#6 This Proves Everything + The Best Hold Music in the World

hey this is pj and this is alex it is wednesday morning we just finished two nights of cast party which was a live performance this huge event we did with a bunch of other great shows we did a new story one of us is very sleepy i am pretty sleepy it was a lot of fun though i want to thank everybody who came out to theaters who came out to the show in new york you guys are amazing it just felt like uh we were all hanging out it was really nice it really was um we are here to tell you two things the first is a sad thing yeah it's gonna make you sad but listen stay until the second thing don't just get sad and turn off your listening device uh the first thing is that this week show is a rerun are you sad you sound sad you sound really sad but i promised on twitter that we would have an update to last week's episode so last week's episode pj wanted to cancel his subscription with handy which is cleaning service he's having a very hard time i helped him out and in the process we stumbled upon the most amazing hold music we've ever heard here is a bit of us uh fawning over it from last week's show oh this is good right so i was on hold for two and a half minutes the whole time totally happy to listen to this song they could have kept me on hold for half an hour it is really good great hold music it's like the it's the it's the theme to the end of a long struggle do you know what i mean it's like everything's okay music the day after the episode we got an email from a listener named tim sheridan that said hi that's great hold music isn't it it's one of the default bits of hold music included with asterisk which is an open source phone software and the song he told us is called simplicity and it's by someone called macroform so we found macroform and this morning i gave him a call hey i'm doing really well how are you uh i'm great i'm finally talking to the man the myth the legend i listen to your guys podcast that's freaking hilarious man um yeah so i am not a connoisseur of hold music generally but i heard that song and it was like that song is mind-blowing we did a live performance last night in new york city with uh lulu miller who works for uh invisibilia which is a podcast from npr and she had just listened to the episode she's like oh my god that hold music it sounds like slow motion in the 70s well it's that's hilarious because i actually used like a whirlixer 208 electronic piano that actually it's kind of like a fender roads has a really kind of gritty 70s sound so you play do you play all the instruments on that on that track yeah i do it's i mainly play music for fun i'm a drummer um but i've dabbled in keyboard and guitar and so i just kind of build tracks on my laptop and release them online for fun you know when you make a track like that and you release creative comments do you ever think that like oh the two lunatics are going to become obsessed with this song or are you just like well i just you know like making music i'm just gonna put it out there actually no that's really fulfilling that you guys thought it was so awesome um i don't do this for a living i'm actually ironically a tech support worker of course perfect so i make this music to keep me sane from all that bullshit so i really just have two questions for you sure the first is where can our listeners go to find the song if they want to listen to their heart's content like we do uh there's a website called jamendo which they can download it and listen to it for free you don't have to listen to the whole music version um all right and here's my second question for you i'm wondering if with your blessing we can incorporate simplicity into every super tech support we do hell yes great man i think that's an ironic twist of fate for me yeah that'd be awesome you can get it amazing you can find more macroform songs at macroform music.com you can find the song simplicity on the website jamendo j-a-m-e-n-d-o.com you can listen to it to your heart's content uh enjoy this episode we're working on some great stuff we'll see you next week depending on who you ask keith calder is either a 35 year old film producer who lives in la or he's a player in a vast international conspiracy designed to conceal the greatest love story never told both stories start at the same time and place on twitter two years ago when a bunch of random teenagers started asking keith if he had a sister at keith calder do you have a sister and what is her name uh smiley emoticon january 2013 at keith calder do you have a sister do you have a sister do you have a sister do you have a sister and don't just rt this shit and not answer my question just tell me so um this went on i'm scrolling down it's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of tweets for what it's worth keith does have a sister she works for an ngo in new york keith couldn't imagine anything she would have done to provoke the attention of a crowd of our mind strangers and then i realized something's up i don't i don't know exactly what but something's up i started doing some research and i realized that there was this woman young woman called eleanor calder and she was dating a member of one direction one direction of course is the boy band of the moment there's five of them one of them louie has a girlfriend a model named eleanor calder same last name as keith so now it seems clear to keith what's going on oh they think that because my name is calder that i must be related to this eleanor calder they must think she's my sister but why would they just i mean surely there are like a lot of calders in the world right what i later found out is that they've done this to many people called calder i'm not the only person from gimlet this is reply all a show about the internet and i'm pj vote keith didn't tell the fans that eleanor wasn't his sister in his mind the questions they were asking was none of their business what he didn't know we couldn't have known was that there's a deeper reason for these fans interest in eleanor calder they believed they still believe that eleanor calder is a cover a cover foisted on one direction by their evil corporate management to disguise the true story the two members of one direction harry and louie are actually secretly in love with each other so back in x factor a couple of people seem to notice a relationship between the two members and x factor is like the reality tv show where the band sort of got their start right yes this is victoria a one direction fan who calls herself a larry shipper larry because it's a mash-up of louie and harry and shipper because she wants them to be in a relationship and with victoria as is the case with many larry