the same thing many times,” Lorelei says. “I have to write it until I don’t feel the feelings, because as long as I’m still stuck on the emotional impact to myself, I’m not going to be able to understand the emotional impact on the reader. But that’s why writing and editing are two different things done at two different times.” To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠joincampside.com⁠. You can also find us on ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ & ⁠Youtube⁠. Have a question, guest idea, or just wanna say hi? Email us at [email protected]. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

James Vanderbilt is a screenwriter, producer, and director whose work includes some of the most acclaimed films of the last two decades. He’s perhaps best known for writing Zodiac, David Fincher’s modern classic thriller. In this episode, he talks to Matthew about Nuremberg, his new film as both writer and director, set just after World War II as the Allies prepared to put high-ranking Nazi officials on trial. Vanderbilt explains that one of the biggest challenges was finding a way to tell such a heavy story without numbing the audience. “I sort of feel like two hours of unrelenting grimness and sadness… I just shut down,” he says, pointing to the moments of levity in Schindler’s List. That film has “humor and grace and wit,” he says. “You laugh during parts of it, so that when you get to the really horrible stuff, you’re able to take it in… and that is something we thought a lot about in terms of [Nuremberg].” To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠joincampside.com⁠. You can also find us on ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ & ⁠Youtube⁠.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Clint Smith is a celebrated poet, essayist, and staff writer at The Atlantic. In addition to his two poetry collections, Counting Descent and Above Ground, he is the author of the award-winning nonfiction bestseller How the Word Is Passed. In this episode, he talks to Matthew about the reporting of How the Word is Passed, and how he made it accessible without losing rigor. “When I was writing the book, I wrote about eight places, but I could have written about 1,008, because the scars of slavery are etched into the landscape all around us,” he says. “I also don’t want a young person, or anybody, to look at this book and be physically overwhelmed or intimidated by the prospect of even picking it up.” To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠joincampside.com⁠. You can also find us on ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ & ⁠Youtube⁠.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Gilbert King is a writer, photographer, and author of several books, including Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. In this episode, he talks to Matthew about the creation of Bone Valley, his hit podcast about the 1987 murder of Michelle Schofield. You can preorder the novel about his experience here Working in audio was a new experience for King, who relied on his producer, Kelsey Decker, to show him the ropes. "I was just ruining the tape left and right," he jokes. "And I remember Kelsey passed me this note on an in index card. It said 'Shut up.' Point taken. So I found myself having to nod a lot and make wide eyes and stuff like that. But I do believe it made me a better interviewer. Just learning to work with the silence, which is something I never really knew." To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠joincampside.com⁠. You can also find us on ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ & ⁠Youtube⁠.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Evan Ratliff is a magazine writer, podcaster, and author of Mastermind: Drugs, Empire, Murder, Betrayal, which was released in 2019 by Random House. In addition to co-founding Longform and The Atavist Magazine, Evan was also one of the founding editors of Pop-Up Magazine. In this episode, he talks to Matthew about Shell Game, a hit narrative podcast Evan funded, created, and distributed independently, working with a small team that included Evan's wife, Samantha Henig, and the independent producer Sophie Bridges. "I've had pretty good experiences doing projects with friends," Evan says. "And enough of those projects have worked out that I feel like it's worth taking some risks, especially in this environment where like the media industry is constantly like devolving in new and unexpected ways that you didn't even think about last year, where you were like, 'Oh, well that's solid,' and now it's gone."  To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠joincampside.com⁠. You can also find us on ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ & ⁠Youtube⁠.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Bonnie Tsui is a veteran journalist and the author of several critically-acclaimed books, including On Muscle, American Chinatown, and Why We Swim, which was published in 2020 by Algonquin Books. In this episode, she talks with Matthew about the challenges of writing Why We Swim, which mixes rigorous scientific reporting, history, and long passages of essayistic exploration. “It’s an instinctive way of writing," Bonnie says of the latter. "I mean, you know you have to come back to the points that you’re trying to make, with the chapter or the piece or whatever, but it is not the same as going to report something, or interview a person, and get all those details in. It’s about feeling your way forward and finding your way to some truth.” To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠joinoriginstories.com⁠. You can also find us on ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ & ⁠Youtube⁠.