Quick Question with Soren and Daniel - QQ ep 61 - Robert's Your Uncle! feat. Alex Goldman

Episode Date: October 16, 2020

In this episode the guys welcome Alex Goldman from Reply All, to chat about journalism, patience in waiting for a story to develop, and which of the three of them is the most adventurous!  And as always big thanks to Postmates. Use code QQ and get $5 off your first five orders.

Hello, everyone, and welcome once more to Quick Question, the only hour-long podcast with two guys, period. That's it. It's a neat little fact from our research department. Doesn't sound right, but the whiz kids know their stuff. I'm one half of that podcast, American Dad writer, American Dad beer, and thanks to a recently aired episode, American Dad performer. I'm also the guy from your Spanish 101 class freshman year of college

who was so excited to make new friends he came out guns blazing with jokes the first day of class causing the teacher to dub him for the rest of the semester white noise or in Spanish ruido blanco which is just somehow way more devastating. I'm joined as always by my co-host Daniel O'Brien. Say hi Daniel. Hello my name is Daniel O'Brien. I am an Emmy award-winning writer for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and a book writer about presidents mostly and person who was so not concerned with being your friend when he took middle school Italian that his greatest pleasure was when the Italian teacher introduced him to a different Italian teacher and said, look how good he is at

the alphabet, securing my fate as someone who was not going to be a sexual icon for a very long time, Daniel O'Brien. Thanks again for having me, Soren. And you may hear another voice as well.

We are still continuing our new thing where we've got another guest on the show today and dan i'm not going to introduce you to our guest this time because i feel like i already did that four years ago when i told you you need to listen to reply all absolutely the uh i would say um the only podcast that should exist. There's no other good podcast including this one. It's true. But Reply All. Reply All is the only podcast that should have been made and should continue to be made. The first time I heard it was an episode called Cathedral and it was this crossover that

Radiolab had done to get people interested in Reply All and it worked hard for me. If you're somehow not familiar with the show, I encourage you to, you know what, just turn off this one and go listen to 158, The Case of the Missing Hit, or episode 56, Zardulu, or episode 86, Man of the People. There's also a three-part series called On the Inside that's very good. It's some of the best hard journalism mixed with incredible storytelling you'll find anywhere. And I'm going to say anywhere. I'm thrilled that we're joined by one half of Reply All, Alex Goldman. Hi, guys. Thanks for having me. I'd just like to say that I was the guy in my junior high school French class that got sent to detention for changing the name Dennis on the board to the word penis.

Classic. I know. I'm really still, honestly, I feel like that was sort of a high point for me. Here's a question. I have no journalism background, but this is a thing that I've thought for a very long time. Alex, are you, so the fact that there was french taught in your school did you come from a town that had a lot of money uh yeah i did i mean okay not a super rich town but i came from ann arbor michigan so you know college town i mean there definitely was there definitely was like, there was like a, there was like a, there was like a

wrong side of the tracks where this kids whose parents weren't professors lived. My dad wasn't a professor, but he was a judge. So I did live on the side with the professors. Okay. Just a simple, humble judge. Just a salt of the earth judge out there every day hoeing the fields of justice. Yeah. So we only had Italian and Spanish in all of our schools growing up.

And I took that to mean that like when I was much younger, a childish idea of like, oh, we don't have enough money for french or latin like we can't afford a third language but then as i got older i thought like oh there might be something to that we might just be like a town that cannot afford teachers now i realized like how incredibly spoiled we were because we had french spanish german and latin german goodness gracious yeah they went far enough they they they jumped out of the romance languages and went right to the right to the hard stuff gosh wait and we had spanish that was kind of it well well soren grew up in like a log cabin in the how old are you guys though? 38, 34. Oh, I was going to say that like, maybe I'm old enough that this was that I grew up in a time when there was still money in the school system. Yeah, no, I'm 40. So 41. So we're okay. So it was a time when you either you, the upper

class went to school and then the other kids became chimney sweeps. Right. Okay. Thanks to Postmates for supporting Quick Question. If you're like me, I'm sorry. But also, you probably start thinking about what to eat for dinner while you're eating lunch. I love food. That's why I love using Postmates. For a limited time, Postmates is giving our listeners $100 of free delivery credit

for your first seven days. To start your free deliveries, download the app and use the code QQ. Well, it's a pleasure to have you on the show, Alex. We've been wanting to do this for a long time and I'm very excited to have you. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. There are some questions that we want to ask you. Generally in the show, the way it works

is that we'll ask a quick question and everybody can answer. Although in this case, I've got some that are very specific to you and I'm not confident Dan would have an answer to them. Okay. Are you ready? Oh yeah, I'm so ready.

I'm really excited. I want you to know that like the premise of this show is, it's just gotcha questions. We're trying to get someone canceled every single week. Yeah. And this week you're in the hot seat all right um challenge accepted question number one i was wondering if you could just give us like an oral history of the creation of mayor wheat okay i mean do i have to explain what mayor wheat is

okay mayor wheat was for a good portion of, I want to say the middle of last year, Alex Goldman started, or pioneered, I would say, a movement online where everyone's accounts on Twitter just said Mayor Wheat for a while. I wish that I could say that I pioneered it. So I have a friend named David Grossman. He's a journalist. And David Grossman tweeted one day, an off-brand Mayor Pete, whose name is Mayor Wheat. And I thought the idea, like, this was at the time when, you know, there were still like 18 candidates in the Democratic primary. And like, Mayor Pete already to me was pretty off-brand. So the idea of like an off-brand Mayor Pete struck me as so unbelievably hilarious that I just tweeted it, but the response to the phrase Mayor Wheat

was such bafflement that I was like, huh, Mayor Wheat really is a thing that people are compelled by for some reason and then there were just all these sort of delightful coincidences that kept it going like there actually is a Mayor Wheat somewhere in Texas it's a woman I can't remember what her name is hold on

just a second Mayor Wheat I will say and I know that Google autofill is different for everybody, but when you Google search Mayor Wheat, it says Mayor Wheat Alex Goldman. Mayor Laura Wheat of Westlake, Texas. So there was that. And then there was like, you know,

