About the Show.

Sources & Methods is a podcast hosted by Alex Strick and Matt Trevithick in which interesting people doing interesting things get to talk about the what, how and why of what they do.

A new episode is recorded every two weeks.

youngalex.jpg

About Alex.

A graduate of the School of Oriental and African Studies (BA Arabic and Persian), Alex Strick van Linschoten successfully defended his PhD in 2016 at the War Studies Department of King’s College London on the identity of the Taliban movement as expressed through their own writings and statements pre-2001. He has also worked as co-editor of a book written by former Taliban envoy to Pakistan, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, published by Hurst and Columbia University Press to critical acclaim in winter 2010; a history of the relationship between the Taliban and al-Qaeda entitled An Enemy We Created: The Myth of the Taliban – Al-Qaeda Merger, 1970-2010; and a volume of poetry written by Taliban members, published by Hurst (UK) entitled Poetry of the Taliban. He is currently working on a large project dealing with archival primary sources by the Afghan Taliban. He has worked as a freelance journalist from Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon and Somalia. He speaks Arabic, Dutch, Farsi, Pashtu and German and can get by in French.

About Matt.

beqaa.jpg

Matt is the founder and CEO of Blank Slate Technologies, a financed ed-tech startup focused on memory and learning (and came out of conversations with Alex in a Kabul household years ago).

Matt spent nine years living abroad, writing, working and researching. He co-founded SREO Consulting in 2013, a research + monitoring and evaluation center that works with the world's leading humanitarian organizations to ensure aid gets where it is supposed to go across the region, and sold it in 2017. Previously, he spent four years working as the Director of Communications at the American University of Afghanistan after working at the American University of Iraq. He is also the co-author of An Undesirable Element: An Afghan Memoir, about the life of Afghanistan's first post-Taliban Minister of Higher Education with a foreword written by US Ambassador Ryan Crocker.

Before going overseas, he worked as a writer and researcher at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, DC for Rock The Casbah: Rage and Rebellion Across the Muslim World by Robin Wright, which won an Overseas Press Club award for Best Non-Fiction Title in 2012, as well as at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. His work has been featured in The Atlantic, Foreign Policy Magazine, the Wall St. Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. He speaks Persian and can get by in Russian and Arabic, and has lived and traveled across the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa, including Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Mali. He holds a BA from Boston University, has a silver medal from the 2008 Head of the Charles Regatta, and has coached the Iraqi and Afghan national rowing teams.