Tech
How I Podcast: Hyperfixed’s Alex Goldman
The beauty of podcasting is that anyone can do it. It’s a rare medium that’s nearly as easy to make as it is to consume. And as such, no two people do it exactly the same way. There are a wealth of hardware and software solutions open to potential podcasters, so setups run the gamut from NPR studios to USB Skype rigs (the latter of which became a kind of default during the pandemic).
This week, Alex Goldman shares his setup. A former producer for WNYC’s On the Media, Goldman co-founded Reply All in 2014. The wildly popular Gimlet podcast explored how the internet shapes us — and vice versa. A decade later, Goldman is back with Radiotopia’s Hyperfixed, a “help desk for life’s most intractable problems,” which he produces from the comfort of his podcasting basement. Here’s Goldman in his own words:
“Since the beginning of the pandemic, so much of podcasting is actually done remotely, so you have to make a little space in your house where it’s comfortable to do it. Mine is a little 8×8 room in the basement of my apartment, and it’s surprisingly cozy. So when you listen to my new podcast Hyperfixed full of hope, helpfulness, and adventure, know it’s coming from this torture closet.
“I mean, sure, it looks like the cabin in “Evil Dead,” but all the gear being on in here keeps it nice and toasty compared to the rest of the basement, and I like to think I’ve made it my own to a certain degree.
“Engineers act like prepping a room to record is difficult, but really it’s about making sure there isn’t too much open space or hard surface for sound to reflect off of. The more cluttered a room, the better prepped it is to record.
“That’s why I have this giant Black Sabbath Vol. 4 wall flag. Behind the flag is a wool blanket I’ve hung on some nails to keep the place sounding good, and I just wanted something I’d like looking at. Because that album is so good. “Changes”? “Snowblind”? Oh my god. To the left and right of my desk are sound baffles that minimize echo, and then all the other crud I’ve filled my office with helps to keep echo down as well.
“I started in public radio, which means that I learned audio editing on Pro Tools, a program that remains the industry standard despite being the most expensive, overpowered, buggy program available to audio editors. Fortunately they have recently started to offer a $10 a month license instead of buying a license outright for $599 like the old days.
“My mic is a Shure SM7B, which has been the public radio standard for 20 years, and a mic that, once you know its profile, you will see everywhere. I even saw Metallica’s James Hetfield barking into one recently during a rewatch of “Some Kind of Monster.” For audio interfaces, I have a Focusrite 2i2 and a Focusrite 18i8; the former is basically the little brother of the latter. I like the 18i8 because it is very useful for recording directly off your desktop, but the 2i2 doesn’t need to be plugged into the wall, which just makes it easier to use.
“The music for the show is made by either The Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder or myself. I am a very, very amateur musician, but it’s pretty easy, and to do that I most often use the Sequential Circuits Prophet 6 Synthesizer. It’s based on a synth from the early ’80s (named, believe it or not, the Prophet 5) that was used by folks like Gary Numan, The Cars, and Soft Cell, and it’s just impossible to make a bad sound with it. If I need great big fat synth bass or super thick synth leads, I use the Moog Matriarch, a more temperamental but still really wonderful and versatile synth.
“For drum sounds, I mostly tend to use stock drums from Ableton, but I also have a couple of samplers and drum machines (the Erica Synths LXR-02 and the SOMA Pulsar-23) that I like making little broken beats with. I recorded an album a couple years back under the name Slow Fawns, and I have been known to cannibalize those completed songs for music cues on podcasts as well.
“Also I’d be remiss if I didn’t address the elephant in the room, or the rubber glove in the room, as it were. When I started renting this apartment, this room was full of a previous tenant’s junk, and I got it all out and set everything up before I noticed the rubber glove on the floor there, just to the right of my synthesizer. At this point it’s so much a part of the room decor, I barely even notice it.”
* We’ve previously asked others of our favorite podcast hosts and producers to highlight their workflows — the equipment and software they use to get the job done. The list so far includes:
Tech
Tesla brings its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston
Tesla is expanding its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston, according to a social media post from the company.
The post says simply that “Robotaxi is now rolling out in Dallas & Houston 🤠” and includes a 14-second video showing Tesla vehicles driving without human monitors or drivers in the front seat.
The company now offers robotaxi service in three cities, all of them in Texas, after launching in Austin last year and starting to offer rides without safety drivers in January 2026. In a February filing, Tesla said that its Austin robotaxis have been involved in 14 crashes since launch.
