Hello, Jackie.
Hi, how are you good? How are you good?
I just got home?
Can you give me just the Liliputians? Real or not real? Do you ever wish you could run like a cheetah? Do you like cold play? Okay?
Can you let me ask some questions?
I have to go? What I have to go doesn't feel so good when the when the shoe is on the other foot doesn't. Why are you used to hanging up on me and saying I have to go and blah blah blah.
Actually, don't listen.
I gotta go though, I gotta I gotta go. No, I gotta go. Okay, Byetta, I gotta go, Jackie. Rats from Gimblet Media. I'm Jonathan Goldstein and this is Heavyweight Today's episode.
Alex, Uh, how long I could do that?
Gimblet Media CEO Alex Bloomberg has asked that I meet him in the studio. He's late.
Oh hey, Alex.
Alex seats himself, mournfully checks his fitbit, glumly crosses his legs with woe and uncrosses them with even more woe.
Hello, Hello, Hello, Hello, can you turn me up a little teeny bit? Hello?
There we go in spite of his gimblet media stock options and buns of stainless Steele. At the moment, Alex Bloomberg is the saddest CEO this gimlet media reporter has ever seen. And I am concerned because not only is Bloomberg my boss, he's also one of my oldest friends. In his hands, he holds a pile of audio cassettes, the old kind they had back in Shakespeare days.
Yes, Alicia Margaret, one of our friends from back in the day ceremony French.
Alex reads the labels on the cassette boxes and stacks each one on the table.
I hate looking at them. I got to cover the up.
Okay, do you want to why on them or something?
But if my hat over them.
Put your hat.
Why is looking at these audio cassettes causing you such uh such royals in the kishkas.
Well, they represent like a like sort of my longest standing broken promise in my life. I think.
Alex leans back and recounts to me a story that begins in the roaring nineties, a care free time when there wasn't a Juno Award Alanis Morissett couldn't win, or a lunchable George foreman couldn't grill back then. When Alex and I first met, he wasn't a CEO, nor even a founder. He was just a producer, same as me, and the thing we produced was a program called This American Life. The program told the tales typical Americans tell, like how your dad raised you in a tree or
how your dad owned Hitler's yacht. When I, a Canadian, was first hired, Alex took me under his wing, mentoring me in the ways of America, teaching me what kind of speedo to wear, American flag, kind, which parent to favor mom, and what pie to eat apple. He taught me small things like how one does not pee in the office water fountain, but rather drinks from it, and he taught me big things, like how to tell an
American story. Whereas a Canadian story usually ended with the hero immigrating to America, an American story ended only once the hero underwent a transformation that totally nobody saw coming. At the end of a long day's work. While I would get together with a bag of Mexican takeout and a box of cable TV, Alex would get together with friends.
And we did all these things together. We would cook meals together. We would like play weekly basketball games together, and like that was my like you know, like my post collegiate early twenties friend family.
And central to this friend family were two roommates, Lars and Kittie.
There were just purely roommates, and like in the beginning, you would never put them together. They seemed like complete opposites. But then they started dating and that seemed like a horrible idea because their roommates, and it seemed like I was just going to end You're just horribly for.
Probably Lars. Even Lars couldn't quite understand what exactly Kitty saw on him. She was put together, college educated and on a promising career path. Lars, on the other hand, was a high school dropout, a sort of bumbling genius who just couldn't find his way. Alex likes to tell the story of how Lars was smart enough to make it onto Jeopardy, but then once on the show, couldn't figure out how to get his buzzer to work. Alex saw himself and Lars he was also someone with a
lot of potential who couldn't quite get it together. At the time that they'd met, Alex was a middle school teacher with dreams of making radio stories, and Lars was reading presidential biographies in the unheated attic in which he dwelled. So when Lars started dating Kitty, Alex worried for Lars's broken heart like he would have for his own. But to the surprise of Lars, Alex and their whole friend family,
the relationship didn't end horribly at all. Lars and Kitty dated for four years and then decided to get married. The plan was to throw a week long party in the country, not just to celebrate their marriage, but to celebrate the friends themselves. Each member had a role to play. Shane, the one with all the CDs with DJ Dave, the
one who had away with words, would officiate. And since they didn't have a videographer friend to make a wedding video, they approached their radio producer friend to make a wedding audio.