Pete Buttigieg worked for a consulting company that was fixing bread prices in Canada. So all of a sudden it was like, oh, Mayor Wheat is a thing that is well outside of my purview. But the thing that I find most delightful about it, honestly, is my tweets delete every two weeks because in the spirit of not getting canceled, I'm like anything older than

two weeks, I probably said something unbelievably problematic. So I'm going to go ahead and like set them to auto delete. That's smart. Um, but now I just deny that it ever happened. No one can prove it. So from the, I tweeted the phrase mayor wheat, like I treated, tweeted just the phrase mayor wheat once a day for like six months and it really took off it took off like wildfire really took off and so from let me just tell you alex from the outside it was the most bizarre thing because we as someone on twitter i just see mayor wheat suddenly and all these people i know are just tweeting mayor wheat and i missed the boat on it and I was like what is going on and I feel like there were a lot of people who missed the boat the very first time you tweeted it and

they're just like I don't know what this is but I'm gonna go with it and they all started doing mayor wheat and then this this like revolution took place yeah I feel like I'm in the same place as Soren where I just woke up one day and saw mayor wheat and I was like what the? I thought I could sleep in. What happened? What are you all talking about? What I found was people would ask me what it was. And if I responded Mayor Wheat, they would just respond to Mayor Wheat. It was like, it was like immediately they were, they were in the fold. It was really exciting. Is that, can I ask, so you, you Google Mayor Wheat and you see Mayor Wheat, Alex Goldman. Are there other things that bring up your name that are surprising to you?

I don't know. Let me Google Alex Goldman and see what happens. Oh, that'll be fun. Alex Goldman age, Alex Goldman wife. Not surprising, but a little unsettling. Oh yeah. There's a lot of age ones. There's Alex Goldman reply all age. There's Alex Goldman birthday. That's so weird. Someone, someone sent me an email the other day,

which was like, I have to know how old you are. What, how old are you? And I was like, what? I don't care other day which was like i have to know how old you are what how old are you and i was like what do you care and she was like i was arguing with my boyfriend about it and i was like why would you what can what possible reason like what what satisfaction is the answer going to give you yeah sounds like an answer won't solve this relationship's problems. Yeah, seriously. They're much bigger than my age. Now, Alex, you... I asked about Marowit because you have sort of like this appetite for letting mysteries remain mysteries.

You did Zardulu. You did an episode of Reply All that was all about the subway rat. Or pizza rat, I guess. Pizza rat. You fucking Colorado hack. Come on.

Yeah, about pizza rat and the origin of pizza rat i guess pizza rat you fucking colorado hack come on yeah about pizza rat and and the origin of pizza rat you also uh breakmaster cylinder does the music for your show uh famously an elusive human being that no one can possibly get in contact with uh maybe doesn't exist it's all up in the air now I need to know for my own edification, did you want to be a magician when you were a little kid? No, no. I wanted to be a basketball player. What? Yeah. I wanted to be a basketball player, but then I realized like, oh, I hate exercise. And my, my dad is like five, four. So I don't think it's in the cards for me. No, I didn't want to be, I didn't want to be a magician,

but the idea that there can be mystery in the world is really exciting to me. And Breakmaster Cylinder, really early on, I said, you know, I want you to get credit for the work that you do. Do you want me to give you credit? And they were just like, nah, Breakmaster Cylinder's fine. But were you an indoor kid growing up?

Like separate from... You don't need to be an aspiring magician, but, like, when you say you wanted to be a basketball player, were you a jock? No, no, no, no. I wanted the wealth and prestige of being a basketball player. Yeah. I did not want to actually put the work in.

I very quickly adjusted to wanting to be a rock star, which felt a little more achievable, but then again, like also didn't really want to put in the work. Yeah. I do agree that that is a more indoor pursuit than wanting to be a professional basketball player. That is somewhere between pro basketball player and magician. In between there is keyboardist.

Okay. Yeah, yeah. Definitely. Who was your guy then? When you were a kid and you had posters of basketball players on your wall, who was your guy? Well, you know, I grew up 40 minutes outside of Detroit, so it was like the starting lineup of the 1991-92 Detroit Pistons because they won.

Okay. All right. I mean, I'm really like my sports knowledge ends at the 1984 Detroit Tigers who won the World Series, so that was a big deal. So that was a big deal. And then the 1991 and 92 Pistons. And a couple weeks ago, someone asked me something like what I know, like was like, regale me with all your sports knowledge. And I was trying to remember the name of Barry Sanders, the Lions.

Running back. Running back. I was going to say quarterback. I was actually just going gonna say football guy um and i and i said barry bonds who i also know is a is a is a sportsman but i don't know i don't know who he plays for i know that i got the wrong person by their reaction i'm not sure what he's doing now barry bonds yeah uh i don't know i don't think anybody knows when i was a kid i always assumed that people's names were like their their names were associated with like sort of what they would end up doing in their lives which i guess was true

you know in the 1500s or whatever so i assume he's like a bail bondsman now he is yes that's that's right i just googled that he is heonds is a Bale Bondsman. That's fair. I want to see if I can guess who your favorite player was. Was it Isaiah Thomas? You know, I got to say, Isaiah Thomas was like such a golden, he was, his public persona was that of like the charming mama's boy. His public persona was that of the charming mama's boy. In fact, there was a commercial on for Detroit Edison, the power company, in which he gave a spiel about electrical safety, blah, blah, blah. And then his mom came on and said, oh, Isaiah, and gave him a kiss on the cheek.

