Unlocked: The State of Search Engine 2025

As a special, one-time holiday treat, we're sharing something we only usually offer on our premium feed, Incognito Mode. Our annual board meeting! We talk about what shopping a podcast has been like in this environment, our internal stats, and… Yes, Yes, No. Incognito Mode https://searchengine.supercast.com/, our ad-free, no-rerun, bonus episode feed.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00PJ Vogt?

  Hello, Search Engine listeners. So, a few years ago, back when we first started telling stories on this feed, we were initially not making any money, super normal for a new independent show. However, we were spending money on reporting trips to pay people like fact checkers and sound designers who are helping us tell our stories. So that turned into a problem, which we needed to solve. But we didn't want to run ads at first. So we put up a website where listeners could voluntarily pay for the show if they wanted to. And a few hundred people signed up, which gave me this silly idea, which is that if your boss is the person who pays you to work, my boss was now a few hundred internet strangers. And I thought we should have like, a corporate style check-in every

• 0:44PJ Vogt?

  so often. So we scheduled what we called a board meeting, which was me and my collaborator Shruthi in suits in front of a Zoom green screen background of a big fake spreadsheet, presenting on the so-called economics of our so-called business to a large group of internet strangers, and then fielding their questions. It was fun. It was ramshackle. It felt a little dangerous, like a joke that wasn't a joke, a place where you weren't sure what the rules were, so you couldn't be sure if people would break them. And as our independent podcast has turned into something like, a very small business, we've kept doing it. Now, we run our board meetings once a year, live on the internet, in a jumbo sized Zoom room. We get hundreds of people. Sometimes it nudges close to 1,000, which

• 1:29PJ Vogt?

  is the capacity for the room. We still take questions, but we also do commit pretty seriously to talking about the evolving mission of our show. It's health, it's numbers. Anyway, typically, these are private for our paid listeners, but we wanted to share one with everybody just this once, as a special holiday occasion. If you like it, if you'd like to join one live in the future, you can sign up to be an incognito mode supporter at searchengine.show. Also, if you sign up today, you'll be able to just watch video of this thing you're about to listen to, which includes some very snazzy slides. Okay, here it goes.

• 2:25PJ Vogt?

  Okay.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  PJ, are you nervous?

• 2:29PJ Vogt?

  Less nervous than usual, which still means relatively nervous. I would say like I'm at a 50%. Not at my total nerves capacity, just out of the normal nerves. Okay, should I begin? Let's do it. Greetings, everybody. We are now commencing our annual board meeting for the year 2025 fiscal quarter four. I want to open today with some remarks about the internet.

• 2:54PJ Vogt?

  When the internet is good, there's nothing better. When it's bad, there's nothing worse.

• 3:01PJ Vogt?

  That's not my line. I cribbed it from a famous speech by a former FCC commissioner named Newton Minow. It's his sentence. When he wrote it, he was talking about TV. It was 1961. Minow had just been appointed to the FCC by John F. Kennedy. And he saw his mission as essentially to force TV broadcasters to make TV less stupid. He thought that the broadcasters had tricked themselves into believing that audiences were dumber than they actually were, that the viewers actually wanted the garbage they were being fed. This was before PBS, before NPR, long before cable. TV at that point really just meant game shows, westerns, brain-dead comedies, and then 15 minutes of news a day.

• 3:46PJ Vogt?

  And Minow, TV's new regulator, in his very first speech to the broadcasters, broadcasters, who, by the way, were expecting compliments, he told them what he really thought about their work. In his speech, he says, "When television is good, nothing, not the theater, not the magazines, not the newspapers, nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing's worse. I invite each of you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and just stay there for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a ratings book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off.

• 4:28PJ Vogt?

  I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland." The internet today, obviously, is our vast wasteland.

• 4:38PJ Vogt?

  By which I don't just mean that a lot of it isn't very good. I mean that we've actually entered into our version of that problem from the 1960s. We're being given something worse than what a lot of people actually want. I don't think it's that people are stupid. It's just that none of us are being given very many options. That's what I see as a consumer of the internet, anyway. Today, I wanted to talk more about what it feels like to be a producer of the internet. I wanted to talk a little bit about what's been going on behind the scenes last few months at Search Engine. So not long ago, we decided that we wanted to make at least one more year of the show, hopefully more than that, but for now, 12 more months. And the thing was, our current contract was expiring, which meant we had to shop our

• 5:21PJ Vogt?

  show to podcast networks, ask them to give us a bunch of money upfront so that they would then sell our ads. This would be guaranteed income to make sure that no matter what happens with our listener subscriptions, the team here is guaranteed salaries and healthcare. So we had all these meetings with podcast networks. The podcast networks legitimately are mostly run by very nice people, more so today now that everybody who wants to make money has fled. Podcast executives get a bad rap sometimes, but in my experience, they are podcast fans. And that meant the actual meetings were very nice. We were talking to people who understand the work that goes into Search Engine. They would tell us how much they appreciate what we do.