shippers she's actually pretty sure that they already are she says the evidence has been there since the beginning they used to make video diaries for the tv show and we just saw that they were always very close to each other a lot closer than the rest of the members they've been like that ever since so i mean just keep they just caught on to a lot of people and when you say closeness i mean they looked at each other like i don't know like they love each other a lot this is eli another shipper what was it that i heard um the management was scared if they came out that sales would go down which is like the main thing that they said is why they're not together like in the public eye there are hundreds of thousands of larry shippers online for obvious reasons they're suspicious about this woman who claims to be louie's girlfriend what can you tell me about eleanor calder there's not a lot i can tell you because she doesn't really do social media that much but um if i had to characterize what you said i would say that you said it suspiciously yes very suspicious why is that very suspicious you know if you've been going out with someone for as long as those two have been going out you'd think that they would show a lot of them being together and doing things but there's no pictures of them ever and so it makes you wonder do you think it's possible she could just be like a shy person it's definitely possible but we actually we just don't think that they genuinely are together at all shippers find each other online in all the usual places the teens do tumblr twitter facebook the facebook groups all seem to be closed invitation only we had to request and be granted access to a shipper facebook group called larry shippers smiley face smiley face to do these interviews and it's in groups like this one that the shippers compare notes run down evidence anything they'll prove conclusively that this theory is correct for example they pay a lot of attention to harry and louie's tattoos they have a lot of matching tattoos that apparently they think it's very subtle but it's not give me an example of one of the ones that they think is a subtle matching tattoo but you can tell the story behind it okay uh louie has a tattoo that says um oops on his arm and harry has one that says hi but they're in each other's handwriting and so what we can conclude from that is that those were their first words to each other and they said that in an interview during x factor so that's one so the way that that piece of evidence gets interpreted then is like usually getting matching tattoos with someone from the first time you met is something that like couples do more than friends do yes interesting oh give me another one um okay there's a ship and a compass matching tattoo that they have together who's got the ship who's got the compass uh harry has the ship and louie has the compass the fans who believe in the conspiracy the symbolism of the ship and the compass is obvious the ship needs the compass plus a couple one direction fans went to a tattoo artist in los angeles and asked him to see his sheet of tattoos that he suggests for couples and they found that very ship encompassed there's also a lot of youtube theorizing the videos are called larry proofs they'll show some small moment between harry and louie they'll play it they'll slow it down they'll repeat it you like that she watches for these tiny telling moments it'll be like a look one of them gives to the other during like when a comment's made or like it'll be like kind of a touch when they're like able to next to each other um it'll just kind of like those kind of small things that you wouldn't really notice will they show the clip like the second time in slow motion sometimes sometimes it's like something really quick or if it's like kind of hidden they'll like slow it down and like surf like try they're good the fandom is amazing at it there's a montage of the top 30 iconic harry about a mark on his neck that she thinks might be a hickey uh did somebody kiss you there it's a scott uh-oh i thought it's a knut flake in german that's louie slightly off mic saying i gave him it the filmmaker provides a subtitle for that in case you missed it and then this music plays and there's a super slow motion zoom of harry he's smiling and looking wistfully towards louie there are 29 more moments like this this was the world that keith calder had bumped up against because of his last name take these two girls who are kind smart and thoughtful but very all in on the conspiracy worldview multiply them by the hundreds of thousands but keith didn't know any of this when the questions about his sister started if he had he almost certainly would not have done this i thought it would be fun to play with a little bit and so i tweeted that uh i can neither confirm or deny the rumors that my sister is dating a member one direction keith published a few more tweets vaguely hinting that he might know something something he couldn't say the fans ate it up the original people that asked me if i have a sister wrote a blog entry on tumblr that is exhaustive about uh proving that i am related to eleanor calder can you like bring it up right now actually does it still exist oh yeah yeah i mean it's been reblogged it's all over the place what do i search for to find it oh i'm sure if you just search for keith calder eleanor oh my god yeah yeah coming up what that tumblr page looks like and the greatest love story ever trolled after a word from our sponsor welcome back to reply all so after keith calder ill-advisedly jokes that he was part of the conspiracy the shippers went to work making him part of the conspiracy the most reblogged tumblr post about keith looks like the crazy wall you see in any fbi crime drama lots of red lines and arrows linking keith eleanor by way of a bunch of other seemingly random people part of what makes these diagrams convincing for the people who believe them is that like any good slander they're chock full of damning half-truths for instance keith that actually does work in the music industry and even co-founded dive records which was a boy band label although not one direction's boy band label oh yeah no that's that's the thing that why this will never die is that there's a lot of vague conspiracy theory aspects here that will that are impossible to deny one of them being that i produced a movie with morgan spurlock and morgan made the one direction documentary if i were looking for proof i would point that as proof but it's not proof it just means that people that people that are in the film industry work together people would send me a screen grab of the credits from the trailer for the movie i produce and they