Matthieu Paley has spent his career walking — thousands of kilometers through the Karakoram, Hindu Kush, and Pamir mountains, photographing communities on the fringes of the map for National Geographic. He speaks eight languages, lived 13 months in northern Pakistan on a one-way ticket, and built a life around the exact things a classroom once told him he was bad at. What he didn't know, until about five months before this recording, was that there was a name for the way his brain works. His son called it first ("Papa, you're full ADHD"), and then a string of  volunteers on his land in Portugal — strangers who clocked him within half an hour.

Laurel visits Matthieu on that land, half an hour south of Lisbon, where he has planted some 1,500 trees, uncovered hidden springs beneath 40 years of dumped trash, and turned an overgrazed hillside into a food forest — a project he describes as the ultimate medicine for a hyperactive brain. Over the sound of running spring water, they talk about how walking for weeks on end recalibrates him chemically, why he says he'd have been "a super productive hunter" 10,000 years ago, and his complicated, very French relationship with diagnosis and medication — which he uses only rarely, and still half-suspects is cheating.

They also get into his scathing view of conventional schooling ("you're teaching 25 kids the same way — in what world are they all the same?"), why he and his wife chose self-directed learning for their sons, the case for letting kids be bored, the depression that hit him in business school when the world seemed to have no place for him, and the advice he'd give his younger self: in the end, everything will be all right — and if it's not all right, it's not the end.

🎙️ Guest: Matthieu Paley — National Geographic photographer and explorer, Palmela, Portugal

🧠 All My Friends Have ADHD is hosted by journalist and filmmaker Laurel Chor.

📍 Recorded on Feb. 28, 2026, in Palmela, Portugal

📝 Episode description generated with AI assistance.

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TW: suicide

When Lizzie Tilia was six years old, a doctor gave her father a piece of advice that would define her life: your daughter is never going to do anything she doesn't want to do — so put her in proximity to many things, watch what she's willing and able to do, and let her go to the full extent of it. In this episode, Laurel sits down with Lizzie in Mexico City — on Chinese New Year, no less — to trace how that prophecy played out: a corporate career spent hopping industries every 18 months, career-coaching videos that racked up millions of views on social media, and eventually a complete reinvention as a psychic and earth wisdom educator.

Lizzie is the founder of Earth Mystery School, an educational platform that teaches intuition and instinct through an ecological lens — and she's refreshingly unprecious about the whole thing. She and Laurel dig into what "psychic" actually means (spoiler: she thinks we all are), the difference between instinct and intuition, and why she believes enchantment is a medicine. They also go deep on the mental health side of her story: being raised on Ritalin and Adderall, the childhood trauma that seeded her OCD, and how Internal Family Systems therapy led her to give her ADHD a name — Glitter Bitch. Yes, really.

Along the way: the sister who was written off as cognitively impaired and became a petroleum engineer, why Lizzie can only create things "from the inside," a striking caution about mixing ADHD medication, cannabis, and social media, and the ADHD survival toolkit they both swear by — sleep, body doubling, and refusing to start the workday before noon.

🎙️ Guest: Lizzie Tilia — psychic, earth wisdom educator, founder of Earth Mystery School, Mexico City

🧠 All My Friends Have ADHD is hosted by journalist and filmmaker Laurel Chor.

📍 Recorded on Feb. 17, 2026 in Mexico City

📝 Episode description generated with AI assistance.

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Maddie McGarvey is a documentary photographer based in Columbus, Ohio whose work examines grief, resilience, and the lives of people in the American Midwest — regularly published in the Washington Post, New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, and others. She was diagnosed with ADHD at 30, after years of not understanding why she couldn't get out of her own way, eventually finding the right doctor and the right medication — including using the GeneSight genetic test to figure out which antidepressant her body would actually metabolize properly.

