A podcast cover titled 'Talking Trash with Matt King' featuring an illustration of a woman with black hair wearing a t-shirt. Her eyes are obscured by a cloud of smoke or pollution, with industrial smoke stacks in the background.

About the show

The vast majority of waste and pollution doesn't come from your household bin. It happens far upstream — in mines, factories, farms, and supply chains most of us will never see. A single mine can dump more harmful waste in a day than you'd produce in a thousand lifetimes. And most of it is hidden by design.

TALKING TRASH is an independent podcast that follows waste upstream to the systems of power, money, race, and design it exposes along the way. Each episode features a conversation with a different author, filmmaker, scientist, poet, or engineer who is unearthing what industry has buried, dumped, or designed out of sight.

New episodes every other week. No consumer guilt trips.

Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Follow us at:
Instagram: @_talkingtrashpod
TikTok: @talkingtrashpod
YouTube: @talkingtrashpod

Person taking a selfie with a smartphone, wearing sunglasses, a blue bucket hat, and a yellow striped shirt, standing in front of a red circle on a light blue background.

About the host

Matt King is a journalist and essayist whose published work sits at the intersection of technology, culture, and environmental ethics. Over the past decade, he has reported and written for The Atlantic, The New Republic, MIT Technology Review, Literary Hub, The Baffler, Boston Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications.

Much of his reportage examines the material consequences of what we build, consume, and throw away. Zombie office towers and the economics of vacancy. Clean-up technologies pitched as false saviors for waste and pollution. The accumulation of space junk orbiting overhead. His culture writing explores hybrid art forms such as video essays, visual collage, genre-bending prose.

Several of his essays have been recognized as "Notables" by Best American Essays and Best American Science & Nature Writing, and discussed in forums ranging from Chicago public radio to the European Journal of Political Theory to Hacker News.

Matt graduated from NYU's Stern School of Business and was an MFA nonfiction fellow at Emerson College. Originally from Illinois, he is currently based in Baltimore.

For press inquiries, guest suggestions, or collaboration: mattking25@gmail.com