would say look at this you produce the one direction movie and i would apply it says right there this is not the one direction movie and what would they say they would say that proves everything everything no matter what i say it proves everything there are one direction fans all over the world and the conspiracy posts i think get translated into other languages so yesterday it became a big thing in brazil hundreds and hundreds of mentions i was blocking literally ended up blocking hundreds of people maybe i think thousands of people and it got to the point where they noticed i was blocking them so what they started messaging me was block me if you believe larry is real and so they're very resourceful mainly this is just a minor annoyance for keith he spent a couple more hours a week blocking people than he'd like but occasionally it affects his actual life in a real way i'm a film producer i have an actual career and when i have meetings with other people in hollywood the meetings begin with so what's the story with you in one direction and i have to have this conversation like i'm meeting with an agent for the first time i have to have a 15-minute conversation about one direction at the start of the meeting there are a lot of communities online where people gather to believe something impossible there are the ones you've heard of like the people who believe obama is a secret muslim and there are the ones that maybe you haven't like the people who believe that stevie wonder isn't really blind but as far as conspiracy theories that i don't believe though the one direction harry and louie are secretly in love one might be my favorite here's why for years boy bands have sold teenage girls on the fantasy that these hot musicians could be their boyfriend but now legions of teenage girls are saying i'd rather imagine a record company's forcing you to say that and that really you're in love with a cute guy standing next to you it's romantic it's hopeful it's pro-gay it's a love story when they come out it'll be the love story of the century because of all the stuff they had to go through and it still stayed strong what makes it better than any other stories because is that they met before they became a band and they became best friends and best friends genuinely you know if even if it's boy boy or girl and boy sometimes they'll fall in love and we can just see that with harry and louie and that's what makes it so special because you can just see how much they love each other it's hard to explain i think i know what you mean and i think it's also it's like you know so much more about that relationship than other relationships that they say that they're in right and it's not and you know you think oh we only know so much about them because they're so famous and eleanor isn't that famous so they don't talk about it but it's really not like that because when the cameras are off and when everyone is gone you still see them together but you see pictures like that are leaked online you don't see leaked pictures of louie and eleanor together at all so you know you know what i mean i think victoria is noticing something real although i disagree with the conclusion it brings her to what i think is that when you're a teenager particularly a younger one you're more likely to experience the rush of overwhelming best friend love than you are to experience romantic love when i was a kid i only saw my best friend duncan over the summer plus one additional weekend a year when he'd come down to philadelphia to stay over for a weekend when he left i remember crying inconsolably like heartbroken lying on the ground facing the carpet crying and my dad saying look you got to keep it together if you want your friend to keep this thing i think an alternate theory for what could be going on here is that these two guys could be straight and yet still love each other more than they love the girls they date and that all this is brutal youtube filmmaking could be fueled by this truth maybe have you heard anything about keith calder i actually have i just read something on twitter about that how he is he had something to do with management i think am i correct um well there's rumors that i don't think i think he just sort of has been caught up i think people think that he's related to eleanor calder that you know he's sort of part of this conspiracy and he was kind of a jerk about it he like made jokes about it and people took it seriously so he gets a lot of messages every day from people who think that you know he's he's in on it well there are a lot of rumors and there's a lot of things that go around on twitter this whole situation with keith that could be um one of the fake ones that we can rule out but it also could be real so i don't really know what to say about that because i don't have a lot of information but i appreciate that like a cop talking about an open case you get a sense victoria just wants to know a little bit more maybe she'll just do the tiny reasonable thing and ask keith about the rumors he's on twitter but that's the problem when things fail on the internet as it's easy for them to do it can take a perfectly lovely normal human impulse and can turn it into a force of nature on bad days when there are hundreds or thousands of tweets keith has to block them all but during the quieter levels he tries to engage he really thinks it's worth it you know human i found that when you engage with someone directly like that usually if they're coming from a good place they'll understand and uh and adjust their behavior actually there are followers that are one direction fans that started following me two years ago or a year and a half ago because of this nonsense and now just chat with me they chat and crack jokes they give them music recommendations uh mostly one direction songs for bands that have opened for one direction but keith likes it here's the first person he knew in his age to hear about ed sheeran another teen pop star who's rising quickly it's fun to know about stuff like that before all the old people do by all is me pj vote and alice goldman we were produced this week by tim howard sirty pinamini fia bennon katherine wiles and lina massitis we were edited by alice bloomberg our show is engineered by rick corn special thanks this week to everybody who sent in to help us ID that song particularly tim sheridan who's the first person we heard from matt lever is the solution to a problem that's been bothering you for a while our theme music is by mysterious breakmaster cylinder and our ad music is by build buildings you can find more episodes of the show at itunes.com slash reply all or at our website replyall.limo thanks for listening we'll see you next week