Not gonna lie… This podcast is not a patch on what it used to be. Thought I’d give it some grace time to get over the past controversies but there is no chemistry anymore, the narrative structuring is so obvious it feels patronising, and they should have just ended it when it turned out they’re a bunch of hypocrites.
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Meanwhile, Cryptoland by PJ Vogt is very good…
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Didn’t know this existed, will check it out. Hope it doesn’t have the same patronising narrative style that Reply All now has where it feels like it can’t decide whether its target audience is my Mam or my gran
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haven’t listened to a single episode since PJ left, didn’t think Emmanuel was a good addition as host before that let alone once the whole thing had been blown apart
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Aaaaaand it’s done.
EDIT: I grew to like Emmanuel in the end. He seemed to be dumped with the ‘serious’ stories for a while, but it got much better when he was allowed to relax.
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I didn’t dislike Emmanuel, I would quite like to hear something new from him actually. I just don’t think that he had the same chemistry with Alex, and he came in at the end of a string of absolutely amazing episodes (including the one with that song that they couldn’t remember). I think it’s good that they’re ending it, there were clearly a lot of talented people involved, but this particular format was as much about its two hosts as anything else.
Been coming for a while hasn’t it. Emmanuel had definitely grown on me but listened to The Contact List and can’t vibe at all with how he treated his old ‘friend’ from college during the call. Could be me but came across absolutely awful. He apologized for how they treated him back then but didn’t seem genuine at all.
So that’s it then? Originally they said this latest one was going to be the last one with these hosts, but from the episode itself, it sounds like it’s all over. Would be very weird if they made the episode with that tone and it was going to continue with new hosts.
The episode was unfocused, self-indulgent and featured a segue that Alex found far more interesting than it was. Kinda sums up the show over the post-PJ era pretty much.
Felt weird that PJ was only mentioned once throughout the whole thing, and only incidentally to describe an episode so they could talk about its soundtrack. Just feels like reaffirmation that the show should never have continued after the Bon Appetite thing.
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I see that PJ Vogt has started a new podcast with quite an innocuous subject matter
I enjoyed Crypto Island, though it was very sporadic, and clearly suffered from the ridiculous time and effort that this sort of thing would really need dedicated to it. It was a reminder that he’s really fucking good at what he does though.
PJ Vogt
- It’s fine to listen to whatever new he’s doing
- I’m ambivalent
- I don’t know / don’t care
- He’s a bad person and listening to what he does validates things that a bad person is doing
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I genuinely don’t know at this point.
I am also a vote for “don’t know”.
I found Cryto Island fascinating but sometimes he came a bit too close to endorsing crypto for my liking.
I also find it really fucking weird that he doesn’t have his own Wikipedia page. Like he’s SEO’d the fuck out of his own name to hide what happened at Reply All? Because he’s pretty famous, right?
Dunno but I like the title of the first episode so I’m gonna go in on it
Damn, I hadn’t noticed before how well he’s cleaned up his SEO. That feels very weird.
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I’ve heard a couple of these now and I do find them annoyingly listenable.
I see that a recent episode of Search Engine has been pushed to the Reply All feed. While I do think it’s clear at this point that PJ Vogt was the driving force in what made Reply All great, the fact that they’ve gone for the “lay low and pretend nothing happened” method is very weird.
This is a good article reflecting on the systemic problems Gimlet media had as a whole.
I might be a bit hazy on the details but I’m pretty sure Sruthi Pinnamaneni is now back working with PJ on Search Engine. I don’t think she was part of the team when that pod first began but I’m pretty sure she was on the credits for a recent ep.
Hope they’ve both learned from what happened before.
Yeah, he definitely mentioned that at some point.
I feel like the toxic environment from Gimlet revolved around cliques which only involved the people that a few powerful people dictated (e.g. all the Reply All team as it was the best performing podcast), and the criticism came from the fact that the clique just happened to be majority white cis male (and the union-busting). Their solution seems to be: Do your own thing independently, so you don’t have to care about inclusion. I mean…
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