They were like, we're not going to have a photographer out there, but what we'd love for you to do is can you do like the sort of audio collage of our wedding for us? And I was like absolutely, And I recorded the ceremony and everything, interviewed all these people and then I never put it together.
And thus Alex Bloomberg sits before me sixteen years later, with six cassette tapes representing hours and hours of unedited, unmixed, unlistened to audio, stacked beneath a Gimblet Media branded Woolen hat.
It's like I took a whole photo album full of photographs of their wedding and then just never developed them and never gave them to them.
Alex explains it this way. After a twelve hour day of editing tape recordings at This American Life, the last thing he felt like doing when he got home was editing more tape. Alex had every intention of keeping his promise to Lars, but then he got married, had kids, started a company. Life got in the way, and so Lars and Kitty have no record of their ceremony, their toasts, their ideas, their heroic transformation into a married couple, a transformation,
by the way, that totally nobody saw coming. Lars was Alex's closest friend, always there for him, and Alex knew he had let him down. Neither Lars nor Kitty ever confronted Alex, but that only made things worse.
You just get in this like reciprocal echo chamber of emotion, right where like I feel bad, they know I'm feeling bad, and then they feel bad because they've they put me in the position where I'm feeling bad, and so it's just this whole like it's this whole chain reaction of like feelings that nobody can talk about because talking about it doesn't do anything.
Over the course of sixteen years, Alex has moved six times, from city to city and apartment to apartment, but all the while, the wedding tapes remain in the same box, in the same spot, right next to Alex's own wedding album.
Every time I look at our photo album, which is fairly regular, especially like you, you know, everyone said like on your anniversary. Sometimes you pull it out and then the kids come along and then you're like, this is me and Mommy when we got married, and it's like sort of like I bring out the photo album with some regularity, and every time I do, I think of Lars and Kitty and how they don't have this and how I was supposed to provide it and how I didn't.
I keep telling myself, well, I am going to get to it one day, and that's why I cart them around. It's like, I'm going to get to it one day. I'm going to like, one day, I'm gonna sit down and actually make good. And what I realized is I don't that's I don't think that's going to happen unless I have some help. That's where you come in.
Oh, I see, And this is what has brought the Great Alex Bloomberg crawling on his metaphorical hands and his metaphorical knees into the studio. Lars and Kitty now live in Vermont, but it turns out that they're planning a visit to Gimblet in the spring to see what their old friend's been up to.
Could you help me make this for them?
I like the sound of that.
Could you just say it again and get closer to the microphone so it feels like you're whispering.
In my ear.
Job.
I need your help.
Could you call me godfather? Come on, don't make me play all right? Of course, yes, I'm gonna help you. Alex had really stepped in the oatmeal on this one, and it was now left to me to pry his fringe tassel jogging shoe loose from the bowl for however many weeks it took I would help the humble CEO to mix, edit, and generally sculpt his ignominious tape recordings into a solid, th react narrative that really made you feel something, just like we did back when we were
young producers working side by side. Alex had done so much for me job, health insurance, public platform to air my grievances mostly about him. I was grateful to finally offer something in return, and best of all, for the first time in a long time, it felt like we weren't simply relating as CEO and Lackey, but as actual friends. And if I wasn't mistaken, Alex was feeling the vibe too.
Are you crying? No, you're crying.
I reach over and with the tip of my knuckle tenderly shmear away a single tear streaming down the proud CEO's cheek.
I'm not crying.
Could you cry? I'm hoping to get a peabody out of this. Some tears when hurt.
Most importantly, here, where are we going to put the mid roll advertisement in the wedding audio?
Like?
I'm thinking between the vows, will she say I do? Or will it be a big fat, I don't. Right after the break, we find out.
Here are these are notes?
They are I don't know about that other stuff? Are those also my notes?
You think people have been looking at my notes?
I've assembled a crack production team consisting of me and my producer, Stevie Lane, who, fun fact, was still in
grade school when Alex's wedding tapes were recorded. I've asked Stevie to manage the production of the wedding documentary, the listening and transcribing, the splicing anecdotes together, the adding of emotionally manipulative music, thus freeing me up to handle more pressing matters like subtweeting my dry cleaner as we await Alex's arrival, I impart to Stevie lessons gleaned for my decades of living and loving a lifetime lived in radio Okay.
