Following The Verge’s report, Reply All released a statement confirming the end of an era, although also possibly taking some of the heat off the hosts: “This isn’t a decision that was made by any one person. Reply All has always been a super collaborative project which is what we’ve loved so much about making it. Ultimately, staff who have been working on this show for a long time–in some cases five, six, seven years at this point–are ready to pursue other things.” (Vulture reports that the rest of the Reply All staff will remain with Gimlet, where they “will be given the room to figure out next steps.”)
Dzotsi, who joined as a co-host in 2020, reposted the statement on Twitter and added, “I’ll have more to say when our last episode airs. But for now, what I feel is just immense pride and gratitude for the people I work with, and excitement for what’s to come. For me, it’s time. And that’s a good thing.”
Goldman also reposted the statement, tweeting that it was “weird to be walking away from” the podcast he’d hosted since 2014, “but it’s time for me.” After expressing gratitude for the team, he added, “I sort of assumed I would make this show for the rest of my life. But things change.”
He later condemned “ghoulish terfs in this website who don’t know what they’re talking about who will try to boil this down to some great abrogation of justice.” He continued, “…I think anyone with a scintilla of nuance knows the world is more complicated than that and the public version of any decision of consequence is informed by a million things behind the scenes you’ll never hear about.”
Following the departure of producer Sruthi Pinnamaneni and founding co-host PJ Vogt amidst the controversy 2021, as well as a hiatus after the disastrous Test Kitchen miniseries, some fans felt that Reply All struggled to return to form. There’s also been major restructuring at Gimlet and Spotify (which acquired the company in 2019), with Gimlet managing director Lydia Polgreen and the company’s co-founder Matthew Lieber, who had been serving as Spotify’s head of studios podcast operations, both exiting their roles, per The Verge.
