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The last time I saw Alex Goldman, in a press photo for his podcast Reply All, he was in a sleek Brooklyn studio surrounded by all the trappings of venture capital: expensive-looking audio equipment, Scandi-inspired decor, a throng of production staff. When we speak now, three years after the end of that podcast and maybe two since the industry itself fell, if not off a cliff then into some sort of deep and jagged ravine, Goldman is still the same bubbly, self-effacing host millions of listeners came to know throughout the 2010s. But the backdrop has changed. “You’re recording me in my basement,” Goldman laughs. “This is my studio now.”

Podcasts have always been a DIY medium—some of the most popular have been recorded in attics and garages much like Goldman’s New Jersey “torture closet”—so a basement set-up doesn’t necessarily signal decline. But Goldman is under no illusions about where he finds himself with his new show, Hyperfixed. “It’s like a band going from playing arenas to playing clubs to playing smaller and smaller venues,” he tells me. “And that’s fine for me. I’m not bitter about it, and I don’t feel like I’m owed anything. But it’s a different vibe.”

Different is perhaps an understatement. When Goldman started Reply All with his co-host PJ Vogt back in 2014, podcasting was still a scrappy cousin to broadcasting—a niche for tech early adopters and storytelling obsessives, not a mainstream money-printing machine. Then along came Serial, and suddenly people who’d never heard the word ‘podcast’ were devouring episodes religiously. Podcasting, once second fiddle to radio, was now centre stage.

For Goldman and Vogt, the timing couldn’t have been better. They’d just left public radio to join Gimlet, a start-up taking a multimillion-dollar bet on narrative audio storytelling. Reply All launched right as the Serial mania peaked. “We were incredibly lucky,” Goldman admits, “because when Serial ended, there were all these articles saying if you want a show like Serial, here’s this new one that just started.”

This wasn’t entirely true, of course: where Serial was a deeply reported true-crime investigation that told one story across an entire season, Reply All was something quite different—a freewheeling riff on internet culture that might spend one episode tracking down a lost pop song from the ’90s, and another chasing scammers through the streets of Delhi.

Still, the comparison worked, and Gimlet’s bet appeared to pay off. Over the next few years, Reply All became one of podcasting’s biggest success stories, racking up millions of downloads and helping to establish the medium as a legitimate home of ambitious and deeply creative journalism. The show won awards, spawned imitators and gave its hosts the kind of resources their public radio days never afforded: they could travel around the world for a story, spend months on investigations, and work with a full production team in those sleek Brooklyn studios.

By 2019, when Spotify bought Gimlet in a deal worth over $200 million, Reply All was one of the crown jewels of a podcasting empire built on the promise that complicated audio storytelling—the kind with meticulous editing and original scoring—could be the next big thing. And for a brief moment, it seemed like that promise might actually come true. Listeners were listening. Hollywood was optioning podcasts for film and TV adaptations. Everyone wanted in, including investors, who poured hot, liquid capital into the space.

Looking back, it’s easy to see these as the good days. But Goldman says they came at a cost. “We were working fourteen-hour days, three or four days a week. And we were miserable.” The transition to corporate ownership didn’t help either. “Spotify is a tech company, and tech companies don’t like journalists,” he explains. “So when we started behaving like journalists, they were like, ‘What the hell is this thing we bought?’” That awkwardness became particularly acute when Reply All wanted to cover Spotify itself, leaving Goldman and Vogt in the embarrassing position of having to tell listeners their own employer wouldn’t talk to them.

The corporate tensions were manageable, if frustrating. But those problems paled in comparison to what came next. You could call it The Great Cancelling, or the end of Reply All as listeners knew it. It’s a topic I venture into warily, worried Goldman won’t want to revisit it. But true to form, he’s unguarded.

“It’s no secret that my co-host resigned,” he says. “It was scandalous.” It's a story most listeners know by heart: in 2021, Reply All started airing a four-part series exposing what it alleged was a toxic and racist workplace culture at Bon Appétit, the popular Condé Nast food publication. The investigation was thorough and damning, and struck a chord with media workers who recognised similar dynamics at their own publications. But it hit closer to home, too. Before the series finished airing, allegations emerged that Gimlet itself had similar problems with workplace diversity and inclusion. Vogt, who had been leading the Bon Appétit investigation, resigned amid criticism that he had contributed to the kind of workplace problems Reply All was busy investigating at other outlets.

Goldman stayed on, trying to salvage the show. But the damage was done. “Being in the centre of a maelstrom like that is exhausting,” he says, suddenly finding himself caught in the sort of internet flame war that Reply All might have once covered with bemused detachment. “People are mad at you because they think that you ran cover for your former co-host; other people are mad at you because they think that you’re a bad friend to your former co-host.”