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Roy Wood Jr. is a comedian, actor, and former correspondent for The Daily Show. In this episode, he talks to Matthew about his new book, "The Man of Many Fathers: Life Lessons Disguised as a Memoir," which is structured as an extended letter to his young son. Early drafts, Wood recalls, were composed by voice note, while walking to the set of The Daily Show – a process that helped give the book its emotional power and irreverent humor.  "I don't believe you type the way you talk because you're constantly thinking about grammar and sentence fragments. Whereas I'm just walking down the street, and I'm like, 'This dude, he snorted cocaine, he stank, he looked like a gorilla, his shirt was sweaty, had brown teeth. He had one tooth that was more yellow than the other. How you get extra tartar on one tooth?' These are abstract, weird thoughts and if I'm in a flow of talking aloud, they're gonna come out. And I can take those, transcribe them, and then at night, really look at this story and go, 'Okay, this part should go here. This is disjointed, let's move this around.' To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠joinoriginstories.com⁠. You can also find us on ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ & ⁠Youtube⁠.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Mitch Albom is a journalist, playwright, and the author, most famously, of "The Five People You Meet in Heaven." Before scoring his breakout hit with "Tuesdays With Morrie," Mitch was a longtime sports reporter for The Detroit Free Press, where his column still appears every week. In this episode, he talks to Matthew about his new novel, Twice, and the importance of putting theme first. "The ideas always come before the characters and even the plot," he says of his creative process. "So I always start with, 'What theme do I want to write about?' Never what plot, or what's the story, or an idea for a character. It's, 'What do I want to tackle?' Because I know I'm going to have to live with that theme for a long time. Plots come and go. Characters can come and go. But if I'm not happy about what it is that I'm writing about, or what I'm trying to sail towards –– my North Star as I'm writing –– I can't live with it for that long." Mitch says he writes every day, for no more than three hours. "You need to fill your heart back up again. It's a regenerating thing, like blood. Like Red Smith said about sports writing: 'It's easy. You just sit down and open up a vein and bleed out a story.' But if you close the vein, you put a bandage on it, the blood eventually comes back in and you get back what you lost. I think it's the same thing with ideas and words."  To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠joinoriginstories.com⁠. You can also find us on ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ & ⁠Youtube⁠.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Steve Burns is best known as the first host of the groundbreaking kids TV show Blue's Clues, which debuted nearly three decades ago, in 1996. After leaving Blue's Clues, Steve worked as a voiceover actor and a musician; his song "Mighty Little Man" became the theme song for "Young Sheldon." In this episode, he talks to Matthew about the creation of his new hit podcast, "Alive With Steve Burns," and the learning curve involved in experimenting with a new medium.  "I watched like 40 hours of Dick Cavett and then I realized that was not useful to this forum in any way," he says. "And that I'd probably be better off taking some improv classes and understanding what journalism is. Right now, it seems like it's improvisational journalism if it's anything. But I'm still flailing around in a sea of fear when I'm here." To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠joinoriginstories.com⁠. You can also find us on ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ & ⁠Youtube⁠. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Debora Cahn is a television writer, producer, and showrunner. Debora launched her career as a scribe on The West Wing and Grey’s Anatomy; later, she served as a writer and executive producer on Homeland. In this episode, she talks to Matthew about The Diplomat, the hit drama series she created for Netflix. “The game that we're trying to win is to stay in a viewer's life for years,” she says of The Diplomat, which is now entering its third season. “Make this story interesting to people for years. And to do that, you plant all of these things in the garden, to use a simple metaphor. And some of them grow and some of them don't. And some of them are just sort of sitting there waiting for you to take advantage of them somewhere down the line.” To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠joinoriginstories.com⁠. You can also find us on ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ & ⁠Youtube⁠.