It also offers a more limited ride service with human drivers in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Tesla may not be running many vehicles in either of these new markets yet, with crowdsourced data on the Robotaxi Tracker website only registering a single vehicle in each city (compared to 46 active vehicles logged in Austin).
Tech
Netflix plans to add a vertical video feed, use AI for recommendations
Netflix is going to launch a TikTok-like vertical video feed within its apps this month, and plans to use AI broadly for content creation and recommendations, the company said on Thursday.
Netflix has been testing a vertical video feed since last year. The short video feature could aid users with discovering video podcasts, along with the current slate of shows and movies. The company is also leaning more into using AI for recommendations after launching a ChatGPT-powered search feature last year.
“We have been in personalization and recommendation for two decades, but we still see tremendous room to make it better by leveraging newer technologies,” Netflix co-CEO Gregory Peters said during the company’s first-quarter conference call. “Recommendation systems based on new model architectures not only improve current personalization but also let us iterate and improve more quickly — adding support for different content types much more efficiently.”
Co-CEO Ted Sarandos said he sees AI tools improving the entire content creation process. “In general, we expect GenAI to make content better; better tools, better processes […] It takes a great artist to make great art, and AI won’t change that. But AI will give those artists better tools to bring those visions to life,” he said.
Last month, Netflix bought Ben Affleck’s AI creation company InterPositive, which, Sarandos said, has garnered interest from creators.
“With our acquisition of InterPositive, we think it accelerates our GenAI capability because it is proprietary technology created specifically for filmmakers and filmmaking, different from other GenAI video applications. While our ownership of InterPositive is very new, we have generated interest with creators who have spent time with the tools, and we are seeing momentum build around adoption,” he noted.
Netflix also mentioned that it wants to use AI to improve its ad suite, and allow for new formats and customization to get better returns. The company expects to generate ad revenue of $3 billion this year.
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Netflix reported revenue of $12.25 billion in Q1 2026, up 16.2% year-year-year, and said profit jumped 83% to $5.28 billion. Alongside the first-quarter results, Netflix said its co-founder and chair, Reed Hastings, is leaving the company’s board this summer.
Notably, the company hiked subscription prices in the U.S. late last month, which could have a positive impact next quarter. The company said it ended 2025 with 325 million paying subscribers.
Tech
Bluesky confirms DDoS attack is cause of continued app outages
Bluesky’s website and app are still struggling on Friday after experiencing service interruptions that chief operating officer Rose Wang attributed to an ongoing cyberattack.
On Thursday evening, the social media company confirmed that a “sophisticated Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack” was to blame for the issues, which had originally started on April 15 at around 8:40 p.m. ET.
Distributed denial-of-service attacks often involve pummeling apps or websites with large amounts of junk web traffic aimed at overloading and knocking its servers offline. While these kinds of cyberattacks do not involve intrusions into a company’s systems, these incidents can still be disruptive to both the company and its users.
In a post on the Bluesky account, the company shared the cause of the problem and noted that the attack was “impacting our operations, with users experiencing intermittent interruptions in service for their feeds, notifications, threads, and search.”
Bluesky said that it has not seen any evidence of unauthorized access to private data, however.
When originally reached for comment on Thursday, Bluesky only pointed us to the status.bsky.app page and account (@status.bsky.app) for updates. The company did not provide an estimated time for a fix.
The network’s status page is currently not working, however.
Bluesky said it will provide another update on the status of the attack and its mitigation by 1 p.m. ET on Friday.
Because the outages are intermittent, the Bluesky site and app will load at times, slowly, and other times will display error messages.
For instance, switching to a particular feed within the app could display a message that says, “This feed is currently receiving high traffic and is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later. Message from server: Rate Limit Exceeded.”
Popular feeds like Discover or the official Bluesky Team’s feed often see this problem, even as users’ own personal feeds are functional.
Other times, like when trying to visit a user’s profile, the site will display an error message, forcing you to refresh and try again.
Bluesky protocol engineer Bryan Newbold remarked around 3:46 a.m. ET on Wednesday, “oof, our services are getting hit pretty hard tonight.”
Notably, the service disruptions are impacting Bluesky, but other communities, like Blacksky, that run their own infrastructure on the underlying protocol that powers the decentralized social network, are still functioning.
Blacksky’s team told TechCrunch that the Bluesky outage has led to a “significant spike” in migration requests from Bluesky users over the past 12 hours, as users, devs, and other ATmosphere founders like Sebastian at Eurosky have been promoting its services.
It was clear that Bluesky’s team was in a hectic state this week while facing these issues, as one message on its status page had a typo: ” investigating an incident with service in one of our reginos [sic].”
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