Friday Frivolity: A Mash Note to Three Podcasts

I love podcasts. They are my companions when I do housework, cook, drive alone, ride my bike, work out at the gym. When I’m especially in my podcast groove, I put on my headphones and listen while walking around the law school at hours when I am unlikely to encounter many students or colleagues.

But lately, my joy in podcasts has been diminished for the same reason my joy in life is diminished. Many of my podcasts have become just an alternative form of doomscrolling, and I do plenty of that already. Happily, my podcast feed is more varied than my Bluesky feed (and by the way, follow the blog on Bluesky!). And it just got more varied because one of my favorite podcasters is about to start a new season of his show, and I just discovered that two other favorite podcasters, who used to have a podcast together, have launched their own podcasts. I have a lot of material to catch up on.

Let me start with those two. P.J. Vogt and Alex Goldman were the hosts of Reply All, which was perhaps my all-time favorite podcast. I mean, This American Life will always be the mother of all podcasts, but Reply All was the most reliably interesting and entertaining podcast I ever discovered. It worked because its topic, the Internet, is an endless source of edgy, interesting, quirky, funny content, and because P.J. and Alex are both A+ podcasters and reporters. The chemistry between them did not just double their virtues; it raised them exponentially. Alex is a ten; P.J. is a ten. Combine them and you get, not twenty, but 100. And their occasional feature “Yes, Yes, No,” with their boss Alex Blumberg added yet another ten to the mix. Reply All provided me with blog fodder on numerous occasions, so you can get a sense of the podcast here and here.

It imploded in 2021 due to allegations of racial insensitivity and union-bashing. P.J. and a senior reporter, Sruthi Pinnamaneni, were on the wrong side of the divide. They apologized for some careless, insensitive statements and left the show. After a hiatus, Alex tried to continue, but the magic was gone, and the show ended in 2022.

Part of what made the show work so well is that, while Alex is nerdy and sweet, to the point of vulnerability, P.J. is a bit more edgy and puckish, and he is happy to prey on Alex’s sweetness without going too far. In a favorite episode (#36 “Today’s the Day”)  that included an escapade involving a boat ride, Alex plays against type and teases P.J., who is seasick. P.J. responds, “Your human programming could be  upgraded.” “That’s fair,” Alex acknowledges. It’s the perfect exchange in the context of a show about the Internet.

In one favorite episode (#96 “The Secret Life of Alex Goldman”), Alex agrees to let P.J. hack his phone, and P.J. is able to invade Alex’s privacy to an alarming degree. Alex says that he didn’t notice anything beyond the fact that the phone’s charge wasn’t lasting very long. That phone was working hard. Not for Alex; for P.J. A lot of the humor derives from the fact that Alex has absolutely nothing to hide. All of his conversations, texts, pictures were completely routine and free from scandal: Alex’s ordinary exchanges with his wife, Alex’s ordinary work interactions, Alex’s itinerary, which involved going to work and going home in an endless loop, were nothing but sweet and innocent. 

Alex was creeped out (by himself) because P.J. had used Alex’s phone to record Alex laughing out loud spontaneously while driving alone in his car. This is indeed something that Alex did from time to time. He would think back on a comedy show or something and laugh out loud, and then he couldn’t stop. Both Alex and P.J. have explosive awkward lacks — a bit like Elmer Fudd on a juicer, as Jerry Seinfeld said of one of his girlfriends on Seinfeld. Alex was embarrassed, but it was actually endearing. P.J. cheered Alex up by playing him a recording of a song that Alex made up to sing to his child while drying him with a towel after a bath. That was Alex expressing totally normal joy and sharing it with his child. One could feel how therapeutic it was for Alex to hear himself experiencing laughter in a healthy setting. “I love that guy,” he says of his son. And the whole episode served the larger purpose of putting us all on notice of how vulnerable we all are to hackers who have the technological ability to inhabit our intimate spaces.