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Max Minghella is an actor, writer, and director. Born in London, Max has acted in projects as varied as The Social Network, The Handmaid’s Tale, and The Ides of March. He also wrote and directed Teen Spirit, a coming-of-age drama set in the world of pop stardom. In this episode, he talks to Matthew about his latest directorial effort, Shell, a body-horror satire about beauty, technology, and transformation. His interest in this kind of material sprang, in part, from a previous acting gig on a Saw spin-off called Spiral. “When we were focus testing Spiral,” he says, “I discovered quite a lot of things watching a movie with audiences that I didn't expect. And one of them was how much glee people took from watching something that made them squeamish. I thought it would just make people turned off or uncomfortable. Actually, it made them laugh. And it made them laugh a lot in a wonderful way –– a really joyous way.” To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠joinoriginstories.com⁠. You can also find us on ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ & ⁠Youtube⁠.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Brian Goldstone is a journalist and anthropologist whose reporting focuses on inequality, housing, and the fragile architecture of the American dream. In this episode of Origin Stories, Goldstone talks to Matthew about There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America, his critically-acclaimed new nonfiction book. "In the last five or six months of writing, where I was just in that sort of fever dream phase, I had started waking up at 4 AM," Goldstone says. "Because with kids, that's the only way I was going to finish this. So I would be at my desk at four in the morning. And what allowed me to keep moving forward was having an outline in front of me that had already been so heavily edited and revised. I could be confident that even if I can't see the forest for the trees right now, I know that if I just keep putting one foot in front of the other, I'm going in the right direction." To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠joinoriginstories.com⁠. You can also find us on ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ & ⁠Youtube⁠.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Stephanie Foo is a veteran radio producer and longtime staffer at shows like Snap Judgment and This American Life. She joins Matthew to talk about the creation of her NYT best-selling memoir, “What My Bones Know,” which explores her early childhood trauma and her more recent diagnosis of complex PTSD. Foo discusses fart jokes, mining old journals for content, her husband’s editing skills, and how she deals with feedback. “Everything we make––everything we do our whole lives, including the way we live––should be a collaborative process,” she says. “Everything from taking edits in a Google Doc to dealing with your husband when he’s telling you to stop leaving out food. How are you going to help other people have their needs met? How are you looking out for the audience? Maybe some artists think about this differently and they make art for themselves, and they think, ‘My audience will come along for the ride.’ But for me, I was thinking very intently about my audience in every single sentence of this book.” To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠joinoriginstories.com⁠. You can also find us on ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ & ⁠Youtube⁠.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Actor, writer, and producer John Hoffman talks to Matthew about co-creating and showrunning the hit television show "Only Murders in the Building,” which is now in its fifth season on Hulu. Hoffman addresses writing lines for comedic greats like Martin Short and Steve Martin, his writing schedule (start early!) and how he deals with studio notes. He also describes the wonder of having a series snap together: “For me, it’s like an internal turn of the dial that says, ‘OK, I understand it all now. I understand how the whole thing holds together thematically and emotionally and how it can be funny and all of that. I can see it.’ And once it clicks in that way, then everything's fun. Getting there is the work.” To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠joinoriginstories.com⁠. You can also find us on ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ & ⁠Youtube⁠.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Palestinian filmmaker Yousef Srouji is the creator of the critically-acclaimed documentary "Three Promises," which uses his mother’s old home video footage to tell an intimate story of life during the Second Intifada. Srouji talks to Matthew about coming to documentary film as a newbie and learning the tools of the trade on the job. He also discusses the difficulty of finding distribution for “Three Promises,” despite the project being largely apolitical. As for his next project, Srouji, a successful entrepreneur, is content to wait for it to arrive: “I don't like to depend on the creative process for my income. Well, let's put it that way: when it becomes a need for me to create, it's not from the heart anymore.” To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠joinoriginstories.com⁠. You can also find us on ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ & ⁠Youtube⁠.