July 16, 2026
Courtenay Harris Bond/PhillyVoice
Alexavier Gonzalez, 18, participates in Dan Horan's social experiment, using an analog phone set up in LOVE Park to talk about how excited he is to be getting into more stable housing.
Dan Horan just wants to get people in Philly to talk to each other.
The way he has been making that happen is by going to different neighborhoods around the city and setting up an analog phone on a table in front of a sign that says, "What's on your mind? Just pick up the phone and talk!" He has a video camera set up to capture what passersby share on the line, which has no one on the other end.
"It's like a voicemail for Philly," Horan explains.
Each night for the past week, he has been editing and posting the reels to his @realfallrisk Instagram account.
Horan, a freelance videographer, started the account about seven months ago. He had attracted just over 1,000 followers before he started using the phone on July 9 in LOVE Park. Now, the account has over 69,000 followers and 12 million views.
"It's a social experiment to get people to talk to each other," Horan said Thursday.
He had been going to events, college campuses and parks and trying different ways to encourage public discourse — putting up tables where passersby could talk one-on-one or letting them note their thoughts on whiteboards.
"But people weren't really hearing each other," Horan said. "They were still doing the same thing that we always do where we shout and hope somebody hears you."
Dan Horan set up an analog phone in LOVE Park to get people to share their thoughts.
Then a police car accidentally ran over Horan's whiteboard at a Fourth of July event. When he went to pick up a new one that someone had advertised on Facebook, it ended up being another videographer who was closing his business after 30 years.
"The tech to make this all happen was in a box covered in dust," Horan said about the phone, the cords and the equipment he uses. "The technology stopped being made 20 years ago."
It was serendipity, Horan said.
"I had been scratching my head about how to get people to interact with a microphone on camera in public, and I saw the phone, and I was like, 'Wow! That's it! That's the answer! Everybody picks up the phone."
But he does have to explain to some young people how to work it, Horan said. "They pick it up, and they don't know what to do."
The sign encourages people to ' Just pick up the phone and talk!'
An "old-tech modulating system gives power to the phone just like you would have in your house," Horan said. "I grab audio through a different piece of technology and then put that into the camera."
Horan, who lives in Northeast Philly, has ferried his phone to the Frankford and Olney neighborhoods. But he is getting hundreds of requests from people in other parts of the city and surrounding regions – and from around the country – to bring his phone to them.
On Friday, he is taking his setup to New York.
Knowing that their voices are going to be heard by so many other people on Instagram is part of the appeal, Horan said.
Also, people have been pouring out love and support for each other in the comments. They are responding to "being understood and seeing that other people feel the same thing," he said.
On Thursday, Alexavier Gonzalez, 18, was a repeat caller.
"I really expressed how happy I am now that I'm looking at housing," Gonzalez said. "I've been experiencing homelessness for a couple of years, so it's a big step in life."
Gonzalez, who has been staying in different shelters, also said that he thanked his mom.
During a call earlier in the week, a woman said, "What's on my mind is how amazing my husband has been taking care of me when I've been sick, even after surgery."
Another caller said she was grateful that the World Cup had brought people together.
"If anything comes out of this," Horan said, "I just want people to be able to be friendly with each other and to walk out of the house and say, 'I love you,' and not look crazy."