So that's how I remembered him. And then I have a friend who has season tickets to see the Knicks. And I went to see the Knicks one time. And he was like, oh, yeah, he's a a terrible coach and he's like a serial sexual harasser. He's just like the worst. Yeah, he threw hands a lot too. He'd get in fights all the time. I just remember him getting kissed by his mom.

I might have a question that's not about sports. Is that all right? Can we talk not about sports on this podcast? I mean, I probably have a lot more to say, but sure, yeah. So I have many questions for you. One of them is the, there's the episode of your show that you did where you actually went to India to track down a person that you've been talking to through a call center. That's long distance.

Yeah. Is that, that's what it's called? Yes. Yeah. Okay. yeah is that that that's what it's called yes yeah okay uh it's it's a fantastic i think it's four parts now because you did like a three-part series of it and then it was two parts originally and then we did just did an update you revisited okay yeah so it's three um but and and it's all fascinating i don't want to spoil anything i want everyone to

listen to it because it's it because it's so captivating. But there's a thing that struck me when I was listening to it. You went there with a coworker of yours who mentioned that you fall down a lot in holes. And that I'm bringing this up because I fall down all the time and i bump into things and i'm a very clumsy person and i i just want to know like like i i heard that and i was like oh yes good someone else who falls down i didn't know if that was if that was being played up for the episode or because like there's a clip of you falling down and be like oh no i'm falling and i was like yes i've said that and i felt that uh so when i was a kid not when i was a kid actually when i was an

adult and like i'd become like you know basically a functional enough person to sort of like you know do my own laundry and stuff like that my grandmother once said to me she was like you know you remind me of that character from peanuts who who has all the dust around him all the time pig pen is the character's name um i'm glad that she didn't say you remind me of pig pen a little too intense for me but i feel like i'm like the kind of person who's like always like rushing out of one doorway into another room and like i've got toilet paper stuck to my leg and i'm like falling over like yes i'm super fucking clumsy i don't pay attention to where i'm going um i am constantly falling yeah um i think that's good i i mean i

don't think it's good i just like i think it's nice to talk to someone who also is clumsy there was a time when when um soren and I met up for an awards ceremony, and the second he saw me, he saw that I was covered in scratches and scrapes on my right arm. And he was like, were you drunk last night? I was like, no. I just was walking my dog, and I walked into a wall. It's the kind of risk that happens. How did you walk into a wall i didn't see it okay there you go i say that but i was like playing soccer one time and i ran right into the

uh like a like a football one of those football goal posts yeah pretty big hard ones back to sports yeah uh well so i listened to that episode last night to try and find that moment again and it's you're with damiano marchetti right and that and it he sounds like this whole like you almost just died and when you he says whoa whoa whoa whoa and then you go oh i almost just fell in a hole like it's like you falling 20 feet to your death is like around every corner for you. The thing you have to understand is like there could not be a person more diametrically opposed to my clumsiness

and general dishevelment than Damiano Marchetti. He's like, he's like the kind of person who has like Somalia apps on his phone. Like he's like, he rock, he's like goes to the climbing gym. Like he's just like a person who's he he um i feel like if they were to make like a modern version of twins we could be the characters well i'll say i would be the devito of course people often ask are you an alex or pj i think that i'm a damiano marchetti

is that an answer i'm allowed to do? Yeah, you are a Damiano Marchetti. Yes. Okay. The minute you started saying he rock climbs and everything, I was like, oh, tell me more about it. Does he want to go rock climbing with me? I bet he would.

I mean, he talks about it so much and he's just like, he's like a fashionable boy. Yes. My people. Yeah. But yeah, it's, it's, I think this is a kindred spirit for you, dude. Yeah. And I also have questions that aren't about how handsome, sore, and dummy I'm going to get you are.

We're not so interested in those. Do we have time for those? Can I get into them? I have a whole list of questions, honestly, Dan, here, and I'm not seeing anything like that. All right. Go that. All right. Go ahead. All right.

So this is more serious than falling in holes. I listen to your show so much. I love it more than any podcast that exists in the world right now. Thank you so much. I don't have a journalist background where I'm just like tracing the, the truth of things. Uh, and like, I'm like, I do, I do jokes. I'm a dummy who does jokes all the time. Um, and I listened to your show and sometimes there'll be an episode that like very clearly

takes well over a year to actually reach any kind of sense of completion. And this is like such a stupid person's question. How do you do that? How do you start making phone calls with a stranger in India and then continue for several months knowing that it might not end up anywhere? So in that particular instance, we were trying to...

A lot of times what we do is when a story begins or when we have a question that we want to answer and we're making phone calls on it we're trying to figure out the answer we try to imagine the best possible version in our heads we try to imagine the best version that could possibly come out of it based on sort of the questions we have and what we want to find out and for three or four months on that particular story the best possible version was I got in touch with a guy who was like, yeah, I really like Counter-Strike. And we thought that

the end would be like us getting together on Steam and playing Counter-Strike. I thought like that was the best possible answer. And then this guy says, hey, listen, on one of my many phone calls, this guy says, hey, listen, if you ever want to come to india you know i'll take you to the taj uh we can hang out and blah blah blah blah and i mean he most definitely was not expecting me to actually show up but once he said that the best possible version of the story became something entirely different and so i was just like oh well this is something we absolutely have to do do you have that latitude on every story where where like where this is inside baseball stuff but like where do the where are the resources where do those go are you allowed on every story every thread that you tug are you allowed for the possibility that you might have to take a flight to another continent

well i will say this. No. Okay, next question. I think that if a story necessitates a flight, we can take a flight. We've been very lucky in that our show has sort of, it's been pretty much in the black since we started because we got to sort of skate on the goodwill of our boss alex bloomberg who worked at this american life for 20 years before he started

the company of which we were sort of like the flagship show like we were very lucky to have this to have like a built-in audience because our boss who had like incredible cachet as like a uh award winning journalist and who you know did the sort of giant pool of money this american life episode which won a peabody or something and also you know founded planet money like he then started a company was like oh listen to these clowns So like we lucked out in that, in that we could afford, like the company would be willing to spend money for us to go places. But my editors, Tim Howard, our executive producer, and PJ, who is the managing editor of the show,

and Shruthi, who also edits. If I want to go somewhere, I need to justify it and not justify it financially, but I have to justify it in a story sense. And that is way harder than justifying it financially. It's I, I imagine that like you as someone who was on the inside of this, it,

it, it feels like struggles to justify every story, especially the bigger ones from an outsider, outsider perspective. It feels like you guys can do anything in the world, which I know, I know is not fair. I will tell you that three,

