A Midnight Phone Call. A Missing Movie. Decades of Questions.
Reveal
The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX
4.7 • 8.7K Ratings
🗓️ 4 April 2026
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Here at the Center for Investigative Reporting, we excel at finding things: government documents, paper trails, the misdeeds people have tried to hide. It’s serious work. But that gave us an idea: What would happen if we used these skills for things that are less about accountability and more about joy? If we turned our energy toward personally meaningful questions?
That was the spark for our first-ever Inconsequential Investigations hour. We turned our journalistic strategies on our own biggest questions to see where the trail led.
This week on Reveal, we take up Mother Jones video correspondent Garrison Hayes’ quest to find the first short film he ever made, even though it was lost to the early 2000s internet. Yowei Shaw of the podcast Proxy brings us along as she meets her doppelganger and discovers the truth behind how people see her. And Reveal reporter and producer Ashley Cleek untangles her own unsolved mystery: Did reclusive rock star Jeff Mangum really call into her college radio show, asking her for a favor?
We plan to do more Inconsequential Investigations like this. If you have a personal mystery that needs looking into, please email Inconsequential@revealnews.org.
This is an update of an episode that first aired in October 2025.
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| 0:00.0 | Add a little curiosity into your routine with TED Talks Daily, the podcast that brings you a new Ted Talk every weekday. |
| 0:07.0 | In less than 15 minutes a day, you'll go beyond the headlines and learn about the big ideas shaping your future. |
| 0:13.5 | Coming up, how AI will change the way we communicate, how to be a better leader, and more. |
| 0:19.0 | Listen to TED Talks Daily, wherever you get your podcast. |
| 0:24.1 | From the Center for Investigative Reporting in PRX, this is Reveal. |
| 0:28.7 | I'm Al Ledson. |
| 0:31.4 | At Reveal, you know how we do. |
| 0:34.0 | We are in the business of big stories. |
| 0:36.4 | We report on government corruption, violations of |
| 0:39.0 | human rights, matters of national, sometimes even global importance. But this week, we're |
| 0:44.6 | revisiting a show that's a little bit different. It's an episode we first brought you last |
| 0:49.3 | October, and it's a really fun one, a show where we use our investigative skills for stories that hit |
| 0:55.9 | more of a personal note. The idea for this hour came from my colleague and good friend reporter |
| 1:00.8 | Ashley Cleek. Hey, Al. Ashley, what you got for me? I'm calling it inconsequential investigations. |
| 1:10.0 | Basically, the idea was to take the same intensity that we bring to all of our reporting |
| 1:15.6 | and apply it to people's memories or questions that they've had about something that happened to them, |
| 1:22.6 | questions that they've never really been able to answer, and questions that we actually have the skills to investigate. |
| 1:29.8 | And the stories that I've found, they're not inconsequential at all. |
| 1:32.8 | At the heart of them are these deep truths about how we relate to the world and the stories |
| 1:38.5 | that we tell about ourselves. |
| 1:40.1 | Now, that very much sounds like a reveal episode. |
| 1:43.7 | I like it. |
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