First of all, sound travels and waves. Did they teach you that at radio school? At radio school, sound travels and do you know? I once to try to build a radio kiss Stevie, who at the moment is nodding her head in much the way a hospice nurse would to an incoherently death gurgling more Abundanty has converted Alex's cassette tapes of Shame into digital audio files of Shame progress. All that's missing is Alex, who's agreed to listen to and opine on our first rough draft. Should I slack him?
We send Alex an interoffice communic.
Kay.
It turns out he's stuck in a board member's meeting as we wait. I tell Stevie what Alex was like when he was a young producer like her. Every day he rollerbladed to work, I say, and instead of a desk chair, he sat on a yoga ball. I was getting excited. Alex and I hadn't spent time together on a creative project since the olden days before he became my dungeon master. Do you know that song out eating Cake by the Lake? Now we're gonna eat cake by
the Lake? Oh it's a scream, Hey Alex, Hello, Alex is here.
Welcome to my editing day.
Thank you.
Alex takes a seat and we get down to business.
Hello Hello one, two and two and two and too and too.
The tapes begin with a young, squeaky voice Alex Bloomberg at Lars and Kitty's wedding.
Hello, Hello, Hello, Hello, Hello Hello.
That's once he checks his equipment, Alex sets off to ask all the friends for their most classic Lars stories.
You know that as a kid, he looks through the Guinness Book of World Records and decided that the only category he could ever compete in would be to become the fattest man in the world, because he could just eat and eat and eat.
Their buddy Dave explains Hilars used to drive without brakes, arguing that it forced him to sharpen his foot and thus make him a safer driver. William explains how, in preparation for playing Capture the Flag in Central Park, Lars went to the Parks Department in order to research topographical maps. Eventually, Alex turns the microphone on himself and in an excited, barely pubescent voice, tells a tale of rollerblading with Lars very slowly down a steep hill.
At a certain point, I'm going down, and then I turn around and he's zooms by me, straight down with his arms out in front of him. And so Lars is going down and I'm just watching him go. He's getting swann small and small and heading straight towards his house and it is faster and faster and faster.
As old man Bloomberg listens to young man Bloomberg, his face takes on a far away look.
And then he comes and he goes boop right into the garage door with.
His hands and then his face and I.
And so I sort of skate down faster and I get to the bottom, and he turns around and he's like, I know that looks really painful, but that's how I stop.
All the time. Alex sits quietly, the distance between the past and present hitting him in the face like a garage door.
It's so interesting. They're just hearing like I my friends were such a huge part of my life back then in a way that that they're not now. You don't have a family, and like it's a lot of there's just a lot of hanging out and a lot of talk and planning, and it feels like now that feels like such a in my mind. I'm just like, oh, like we sound so happy and care free.
The sound emanated from Alex's laptop is a message requesting sales figures.
Sorry, hold on one second, I just have to.
Do you remember that you used to sit on a yoga ball Pretty soon Alex is absorbed in spreadsheets open across his desktop. Stevie puts on her headphones and gets back to editing the tape while I sidle up closer to Alex.
He used to sit on a yoga ball.
Yeah, I wanted Alex to remember the old times. How much sitting in an editing bay like this once meant to him.
A yoga ball. Yeah, yoga ball, you remember that, right?
Yeah, that yoga ball is his rosebud. I believe that if I could just get Alex to remember his yoga ball, he'd regain his focus. You know the thing about a yoga ball is it's one of the few objects that you would find that has had buttocks touch every single inch of its entire surface. Right, There's nothing else like that in the world.
You're not even paying attention to me.
Alex is lost in a world of cumulative download numbers. He gets up and without even saying goodbye, runs off to see Jim in Finance.
Hello, I have you right here.
A few weeks later, the team reconvenes to listen to the next draft of the wedding audio. Now that Stevie's chosen the sounds and stories, we wanted. We needed to strategize on how to string it all together. For inspiration, I've asked Stevie to cue up various documentaries, documentaries, rockumentaries, and shcumentaries. We begin with the Slice of Life Fly on the Wall, arguably boring work of acclaimed American documentarian
Frederick Wiseman. What do you mean you can't take dressed in the morning?
Yeah, do you get undressed?
Well, you can get into.
A gym out of it.
Yeah.
I prefer a more very tay style. I don't know about you. I come from the like the Wiseman school. I'm thinking like, no scoring music, no narration.
Wait, don't you have a narration on the show Heavyweight?
Yeah?
I do.