By early 2022, Goldman had had enough. “At that point I was just like, I think I’m ready to move on,” he tells me. He quit Reply All, confident that his track record would open doors. “I was leaving on top of the world. I made this incredibly successful show. I can pitch whatever crazy shit that I want and people will just say okay.” But he was wrong.

Around the same time Reply All imploded, the broader podcasting industry was beginning to show cracks of its own. Spotify and the other tech giants that had flooded the medium with capital discovered that expensive, highly produced storytelling wasn’t the guaranteed money-maker they’d hoped for. What did appear to work were the kinds of shows that don’t require extensive reporting, or teams of producers, or journalism degrees. Rambling, three-hour-long discussions that felt more like conversations between friends became the dominant format, helmed by everyone from celebrities to former wrestlers peddling conspiracy theories and race science. These shows had always existed. But now they were the ones making real money; they also had the benefit of being cheap. Gimlet’s meticulously crafted shows were quietly cancelled, one by one.

It was into this market that Goldman tried to launch a comeback. But the market, frankly, wasn’t buying. In the brief interregnum between ending Reply All and taking time to figure out his next move, Goldman found the easy money for his type of storytelling had vanished. “I was so convinced that I would find a production company that would bankroll [my new ideas],” he says. “But then it became increasingly clear that this was not the way things were going to go.”

After two years of rejections, Goldman finally accepted what the industry was telling him: if he wanted to make the type of show he believed in, he’d have to build it from scratch.

Which is how he finds himself now, in that New Jersey basement, building Hyperfixed from the ground up. The show launched in September 2024, a process that forced Goldman to confront his own limitations. “It very much felt like starting over,” Goldman says. “I had never had a job in journalism without PJ, and he’s just this incredible writer and editor. Those are things I am not very confident in, and I was like, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to do this.’ It was terrifying.”

Adding to the fear was a business model that felt completely alien to someone used to corporate backing: instead of relying solely on ad revenue, Goldman was pinning his hopes on voluntary support from listeners, hoping they’d pay for premium episodes and bonus content. To make it work, Goldman put up $50,000 of his own money to pay his small team’s salaries and keep the lights on. The maths is perpetually tight. “I have, like, $1,300 in the Hyperfixed account right now,” Goldman says. “And I have some outstanding invoices to pay. That stuff is all very stressful.”

The shift to direct listener support was just one part of Goldman’s broader rethinking of how to make podcasts. Without backing from venture capital, he needed something fundamentally simpler—no globe-trotting investigations or elaborate productions, just Goldman in his basement solving listeners’ puzzles: why supermarket fridges don’t have doors, whether it’s responsible to have kids in a burning world, and other mundane mysteries.

When I ask how he responds to listeners who expect Reply All–level production, he tells me something most podcasters, writers, artists—hell, most people—would never publicly admit: he’s lowered his ambitions. “I still want to make something that connects,” he explains. “But not at the expense of killing yourself.” This simple format allows him to maintain a sustainable pace. And crucially, it allows for imperfection. “I’m not going to put something out that I think is bad, but they can’t all be winners. If I put out something that’s just kind of whatever, my philosophy is like, well, there’s always next week. There’s always another day to fight.”

Eight months into this experiment, how are things going? The reality is that even a more modest approach to podcasting comes with challenges. In May, Goldman shared an earnings report with his subscribers that revealed the brutal economics of independent podcasting. Despite having eighty-five thousand listeners per episode, he’s still well short of the two hundred thousand he needs for sustainability (assuming five per cent of those listeners opt to become paying subscribers).

The numbers are stark: he has enough money to last until the end of 2025, but if things don’t turn around soon, he might need to get “a real job.” It’s a level of transparency that would make most creators uncomfortable, but for Goldman, radical honesty has always been part of the brand. “My whole career I’ve been way too open about my personal struggles,” he says. “And my experience has always been that that has strengthened my relationship with the audience.” With Hyperfixed, that openness has become even more essential. “If I’m asking the audience to fund the show, I kind of owe it to them.”

As our conversation comes to an end, I realise Goldman has found a different measure of ambition entirely: his relationship with his audience. The venue metaphor he used earlier suddenly takes on a different meaning: arenas hold more people, sure, but you can’t see individual faces in the crowd. In smaller venues, you know half the audience by name. It’s a different kind of success, but as Goldman puts it, “that level of intimacy is very special. I don’t take that for granted at all.”