Formerly the internet’s favourite podcast about the internet, Reply All is at the start of a bit of a rebuild.

From its first episode in 2014 up until February 2021, hosts PJ Vogt and Alex Goldman chased leads into the very strangest and most unexpectedly fascinating corners of modern life. They called back cold callers and made friends with them. They tried to help a man track down a song he thought he heard at a party years ago. They unravelled tweets to their befuddled producer.

Then came their exposé on Bon Appetit’s Test Kitchen. Just as Reply All tried to lay out exactly how Bon Appetit had been a toxic, unsafe environment to work in for people of colour, contributors and staff pointed out something not dissimilar was happening at Reply All. Vogt and producer Sruthi Pinnamaneni left under a cloud.

In June it returned from its short hiatus with the Londoner Emmanuel Dzotsi alongside Goldman, who’s contributed some of Reply All’s best stories over the last couple of years – see episode 167, ‘America’s Hottest Talkline’, about a weird recording promoting an intimate chatline which kept turning up on American government phonelines for years. It’s brilliant, and the future of Reply All looks bright.

Episode 114: Apocalypse Soon

It remains to be seen whether the Yes Yes No segment will return in Reply All 2.0, but even if it doesn’t there’s an enormous amount of fun lurking in the back catalogue. Each time, Vogt and Goldman explain a tweet to Gimlet Media co-founder Alex Blumberg, who is terminally confused by Twitter comedy.

They’re often extremely densely packed with stuff you need to have been living fairly intensely online to get, and never more so than a tweet which packaged several notable Twitter fights from 2019 into a new verse to ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’. Along the way, we learn about the beefs between people who wash their legs in the shower and those who don’t, the Aperol wars, and a grown man who blocked his wife on Twitter.

It’s hilarious, and also maddeningly catchy. Quite how Billy Joel restrains himself from singing, “Uber strike, Wiccan life, gamer blocked his elf wife,” in concert is a marvel.

Episode 158: The Case of the Missing Hit

This one has a case for being both the most Reply All episode of Reply All, as well as the very best Reply All episode of them all. The ingredients are all there: someone kind of remembers some fragment of culture, and needs help finding out what it actually was; Goldman and Vogt go way, way, way beyond what any sensible podcast would reasonably do in pursuit of a story.

It started when Californian filmmaker Tyler Gillett sang a song he remembered to his wife. It was kind of like Barenaked Ladies, a little bit like U2, something from the nineties. But after hours and hours down blind alleys on the internet, he can’t find it. Is he going mad? Has he somehow written his own earworm? Reply All tries to get to the bottom of it, going as far as to get Gillett to reconstruct the song with musicians in the studio.

With twist after twist and a great pay-off, it was an instant favourite. “We say in the story that the song and the desire to find it are contagious,” Vogt reflected last year. “I think that just turned out to be a little truer than we thought.”

Episode 166: Country of Liars

The QAnon phenomenon spurred a lot of podcasts. It’s an amazing story: a fringe gag on the 4Chan imageboard where someone pretended to be a member of the secret service turns into a community of credulous believers, which turns into a mini-industry of gurus and vibe artists interpreting gibberish a thousand ways, which turns into thousands of people storming the Capitol building and five dead.

Reply All’s QAnon story, though, might be the one which actually got under the skin of it. Cutting through all the noise and sensation which came after, Vogt goes right back to the very beginning of the QAnon story, to 2Chan, 4Chan and 8Chan. Frederick Brennan founded 8Chan as an ultra-free-speech alternative to 4Chan, but lost control of his site as its posters became more and more unhinged. Brennan, though, was able to see the nuts and bolts of the site, and has a good idea who the original Q was.

As fun as Reply All regularly is, this is a reminder that it also has some really, really solid journalism at its heart.

Listen to Reply All on SPOTIFY, ACAST, and all other podcast apps.

The post Where to start with Reply All appeared first on POD BIBLE.

‘The Takedown Producer and Narrator, Matthew Nelson

Hi Matt, this is your first foray into True Crime – have you always wanted to do a TC podcast, or was it just THIS story?

