Origin Stories

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 cocktail party.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.