The Amphibian Show

Hey there, I'm Matt Stroud. See above 👍

I'm still figuring out exactly what this show is. That's not a hedge. That's part of the point.

For a while I was building a show around narrative control: how politicians, corporations, celebrities, institutions, journalists, advertisers, artists, and ordinary people try to shape the stories told about them. That idea still matters. We live in an attention economy where everything is a performance, every crisis comes with a communications strategy, and every person with a phone is expected to become the narrator of their own life.

But the frame needs to get bigger.

In 2026 and 2027, I'll be reporting through the O'Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism at Marquette University on defense spending and surveillance technology. That work will shape a lot of what Amphibian becomes on YouTube. The project involves reporting, research, interviews, documents, money trails, companies, government agencies, technologies, lobbyists, and the places where war, policing, politics, and private industry start to look like one big machine.

So the YouTube channel will be a public notebook, a reporting lab, a conversation space, and eventually a show.

Some videos will be polished. Some will be rougher. Some will be interviews, explainers, or clips from larger Amphibian projects. Some will be me working through a question in public before I know where it leads. The connective tissue is the same thing that runs through Amphibian as a whole: power, money, violence, belief, media, politics, music, psychology, technology, and the stories people tell to survive all of it.

The newsletter is where the deeper work will live first. Subscribe for reporting process, research trails, interviews, notes, arguments, and the weekly collection of whatever I'm trying to understand. The newsletter will feed the YouTube show. The YouTube show will feed the newsletter.

The show is still taking shape. It will land here.