What the Heck is Going on With Reply All, and How an Australian Christian Music Group Accidentally Became a Part of it

Disclaimer: I’m not a journalist and I have no intention to be, but I tried to do a good job writing this and research it properly too. This whole thing was disruptively taking up all my brain space, so I had to get it out there.

Some extremely juicy twitter drama went down yesterday with one of the biggest podcasts of the moment, and I want to talk about it. A few articles have been written already which do an excellent job of summarising the events, which you can read at The Vulture, New York Times or LA Times. I, however, much like Reply All’s The Test Kitchen is to The Sporkful’s A Reckoning At Bon Appétit, (that was a fun podcasting joke, by the way) want to delve a little deeper, explore some of the context, and be extremely self-indulgent. Plus — I have an additional, extra-exclusive scoop about how Christian music is involved.

So: Reply All. It is a very popular podcast, but I am going to explain it if you don’t listen. At the time of writing it sits at around the top 50 mark in both Apple and Spotify’s charts, more like top 25 if you remove official news media, right wing talk shows, true crime and relaxing sleeping sounds. It is the #1 most popular podcast made by its parent company, Gimlet Media.

Reply All is hosted by PJ Vogt and Alex Goldman, and it is officially a show about the internet, technology, and how that affects humans — but they’ve often gone in different directions, when they want to tell different kinds of stories or react to tumultuous world events. This broader genre includes episodes like On the Inside (#64–67), a series about a man in jail who claims he is innocent, or their numerous call in shows which usually follow big events, as a chance to check in with their community. #82 Hello? aired just after Donald Trump’s election, and they did it again with #162 The Confetti Cannon after Joe Biden’s. It is a really good show. It’s well produced, edited and written, with interesting and surprising narrative arcs that feel both mesmerisingly outlandish and incredibly human and relatable. It is (was?) one of my favourite podcasts. One of the episodes I like to tell people about is #76 Lost in a Cab, wherein a fraudulent lost-and-found website profits off the panic of people who’ve left their belongings in NYC cabs, with no intention of helping them.

I would describe their politics as socially quite left-wing, in the most universally appealing way possible. They have tackled some big topics, like an uprising against political corruption in Ecuador (#92 Favor Atender: The Return), unfair policing practices (#127–128 The Crime Machine) and QAnon (#166 Country of Liars). But I would generally say that they want to hold our hands, rather than make us question things. At the very least, they haven’t done so (excluding a few episodes made by POC, but, more on that later) in a way that has left a lasting impression on me. And I’m trying really hard to think about it!

Other podcasts do make me question things, for example, Episode 12 of Doughboys, Chick-fil-A with Betsy Sodaro, in which Mike Mitchell and Nick Wiger question the fairly universally accepted left-wing attitude that we should not eat at Chick-fil-A because of their horrible politics, but other fast food places are okay, by doing a deep dive on the histories of other fast food company CEOs and finding equally abhorrent things — so, like, we are kind of always going to be supporting something yucky simply by being consumers. I am not offering a definitive value judgement on this, by the way, simply pointing out that it did — and continues to — make me question things. And I would definitely say that Reply All is more left-wing than 2015 Doughboys. Shhh… I told you this was going to be self-indulgent.

Reply All’s progressive social politics are similar to that of Gimlet Media as a whole. They are, after all, their poster child. Notably, however, Gimlet is very economically centrist. They love capitalism! Which I guess they have to, they are a startup, and capitalism allows startups to exist. Gimlet’s CEO and co-founder, Alex Blumberg, made a name for himself as a host of NPR’s Planet Money, a podcast about capitalist economics. Full disclosure: I’ve listened to a lot of podcasts, but not this one, so I can’t comment on its politics with authority. Gimlet Media also produces StartUp, The Pitch, and Without Fail. I have listened to the entirety of the latter two, and they have a distinctly capitalist framing that I don’t… love.