I've spent the past three weeks, like banging my head against the wall, trying to find stories. I'm, I'm really in like a fallow period i'm having a very hard time it's really stressful and um especially since you know two weeks ago pj my co-host just put out like this insanely good episode the q anon episode but yeah the qon episode. You know, he put out this episode where he basically pulled all of these strings together, sort of stuff that's been out in the ether, but put it together in this very presentable way, which presents a very compelling hypothesis to the identity behind QAnon, right?

And so he did that episode. I sat in on one edit in it. I wasn't actually in the episode really. And, um, I got to like sit in on this thing that I was like, oh my God, this is so good. And then once I was done with the edit and giving my notes, I just, I'm just staring at a computer screen, begging, begging the heavens, the cosmos to send me a story that's worthwhile. Alex, there's occasionally in the early morning, someone will drive down my street and he takes pictures of my house. Is that anything? Uh, I mean, for you, it's certainly something. What, what, what, what kind of car is it uh like a ford taurus very

nondescript car but only of your house or all the houses of my house i i said i i'm mostly just joking here when i'm saying is this a thing but i mean it is something where i was like that's a weird thing and i looked it up and people other people have had this complaint and i guess sometimes it's like insurance uh companies banks will do it if they have a mortgage on the house because they want to make sure that the property isn't falling into dilapidation i i think there's a lot of really bad answers for why somebody would be doing it as in like boring answers i do feel like that's the thing that happens a lot is we'll find some, we'll have like a very tantalizing question. And then the answer is what my editor slash executive producer, Tim Howard calls a wet fart.

He'll say, yeah, it's too bad. The ending of that's just a big wet fart. And then I'm just, then we just sort of kill it and move on. I do think that illustrates a difference in the way that Alex, your brain works and mine works is that Soren will say someone's taking my pictures and you're immediately like what kind of car? Is it just your house?

Like you're doing like journalism stuff. You're asking like details that are gonna like you're assembling puzzle pieces that you hope to put together and if Soren had just asked me hey someone's taking a picture of my house every morning, I'd be like, fuck that guy.

Don't let him. Don't let him is so funny. The idea of don't let him. It reminds me of Dan Akarich and Getter at the beginning of Ghostbusters. I have another question for you, Alex. This is an episode from a long time ago, but it's called Today's the Day, where you and PJ go off and you explore New York,

and you get into some areas that feel very not city-like at all, where you guys are definitely alone, where you're breaking into some weird abandoned areas. And I'm curious if it's important to you in New Jersey or wherever you are to have areas like that that are just yours. Oh yeah, totally. I mean, you guys saw my attic. I have this sort of weird attic that has this spray insulation foam on the

ceilings that makes it sort of look like a cave um it's where i have recorded since march um since you know the pandemic began in earnest in the united states and um like i make music up here i spend all day up here um it's a huge fucking mess. And it is like definitely uniquely my own space. But yeah, I mean, special places that other people, that people tell me I'm not supposed to be, I think are sort of uniquely attractive to me. I did an episode of a podcast called 99% Invisible. It was sort of the first long form journalistic story I did. episode of a podcast called 99% Invisible. It was sort of the first long form journalistic story I did. When I was in junior high and high school,

there was this field outside of Ann Arbor, Michigan, where there was this gigantic weird structure. And all around the property, there were signs that sort of said like, turn back no matter what you do. do not come here. The police, the property is watched and you will be arrested and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And for years, I was like, why is this thing out here? you know, in my early thirties by like sending random letters to people's houses in the area, asking them who owns this thing and who, and it turns out it's like an eccentric millionaire, um, who, who got drunk with an architect, with a, like an architect slash, um,

artist friend of his one day. And they were like, what if we made a thing out in that field? And they actually made the thing out in the field. And was like and i said to him hey and it's massive it's the size of a small house i would say and i said to him in the story i was like so you know all those signs that say don't come in i'm wondering if those signs were there to dare us to come in like were they there to weed out the weaklings and to get like the good the sort of brave ones to come in he's like no i fucking hated you guys you're always on my property i wanted nothing to do with you um but those spaces to me are like just it just feels like um it feels like uh i don't know i imagine it feels like indiana jones at the beginning of indiana jones you know like like claiming a relic. Yeah.

It's incredibly exhilarating. You sent letters to strangers to find out what, I mean, there was a farmhouse where we always hopped the fence and I just assumed that it was owned by the farmhouse. So I just started sending letters to people. Where did you, who taught you that?

