Reply All - #22 BONUS: The Man Who Refused To Email

Episode Date: May 4, 2015

A special bonus Email Debt Forgiveness Day themed episide! First, PJ talks to Buzzfeed San Francisco Bureau chief Mat Honan about his decision to abandon personal email entirely, and his agonizing fear that it makes him seem like a douche. Then we listen to some of the voicemails people left us on our Email Debt Forgiveness Day hotline. Thanks for participating in the inaugural email debt forgiveness day! We can't wait until next year. Check out this great New Yorker article about Email Debt Forgiveness Day by Reeves Weideman: http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/every-day-should-be-e-mail-debt-forgiveness-day Sponsors: Mailchimp: http://www.mailchimp.com Squarespace: http://www.squarespace.com (offer code reply) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From Gimlet, this is Reply All, a show about the internet. And this is our first bonus episode. In our month where we were very obsessed with the idea of email debt forgiveness day, we found some really interesting stuff, but we were worried about giving people too much email debt forgiveness day. And so we just took the best stuff and split it off into this bonus episode. And I have to say, hands down, the coolest part about doing this was that we left a voicemail where people could leave messages about emails that they'd been unable to send or trying to send.

and listening to them was just such a privilege. You listen to all of them? I really did. Wow, I'm impressed. It was really cool. It was like, did it just make you feel glad that you aren't alone? Honestly, it made me feel as unalown as anything in recent history that I can remember. Like, it felt like, it just felt like, oh, it's hard for everyone to be a human being.

Like, everybody runs into stuff where they're just like, I don't know. in the second half of the show we're using the great rules of radio here to tell you about the thing you're not about to hear. We're going to play some of those emails later. But there was this one other interview that I did and I was so inspired by it but it felt like a thing to put out

after email debt forgiveness day. Do you think you should say who it's with and what it's about? I think that's a great idea. So it's with Matt Honan, BuzzFeed, San Francisco Bureau Chief. He's a great tech writer, but the reason we're talking to him

is because of this one crazy thing that he has decided to do. Matt Honan has stopped using email to talk to his friends and family. He still has a work account, but otherwise he's completely sworn off email, which means he's either a completely insane person or possibly the first person to do something

that eventually, hopefully, all of us are going to do. Matt said there were two things that led him to do this. One is that in the moment that we're living in now, there are a ton of great alternatives to sending an email. You can text somebody. You can hit me on Facebook Messenger. You can send me something on Twitter. You can hit me on G-chat. You can do all these different things to get in touch with me, and you don't necessarily need to use email.

And then on top of that, he's had the same personal email address for years, and he's a reporter, so he emails a lot of people for work. And so his email box is just a mess. You know, over the past decade, it's become just a landmine or landmine fitness. build wasteland of special offers and, you know, pitches from publicists. And, you know, I've signed up for some restaurant's mailing list, and they got bought by some other restaurant, and they got bought by somebody else. And all of a sudden, I'm on 37 email lists that I never meant to be on. And I just wanted to get away from that.

And I realized that the best way to do that is just to, like, set it on fire and turn around and run. And how has it been so far? It's been awesome. It's been great. Like, I love it. I mean, basically all it's done, like, so I have a confession, which is that I still check the box, right? But I don't do it every day, and I don't feel the need to do it every day. Basically, that auto response goes out, and it accomplishes it's like letting my friends know that I'm not going to see their message probably, or that if I do see it, I'm not going to see it in sort of a timely fashion.

Matt writes about technology. And there's been this recent trend in tech where people are trying to invent new email programs that solve the problem that he's running away from. You know, if you think about all the email startups over the past couple of years, mailbox and Boxer and like there's that one from AOL even, you know, I mean, just all kinds of things that are designed to help people triage their email. Clearly, there's an email problem. I mean, like Google is trying to help you triage your email even, you know, with, with inbox.

And Google's saying, okay, we recognize that our own email system that we're trying to get you to use is so broken that we need this whole other app to help you organize the email in your app than stuff's messed up and it has to go in another direction. Of course, one of the big obstacles facing anybody who would like to stop using personal email is us. we tend to be judgmental and weird about people's technology choices. And the whole time I was talking to Matt, I could sort of feel his worry about that. There's this subtext in there like, is this actually an okay choice for him to be making? Is not using email going to seem pretentious? Is it really douchey? I don't think so.

This is the thing I can't figure out. Like, I don't think it is. When we started talking about having problems with email, because we were doing this holiday where the conceit is that you can email somebody and you're allowed to do it. just pretend that it was an immediate response. It's to let people off the hook. And there were a couple of people who, and essentially said, you're a douche. Because what they read into it, I think, is other people might be able to handle their

email. But when you're, you know, a D-List podcast host such as myself, the demands on my time are just too much. Like, I guess the big, do you remember, I don't know if you remember, there was a story, I think it was Nick Dilton wrote about not using voicemail anymore. And the response to it, I remember the response more than I remember the actual story. I remember the response is just like, how dare you? You entitled Prick, how dare you not check your voicemail, you know?

And I guess that's sort of what I'm afraid of. And I think that's why I haven't actually written about me not using personal emails. I'm afraid I'm afraid that I'll get some of that response. All right. So that is BuzzVeed's Matt Honan. he is a formerly in the closet, now slightly out of the closet, email opt-outer. He feels scared. I felt so inspired by talking to him.

In the same way that those voicemails made you not feel alone, I bet it felt vindicating to find someone who is like, I've given up on the entire premise of email. It was like somebody being like, I've decided not to age anymore. That's not for me. I'm just not going to age. He's grappling with this problem. He's like, yeah, you could just opt out. Through sheer willpower, he's like managed to.

stop the tide or something. Yeah, he stood on the beach in front of the ocean and he was like, I'm not doing waves anymore. And the waves just ceased. The waves ceased. Okay, so after a quick break, we hear from you guys and the voicemails that you left for us.

