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.
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 here or wherever you get podcasts.
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.
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 other player here.
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 itself. Listen on the NYT website or your podcast app of choice.
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 this hour about Poe’s tales and the long shadow they’ve cast over popular culture. You can listen to the episode here or on Apple Podcasts.
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 well-rested superkids or just push everyone’s bedtime a bit later. I produced this episode of Vox’s daily news podcast Today, Explained, which you can listen to here or on Apple Podcasts.
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 of Meetings) and Priya Parker (The Art of Gathering). You can listen to the episode here.
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 book I read for an episode of Freakonomics Radio. It’s called Cribsheet: A Data-Driven Guide to Better, More Relaxed Parenting, from Birth to Preschool. And it’s by an economist, Emily Oster. She investigated the studies behind the guidelines parents get from pediatricians, and also went looking for evidence to back up common advice you hear from relatives and other parents. She found that mostly, parents worry too much about things we can’t control. Which nicely supports my prejudice against reading parenting books. You can hear the episode here.
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 of crashing income, the labels are growing again. Spotify has also benefited big, name-brand artists who have billions of streams. But the story is quite a bit less rosy for artists caught in the long tail – exactly those artists who seemed to have the most to gain from the arrangement. You can listen to the episode here (or, for that matter, on Spotify) and read a summary on Medium.
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)
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 ongoing series for Freakonomics Radio that asks these questions, featuring interviews with creative practitioners like Elvis Costello, Ai Weiwei, Tracy K. Smith, Jennifer Egan, Wynton Marsalis, John Hodgman, and many more. Listen to the whole series here.