Who said you could do that? Um, no, I mean, that's how you know, no one is the right answer. If that's an acceptable answer? I mean, that's how you answer that. No one is the right answer. That's an acceptable answer. I mean, I was living in New York, and otherwise I just would have knocked on their door. So, Alex, I grew up in Colorado where there's a lot of mines. The town I grew up in is called Carbondale, which gives you a sense of, like the uh the money was built around there and uh there are all these mines that are abandoned around the town and around the aspen valley that you're not supposed

to go near there's signs everywhere there as kids there's all kinds of warning videos you watch and everything because they don't want kids in mines and that just made me want to go into mine so badly and so like friends and i we would try and find these mines that we could get inside of. And like you'd go in, there's always an entry point in a mine where, first of all, they always put padlocks on them. If you can break a padlock off, you can get inside just the very first part of it. And then we'd always get very scared because it just drops off after that. And I was so like curious about going down all those levels. Now, as an adult, my wife, her dad collects minerals and he owns a mine, an old copper mine that all he does-

And have you been in? Yes. Is it as awesome as it sounds? Oh, my, Alex, it's the coolest thing I've ever done. If you have to wear a hard hat, because it's very small in some areas where you're just hitting your head on rock. And then you basically walk in. It says no admittance. It says stay away, stay away.

It's all those signs. And then you just walk right through. And then you climb down a rickety ladder six stories down into the ground. And at each stage, you can go off on these different levels where they've dynamited or they've created these different tunnels. And at the bottom, there's an old mining cart and there's a track and you can actually push it on the track. And so cool. There are areas that they've never actually explored. So you might at any point be in a place that hasn't been, no one's seen since like 1890.

Oh my God, that's amazing. It's really since like 1890. Oh my God. That's amazing. It's really, really incredible. When I was in high school, we used to, um, every building in, uh,

that was part of sort of like the central university of Michigan campus is heated by these, uh, by like, I don't exactly know the mechanism because I'm, you know, I don't, I'm not a physical plant guy.

Um, but they are, um, there are these steam tunnels that connect all the buildings. So we used to, um, we found a loading dock, uh, in one of the buildings that you could run down a flight of stairs and run into the steam tunnels. And we used to run around under there. There were rumors that someone died in the eighties in the steam tunnels playing Dungeons and Dragons. That's such a bad rumor.

Yeah, I know. And there were also rumors that the steam tunnels were like self-cleaning, like an oven. And if you were down there, they would spray like hot liquid fire on you and just melt you to death. Which, in retrospect, is ridiculous. At the time, I was like was like oh my god what if that happened to us but you could like run or you could run around in there and get totally lost and then just end up on the other side of campus in a building in some buildings basement it was so fucking that was uh so occidental college in los angeles has tunnels and it was like rumored to

have tunnels throughout the entire school and for years, we spent trying to find those tunnels that ran through the entire campus. And we finally did find them. We had to get in through like the chemistry building and you can get down there and people have written all over the walls and everything. Other people from like 1976 have written stuff down there. And you can get to the bottom of the library.

You can get into any closed building. It's the coolest thing. One time my brother- So the answer is yes. I like- Go ahead. I like walking around in the dark one time my brother tommy and i walked into a sewer and got sick is that anything

am i am i part of the conversation uh wait a minute okay i have a lot of questions great would you drink the water why did you get now we just, we walked, we lived near some woods and we, and there was an opening to a sewer in the woods and we walked into it and then started to get headaches because we couldn't breathe, I guess. Dan, point, sorry, point of order. Was the, were the woods behind a Sears? No, this was not, this was not that. The woods woods behind a Sears? No, this was not. This was not that.

The woods were behind an elementary school. Oh, okay. Well, you're also really cool. I just really agree with you. Getting a headache and leaving quickly, that's also really neat. I'm really, I just want you to know you're part of our adventure club.

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That's code QQ for $100 of free delivery credit for your first seven days when you download the Postmates app. Anything you need, anytime you need it, Postmate it. Alex, you said in an interview a long time ago that you would love to have a show that's just called Controversial Opinions with Alex Goldman, where you just get to shout about things in pop culture that you hate or things that nobody else likes that you love. And I wanted to know what's like a what's stuck in your craw right now what's your current controversial opinion

uh you know i know this doesn't sound like a current controversial opinion but it is something i was thinking about today um i fucking hate the replacements. Okay. The movie? No, the band. Okay, so not the Keanu Reeves vehicle? I mean, I'm not a huge fan of that movie. But you know, everybody loves, I feel like it was one of those things

that I was supposed to love. And like, I got the albums and I listened to them over and over again. Everybody told me like, oh, you're gonna love this're going to love this band. They're like everything that you like. And they suck. Replacements suck.

I'm sorry. That's not. No, that's fine. It's not a great answer, but that's, that's true. I really fucking hate Replacements. I have another question for you. If you're okay. Soren has one.

No, go ahead. you if you're okay soren has one no go ahead no so um so i find a kindred spirit in you because you have a lot of nerdy pursuits and i really appreciate that and i feel like your co-host this is gonna feel like so much projection i feel like your co-host sometimes tries to give you a lot of shit for your nerdy pursuits and you don't balk at it like when he asks you something that he thinks is going to make you do an unforced error where you embarrass yourself you meet the challenge with gusto and apl plum and I don't want to be insulting you have a lot of nerdy pursuits but you are a confident person oh no no I'm not you seem like a confident person I sure I can project con that's what I want to know I want to

know when you when you learned that. Because when PJ is like, here's some rope. I'm going to give it to you so you can hang yourself. And you meet that challenge with confidence. I was like, man, what class did he take to do that? Because I also have a co-host between you and me. He's a piece of shit. Oh, yeah. You have a cool guy you're a cool

guy yeah yeah so so here's the thing that i i have to tell you is that don't help him is that is that it plays totally differently like if we're in a story meeting or something and he does that to my to my to my co- when I try and, when I try and meet it, they're just like, Oh, this is embarrassing. You're like, I'm watching their faces fall. Like that to me, it's like being murdered. It's so painful. And I try the same tactic of like, of like stand, of like just rolling with whatever he's trying to like

what he tries to do is use my my my personality as like a weapon against me and on the show it comes off as just like um him being a mean-spirited dick soren go on but but uh but with my friends it just comes off as him being like, as him like recognizing all of the horrible, fragile things about me. So you don't feel like a confident person in real life? Oh no, no. Every once in a while, I'll like make a joke

in a morning meeting or something. Because every morning we get together and talk about what we're working on. And, and, you know, especially now that we're all not in a room together, if I make a joke, PJ will just say like,

great response to that one. Then no one laughs. Ooh. Devastating. It's just like, it's just like someone taking a knife and twisting it right in my stomach. Now, you have a lot of tweets where it's like you're reliant on a pun for the tweet to work, and it's kind of like a long walk to get there.