Stick around. Welcome back to the show. So a month ago, we asked listeners to leave us voicemail messages about emails that they'd had a hard time sending for whatever reason. And here are some of those messages. My name's Juniper. I live in Seattle. And two years ago, I came out as trans to my friends and then to my job and then to parts of my family. But I still haven't told my conservative Russian grandparents. I love them. And I think they're generally great people, but they don't have the best track record for controversial issues, let's say. And I haven't responded to any of their calls, the text messages or email for

like two years and I really need to get back to them and tell them that this is who I am and my life is different and that the person that they knew for the whole life is somebody different now. Yeah, so April 30th, I'm going to try to send out that email. Thanks. Bye. Two months ago, I left this note in a stranger's mailbox inquiring about their 13-foot fiber and I wrote this little note that said, hi, I really love your camper. I would really love to own it, maybe.

If you are thinking about selling it, let me know. Here's my email. Hope you have a great day. And then I get an email from a sweet woman named Karen, and basically the gist of it was a, sorry, no, I'm not selling it, but she goes on to tell me the story about how her husband just died and that she uses it to go on these fly fishing camping adventures with this organization called Fly Sisters.

I don't know, basically a retired woman who go on fly fishing adventures, and she invited me to come with her on a trip, and I've been wanting to respond to Karen, but it's been so long, and I'm sure she put out her heart and soul into the email that she wrote me, and I haven't responded because I'm going to jerk. Hey, reply to all guys. I actually woke up today,

and had an email from the person who I've been planning on emailing for email debt forgiveness day. So I don't know if that qualifies as an email debt forgiveness day miracle, but it meant that I didn't have to be awkward what I sent that email today. So it was great. About four months ago, I endured a pretty messy breakup with my longtime girlfriend. It's a little bit hard to hear the phone tape here, so I'm just breaking in to paraphrase a little bit. Doug has this bad breakup with his girlfriend, Sarah, and then Sarah's mom, who Doug had always been close to,

sends him a package in the mail. That's a pretty abnormally shaped package. Tall at the kitchen table, but maybe as a lot of the basketball. And when he opens it up, it's a yoga mat. Now, I've never done yoga thing. He hasn't talked to Sarah's mom since the breakup, and he doesn't even know if Sarah's told her mom that they've split. So the yoga mat could either be something she'd sent,

not knowing they'd broken up, or some message about the breakup itself to him. Either way. He doesn't know what to do, and to make things worse, he looks up the yoga mat online and finds out that not only was it a thoughtful gift, it was a super expensive one. For about 140 bucks on Amazon at the time.

And he started doing shipping and the weight of this thing. It was not a cheap gift. I didn't really know how to say his mom for this. I didn't exactly want to break the news about the end of the legislation. if Sarah hadn't told her yet, but I wasn't enough to ask Sarah if she'd talk to her mom either. She knows about the breakup by now. Sarah's mom knows what the podcast is, because if not, she's going to be pretty confused from April 30.

Hi, this is Mary Ann calling with her email debt forgiveness story. I used it to admit that probably 10 years ago when I was backing out of a friend's house, I hit their car, and I knew I wouldn't see them for a long time, so I did not mention it. opportunity to deal with this thing I've been ignoring. Hi, my name is Greg, and I have a story about email debt forgiveness. So it was Florida 2005, and I was trying to write a book, and I was frequenting a strip club a lot, and I know that sounds like a pretty hollow excuse to be frequenting a strip club, but that's what I was doing. It's a pretty seedy book, and I struck up a pretty legitimate friendship with a young stripper,

and we started to hang out outside the club, and this is not like a euphemism for prostitution. We honestly just met her coffee and I talked to her about her life. And, you know, I think we developed some feelings for each other, which I know makes me sound delusional. But eventually, this is probably our third or fourth hangout. I think we were at Applebee's. And she said, okay, I just went into the bathroom to psych myself. I told two people. It was an accident, but I hit him with my car and I was drinking and I'm going to prison on Monday.

And I didn't really know how to respond, obviously. So she did go to prison and she started writing me, letters, actual letters, not emails. And I was paralyzed for some reason and I still can't really understand about how to respond to these because we had a really quick and sort of intimate friendship, but it seemed inappropriate for me to be responding at that point in my life to a stripper who was in jail. And I think that that makes me out to be kind of a shitty person. After she finally got out five years later, she looked me up and emailed me and sort of just said in the most frank way possible, hey, how come you never wrote to me in prison?

And not surprisingly, I kept in character and didn't respond to this email for a long time. I'm not sure if this is a story you're looking for because I did eventually respond, and it was one of the most agonizing keyboard experiences of my life, just sitting there having to basically type out, I am not a man, or at least I wasn't then, and I'm sorry, and I can't give you any good explanation for why I abandoned. in you at your worst hour. And since then, I think that I've profoundly changed as a person. So the idea of unanswered correspondence has been a pretty heavy issue in my life. Just thought you guys might want to know. Thanks to everybody who called in and thanks to everybody who

participated. That's our bonus episode. Reply-all was hosted by me, PJ Vote, with Alex Goldman. We're produced by Tim Hauer and Surthi Penameney. We were mixed by Merritt Jacob. Matt Lieber is a gift you weren't expecting. Our theme music is by the mysterious breakmaster cylinder, and our ad music is by Build Buildings. If you like to listen to more episodes of our show, you can find them at iTunes.com slash replyall or at replyall. Thanks for listening. We'll see you on Wednesday.