But this is gonna be this is gonna be a little bit of yeah, I guess I do.
It is true.
That doesn't seem very Wiseman school.
Well, I'm happy to learn that Alex actually listens to my podcast. I'm not so sure I like his tone.
So it's pretty heavily narrated. Actually, there's pretty much nothing verite about it.
Well, narration can be a helpful way to convey information economically, it can also potentially eclipse the voice of the subject him or herself.
A wise man, sir, But.
In some situations a little eclipsing isn't so bad. I want to show that town. I wanted to show it to.
Do.
As Stevie continues to work on the mix, Alex and I watch the Maisley's Brother's Gray Gardens and argue over who our favorite Maisley's brother is. Alex, Albert, me David. Just as things are getting heated, Alex's phone rings. It's his wife, Nose and Nan.
Shoot, sorry, hold on, Hello, Hey, I'm gonna leave right after.
Hey, can I sorry? Can I take Can I take that?
Hold one? Take it?
Hey?
Nas?
Yeah, Alex is going to be home late tonight. We've got a lot to do here.
But no, no, it's totally cool that you're calling in it. Maybe you should just text or something because it gets you know, he gets distracted easily, so Alex grabs the phone back and apologizes for my interruption. He says he's on his way home for the kid's bedtime, and with that, Alex Bloomberg has left the studio. In the weeks to follow, Alex can hardly find time to work on the wedding audio, and when we do get together, his mind is elsewhere. Okay. Sorry.
The irony is that Alex loved radio production so much he built a whole company out of that passion. But now the time it takes to actually run the company makes doing the thing he loved most almost impossible. One of the drags of being a CEO, Alex tells me, is there's always so much to get done.
What does a CEO do?
You know? Run the shit?
Just as I thought, nothing. All right, let's get to work.
But then, but then, but then, but then, but then.
Doctor Goldstein begins to operate, carefully, executing an extremely tricky edit that involves cutting out in Aaron Turp between the words but and.
Then but then but then but then.
But then then we're interrupted yet again, and then, this time by Alex's executive assistant. But yeah, you're gonna have to tell You're gonna have to tell him that he's gonna be late.
I gotta go, but then but then, but then, but then.
It's very rhythmic, but then but then it sounds like techno music.
But but then but then but then but then but then but then but then but then but then but then but then but then but then.
But then then in the weeks to follow, Stevie and I spend a lot of time waiting for Alex. Sometimes he makes an appearance, but mostly he doesn't. All the while the work continues, by which I mean Stevie's work and my editorial oversight.
You all know that Kitty and Lars had an accelerated And someone say.
Do you know when I was younger, I always wanted to have a rat tail.
Oh like the hairstyle. Yeah, I didn't have the stick to itness.
Yeah, the same tube.
Together. Stevie and I tirelessly pour over the tape day after day. You know, I've always related to Charlie Brown in a lot of ways. Did you know that his dad was a barber?
I didn't that. Do you see why that would be ironic?
Appreciate the Stevie proves to be just as attentive as Alex ever was. It feels just like old times. Think about it. His son's bald. Charlie Brown is bald. He has no hair all right, Or you.
Might have read something into the fact that Lars found himself getting up early in the morning.
There's only two weeks to go before Lars and Kitties visit, and we've barely started on the will use much less the I do's if we hope to produce one of the greatest documentaries of all time, something to make March of the Penguins look like March of the Garbage, We're going to have to work twice as fast, then then with three times as fast, then with possibly four times as fast. Then the results after the break your break,
because Stevie and I we don't get a break. We have a lot of work to get done.
Okay, So here we go.
After weeks of Stevie's hard work editing audio and avoiding my editorial guidance, the day is finally here. In spite of Alex's busy schedule and in spite of my enthusiastic but generally unhelpful brand of helpfulness, Stevie has managed to turn hours and hours of drunk people sharing anecdotes from
before she was born into an audio documentary. Lars and Kitty are scheduled to arrive at Gimblet any moment, and they haven't a clue that when they do, they'll be presented with the wedding audio they've been waiting sixteen years to hear. Alex paces the halls of Gimblet Media.
Yeah, I'm really nervous, weirdly, and then.
I don't know.
Hello.
Lars and Kitty arrive with their two kids, Nora and Oscar. Hey, how's it going?
How was the Yankees?
What happened?
Oscar?
Well?
Yankees are losing three.