This episode was recorded at the NatGeo Storyteller Summit in LA — the same summit at which Laurel launched this podcast a few hours before the welcome dinner, after an ADHD procrastination spiral that lasted nearly a year. Maddie and Laurel talk about what it took to finally get heard by the medical system as women, how ADHD presents differently in women and gets masked differently across cultures, what getting properly medicated actually changed in Maddie's life (she bought a house that year), the perfectionism paralysis that affects women with ADHD disproportionately, and Maddie's 15-year documentary project following a family through poverty, grief, foster care, and into adulthood. Plus: why every single day being different makes photojournalism basically the perfect ADHD career.

📝 Episode description generated with AI assistance.

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Dominic Bracco II is a photographer, journalist, author, educator, social practice artist, playwright, occasional actor, and co-owner of Uvas y Hojas — a bookstore, cultural center, and small publisher in Baja California Sur, Mexico. He was just diagnosed with ADHD and autism a week before this conversation, and he's still processing what it means.

Recorded at the National Geographic Storyteller Summit in LA, this is a wide-ranging conversation between two photojournalists trying to figure out how their brains work. Dominic grew up near the Texas-Mexico border, fell into photography at 13 after his grandfather's advice about the 10,000-hour rule, covered a decade of violence in Ciudad Juarez, nearly got himself killed several times, had a profound spiritual experience at a Maori sacred site in New Zealand, went broke in Baja painting houses and selling tortas on the beach, started a bookstore with two friends, and was recently put on Ritalin. He also has a manuscript he's written 20 different ways and still hasn't finished — but he has a pineapple plant that's been growing for five years and hasn't made a pineapple yet, and he finds that very clarifying.

They talk about the grief and relief of a late dual ADHD and autism diagnosis, what it means to finally understand why you've been struggling, masking, medication, depression mistaken for personality, addiction as coping, and why ADHD brains might actually thrive in conflict zones and chaotic creative lives. And whether structure and stability actually solve anything — or just create new problems.

📝 Episode description generated with AI assistance.

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Svet Jacqueline is an American documentary photographer based in Kyiv, covering the war in Ukraine for the Wall Street Journal and others. Before Ukraine, she covered BLM, migration at the US-Mexico border, and wildfires. She was diagnosed with ADD at 11 — more than two decades before this conversation — and has spent her adult life building the systems, workarounds, and hard-won self-knowledge that keep her functioning in one of the most demanding, unpredictable environments on earth.

This episode is a little different. Recorded in Kyiv, it's as much a conversation between two friends and colleagues as it is an interview — two conflict photojournalists with ADHD comparing notes on what it actually means to live and work this way. They get into the particular chaos of freelance life with ADD, what it's like to be diagnosed as a child versus an adult, why weed makes everything worse, the relationship between risk-taking and ADHD, medication dependency and what happens on the days you forget it, visual memory so sharp Svet once recognized a stranger on a New York street from a single glance at a painting four years earlier — and Laurel's theory that the closer you get to the front line, the higher the incidence of ADHD among people who don't have to be there.

🎙️ Guest: Svet Jacqueline — documentary photographer, Kyiv, Ukraine. Work published in Wall Street Journal and others. Previously covered BLM, US-Mexico border migration, and wildfires.

🧠 All My Friends Have ADHD is hosted by journalist and filmmaker Laurel Chor.

📍Recorded on July 24, 2025 in Kyiv, Ukraine 

📝 Description generated with AI assistance.

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Eniola Mafe Abaga is a force of nature — a British-Nigerian global development leader, co-founder of civic movement #TheNewNigerian, and currently Global Advocacy and Partnerships Director at Fika (formerly known as Bridges to Prosperity), an NGO literally building trail bridges to connect isolated rural communities across Africa and beyond. She's also been diagnosed with ADHD since her sophomore year at Spelman College — a diagnosis she promptly forgot she'd even taken the test for.

