AG Alex Goldman Alex Goldman Reporter and audio producer who co-founded the podcast Reply All in 2014 and earlier produced for WNYC's On the Media.

“I worked on Reply All for a decade. We got YouTube on the record once. Google never on the record. And our company was bought by Spotify in like 2020. And Spotify wouldn't even come on our show. And it was really embarrassing to be on a show that was owned by Spotify and have to say more than once, yeah, they declined to comment for that.”

Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · October 2026

“I worked on Reply All for a decade. We got YouTube on the record once. Google never on the record. And our company was bought by Spotify in like 2020. And Spotify wouldn't even come on our show. And it was really embarrassing to be on a show that was owned by Spotify and have to say more than once, yeah, they declined to comment for that.” — Alex Goldman, Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast

The Waveform hosts had pitched Goldman on investigating a recurring YouTube bug for his podcast. He told them tech companies are the least likely of anyone to answer his questions, and put the odds of getting the technical explanation at zero. He agreed to send the email anyway.

Transcript

Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast Around 31:44 into the episode
Speaker 1

So here's what I'll say about this. Tech companies are the least likely to ever respond to our channels. We actually had two active Google-related investigations. And I know somebody who works at Google in their press office. And I was like, I got an in. It's cool. And this is in the last six months. This isn't like over the course of this is recently. We have contacted them about both. One of them they actually fixed.

Speaker 3

Okay.

Speaker 1

But they won't talk to us. They refuse to talk to us. I worked on a tech show for a decade. I worked on Reply All for a decade. We got YouTube on the record once. Google never on the record. And our company was bought by Spotify in like 2020. And Spotify wouldn't even come on our show. And it was really embarrassing to be able to be on a show that was owned by Spotify and have to say more than once, yeah, they declined to comment for that. That's wild. So I would, this is to me is super interesting because I feel like the technical answer would be fascinating to me. The likelihood is zero. That's totally fair. I will send the email.

Speaker 2

Okay. Or even if someone does respond to you and it's not enough for a story, we will just be like, chapters work now because of Alex Goldman.

Speaker 1

That would be wonderful. You're going to have to do that. There's going to have to be like a sponsored Alex Goldman segmented. We'll put

Speaker 2

one in. Yeah. I just want a UI to add them. I feel like that's not hard. They have a fantastic UI for wherever you want to put mid-rolls in any video. I feel like it's the same thing. It seems like it should

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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