Alex says that one of the things that makes them happiest about hanging out with Lars nowadays is seeing the transition he's made from ne'er do well to wonderful dad. In fact, just earlier, in anticipation of Lars's arrival, Alex told me about this one Lars parenting moment that's always stuck with him. It took place at Alex's outdoor wedding.
Four year old Nora was standing by a swimming pool that had a no jumping sign, but when a large bearded man jumped in anyway, Nora asked Lars if she could jump in too.
And Lars was like, well, some people make the choice to break the rules. They some people think that rules don't apply to them, and do you know what we call those people? And she was and she was like no, and he was like, we call the anarchists. And then Lars was like, who else do we know that's an anarchist? And Norah thought for a little bit and she was
like grandma. And I was like that was so perfect because it took this moment that was inherently a power struggle and it made it into sort of like both a learning moment and a choice that she was now capable of making, like do you want to be in this camp or this camp?
Yeah?
Votes is pretty cool.
Nora was just a toddler back then. She's now sixteen and her younger brother, Oscar is ten. Alex proceeds to show them around the office, so this is.
Like that's sales, that's like the development team. Oh that's Hogy you guys, Yeah, yeah, do you know Hora? Hey you want to go say hi?
Yeah. The tour makes a pit stop to introduce Gimblet media editor Jorge just who at the moment is seated atop my desk, touching on my things. It turns out that Lars has already met Jorge, and so is Nora.
You guys met when you were a foreign you were an infants at Alex's wedding.
Oh yeah, Lars explains how his daughter might best remember the podcast editor. Turning to Jorge, Lars says.
You jumped in the pool that the.
Large bearded cannonballing anarchist and Alex's favorite parenting story was none other than America's favorite role model Porgey.
Just is he the one, yeah, yeah, who broke all the rules.
A very good life. Lesson, break all the rules at somebody's wedding and they'll hire you, give you a job.
And with that, Jorge resumes his job of manhandling my stress ball with extremely sticky hands, and Alex resumes this tour, which Lars and Kitty think is just one of your standard garden variety office tours, but is actually a semi carefully choreographed ruse to get them into a studio for the surprise.
These are all the various shows.
I've been listening to a bunch.
Of your shows.
Which ones you listen to? Crimetown?
I really liked Homecoming?
I liked Do you like Heavyweight?
Liking Heavyweight is a key part of the plan.
I listen to Heavyweight?
Eh?
Close enough? Alex points to the glass door of the studio in which I'm seated.
That's stopping all you want to say?
Hi, this is the most crucial part of the plan, Alex must lure the family into the studio with the promise of meeting your humble host is Jonathan Kitty.
Yeah, we met prey many years ago.
Hi.
Hey, Yeah, it's nice to see you.
Hi.
I remember Lars and Kitty from back in the day picking up Alex at work to do cool young people things that I don't recall being invited to. They're now middle aged, like Alex, like me. Now that we're all in the studio, Stevie sets the final piece of the plan in motion, cool and casual, like.
We should play them the thing we're we're going on.
Yeah, do you guys want you haven't? Yeah? Okay, Lars, Kitty, Nora and Oscar all settle in.
Okay, you ready.
Welcome everybody. Welcome to the wedding of Kitty Wade Bartlett and Christian Jacobson.
Lars and Kitty's faces light up, so it's actually happening. I'm not surprised that Lars and Kitty quickly recognized the promised wedding audio, but at just a few seconds in, I'm amazed at how quickly they recognize it.
Every time I come to see you, I'll visit New York every couple of years a year and hang out with Alex and Kitty. I'll say, you know, and ask him for the fucking tape. Yeah, we definitely always remembered that.
Even their daughter Nora knows about Alex and the tapes.
I never really thought it was really gonna happen.
Either, But what did What did you hear about it?
Well?
I heard that, yeah, that he came to the wedding and interviewed all of your drunk family.
Members and that you were terrified.
And then I said, well, I don't know if I want to hear I've seen your family drunk.
Oh, you're gonna You're gonna hear it now. Yeah, I'm excited.
It gives me a great pleasure to finally deliver the thing I probably seventeen years.
This is really exciting.
So should we Let's do it.
Let's get on with it. Okay, I have a go.
Yeah, this is exciting.
Okay, Stevie presses play.
Welcome everybody. Welcome to the wedding of Kitty Wade Bartlett and Lars Christian Jacobson. This is going to be a somewhat unconventional ceremony.
