Hello and welcome to the Longform podcast. I'm Aaron Lammer. My co hosts are Max Linsky of the website longform.org and Evan Ratleff, formerly of the out of this magazine, which I believe just celebrated its 10th anniversary. Is that correct?

You are correct, Aaron. It is 10 years from the founding of the out of this magazine.

Well, I just wanted to salute you. Hey, Mazeltoff, Evan. I was touched. Evan did a whole Twitter thread about the 10-year anniversary of the out of this magazine.

And not only did it make me nostalgic for that time in our lives, but it made me feel sort of shameful, Aaron, that I think we didn't even acknowledge to each other that longform had turned 10.

I am just not accepting that it happened because it didn't happen. I don't see what possible sequence you're talking about.

We're not 10 years old. Yes, we were founded before the out of this. Anything, anything could have contributed to this state of affairs.

So congratulations to Evan. No congratulations to longform. We'll celebrate 10 when we do 10 years of the podcast. Where are we? We're about like seven or eight right now.

We're getting there. We're getting there. We're around year eight. I will also say Aaron, congratulations to you because you landed a guest for the show this week that all of us have wanted to have on for all of these years that we've been doing the show.

Tell me about your conversation with Luke Mogelson. So we have a reluctant guests, Hall of Fame. I can't tell you who else is in it, but Luke Mogelson has been one of our number one try to get for a long time.

I actually know exactly how long it's been. It's been since 2013 because I picked up on the original email thread.

He has been reluctant to come on the show. He has his reasons for that. I think mostly just not really liking to do personal interviews.

But I saw that he had a new piece in the New Yorker. He has been embedded with militias and Michigan and various groups that converged on the Capitol riots.

He was inside the Capitol and took some footage in there. And the minute I saw that footage, I had a lot of questions. And so I thought I would take another stab and email him and he replied.

He's one of my favorite reporters, honestly, like he wrote a story, which I was trying to get him on last time about where he traveled with a group of refugees seeking asylum from Indonesia.

To an island that is Australian territory and where people go who are trying to get asylum in Australia.

That was a really big piece in 2013. He's had many since then. But we finally got him.

So yeah, it was great. And he was once I got him totally game to talk about all of this stuff and really thoughtful and clearly cares a lot about what goes into his work and what his approach is.

So I highly recommend this one.

One thing I also highly recommend is starting an email newsletter with MailChimp. I'll tell you what, I have a podcast, a different podcast in this. I won't say its name. You've probably heard of it.

We never started an email newsletter. We let the show become defunct. Now we're spinning it back up. I have no way to let people know. Don't make that mistake. If you're starting a project of any kind, start a newsletter.

So the people who care about it can stay in touch. It might die and then come back.

Thanks MailChimp. Now here's Aaron with Luke Mogelson.

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