Author: Matt
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Bryan Cranston Won’t Play Donald Trump
For the New York Times Opinion podcast Sway, I produced this conversation between Kara Swisher and actor Bryan Cranston. Cranston became famous playing powerful, broken men. But he’s not interested in playing Donald Trump. Yet. You can listen here or subscribe wherever you get podcasts.
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Food Delivery Is Keeping Uber Alive. Will It Kill Restaurants?
For the New York Times Opinion podcast Sway, I produced this conversation between Kara Swisher and Dara Khosrowshahi, the CEO of Uber. During the pandemic, Uber’s ride-hailing revenue sagged. But Uber Eats, its restaurant delivery service, soared. What does he say to restaurant owners who claim Uber’s fees are ruining their business? You can listen…
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What’s Next in Your Netflix Queue?
For the New York Times Opinion podcast Sway, I produced this interview between Kara Swisher and Bela Bajaria, the new head of global television at Netflix. Bajaria, who moved to Netflix from NBC, is the first person to oversee television content for the entire world at the streaming giant.
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Escaping the Las Vegas Shooting
For Vice News, I produced an episode of the podcast Source Material, non-narrated stories based on recordings made by ordinary people who live through extraordinary events. I interviewed Cory Langdon, who was driving a taxi on the night of the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. You can listen to her story on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or any…
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Math Lessons from Pennsylvania
For the New York Times Opinion podcast Sway, I produced this interview between host Kara Swisher and John Fetterman, the Twitter-famous Lieutenant Governor of Pennsylvania. After Election Day, Fetterman started saying out loud what a lot of Democratic politicians were thinking: that Trump’s attempts to stave off defeat added up to a battle against math…
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American Icons: The Tales of Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe’s stories are so familiar they’ve become part of our cultural wallpaper. A raven croaking “nevermore?” An enemy bricked up in a cellar? A heart beating under the floorboards? These images are the stuff of our collective nightmares, but Poe dreamed them all up first. For Studio 360’s American Icons series, I produced…
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California Dreamin’
A new law in California mandates that middle schools can’t start before 8 am, and high schools 8:30. This is based on years of studies showing kids need more sleep than they’re getting, teens in particular. But it remains to be seen whether a statewide ban on early classes will result in a generation of…
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How to Make Meetings Less Terrible
In the U.S. alone, we hold 55 million meetings a day. Most of them are woefully unproductive, and tyrannize our offices. For Freakonomics Radio, I produced this episode about practical ways to improve meetings — with better agendas, smaller invite lists, and an embrace of healthy conflict, with advice from Steven Rogelberg (The Surprising Science…
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The Data-Driven Guide to Sane Parenting
When my daughter was born, my wife and I agreed that we wouldn’t drive ourselves crazy reading every book of parenting advice on the shelf. So much of it seems designed only to cause anxiety – and, of course, to sell more books. But I do find myself referring over and over to this one…
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How Spotify Saved the Music Industry (But Not Necessarily Musicians)
Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek gave a rare interview to Freakonomics Radio for an episode I produced. We tell the story of how Ek (who grew up in Sweden listening to pirated music) managed to sell the record labels on his plan to make online listening legit. And, remarkably, it has worked: after years…
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Low Fidelity
Journalist Bella Bathurst describes how she lost her hearing while conducting interviews with the last generation of Scottish lighthouse keepers and then how it felt, twelve years later, to regain it. For this episode of The Organist, I edited, sound designed, mixed, and scored this interview between Bathurst and journalist Jason Boog. (Starts at 8:30)
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How to Be Creative
Creativity has become a buzzword, universally desirable but uniformly misunderstood. What is it, really? Is there a definition large enough to capture all the various activities that fall under its umbrella? And what can social scientists tell us about where it comes from and (more importantly) how to get more of it? I’m producing an…