Honestly, it’s a bit of both. I do watch a lot of the true crime docs on TV, stuff like Making a Murderer, Tiger King (obviously), and I’ll Be Gone in the Dark. And shows like Crimetown, Serial, and S-Town are big influences on the kind of podcasts I’ve made, and the things I aspire to make. But most of all, I’m a bit of a heist nerd. I don’t think there’s a heist movie I haven’t seen. And the best ones — Heat, The Town, Den of Thieves (you may laugh, but I think it’s immense), Widows — I know off by heart. The opportunity to make a podcast homage to that genre was really exciting. I wanted to capture the energy and propulsion of these films, but also stay true to the things that make podcasts so great and give the listener time to really be immersed in this crazy world of early MMA and heists.

How do you feel about being described as something out of a Guy Ritchie movie?

HA! For anyone who hasn’t heard it yet, Crime Show’s regular host, Emma Courtland, describes me as sounding like I’m something out of a Guy Ritchie movie. That was mostly because there are a lot of commonalities between Lee Murray’s story and something like Snatch. And also because the aesthetics of those films really informed the sound design we went for (shoutout to Daniel Ramirez and Bobby Lord for mixing and scoring). But, yes, it’s a huge honor. Guy Ritchie has a fine reputation for casting extremely handsome men in his films — Brad Pitt, Jason Statham, Charlie Hunnam, and Frank from Eastenders — so I’m in good company.

Who should play Lee Murray in the film of this podcast (and why)?

I asked this question to a lot of people who knew Lee and the most popular answer I got was Tom Hardy. And I think that’s a great choice. He’s been in a film about fighters before (the excellent Warrior), and he’s also in a Guy Ritchie movie (the less-than-excellent RockNRolla).

Do you have any podcasts suggestions for people who want to learn more about this story/London’s underground scene/MMA drama?

Check out anything with Ariel Helwani. Not podcasts but also great: Jon Wertheim wrote an excellent piece about Lee for Sports Illustrated, and his book about the early MMA scene, Blood in the Cage, is phenomenal. Shaun Assael (who’s in the podcast) also wrote a great story about Lee for ESPN. After you’ve read those, you should just re-listen to The Takedown. At 0.5x speed.

Listen to The Takedown, pt.1 and The Takedown, pt.2 now on Spotify.

The post The Takedown // Crime Show takes on a UFC fighter heist story appeared first on POD BIBLE.

That kind of personal connection develops in many ways, but a clear breeding ground is when a host allows themselves to be truly vulnerable to their audience and lets us in to something deeply personal. It’s easy to automatically think of stories detailing traumatic or emotional experiences, but sometimes those personal moments come from a sort of honesty that catches us off-guard because it seems so, frankly, normal.

A wonderful example of this recently appeared in the form of The Michelle Obama Podcast. When celebrities, politicians, and other high-profile individuals step into the podcasting world, people often have preconceived ideas of what they’ll be getting. There are, in many ways, formulas to these things. But former First Lady Michelle Obama dispelled that notion right from the first episode where she chats comfortably with her husband (who just happens to be the former President of the United States).

The programme has only released four episodes so far, but our host has invited us into a variety of topics that make her feel approachable and familiar. In particular, her discussion with Dr. Sharon Malone about health and the things nobody tells you about puberty and menopause was simultaneously powerful and reassuring. There are so many things that occur in every day life – between partners, inside our own bodies, at our jobs – that people just never talk about. But if Michelle Obama is willing to make these semi-secret, pedestrian parts of our existence part of our vernacular, then perhaps we can all follow her lead.

Within the world of podcasts, it’s easy to get lost in a sea of famous faces or intensely-hyped concepts. In the case of The Michelle Obama Podcast, a recognisable name and face is participating in conversations many have been having before, but her candidness welcomes more into the fold and encourages them to seek out these conversations elsewhere. Hopefully, those who feel that sense of connection with her will continue to explore similar conversations from others building intimacy with listeners the world over.

The Michelle Obama Podcast is a Spotify Original, produced by Higher Ground. Discover new episodes on Wednesdays via Spotify.

The post REVIEW // The Intimacy of The Michelle Obama Podcast appeared first on POD BIBLE.