Podcasts

Shell Game Season 1

A podcast about things that are not what they seem. In Season One, that thing is my voice. By creating a voice clone and hooking it up to an AI chatbot, I set out to discover what happens when you try to take control of the very technology that threatens to replace you.

Over the course of six episodes, my voice agents talk to spammers and scammers, to my friends and family, to colleagues and sources, to other AIs, and even to a therapist—all to better understand what AI voice is able to do, what it can’t yet do, and what to expect from a future in which more and more of the people we encounter in the world aren’t real.

Shell Game won the 2025 Independent Media Initiative prize, and was excerpted on This American Life, Radiolab, and Pablo Torre Finds Out. It was named one of the the best shows of 2024 by Apple’s top ten “Shows We Love“, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Vulture, Podcast Review, The Information, and The Economist. Visit shellgame.co to find out more and support the show.

Persona

What does it feel like to pick up the phone and scam someone out of $50 million?  Persona: The French Deception is an eight-part investigative look into the story of Gilbert Chikli, one of the greatest con artists of all time. Created with Pineapple Street Studios, the show investigates how Chikli successfully duped some of the world’s most powerful people into handing over their fortunes. Persona explores how Chikli evaded the law for years and became a Robin Hood-like hero. More than just a tale of criminal genius, this is a show about the moment we’re living in right now—the golden age of scammers—and the power of seduction. But what happens when the fantasy we’ve been lured into finally crumbles away?

The show charted in the top 3 overall podcasts on Apple, and was reviewed and recommended by Vulture (New York Magazine), The Guardian, Financial Times, and Airmail, among others.

The Longform Podcast

The Longform Podcast was a weekly in-depth conversation with nonfiction writers, editors, radio storytellers, and documentarians about their work, careers, and lives. It was hosted by Aaron Lammer, Max Linsky, and myself. From 2012 to 2024, we interviewed hundreds of guests, the podcast was downloaded tens of millions of times, picked as Time’s 100 best podcasts of all time, and named to best-of-the-year lists from the likes of Time, The Guardian, The Atlantic (and again!), New York magazine, and others. The New York Times  covered our decision to end it in 2024, while Vulture, Defector, and The Point published some lovely remembrances.

You can find the full archive of interviews at longform.org/podcast. I also switched seats and was a guest on the podcast, in 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2022.

Here’s a selection of some favorite ones that I conducted:

Connie Walker, episode 430

Jack Hitt, episode 200

Ta-Nehisi Coates, episodes 7, 97, 168, 225, 360 (with Chris Jackson), 408, 584

Margo Jefferson, episode 157

Ben Taub, episode 210

On Musk / On Franklin with Walter Isaacson

An ongoing conversation about biography and its subjects, with Walter Isaacson. In the first season, we ask: What is it like to shadow Elon Musk for two years? To sit courtside as he builds a rocket? Or tears apart an engineer? Or couch surfs at the homes of billionaires? And how on earth do you make sense of it all? Walter Isaacson is the biographer of giants: DaVinci, Franklin, Doudna, Jobs…and now Musk, former enfante terrible, rocket launcher, electric car innovator, and Twitter—er, X—disruptor, to put it gently. In this four part series, which reached number 1 on Apple’s overall charts, I sat down with Isaacson to draw out the behind-the-scenes stories of this epic biography, and what the writer has learned as an outsider inside Silicon Valley.

In the second season we take a behind the scenes look at the story of Ben Franklin, and how his genius shaped our national character. From Franklin’s adventures as a mischievous apprentice, to his evolution over 84 years into America’s best writer, inventor, scientist, diplomat, and business strategist… as well as Founding Father, Isaacson covers everything from the wit behind Poor Richard’s Almanac to the wisdom behind the Declaration of Independence; not to mention, how a former slave owner evolved into the shepherd of a near-perfect Constitution. Isaacson provides a look at how he came to understand Franklin’s remarkable life, how it shaped America’s national identity, and why Ben Franklin matters so much right now.