Anyway. Reply All is gone, not unmourned. But Alex and P.J. are back with solo shows, and I am psyched. P.J.’s no-longer-so new venture is called Search Engine and it, along with Reply All, has made Time Magazine’s list of the top 100 podcasts of all time. The first season was called Crypto Island. It is not Reply All, because it is just P.J., but he delivers. It becomes clear in the show that P.J. is not just a great podcaster; he’s a great reporter. I went back to the crypto episodes, which aired in 2022, and they still feel pretty relevant, even though that world changes at alarming speeds. The show is generally about answering the sorts of questions that one might type into a search engine but in a much more satisfying way.

I am just staring Alex’s new show, Hyperfixed.  The show seems a lot like the third show I’m going to talk about today in that it is about the host’s attempt to help people solve their problems. The difference is that Alex’s focus is not so much on figuring out some mystery, hidden in the recesses of the episode subject’s poorly-remembered past. It is about addressing a practical problem, while also exploring how that problem came into existence. Like P.J., Alex’s skills as an investigative reporter are foregrounded more in this show than they were in Reply All.

The first episode is about Alex helping a friend overcome her fear of driving in New York City. I think This American Life (it may have been a different podcast) had an episode just like that, so I was thinking Alex wasn’t being very original. I can’t find the episode I have in mind, but there was a moment in it that really stuck with me.  The woman who was trying to overcome her fear of driving enlisted a cousin to help her get acclimated. He scolded her for using a turn-indicator, saying he never used them because “It’s nobody’s business where I’m going.”* That woman, like Alex’s friend, is especially nervous about driving on the highway.

But that is where the similarities between Hyperfixed and that other podcast about urban driving end. Alex takes us on a journey to discover why urban driving is so nightmarish. He narrates a brief history of the transition from an urban landscape designed for pedestrians to one designed to give free rein to cars, while turning pedestrians into “jaywalking” interlopers. Fascinating stuff. From subsequent episodes, I have learned how imperfect our systems of measurement are, and having recently going on my first cruise, I am very taken by Alex’s periodic check-ins with a retired reporter who has signed himself up for a 3 1/2 year residential cruise.

Finally, I turn to Jonathan Goldstein, whose Heavyweight is returning for a ninth season and also made Time Magazine’s list of the top 100 podcasts. Jonathan, like Alex and P.J,. is a 10/10 podcaster. He is not really an investigative reporter, although he does sleuth-like investigations as part of Heavyweight. He is more like a David Sedaris type humorist. I can’t imagine him doing stand-up comedy, but I can easily imagine him reading his stories to delighted audiences. His former show, the CBC’s Wiretap, featured a series of returning characters, including Gregor Erlich, the subject of a Heavyweight episode and Jonathan’s quirky parents. I’ve been listening to re-released episodes of that as well.

Heavyweight just seems impossible. Each episode features some person who has been bearing some heavy weight throughout their life. Something happened, years, if not decades ago. Revisiting the event is painful, but the person cannot let it go. Sometimes the episodes involve mysteries — What really happened that day? What became of that prized object? Sometimes the episodes involve the most complex of human interactions? Why did I get kicked out of my sorority or my apartment? Why did that popular girl really ask me to take her to the high school prom? I’m pretty sure I broke my leg as a child, but my parents and siblings all say it was my brother who broke his leg! How can I make good on mistakes that I made as a young adult?

Each episode begins with Jonathan calling his childhood friend Jacky. In the first episode (I think), Jonathan explains that in his new show, he will act as a sort of therapist. As she does in every phone call, she laughs at him and hangs up. And yet, improbably, Jonathan and his team always find answers to the questions at the heart of each episode. And almost invariably, with frequent comically self-deprecating interludes, they relieve the carrier of the heavy weight that has been burdening them.

It sure beats doomscrolling.

*If you ever want to test the limits of AI’s capabilities, ask it to find that episode for you. I tried two different AI assistants with identical results. AI will tell you, “Ah, yes, that is this episode [it names the episode] from 20__, and in it a woman enlists her cousin to help her get over her fear of driving.” It then repeats what you told it and remarks on how poignant and droll the episode is. You then look up the episode in question, and the title is different, and it is about something completely unrelated to what you are looking for. It may mention cars or driving, but that’s about it. You inform AI that it was wrong, and it spits out a different episode. This can go on indefinitely, but if you suggest to AI that maybe the better answer would be just to admit that it cannot find what you are looking for, it will admit that it can’t.