Every episode starts with a true story that sounds made up — and then the hard part: finding a way into it that nobody has used before.
Sheri never tells two stories the same way. Her episode on Ted Kaczynski being experimented on at Harvard by the CIA isn’t told as the story of the Unabomber. It’s told through a question: what is a hermit? Even the physics-heavy episodes are built as stories: one takes you underground, into a former gold mine in South Dakota, where scientists are hunting for the reason anything exists at all.
What she writes isn’t an essay. It’s a production script, with every musical transition and sound effect written in and a cast of voice actors reading the parts. Max directs — sometimes sounding out names phonetically in languages he doesn’t speak — and Doc produces. Between Sheri and Max, every episode takes 14 to 20 hours to make.
And some of them start with you. The show takes requests, and one episode was even written by a listener.