Origin Stories

Over the past year, I’ve had the chance to talk with some of the most interesting creative minds working in film, television, podcasting, and journalism—and to discuss their inspirations, influences, and obsessions. Now, Origin Stories is moving to a new home as part of the Campside community on Substack. But don't worry: I’ll keep doing what I’ve been doing: Origin Stories will still publish new content. And you’ll also find writing, interviews, and recommendations from Campside, plus new episodes and some old favorites from the archive. Hope you’ll come along.

 To connect wi...

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 original Catfish documentary, why audiences initially struggled to believe it was real, and how that experience eventually became one of MTV's most successful reality series. He also reflects on the challenge of building...

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 the modern American West.

In this episode, he talks to Matthew about the New Yorker article that inspired the book, the challenge of turning water law and infrastructure into narrative, and why following...

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 philosophy of small teams and minimal bureaucracy still shapes Silicon Valley today, and the challenge of turning deeply technical research into compelling narrative. He also reflects on the realities of hist...

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 economics of podcasting, why heavily produced narrative limited series have become harder to sustain, and how those realities shaped the creation of Are We Doomed?. Along the way, he reflects on the practical realities of...

We’re excited to share a preview of a new podcast we think you’d enjoy: No Such Thing

No Such Thing is a show where three best friends and journalists settle their dumb arguments — and yours — by actually doing the research. Hosts Manny Fidel, Noah Friedman, and Devan Joseph start each episode with an argument using just their gut feelings. Then they go out into the world, investigate, talk to experts, and conduct some experiments. Finally, the guys bring their findings back to the group to see if they can change minds, enlighten each other, and move pas...

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 deeper question at the center of the series: why she has never wanted children, and whether that feeling might one day change. She describes how the project evolved...

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...

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 ho...

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...

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 g...

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.

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 Ma...

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...

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 t...

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-M...

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...

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 th...

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...

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 se...

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...

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...

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 trau...

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 ha...

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...

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 wi...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Special episode alert! This week, we're featuring an interview from So Your Parents Are Old, a new podcast about the realities (funny, sad, and somewhere in-between) of dealing with aging loved ones. In this episode, host Vanessa Grigoriadis chats with Amanda Uhle, a writer and the publisher of McSweeney’s, about her new book "Destroy This House." For more information on the show, plug the words "So Your Parents Are Old" into whatever podcast app you use. Or head on over to joincampside.com.

Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/origin-stories/id1833077585?i=1000740855568

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 f...

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 fee...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 senten...

Part book club, part English class, Zero to Well-Read is a fun and irreverent guide to the books everyone talks about, from classics you should have read in high school to the modern hits everyone's buzzing about. In each episode, hosts Jeff O'Neal and Rebecca Schinsky tell you everything you need to know about a must-read book, including its plot, what it feels like to read, why it’s important, and the key takeaways you can use at your next dinner party.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.co...

Bad Elizabeth is a comedic true crime podcast  hosted by friends and former “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” office mates, Gideon Evans and Kathy Egan-Taylor.

The premise is as simple as it sounds: each episode explores the story of an “Elizabeth” (or any derivation of that name) who is notorious, be they a murderer, a fraudster, or just a complete a-hole. These women span both past and present, in pop culture, and world history. Gideon & Kathy guide you through these sordid and outrageous tales breezily, as if you were a guest at a fun cockt...