A Midnight Phone Call. A Missing Movie. Decades of Questions.

Reveal

The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX

News

4.7 • 8K Ratings

🗓️ 25 October 2025

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Here at the Center for Investigative Reporting, we excel at finding things: government documents, contact information, the misdeeds people have tried to hide. It’s serious work that we use for serious tasks—but that gave us an idea. What would happen if we used these skills for things that are less about accountability and more about joy? If we turned our energy toward meaningful, personal questions?

That was the spark for our first-ever hour examining our favorite inconsequential investigations. We turned our tried and true journalistic strategies on our own biggest questions to see where the trail led.

This week, we take up Mother Jones video reporter Garrison Hayes’ quest to find the first short film he ever made, even though it was lost to the early 2000s internet. Yowei Shaw of the podcast Proxy brings us along as she meets her doppelganger and discovers the truth behind how people see her. And Reveal producer Ashley Cleek untangles her own biggest unsolved mystery: Did reclusive rock star Jeff Mangum really call into her college radio show, asking her for a favor?

We plan to do more “inconsequential investigations” like this. So, if you have a personal mystery that needs looking into, please email [email protected]

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Transcript

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0:00.0	From the Center for Investigative Reporting in PRX, this is Reveal. I'm Al Letson. At Reveal,
0:07.3	we're in the business of big stories. We report on government corruption, violations of human rights,
0:14.2	matters of national, sometimes even global importance. But this week, we are turning our attention
0:20.4	from the macro down to the micro, if you
0:23.8	will. We're going to use our investigative skills for stories that hit more of a personal note.
0:30.2	The idea for this hour came from my colleague and good friend, reporter Ashley Cleek.
0:35.7	Hey, Al.
0:36.7	Ashley, what you got for me?
0:38.9	I'm calling it inconsequential investigations.
0:43.0	Basically, the idea was to take the same intensity that we bring to all of our reporting
0:48.4	and apply it to people's memories or questions that they've had about something that happened to them,
0:55.5	questions that they've never really been able to answer,
0:58.4	and questions that we actually have the skills to investigate.
1:02.8	And the stories that I've found they're not inconsequential at all.
1:05.8	At the heart of them are these deep truths about how we relate to the world
1:10.3	and the stories that we tell about ourselves.
1:13.0	Now, that very much sounds like a reveal episode. I like it. I like it. So what investigations have you gone on?
1:21.0	All right. I have three stories for you today. Okay. One is a quest into the early Internet, the Internet of the early 2000s.
1:29.1	Oh, that's where I live.
1:31.0	Like, I still hear the AOL dial-up in my head when I connect to the Internet.
1:35.3	The next one is about what it means to meet your doppelganger.
1:38.7	Oh, that could be a horror story.
	...

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