This can be the trouble with being socially progressive and economically stagnant. You can approach things with an inclusive, well-meaning attitude, but if your primary goal is to make lots of money, that will win out when the two things are occasionally at odds with each other. Corporations will only truly prioritise diversity when it impacts their finances. Sruthi Pinnamaneni actually has a good quote about this from Reply All’s The Test Kitchen (ooooh, foreshadowing):

“After police killed George Floyd, one big advertiser, Proctor & Gamble, would threaten to pull their ad dollars from one Condé Nast brand, Vogue, if their magazine remained as white as it was. Within a week, as if by magic, the company had put together a solid diversity strategy with real teeth, and real money behind it. That’s all it took. A horrific killing, and a stern email from the maker of Crest Toothpaste.”.

Gimlet has had issues with representation, and to their credit, they’re at least somewhat honest about it. Their show StartUp, about startups, did some episodes on themselves, a startup. This included an episode where they confronted their lack of diversity and promised to change and try to do better. They followed this up with an official Diversity Report published in 2017, discussing how they diversified their line-up of editors and hosts in the 2016–2017 financial year. It’s a good step, but it also confirms the idea that being more diverse and inclusive is a good thing to do because it will help them make money, as opposed to just, like, being a good thing to do? Here’s a quote:

“Why are we doing this? … Also, it’s a smart business decision. People of color are the fastest growing segment of society — if we aren’t producing programming by and for more diverse audiences, we just won’t succeed as an audience focused enterprise.”

This report also mentions;

“To hold ourselves accountable, and in the spirit of transparency, we are going to be issuing a Gimlet diversity report every year. Below you will find our 2017 Diversity Report with data spliced a few different ways and compared against other baselines, including US.”

Unfortunately it appears they didn’t make good on this promise, as I cannot locate any follow-up Diversity Reports. Whoops?

They have definitely made noticeable efforts to do better at this, though, in ways that feel authentic, honest and important. You know, as well as helping them make money, of course.

Reply All published an episode created by Emmanuel Dzotsi, who is black, after the killing of George Floyd (#162 The Least You Could Do) that takes a hard look at how white people responded to the event. Gimlet also launched a show called Resistance in October of 2020, hosted by Saidu Tehan Thomas Jr., about the Black Lives Matter movement and other important stories from black people in America. It’s really good!

In October, Reply All published another story by Dzotsi, which came with an announcement that he would be a permanent host on the show going forwards. This is kind a disruptive thing to do, as it has been The PJ and Alex Show for a long time. It’s not the only thing about Reply All that’s been changing, and with change comes uncertainty.

PJ Vogt and Alex Goldman have been through a not-uncommon journey of making a thing that lots and lots of people turned out to love. They started out with a spring in their step, gained momentum, got more ambitious, started putting every waking hour into it, realised it wasn’t totally sustainable and got a little bit burnt out, had some interpersonal issues as a part of that, had to reconcile how to keep doing this long term, stepped back a little bit, started publishing less often, tried to level out and plan for the future of the show…

That’s not speculation, by the way, PJ and Alex have spoken quite candidly about themselves, their relationship and their show as podcast guests on Kevin T. Porter’s Inside Voices (Alex Goldman Has A Curious Voice, published March 10th 2020) and Hrishikesh Hirway’s Partners (PJ Vogt & Alex Goldman, published March 18th 2020).

After Emmanuel Dzotsi’s official welcome in October of 2020, the show did feel like it was stagnating a bit. I can attest to this as a fan, as could many opinionated people on Twitter. They put out four new original episodes in four months (it was weekly in the good old days) and these all felt like “lower effort” stories that required less investigative reporting and more just chatting to each other. Now, I am not here to critique this. Making podcasts is hard work, and people deserve a break in 2020! I’m bringing it up to speak to the feeling amongst Reply All’s fans at this time, which was pretty much “something big and exciting had better be coming!”. PJ Vogt also kept alluding to this promise, sensing his fans’ exasperation.

