The long way around

In 2008 I was a college freshman in Indianapolis with an idea that sounded absurd. Crimes were happening on campus. The university was not reporting them, the local press was not covering them, and students were walking into danger they could not see. So I did the one thing that made sense. I started talking about it.

No studio. No budget. No audience. A microphone, a story that needed telling, and a guess that someone would listen. Someone did. Then a lot of someones. That show became the first true crime podcast in America, before Serial, before the genre had a name.

Nearly two decades later it is the Myths and Malice network. Six shows, more than 1,500 episodes, a team of hosts and producers who hold one line: accuracy is not optional, and every story belongs to the people who lived it.

Every story I have told and every system I have built comes back to one habit: find the real question. Not the one people are asking. The one underneath it.

It is also how I listen. I do not try to fix people from above. I sit with them and help them find their own way through. That is the difference between handing someone an answer and being in it with them until they can see it for themselves.

In journalism it meant finding what nobody was looking at. In business it meant seeing the people problem hiding inside the systems problem. Coaching is the thread I am growing into now, the same instinct: sitting with someone while they find the question underneath their own.