For the next hour, we all sit and listen. The friends tell stories about Lars.
Lars and I had decided after a night of drinking at four in the morning, we decided we were going to do a triathlon together. And every time we would meet to work out get in shape for the triathon, we would end up drinking for eight or ten hours straight.
And the friends tell stories about Kitty.
When I was ten, she convinced me to wash the cat. It's a bad, bad, bad idea, but it seemed like the best idea.
And when I was fourteen, there's a lot of just hanging out that was perfect, remember, And then there are the toasts.
And Lars has an amazing amount of love to give and I've always known that, and Kitty, I'm just so enthralled with the way that he has been able to give this to you, and he does. And I can't tell you how happy I am and how proud I am of my brother.
You know, as we all listen, Lars looks down at his lap. Kitty listens with her eyes closed tight.
Kitty and I had this planet that we were just going to grow old and have rocking chairs next to each other, and we were going to grow old together and cook wonderful meals, and share a house and just be old biddies and sit on our rocking chairs and criticize everybody.
As we grow up, the friends we once sat around plotting our futures with become the friends who, once that future comes, we only end up seeing once a year. The friend we saw Patch Adams with becomes the friend who picks us up from the hospital. The couple who introduced us to our girlfriend become the ones who weren't there for us after the divorce. Disappointment and self recrimination pile up, but so do shared history and love, and so the friend who broke his promise.
And he goes.
Right into the garage.
Becomes the friend who makes it right. How many When we first sat down, everyone was focused on the gesture. After sixteen years, Lars and Kitty were finally getting their wedding audio. But once the gesture had been made and the excitement had faded, they were left with something else altogether, the time machine.
Kiddy, do you wish to take this man as your husband, to have holden bear all times and all things great and small, for all the days of your life? I do, Lars, do you wish to take this woman as your wife, to have hold in bear through all times and all things great and small, for all the days of your life.
I do, can I have the rinks.
At the end of the ceremony, the officiant issues a final request.
Lars and Kitty have organized this ceremony today because they want this to be a shared moment, our page in our communal memory. With the corner folded over, I'd actually like to pause here for a few seconds so that everyone can fix this time in their minds and maybe offer whatever silent blessings they want.
We listen to the silence in silence. For Kitty and Lars, the silence back then was meant to keep them in the present, two people suspended in a singular moment, just having made a promise to each other, but before spending the rest of their lives trying to keep it. The silence says, Lars and Kitty sit in the room today with their two children, and their old friend is taking them back to the past, reminding them of who they were and who was with them. Lars rests his hand
against his face. Kitty has a quiet smile.
I love you, I love you.
The wedding audio comes to a close. No one really knows what to say. A situation that's never stopped this guy.
That's the wedding.
I do have a lot of love to give.
He's right, and uh, yeah, that's what.
But it made perfect sense, like, yeah, that's why Kitty loves me. That's why, Like, oh, that's what I have to offer Kitty.
I'm so glad.
Well, I mean from the outside, like I ever, you can see what you know she brings to me, to her. But I sincerely have a lot of love to get. I always know it's good for me. It was nice that it was good for you too.
Yeah, those friends and that that time it was it was such a great time and it just kind of, I don't know, waiting for it seventeen years makes it that much sweeter.
Yeah, that's the other thing, though, are you taking so long?
Is that when I knew when we did hear it it would be.
Longer because it's been.
It's surprising, you know what was surprising?
Well, just so.
How things really haven't changed that much?
Have things not changed?
This catches Alex everything that surrounds him. The equipment, the employees, the studio were packed into, and the building were in it all serves to remind him of just how much has changed. But Lars is talking about something else.
Not to sound corny, but I still feel the same way. I feel like the emotions are still completely familiar.
Right.
Do you still feel the same way about Lars as you did back then?
I actually do.
I mean I still love him for all the same reasons.
Lars says that he and Kitty always somehow knew that Alex would never abandon the project completely. It just wasn't in keeping with Alex's character or his capacity for guilt.
And I kind of felt once you started Gimblet like there's no way because it's hard for me to see you have a free time.
Well see now, actually what happened is the entire thing is all lated to this. Well, if I hadn't started Gimblet never would have happened.
