Stay Away from Matthew MaGill · Pineapple Street Studios and Audacy

Part 1 — The Box

April 13, 2021·32 min·3 clips

Eric Mennel discovers a box holding the artifacts of Matthew McGill's incredible life, from Broadway to a 747 hijacking, while confronting his own family estrangement.

A family recording comes first. On Christmas Eve 2017, the host and his sister sit in a Chinese takeout place near where he grew up in Florida. She teases him for never podcasting about family. Then the story slips to rural Florida, where Ed Libby drives past a new nursery and notices the owner tending plants in a large straw hat. Ed stops to make a sales pitch and meets a man introduced as Matthew McGill. The talking is the hook. Ed is no fool; the host describes him as smart, educated in political science and government, and fond of market theory and history. But his days are quiet. He lives alone, without much variety, and Matthew keeps feeding him stories. They get bigger fast. Matthew says he was shipped off young, spent his teen years in Peru, and had a grandfather who served as agriculture minister. Ed asks if Matthew was Peruvian. The answer is just no, which gives the story its first dry little wobble. Then Matthew says he crossed the Atlantic alone in a small sailboat. After that come Vitalis modeling, a perfect ski-jump stunt in upstate New York, Camelot on Broadway, and roommates tied to Monday Night Football and Christopher Walken. Each claim lands like something pulled from a box.

As heard by us

A patient portrait of a nursery owner whose stories keep getting bigger.

The episode opens on a Christmas Eve 2017 family recording in Florida, then shifts to Matthew McGill, a nursery owner whose life story comes in a steady run of big claims.

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Why you'd press play

When a charming stranger starts sounding like a whole false life.

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