And, of course, you're going to catch some flack for that because there are people who are furious by the fact that they had to sit through it. But you have such confidence when you do it. It's like, you know, this joke is going to bomb, but like, that's the pleasure about it. So there's a sort of recurring character on our show. This guy, Matt Farley, who we did a story about many years ago. PJ did a story about him. Basically, his deal is he has written something like 40,000 plus songs and he has them all on Spotify, et cetera, et cetera. And he does songs that are like, he has a song with like every city in America's name. He has a happy birthday song for every possible name. Um, uh, he does a lots of songs about pee and poop because apparently kids love to search pee and poop.

He has a song called The Poop Song, which has over a million plays on Spotify. Jesus. But a thing that I learned from him is rather than, is like what he does is he just, is he like never stops to look back at the thing that he's just made. He will just keep making and keep making.

And like he, if someone says like, you're a scam artist and the only reason you make all this music is so that you will get money. Not because you like actually care about music. His response is never like, that's not true. Fuck you.

His response is, I'm sorry you feel that way. Here's an eight hour playlist of some of my favorite songs that might change your mind. Like relentless positivity has gotten him very far in his life. He makes like $60,000 a year from the 40,000 songs he has on Spotify. So, you know, he's doing all right. I figure, you know i what's my latest tweet my latest tweet was um i'm too tired to be a blade runner i'll be a blade walker solitude goodness gracious it's good stuff man uh so so i mean you know you know it's out there in the world now i can't do anything about that but that's what i think the pleasure of it is that like I this thing now exists and people are like forced to reckon with it.

And that's where the funny is. Well, you know, there's a there there is another tweet that I just did, which is you're familiar with the lawyer David Boies, who famously helped litigate the Gore Bush election and more infamously did a lot of work to protect Harvey Weinstein. No, but I'm sure this is going to be worth it. Yeah, let's pretend I'm familiar. So his name is spelled, it's David Boyes, B-O-I-E-S. And for years, I have been thinking about a tweet that is just David Girls, G-I-R-L-E-S. And today I just decided to tweet it.

And then I followed it up with a tweet that said, I've been thinking about this tweet for like three years. And a guy responded to me whose name is David Bodson. And it said, mocking people's names is hopeless because there's no way you'll come up with anything that isn't done better than by the bully in third grade. To which I, his name is Steven Bodson. His name is Steven Bodson. Yeah, drag him to fucking hell, Alex.

He said, mocking people's names is hopeless. There's no way he'll come up with anything better uh that wasn't done better by the bully in third grade to which i responded steven butch it's napalm you got him man i know i. As someone who's been a fan of you on your podcast for so long, like with the way you can shape a story and the way you know how to ask questions, I'm so annoyed that you're this funny. I think it's really unfair. You should only be good at a couple of things. I'm not good at anything.

Clarinet. Clarinet, yes. You're good at clarinet? No. Played it growing up. Yeah. Doesn't that mean like you're kind of good at all the reed instruments? Aren't they all, don't they all have sort of like a similar vibe to them? They have a similar vibe. I did saxophone for a little while but I wasn't as good at clarinet. There's a learning curve thing. Sorry, you're drifting off a little bit. What did you say, Dan?

I feel like this is where you have to dive in and be confident. This is the moment on the Reply All episode where I'd be like, oh, yeah, well, listen, I've been working on trying to do songs that are only in the minor thirds of all of the keys. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, you just have to fucking, you have to be like, you have to be like, you know what? I know my reed instruments, and I'm going to talk about them with Ver.

Guess what, Sorin? I'm good at oboe, which has, check your math, two reeds, suck my dick. Ouch. Is that cool? Am I cool now? Another tip I give you is don't ask, am I cool now? Alex, I have one more question for you.

You and I became sort of mutuals on Twitter after I think you had watched a couple episodes of After Hours, which is a show that Dan and I used to do. And I'm, this may be, I'm leading to something here and I'm hoping it's not the right answer. How did you discover After Hours? This is going to be hurtful. No matter where it goes, it's going to be hurtful. I don't think it, I think it's, I think it's actually not going to be hurtful let's see um uh i read john dies at the end oh and and found my way to cracked through that and then after hours was like uh was was sort of a flagship property on on cracked and it was just like it was just it was good was just, it was good. Also, I feel like the YouTube algorithm sent me toward like nerds talking about shit.

So I might've found it that way too. You came in a different door than I expected. And that's very nice. That's great to hear. What did you expect? Well, so we did an episode. I can't remember what the focus of it was, but at one point I talk about the guy from Man of the People in it and it was your research that we did not we didn't credit reply all or

anything hell no glossed over this guy who would sew testicles into people and and then afterwards I remember thinking like even when it was airing I was thinking oh we should have like we should have put something in there like they did all this research you guys came with this it's for anyone who doesn't know this episode is really wonderful about a guy who just like bluffs his way to the top and has all these uh connections to trump like it's he's just the exact same type of person and like how somebody like that arrives where they are and continues to fail upward no matter what and it was such a great cohesive story and we just like we just took a detail from it and didn't credit you yeah and i thought maybe somebody might have seen that and send it to you and then you

found after hours that way no that's not that that isn't um how we found it but now i'm really pissed at you yeah i figured that's why i wait till the end to ask this of you. You should be pissed at me too, because like every once in a while, I'll have a morning meeting at work at last week's night and be like, you know, I heard this interesting story about XYZ. And then my boss will be like, no, yeah, I listened to that episode of Reply All Too. I mean, to be perfectly fair, before that episode came out,

I had read the book Charlatan by Pope Brock, which is about John Brinkley. Okay. So, like, you know, it's not like we were the first people to ever tell a story about him. There's a documentary about him called Nuts. Yeah, but I just didn't want that to be the access point. Yeah. I didn't want that to be the one where you're like, oh, these fuckers stole our shit? It wasn't that.