If Alex hadn't started Gimblet, he wouldn't have had me to delegate to, and I wouldn't have had Stevie. So is it not possible that the hand that signed the papers incorporating Gimblet Media was subconsciously guided by a year's old promise seeking its fulfillment. Possibly, or maybe Alex just had a passion for boxed meals and mattresses delivered directly to your doorstep, of which, no matter what your purchase, please remember to use the offer code heavyweight.
It's really sweet. Thank you, I know, I mean thank you, Stevie. It's a pleasure to meet you.
I know, thank you, Steve.
You are my oldest friend.
Well, I feel like I need to know more about you, because you know so much about us.
Here we go.
After leaving the studio, Alex pops open a bottle of champagne. Unlike how we might usually drink bubbly from a trophy cup or billionaire shoe, he drinks it from a Gimlet Media branded coffee cup. After all, he's among friends. Cheers, clars, Yeah, getting the job done. After champagne, the heroes are complete. Alex heads to dinner with his friends, and although I'm not invited nor even thanked, I can tell Alex is grateful.
Something in the way that he doesn't say goodbye or even look at me that speaks of our friendship, a friendship with roots that extend through the floorboards, creep into the insulating asbestos, and down deep into the polluted earth of the Guanis Canal, the very foundational sludge upon which Gimblet Media was founded. Later, Alex will tell me how it was the first time he'd been able to properly digest a meal with Larsen Kittie in years. He'll tell me how they all went crazy and had two drinks
with dinner like they were celebrating. How they all lingered longer than usual, just hanging out like they used to.
Now that the Fernitures returned into its goodwill home, now that the last month's rent is scheming with the damaged pos, take this moment to dissolve, if we meant it, if we turn.
We felt around from far too.
From things that accidentally Talk. Heavyweight is hosted and produced by me Jonathan Goldstein, along with Peter Bresnan, Khila Holt, and Stevie Lane, who who if you do want to know more about, enjoys eating pears, chewing on ice, and making jewelry that can be viewed at Stevielanejewelry dot com.
The show is edited by Jorgeus, with additional editing by Alex Bloomberg, who, on his show Without Fail this week, interviews our mentor from wayback in Shakespeare Days, Ira Glass and Ira confronts mister Bloomberg in a way I could only dream of. Are you so far down the road of your venture capital?
Like that?
If somebody leaves you, you have to crush them like mister Burns.
Special thanks to Emily Condon, Lynn Levy, Kimmi, Regular, Amanda Melhuish, Mia Bloomfield, Phoebe Flanagan, Jasmine Romero, Matthew boll and Jackie Cohen. Bobby Lord mixed the episode with music by Christine Fellows, Michael Hurst, Blue Dot Sessions, and he himself, Bobby Lord. Additional music credits can be found on our website Gimletmedia dot com slash Heavyweight. Our theme song is by the weaker Lands courtesy of Epitaph Records, and our ad music
is by Hailey Shaw. Follow us on Twitter at Heavyweight. This is our last episode of the season, but we're already starting to look for stories for season four. So if you have one, email us at Heavyweight at gimltmedia dot com and if you see fit, why not punch in some stars for us on Apple Podcasts. Thanks for listening. Okay, hello hello. If we hope to produce one of the greatest documentaries of all time. Something to make March of the Penguins look like March of the Garbage. We're going
to have to work twice as fast sounds good. Actually, wait here, let me let me, you know, let me just try a few other ideas that I had, and you could just pick whichever one you like best. Okay, here, here we go. That'll make fog of War look like fog of garbage, makes gimmey shelter look like gimmy garbage, makes stop making sense look like stop making garbage, makes Jodowski's Dune look like dune, makes Harlan County, USA look like Garbage County, USA. Makes Nanuka the North look like
Nanuka the Garbage. Makes kanyan a Squatzy look like garbage. Squatzy, makes bowling for Columbine look like bowling for garbage, makes the Queen of Versailles look like the Queen of garbage, makes winged migration look like winged garbage, makes touching the void look like touching the garbage, makes searching for Sugarman
look like searching for garbagemen. Makes an inconvenient sequel Truth to Power look like an inconvenient sequel truth to garbage makes Gyro dreams of sushi look like Gyro dreams of garbage, makes Paris is Burning look like garbage is burning, makes American movie like American garbage, makes When We Were King looked like when we were garbage. That's a good one, makes supercise me look like supersized garbage, makes fire the
greatest party that never happened look like garbage. Fire the greatest party that never happened.
Then