In this episode, Eniola and Laurel get into the full arc of what it means to navigate ADHD as a high-achieving Black woman: from report cards that said "brilliant but always late" to working on Wall Street, to finally hitting rock bottom during grad school at Georgetown and actually doing something about it. They talk about the grief of diagnosis, the particular stigma of ADHD in African and Nigerian contexts — where medication can be near-impossible to find and some psychologists still advise patients to "pray it away" — and how Eniola went from quietly managing to speaking openly about her diagnosis in professional and public spaces. Plus: how she uses ChatGPT as a coach for initiation, building her own AI digital twin, and measuring productivity in album lengths instead of hours.

🎙️ Guest: Eniola Mafe-Abaga — Global Advocacy and Partnerships Director @ Fika (formerly Bridges to Prosperity), Cross-sector collaboration and revenue development expert, formerly at World Economic Forum, Merrill Lynch

🧠 All My Friends Have ADHD is hosted by journalist and filmmaker Laurel Chor — exploring neurodivergent minds across cultures, careers, and continents.

📍Recorded online on June 18, 2025 (with Eniola tuning in from Lagos)

📝 Description generated with AI assistance.

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This week Laurel sits down in Paris with César — French-Japanese designer, ocean technologist, educator, environmentalist, TED Senior Fellow, and PhD candidate — who has never been diagnosed with ADHD, but was diagnosed with dyslexia, dyspraxia, and an epileptic condition after a truly unforgettable childhood head injury. What follows is one of the most wide-ranging conversations yet: shapeshifting boats, the BP oil spill, floating oyster farms, hydrogen energy, sea level rise, Fukushima radiation — and what it means to have a brain that runs on emotional urgency, hates wasting other people's time, and organizes 15,000 people in a two-database Notion system.

🎙️ Guest: César — ocean innovator, designer, TED Senior Fellow, PhD candidate in ocean innovation, Paris/global

🧠 All My Friends Have ADHD is hosted by journalist and filmmaker Laurel Chor — exploring neurodivergent minds across cultures, careers, and continents.

📍Recorded in Paris on May 31, 2025

📝 Description generated with AI assistance.

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In this episode, Laurel sits down with serial entrepreneur Lindsay Jang — co-founder of Yardbird and Ronin, founder of Family Form and Always Joy — and her 17-year-old daughter Lili Jang-Abergel.

Both have ADHD, diagnosed years apart, and neither knew the other had it when Lili was first diagnosed. They talk about what untreated ADD looks like when it masquerades as depression, why Lindsay didn't recognise herself in Lili's symptoms, the "Limitless" moment of finding the right medication, and how ADHD manifests completely differently even within the same family. 

🎙️ Guest: Lindsay Jang — entrepreneur, co-founder of restaurants Yardbird, Ronin & Always Joy, and wellness brand Family Form

🎙️ Guest: Lili Jang-Abergel — student, 17 (at the time of recording)

📍Recorded in Hong Kong on May 7, 2025

📝 Description generated with AI assistance.

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Mary HK Choi is the New York Times Bestselling author of Emergency Contact, Permanent Record, Yolk and Pool House (now available for pre-order). She was diagnosed with both ADHD and autism in her 40s. 

Permanent Record is being adapted for a feature film, while Yolk will become a TV series. Mary is an executive producer and writer for both, because her talents are endless. 

Mary is a third-culture kid: she was born in South Korea, grew up in Hong Kong and Houston, and now lives in New York City. 

In this episode, we talked about making deadlines, learning to say no, and ADHD burn-out and/or autism melt-downs. 

Recorded in New York City on April 30, 2025. 

📝 Description generated with AI assistance.

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In this episode, I speak to Fer Ligabue, a documentary filmmaker who works on indigenous issues, and Isa Luz, who works for social NGOs and focuses on gender issues, about getting diagnosed as an adult (or feeling resistant to getting formally diagnosed) and living together as a neurodivergent couple. 

Recorded April 23, 2025 in São Paolo, Brazil. 

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