I did. I don't even know if I should say this. You probably should. Someone sent me a QAnon article on NBC the other day, or on like NBC's website. And it just reads like a synopsis of the story we put out a week and a half ago. Really? Yeah.

I mean, it happens. You know, I am like the last person to get mad at someone for doing that because the sort of way that journalism works, and it's a job that I've had in the past, is that you have to write six articles a day and you have to have them run against, know fucking ads for you know you won't believe this one weird trick that'll make your skin look 10 years younger so i mean i totally get it uh i totally get it like uh you know i i feel like i had a very low point one time in which I wrote a mean article about an,

this was when I was writing for an online publication. I wrote a mean article about a person who wrote a mean article about Macaulay Culkin's Velvet Underground pizza cover band. So this is getting kind of close to home. So it'll be real cool. They did a performance in Boston. A reviewer gave it a negative review.

And I wrote an article that was like, isn't that so mean of her? And then afterward, I was just like, I was was like i want to take a shot this sucks but i also have to write four more of these things so uh i would never begrudge anybody for summarizing my work and not crediting me i'd just be like well that sucks so uh that sucks guys that's almost worse i I'm not mad. I'm just disappointed. Yeah, that's what I was heard. Dagger to the heart.

My son has started taking, too. As a joke, when he wants to pretend to be mad at somebody, he goes, I'm so disappointed in you. And it's clear that at some point one of us said that to him and it just shook him. Yeah. Like it was such a bummer to hear. said you or your wife said disappointed and he was like oh man that's way worse than mad yeah so now he's just like trying it on to see like well can i use this weapon let's see what it's like i mean i'm sure that my son gets all of the things that he says to me from me um but it like it's a it's a really bad reflection of my parenting that the thing that he says to me from me um but it like it's a it's a really bad reflection of my parenting that

the thing that he says to me when he's upset with me is you're annoying me right now that's brutal to hear from your kid how old is your son by the way uh he's five that's very fun uh devotees of the show will know that i'm uh baby crazy i don't have kids of my own but i think about them all the time in a not weird way, and I'm very excited about... He has a daughter as well. Daniel? Yeah. How old's your daughter? She's two and a half.

Oh my god. What's her name? Can you say it on air? Yes, I can. Her name's Polly. Polly. Oh my goodness. Dan wants to come babysit right now. She is incredibly fucking cute. She also has like the craziest voice I've ever heard on a creature.

Oh, I know the video I'm going to play. It's a video of her. So the setup for this is, let me just find it. The setup for this is, let me just find it. The setup for this is she poured, she poured like, she had like hair bands to tie her hair back. And she like poured them all over the floor. And this is me asking her what happened.

So what happened, B? Don't know, there's a mess in the back. There's a mess? know. There's a mess in the back. There's a mess? Yeah, there's a mess in the back. There's a mess on the floor. And you don't know what happened? Yeah, I don't know what happened. Okay.

Are you going to help me clean it up? Yeah. All right. What an amazing child. She's got such a wonderful cartoon child voice. Yeah, really. It's ridiculous. Oh, that's so cute.

And she's not taking ownership over it. I love it. And she's like, oh, we're moving on from that? Perfect. Yeah, I'll help you. Do whatever you want if we're not getting in trouble for it. Yeah, I don't know what happened. It's a mess.

I don't know what to tell you. It's a mess. Listen, we've looked into it. It's a mess in the back. It's a mess. I don't know what to tell you. It's a mess. Listen, we've looked into it. It's a mess in the back. It's a mess in the front. I'm here to help you if you want to clean it up, but it's not really my problem. Alex,

this has been a real treat. I only have one more question for you. While I go... Is the show still going? Yeah. While I go look for all of our stuff to plug at the end here, there's just one other thing I wanted to ask you. So in one of your episodes,

you guys famously do call-ins where you guys will be up for 24, 48 hours. I can't remember. 48 hours. 48 hours and you just let people call in and you have such a wonderful fan base to start off with. Soren almost gets 28 hours, famously a normal amount of time.

We're going to be up for 28 hours, everybody. Your fan base is so, they seem so smart and egoless and they're from all walks of life. And I, I like, I'm so jealous of the people that love your show because they seem so wonderful. And somebody called in and was very cagey about the fact that he had discovered the miracle to hair growth. Anyone who had lost their hair, he knew how to make hair grow back. And he was very, very cagey about explaining this to people because he was worried it was going to change the world.

It had a lot of other benefits beyond just hair growth, too. Yeah, it was a lot of other benefits beyond just hair growth too. Yeah, it was a lot of stuff. It was like metabolism and it cured depression. We want to know what it is. Yeah, what is it? Legally, I'm not allowed to tell you. I signed a contract with him that says that I'm not allowed to tell you. Did he himself draw up the contract?

Spotify drew up the contract. Spotify? You stupid assholes you could have given the world the secret to internal life or if not that like a like a funny end note to this podcast you will i get heads god damn it did you try it, Alex? So one of the best things to do on the show, one of my favorite things to do on the show, is put myself through incredibly unpleasant circumstances in order to make funny radio.

For example, staying up for 48 hours to answer phone calls. And so initially, I was going to, you know, try it. Go on a regiment of this hair loss cure and do it with our caller. But our caller, who I thought was like a really sweet guy, and I thought that the conversation was really funny and like a little maddening, but in a very funny way. Easily the most controversial thing we've ever put on the show. Hated it.