Well, the Big Thing arrived. A four-part miniseries about the cultural implosion at food-magazine-turned-online-content-creator, Bon Appétit, The Test Kitchen. The first two parts have been published so far, on February 4th and 12th respectively. It remains to be seen if we will hear the rest of it, but I am getting ahead of myself again.

I won’t go into detail about the contents of this story, firstly because this is already getting really long, and secondly because it’s been covered very well elsewhere. You can read about it in the article Bon Appétit staffers of color say EIC Rapoport led ‘toxic’ culture by Rachel Premak on Business Insider, or listen to it in the podcast episodes A Reckoning At Bon Appétit by Dan Pashman’s The Sporkful. Both of these stories were reported pretty much at the time that the stuff happened, and were mostly about the current, pertinent events. Reply All’s series promised to be more extensive, in depth, and to examine how the culture got to be the way that it was as well as the events that led to its downfall. And they certainly did a good job of going in-depth — the producer and host of the story, Sruthi Pinnamenani, has seemingly interviewed everyone who worked at Bon Appétit since it has existed, and claimed to have purchased every issue of their magazine.

Objectively speaking, it is a good story. It has phenomenal production quality, narrative arc, “big names”, new revealing information and dynamic editing. Objectively speaking. Subjectively… it is extremely tone-deaf, in a way that goes all the way to shocking and then bends around again to simply hilarious.

To sum it up: the story of Bon Appétit is about a cool, trendy, millennial-focussed company that appeared outwardly diverse without practising those values internally, creating a culture where a small clique of elite content creators didn’t feel the need to listen to their disenfranchised colleagues’ complaints about cultural inequality.

Reply All’s reporting frames this first and foremost as a race issue, which it is in large part — and the context of being a food magazine makes race more important, because recipes and cooking have long, interwoven cultural and ethnic histories. (Podcasting does not). Sruthi Pinnamenani, who is reporting the story for Gimlet, is Indian. She frames the Bon Appétit story with her own experiences as a non-black woman of colour, highlighting that the oppression she’s faced in her life and career is more nuanced, less everyday, and requires more introspection to acknowledge the full effects of. These are completely valid experiences. I also related to her observations in the context of my own experiences as a queer woman (not the same thing! But the way she discussed it personally resonated a little bit).

The error of this framing is that it potentially obscures the size of the role that class and wealth play in this power discrepancy, in addition to race. Sruthi is not a regular host of Reply All, but she helps make the show, and has reported other stories from time to time, pretty much since the beginning. She’s part of the Reply All clique.

And, after all, Gimlet is a cool, trendy, millennial-focussed company that appears outwardly diverse without always practising those values internally, creating a culture where a small clique of elite content creators don’t feel the need to listen to their disenfranchised colleagues’ complaints about cultural inequality.

Sruthi reports the Bon Appétit story as a way for her to also understand more about herself, and how she has both experienced prejudice and may have additionally benefited from a culture of inequality, by working out how to “fit in” with the elite crowd. Devoid of context this is a touching and intimate way to hear the story, that feels personal and relatable. In the context of what is happening at Gimlet, it’s really yucky.

I don’t know the full story of Gimlet’s own cultural reckoning, and it’s not fully and transparently reported anywhere that I know of yet, so I won’t pretend I can tell it. What I do know is that many younger employees of colour complained about mistreatment to the end of establishing a union. I also know that Spotify bought Gimlet for $230 million in 2019, and that this may have created some amount of internal tension.

To hear Sruthi describe how investigating Bon Appétit lead her to realise how damaging power structures can be is deeply insulting to Gimlet employees who actively watched her participate in those damaging power structures in her own workplace, where she didn’t manage to make the same realisations.

Sruthi closed out the most recent episode of The Test Kitchen with the following:

“The company where I work, Gimlet, had its own version of these problems. The white people who ran the place hired people of colour, promised them change that never quite seemed to materialise. A group of employees tried to fix the place themselves, and eventually things ended up as these things often do — in an union drive. Plenty of people joined that fight. I did not. To the extent I talked about it, I talked about the way their fight was stepping on my toes. It took 8 months of reporting on Bon Appétit for me to see how wrong I was about all of that. And if I’m honest, I’m still processing the anger that I feel towards myself. I wish I’d made different choices.”

