Hi there. It’s been a while since I’ve updated my Substack. I’d like to attribute that to a surfeit of exciting news to share with you here about what I’ve been up to, but to be honest, I haven’t been up to much. I have been going to the park with my kids, and playing some music, watching a lot of movies, and taking meetings. So many meetings.
To be perfectly honest, I couldn’t have possibly anticipated how weird and bad the podcast industry would become. I have a lot of incredibly talented friends who have been laid off by companies like Spotify, Pineapple, Pushkin, Sirius, NPR, WNYC, and many, many more. I have had people worry to me in emails and DMs and texts and phone calls about what the future holds.
Those meetings I mentioned above — they have been with some fantastically big and fantastically small players in this industry. I’ve laid out insane and ambitious plans for audio projects that no one else has ever even attempted. I have pitched things that are so foolish I can hardly blame anyone for not taking a bite at that particular apple. I’ve pitched scaled back and deliverable ideas that felt like a compromise I didn’t want to make, but thought it was more important to just get working again. I’ve piloted chat shows that I wasn’t particularly interested in, but felt confident I could make into something meaningful once it was ordered to series.
I don’t write any of this for pity — it’s equally possible that my lack of finesse (incredible) and personality (terrible) are as much at fault for this predicament as the state of the industry. And honestly, I’m doing ok. I am producing (and pinch-hosting) Western Kabuki, a chatty podcast that is even more online than Reply All, if you can believe it. I’m not broke, I’m still making music, and have a remix of a song by my good pal Josaleigh Pollett coming out this year, and also maybe an EP of 80’s hardcore songs if I can get it together to write some lyrics.
But man, I’m hungry to report again. It’s been too long. I miss interrogating people about their weird decisions and I miss solving problems and trying to understand the world better than I do. One of the weird side effects of working at Reply All is that I worked so much and spent so much time with everyone there, between the show and fatherhood a lot of my friendships kind of melted away. Faced with all this underemployment I have spent more time on my own in the last 18 months or so than I ever have in my life. It’s a little lonely!
But whatever, the past is prologue. I am feeling hopeful these past couple weeks that I might be spinning up something new. If you have any kind of sense of my general demeanor, you know that hopeful is usually not on my slate of emotions, so that must mean something is going right.
But among the things I’d like to start doing, in addition to starting a new gig, is to begin writing here again. So if you have anything you’d like me to write about, please feel free to leave it in the comments. And if there’s nothing you’d like me to write about you can tell me that as well. Sorry I wasn’t around for so long. Glad to be back.
Anyone here need some supertechsupport?
Good to hear from you. About 8 months ago, I heard a former co-host of yours advertising their new show, and I thought "I wonder what Alex Goldman is doing these days-- he was always the more talented of the two." (That's how you know I'm not talking about Emmanuel.) And then I found Western Kabuki, and have been subscribed to that for a while.
I'm glad to hear that you have irons in the fire, and that they involve reporting. That's always been something I love hearing you do. Since you asked for leads, there's one thought that crossed my mind. You've talked before about how your early experiences online were on MLive (not too dissimilar to my Detroit-area BBS experience in the late 80s and early 90s), and there's a couple of different directions that I think you could go in making a kind of historical retrospective of the explosion of the Internet, from regional BBS' to college kids getting an email address to that period of time where "If you have AOL, you aren't really on the Internet."
One direction that might be an interesting, specific perspective (which might involve more reporting, which could be good or bad right now) would be this: with identity theft and internet scams like Pig Butchering being such a huge industry right now, a look at the history of scammers on the internet, from the 90s through today, could be a fascinating retrospective, and I think hearing it in your voice would be amazing.