Hey, it's Max.

So for the third year in a row, we're doing a series of interviews this week with winners

of this year's prestigious George Polk Journalism Award.

Every day this week, Monday through Friday, we're going to put up an interview with a different

Polk Award winner discussing their winning work.

The Polk Awards honor long-form reporting, and as John Darden, the curator of the awards

talked about at the ceremony earlier this month, that work is done at a great cost.

Sixty-seven journalists were killed in 2022.

That's almost double from the year before, and the highest number since 2018, according

to the committee to protect journalists.

And as you'll hear, these conversations are not just a testament to the importance and

the value and the power of investigative journalism.

They're also a testament to the incredible risk this work often demands.

Unlike previous versions of this series, everyone you're going to hear from this week

has never been on the show before.

Many of them are people we wanted to talk to for a really long time, and I cannot wait

for you to hear these conversations.

But up first is a journalist who I will tell you I had never heard of until very recently,

but that's because he hadn't been a journalist until very recently.

Theobaker is an investigative reporter at the Stanford Daily.

He's a freshman, and he received a special poll award this year for a series of articles.

He's actually still working on this reporting that uncovered allegations around research

...