Origin Stories

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 a show around real people's lives, learning to trust his instincts on camera, and what it means to have his identity become inseparable from the work he's best known for.“There are not a lot of things that I've done in my life that I really felt, in that moment, as I was doing them, like, ‘This is exactly right for me."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.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

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

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

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 with a world driven by imagination, dreaming, and flight as a metaphor for hope. “Being a showrunner is as close as you can get to playing God,” he says. “It’s really you and the blank page and it’s Genesis and you’re like, ‘Let there be flying ships,’ right?” 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.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.