People thought that the guy was infuriating and were very angry about it. And we're angry that we didn't reveal what it was at the end of the show. Cause what we did was we, we, we said what it was, but we, we beeped it out. Yeah. And afterward we were like, Hey, so now that we've made you the subject of you know hundreds of thousands of people's ire you want to go ahead and do it with us and he was just like fuck you guys like i don't want anything to do with you heard oh have you heard so one of the things that

you did at the end of the episode was uh you allowed people to email him to hear more from him have you heard from those people because i i i don't want to be rude i i know liars i think this guy's a liar but i want to know what the experience of the people who reached out to him was i don't think he's a liar i think he's just wrong okay um the people who who reached out to him said that he didn't get back to them. I think he was overwhelmed pretty quickly by people who emailed him. Also, what didn't make it on the show, you know, due to our sort of journalistic inclinations, was to, we contacted like a bunch of scientists about hair loss. And we were like, hey, do you think this will work?

And they were like, no, it it's not in a million years so i think he honestly believes that it works yeah i think that he's just incorrect give me um on a grossness scale of one to ten where one is like oh man i have to drink human urine and wait one is urine and 10 is what 10 is uh draining of fluid with your own mouth from a person who is uh whose heart is still beating that's are you talking about blowjobs dan it's such a weird way to talk about oral sex I Definitely wouldn't put that Okay here human urine is one and then non-consensually Forcing a fluid from someone's body is time. He's this vampires. I'm like yes

So I'm trying to figure out like the grossness level of this Okay, I think it's square in the grossness level of this. Okay. I think it's square in the middle. Oh, that doesn't help me at all. Here's what, Dan, I spent, I was listening to this episode. I found him very annoying only because he was so, like there are people who are not good at telling stories in the world. And when you have to listen to a story from them, it's interminable.

Because they can never get to the point and it just drives you nuts but he's doing it very intentionally because he's got something he doesn't want to share too much of and then when they get to the point where they ask him he bleeped it's bleeped and then you guys both in unison say of what not from what of what and it was so that's such a baffling phrase to me, because if it's from an animal, you're going to say, like, from what? If it's any sort of, like, a heart, a liver, feces, like, you're going to say from what? But you guys said of what?

And that's so, it drove me nuts. It's milk of magnesia. What is that? He said, it's milk. And we said, of what? Of magnesia. What is that? He said, it's milk. And we said, of what? Of magnesia. Alex, is there anything that you want to plug? No, just

Reply All. You can find our show at replyallshow.com and also replyall.diamonds, replyall.limo, replyall.pizza, replyall.ninja. I think we have replyile.fail. We have a lot of different. We have our favorite episodes that we're definitely going to plug in the footnotes of this episode.

If you have any others you want to throw in, that's fine. If not. I think that the most recent episode is very emblematic of sort of the, which is called, this is embarrassing. But it was so weird because you were not involved in that episode. Like, we didn't hear you in that episode. The most recent episode is called Country of Liars. It's episode 166. So, the thing is that, like, that, like, every decision is made in sort of service of the story if if if a story

a lot of the sort of interaction between pj and i on the show me and pj on the show is is us goofing around and like it i one of us sort of serves as the audien surrogate where they will tell the story and i will ask the questions like well what about so and so and what about that um and it's not a put on it's not like um it's not like uh i know the story beforehand when we go in the studio i actually don't know what he's going to say which i think is generally what brings us sort of the best sort of weird unscripted moments of the show but um but um in this particular story we just felt like it was, it was much better as a written story because first of all, it was like so fact heavy and there were so many exact sort of pieces of

information that needed to be sort of organized just so, you know? But usually it's us goofing around. And, and yeah, I don't know. I, whenever PJ puts out an amazing story that i'm not in i just get really jealous because i'm like you couldn't even cut me into that one a little bit just have me going like what just you know reacting surprised being the audience member yeah

i've had for for this podcast i've recorded a a bunch of like cold reads of me saying like, get out of town. Are you sure? And then I like insist that Soren puts them in no matter what. That sounds like a great idea. I used to work for a guy named Bob Garfield who hosts a show called On the Media. Both PJ and I were producers there. And we had a coworker named Jamie York who I think works on More Perfect Now, which is a radio lab spin-off. And he said that his only goal as a producer at On the Media was to get Bob Garfield to say Bob's your uncle. And he never pulled it off. And to me, that's like a real,

that's an insane failure. Yeah. It's a dereliction of duty. You can follow Alex on Twitter at A. Goldman. That's A-G-O-L-D-M-U-N-D. You can follow our show on Twitter at QQ underscore Soren and Dan.

You can follow me at Soren underscore LTD. Yeah, I mean, none of this really matters. This is, this is, uh... Well, let me... This just got, this took, like, a really sharp, really bad turn. We ate this part. A peek at how the sausage is made right now.

Alex, the end of your show is so fun and and uh uh so warm you say uh no pj says like a nice thing about uh matt right yeah at the end of every episode like a perfectly sweet thing to say it's a very it's the only podcast that i want to listen to the end to because i i'm i'm excited about what they're going to say this podcast the one that i co-host i don't give a shit it's because it's it's going to be garbage like what soren is doing right now listen it's you guys picked the smarter route to insult each other and just sort of get out because we have no internal record of what we've said Matt Lieber is in the past. So there have been times when we've actually got

the whole episode recorded. We're doing final listen through to make sure there are no mistakes. We're ready to upload it. And one of our producers will be like, you've said that Matt Lieber before you have to go record. I assumed there was like a running Google doc that was like, here are things that Matt Lieber was, and here are things that he will be. Smarter co-hosts might've done that. But here we are. Dan O'Brien is a breeze in your crawl space when you're just down there hanging out and feeling a little sweaty.

Fucking sucked. Awful. Terrible. sucked awful terrible all right all right well bye