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Mimi Leder is a producer, director, and two-time Emmy winner. Among her credits are films like Deep Impact and On the Basis of Sex and television programs like The Morning Show, a critically-acclaimed drama now entering its fourth season on Apple TV. In this episode of Origin Stories, she talks to Matthew about the establishing the tone of The Morning Show, the importance of creative synergy with actors and staff, and learning to honor both her experience and her gut instinct. “It’s really a process,” she says, “because something that may work on set doesn't always work editorially. Or maybe a sequence becomes something completely different than what you imagined it to be. Or it becomes even better than you thought it would be. It's very interesting: You make a movie three times. You write it, you direct it, and then you edit it. And you're remaking it every single time.”See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe is the author of several books, including “Empire of Pain” and “The Snakehead.” He talks with Matthew about “Say Nothing,” an award-winning book that was later adapted into a TV series on FX. On the agenda: The importance of outlining, the joys of research, and learning how and when to trust your gut. To Keefe, great reporting in 2025 must be accessible:” Personally, I want people to read what I'm writing,” he says. There's a point beyond which I'm not gonna dumb it down. But I will take no satisfaction from having like preserved, like, my belletristic integrity and insisted on the two paragraph description of what the landscape looks like,” he adds.”I do think that if you don't consider your audience, it just feels sort of self-indulgent.” To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠joinoriginstories.com⁠. You can also find us on ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ & ⁠Youtube⁠.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Connie Walker, a veteran Cree journalist, was the first podcaster to win both the Pulitzer Prize and a Peabody Award in the same year. She talks about the backstory of “Stolen: Surviving St. Michael's," a deeply-personal investigation of the Canadian Indian residential school system, which she reported while at Gimlet, then the biggest podcast company in the world. To Connie, all great audio documentaries should hinge on “a question that you're trying to answer. It doesn't have to be the question that you end up asking the whole way through,” she says. “But initially, you have to start with that.” To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠joinoriginstories.com⁠. You can also find us on ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ & ⁠Youtube⁠.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Dan Taberski is a writer, director, and former producer at The Daily Show. He joins Origin Stories to discuss the podcast “Hysterical,” which centers on a strange illness that afflicted a group of girls in the New York town of LeRoy. “Hysterical,” a 2025 Pulitzer finalist in the audio reporting category, went on to win a range of awards, including Show of the Year at the Ambies, the podcasting equivalent of the Oscars. In this episode, Dan discusses his reporting and outlining approach and the importance of treating subjects (and their stories) with care and respect. “People have real wisdom about their own experience,” he says. “I'm not looking for somebody to retell the story. I'm looking for people to sort of tell me what they got from it. Like what was that experience like as a person? And very often people have thought about that. It’s sort of a fool's errand to go into these situations thinking that you know what you want people to say because you don't. Also, it would be so boring if you did.” To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at joinoriginstories.com. You can also find us on Instagram, TikTok & Youtube. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Noah Hawley is a screenwriter, novelist, and Emmy-winning director. He joins Matthew to talk about his latest TV series, Alien: Earth, which grew out of a memo he was once asked to prepare for FX chief John Landgraf. Hawley discusses his creative process, his writing regimen, and the challenges and pleasures of adapting a beloved horror franchise for a modern audience. To Hawley, good ideas have to be carefully nurtured lest they dissipate before they can be executed upon. “It's kind of like trying to feed a squirrel,” he says. “You're like, ‘No, no, come here, come here. It'll be okay.’” To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠joinoriginstories.com⁠. You can also find us on ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ & ⁠Youtube⁠. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Origin Stories is a podcast by creatives –– and for anyone curious about the workings of the creative mind. Hosted by veteran journalist Matthew Shaer, every episode of the show takes you behind the scenes of your favorite book, magazine article, TV show, podcast, or movie –– from the initial spark of curiosity to the long sessions in front of a white board. Nothing is off the table: not the frustrations and the joys, not the setbacks and the successes. New episodes weekly starting September 10th! Get behind the scenes content and more go to ⁠joinoriginstories.com⁠ See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.