You can see how, in the context of everything, this sounds bad. Maybe, if you have to choose between the two, introspection is better than spicy interview content. The general podcast listening community might agree with me on this too — You’re Wrong About, an independent show by Michael Hobbes and Sarah Marshall, has built a journalistic ethos around re-examining existing stories without uncovering any new information, but simply applying critical thinking and empathetic judgement to stories that have already been told. They are doing quite a bit better than Reply All in the charts.

After this episode was published, a former employee of Gimlet — Eric Eddings (who is black) — posted a fairly damning series of tweets detailing exactly why Sruthi’s reporting of this story was so incredibly hypocritical. The thread — which you can find, and should read, at @eeddings — discusses Sruthi Pinnamenani and PJ Vogt’s elitist behaviour and opposition to workplace unions at Gimlet (sorry, back to PJ and Alex for a second! This is important too — they have different roles in this. PJ is the main producer on the Bon Appétit series next to Sruthi, and Alex wasn’t involved at all. The re-evaluation that Reply All had to do to avoid burnout involved Alex taking a little bit of a step back and allowing PJ to do more — Alex is married with small children and doesn’t want to work long nights. The show generally portrays him as the bumbling, kind of silly but sweet dorky dude. The whole story isn’t clear, as I said, but Alex has been more involved in the unionising effort. PJ is the more archetypal hardworking single millennial who gives his life to the show, and maybe couldn’t see past his own success.) You should read the whole thread, but here are some good quotes:

“Last week I got an email from Sruthi about Reply All’s Test Kitchen series. I had been avoiding listening but once I did I felt gaslit. The truth is [Reply All] and specifically PJ and Sruthi contributed to a near identical toxic dynamic at Gimlet.

[PJ’s] response was always that he liked that [Reply All] was perceived as a clique or club and that he cared about diversity but would have to think more about how he could get involved beyond his team.

So [Reply All] found out about the effort last. They were pissed. The team led by PJ, Sruthi, and Alex G used their weight as a cudgel against our efforts at voluntary recognition. Sruthi personally held an Anti-union meeting, trying to rally people against it.

[PJ] told me he was slacking with Sruthi and that she had “called me a piece of shit and asked him to tell me.”

The union drive was weakened but ultimately succeeded. Alex Goldman is now on the bargaining committee and fwiw I’ve been told he’s been a staunch ally since. But Pj and Sruthi producing and editing this series is A LOT.”

Wow, big! Yikes! Double yikes! Triple yikes! Hopefully the poster children of the internet, who’ve established a name for themselves by being well-versed in Twitter culture, would at least have the means to respond to this elegantly and eloquently, right?

How about a good ol’ Notes App Apology. It is a huge cliché and personally I hate it for how it screams “I couldn’t even be bothered to get out my laptop for this”.

A leaked Gimlet-wide email confirmed that Sruthi and PJ are leaving the show. (You can find it in the Vulture’s article on this, it is very capitalist and not very interesting so I’m not including it).

Let’s talk about these apologies! This is already long enough, and I think it’s interesting. There is a cool organisation called Sorry Watch that breaks down how to tell if something is a good apology or not. In a full circle kind of way, I heard about it on an episode of a podcast — Helen Zaltzman’s The Allusionist. It’s very good, independent, and I would recommend it.

Anyway, the apologies. Sorry Watch gives six criteria for a good apology, and a seventh that they mentioned on their podcast episode which I will append to this list.

1. Use the word “sorry” or “apologise”

PJ says “sorry”, Sruthi says “apology”. Ok, good job, this one’s not that hard.

2. Name the offense

This is a solid “ehhhh”. They kind of did? But not in a straightforward way.

3. Take responsibility

PJ does pretty well here. “I deeply failed as an ally during the unionization era at Gimlet”. Sruthi, also, “My conduct around the diversity and union organization efforts at Gimlet was ill-informed, ignorant and hurtful”.

