About the show
Small questions, long answers.
Onear started in 2023 as a kitchen-table experiment: what happens if you give a curious person an hour and no agenda? Forty-eight episodes later, we’re still finding out.
Co-host & producer
Mara Quinn
Mara spent eight years producing radio documentaries before deciding she wanted to ask the questions herself. She edits every episode, reads every footnote and keeps a list of 400 people she’d like to interview.
Co-host & science writer
Theo Adebayo
Theo writes about science for magazines and once spent a month living on a research boat. On the show he’s the one asking “but why?” until the guest laughs.
How an episode gets made
Twenty hours for every one you hear
Research
We read the books, the papers and the comment sections so the conversation can go somewhere new.
Record
Ninety minutes, two hosts, one guest and no script. The best bits usually come after we say “one last question”.
Edit
Mara cuts every episode by hand, keeping the tangents that matter and losing the ones that don’t.
Questions