Some podcast hosts open an interview with a résumé. Julian Dorey opened his conversation with Annie Jacobsen by telling her about the morning his car blew up. On his own show, the Julian Dorey Podcast, he explains that the first time he ever heard her voice, it was coming out of his car stereo while the car was on fire.
Clip: Viral Podcast Shorts YouTube Short from the full source linked below.
It is his memory, told as a welcome to his guest. The dates are hedged, and the details are the ones that stuck with him.
The first time he heard her
Dorey says he first heard of Jacobsen "back in 2019 when you were on Joe Rogan's podcast." He thinks the episode had come out "maybe like October, November, something like that."
The setting was ordinary. It was the first Monday after Thanksgiving. He had spent the weekend in South Jersey with his parents and was driving back up to North Jersey, where he lived and worked, early in the morning. He put the episode on and saw that she was talking about the Nazis.
He tells her he's sure people have told her this before: she has "a very entrancing voice." He calls listening to her "kind of like a trippy experience," and he describes the strange mix of a calm, sweet delivery and very dark subject matter. "Wow, this is like kind of dark," he remembers thinking. That is as far into the episode's topic as his story goes.
A smell on the Garden State Parkway
Then the drive changed. Dorey says he was on the Garden State Parkway when "this smell hits me like right in the face." He describes it as the kind of smell that makes you realize something has been going on for a while without you noticing.
He looked at the front of his hood. "My car is on fire," he says. His reaction, by his own telling, was not polite, and the language in this part of the story is strong enough that the Short's captions mask it.
He pulled off to the side of the road and opened the windows because he thought there was smoke inside. Meanwhile, the episode kept going in the background. Then he decided he had to get out.
"I don't press pause"
The detail that makes the story is what he did not do. "I don't press pause," he says. "Like, you're still talking. Car's on fire."
He got out, moved to the grass beside the road and called 911. From where he stood, he says, he could still hear Jacobsen's voice coming out of the car, still talking. And then, in his words, "my car just explodes."
The exchange that follows is the reason the story was told at all. "And so, whenever I think of you," Dorey tells her over laughter, "I think of an exploding car." Then he adds, "And now I met you."
"The best introduction"
Jacobsen answers: "Oh my goodness. That's the best introduction I have ever had."
Dorey keeps the joke going. He says he's happy it happened that way, and that "it did come at the expense of a car, but I think it's worth it." Near the end of the clip comes a simple verdict on the whole thing: "you can't make that up."
The clip doesn't say what started the fire, and it doesn't add any more detail about the car. What it does give is an unusually memorable answer to a common interview question, which is how a host first came across a guest's work. For Dorey, the answer is a burning hood, a 911 call and a voice that kept talking from inside the car.
Related reading
- Joe Rogan's real name
- The Hollywood Bandit's prosthetic disguise, from the Julian Dorey Podcast
- Why Philip IV destroyed the Knights Templar, from the Julian Dorey Podcast
FAQ
How did Julian Dorey first hear of Annie Jacobsen?
He says he first heard her in 2019, when she appeared on Joe Rogan's podcast, and he listened to that episode while driving.
Where did Julian Dorey's car catch fire?
By his account, on the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey, while he was driving from South Jersey back to North Jersey early in the morning after Thanksgiving weekend.
Did he stop the podcast?
No. He says he didn't press pause, so he could still hear her talking from the car after he got out and called 911.
What happened to the car?
He says it exploded while he waited on the grass at the side of the road.
What did Annie Jacobsen say about the story?
She called it the best introduction she has ever had.