4. Show you understand the impact

Ok, not horrible again. PJ: “I should have reflected on what it meant to not be on the same side of a movement largely led by young producers of color”. And Sruthi’s, I have to admit I really like this quote, “Your trauma is real and deserves to be untethered from my personal shortcomings”.

5. How will you insure this doesn’t recur?

See, here we get a bit dodgy. It just sounds so generic! “I am going to take some time to think and listen”, and, “I am committed to doing the work.”

6. Make amends

Nopety nope! I guess leaving the show is amends??

7. Be clear who you are apologising to, not “to everyone I’ve hurt”.

PJ says “to everyone I’ve disappointed.” Hmmmm. Sruthi is better, “my current and former Gimlet colleagues”.

The not-that-interesting corporate email confirmed that Sruthi and PJ are leaving the show, and it seems unlikely that the Bon Appétit series will continue, so we don’t really know where Reply All is at right now. Technically and officially, their two hosts still on board are Emmanuel Dzotsi and Alex Goldman but I really… have no idea what they’re going to do.

This all sounds pretty wild. So what are all of the other podcasts saying about it?? Nothing, mostly, because there’s a huge ice storm going on that has cut off power to many of the USA’s finest podcast hosts. I’m mostly mentioning this to set the scene… things are kind of chaotic right now. One podcast, though, is hosted by two L.A. residents, who do not have the ice storm: Kevin T. Porter and Caroline Healy’s Good Christian Fun. See! I told you Christian music was a part of this!

In a poetically unfortunately timed scheduled post, Good Christian Fun released their latest episode at around midnight Los Angeles time, the evening after Shit Went Down. Alex Goldman, the other host of Reply All who is Not A Part Of This but Also Kind Of A Part Of This is their guest.

Good Christian Fun is also a very good podcast, which is in name and description about Christian pop culture but in reality is kind of generally about people’s complicated experiences with faith, and how we evolve, change, and recontextualise things. I really like it! I know I’ve said that of a lot of podcasts by this point, and it’s true, but GCF is worthy of it — I subscribe to their Patreon, guys. Their episode format is to have a guest on, discuss their experiences in the world of faith and religion, and then dissect a song/album/movie/book/etc. in Christian pop culture together.

Caroline and Kevin are excellent hosts. What is kind of funny here is that I, and I assume many others, see Kevin T. Porter as someone who knows a lot about what happens on the internet. This is also kind of what Alex Goldman is well-known for. But he gets shown up in this episode; there are multiple occasions where Kevin references an Internet Thing, Alex doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and Kevin has to explain. Not really relevant, but it’s funny and I deeply enjoyed it.

Their episode of the podcast dissects the Christian pop song “Shine” by the Australian group the Newsboys. This is even less relevant, but I promised a juicy connection to Australian Christian music in the title and it’s technically true, so here it is.

Good Christian Fun’s part in this story is not very controversial, really, just incredibly unfortunately timed. The only spicy nug I can offer up is the dirty delete I witnessed…

This is where I flex my secret powers of Being Australian, because their episode at time of publishing contained Alex Goldman glowingly recommending Reply All’s The Test Kitchen series. I was awake to hear this. Most Americans were not. And I can’t quote it for you, because by the time the Americans had woken up, GCF had quietly edited that part out. I redownloaded it to check. None of the hosts, official podcast accounts, or Alex Goldman have tweeted about this show yet, and I can’t blame them. If my internet husband tweeted a notes app apology in which he resigned from our biggest project, I wouldn’t want to break the silence with “Hey! Check out my guest appearance on Good Christian Fun!”.

So what’s my takeaway? I don’t like corporations! Even if they seem to care about your values, it’s always secondary to profit. Listen to independent podcasts, there are plenty of incredible ones. Most of my favourites are mentioned in this piece. Oh, especially listen to Good Christian Fun if you can, they are excellent and did not deserve to get caught up in this, and I only talked about it because it was really funny in a bit of a tragic way.