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 Originstories@campsidemedia.com

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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 Originstories@campsidemedia.com

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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 Originstories@campsidemedia.com

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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 Originstories@campsidemedia.com

See 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 Originstories@campsidemedia.com

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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 Originstories@campsidemedia.com

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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 Originstories@campsidemedia.com

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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 Originstories@campsidemedia.com.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.