• 6:04PJ Vogt?

  And then about a month later, we would get an email with their offer. Here is how much we can pay the show upfront based on how we think next year we'll go for the business. And these offers, a sobering amount of them this year, were for much less than our current budget. As in, they both loved the show and they were budgeting for a world where next year, the ad market would mean it would do worse instead of better. In the language of money, they were saying that they think our mission is going to get harder from here. This wasn't an insult. This is just people acknowledging the thing we've all noticed, which is that we are now on a new internet. Not an internet predominantly made out of sentences, which is the internet where podcasts were born,

• 6:48PJ Vogt?

  an internet made predominantly of TV. On this internet, people log on to TikTok or Instagram or YouTube, and they watch not shows, but really just super fast algorithmic channel surfing.

• 7:01PJ Vogt?

  On this internet, long form, at least as defined by the 15 year old whose brain I most worry about, long form is now YouTube.

• 7:11PJ Vogt?

  The thing we make, search engine, does not have a natural home on this new internet.

• 7:17PJ Vogt?

  New listeners are not going to find us through a clip on TikTok or through a YouTube short. And those are currently the internet's front pages. The people who are finding us are so intensely motivated to find something that is genuinely long form, something that feels different, that they've essentially just driven very far off the main highway of the internet, past the side roads. They've driven deep into the brush because somebody told them that there's a restaurant that sells good food out there, which emotionally feels very good. As a business, obviously, it's a bit of an obstacle.

• 7:49PJ Vogt?

  When we were shopping the show, we had some meetings where some people would ask, would search engine want to join the TV internet? Do we want to translate this into video? There is an expectation that if we were willing to do that, it would unlock more money. The money in video right now seems to be even bigger than the money that floated around podcasting a decade ago, money that used to let people like me make anything we could dream of with as many people as we could find or teach to help make it.

• 8:18PJ Vogt?

  On the audio side, the conversations would be about the most people could do. In the video conversations, none of which went very far, but they would have people asking, how much money do you think search engine needs? And that question, just how much money do you need? I think anyone who makes stuff finds that question very intoxicating. There was a week not too long ago where I just lost sleep naming large numbers in my head at night. I thought a lot about the stuff we could make with a big budget. I thought about a grill that I personally wanted to buy. I came up with comically large numbers.

• 8:53PJ Vogt?

  I know that a story about search engine going video plays in a very specific way in this room. This is a room for podcast i-hards, people who are voluntarily paying for an audio-only show, people who mostly like podcasts and do not want them turned into video. But the truth is, I am not against moving images. If there is a way where we could figure out how to make something that makes me feel the way a search engine does, but in video, I would not be against it. Good TV exists, but we said no this time because we don't know how to get there from here. We don't want to take a bunch of somebody else's money without a clear view of a path to making something we think is great. So

• 9:33PJ Vogt?

  this year, once again, we are what is now called an audio podcast, and this chapter of our story has a happy ending. We signed an advertising deal, one we are very happy with, with a network we already love working with, people who we deeply, deeply trust. They've been great partners to us. So we feel good about the next 12 months. We feel particularly good about the next 12 months because a third of our budget right now comes directly from you, our listeners, our paid subscribers, the people who are in this room. But to update you on some things that we did learn from this process. One, we really, truly do not love the idea of making short-form video. There are people

• 10:14PJ Vogt?

  who do it well. I stare at my phone and see it. But our team does not think in short-form. And we think there's always going to be an audience for long-form, whatever long-form evolves to mean. Long chains of thought, contradiction, nuance, uncertainty. We are not against the market. We're not anti-commercial, but we want to make stuff for people, not algorithms. This year, at some point, we are going to pilot some kind of video experiment on the side. It won't be search engine. Search engine is an audio show. But we are going to push ourselves a little bit outside of our comfort zone. We're going to find out what it's like to ask questions in different formats. And for Search Engine, the show that we love making,

• 10:57PJ Vogt?

  that we get to make because of you, we are going to continue to push that show forward, too. We are unhappy with the current internet. Our show is optimistic and curious. We do not like to complain. We try to help. And for us, that means that in this next year, we're going to work on stories that dig into questions about how to live on this internet and how to improve this internet. For all the work we did this year, all the big reporting swings we tried to take, the breakout hit, like far and away the episode that just did insane numbers, was a simple interview. The title was, "How Do I Use My Phone Less Without Meditation or Self-Discipline?" For us, that is a big data point about where people are, where sentiment is.

• 11:43PJ Vogt?

  We believe our listeners are looking for smart, challenging conversations about how to push past where we are, towards the internet we want, beyond the wasteland. So I'm going to pause in a minute so we can actually present our internal statistics here, like what the show looks like. We're going to measure its heartbeat. And after that, we're going to open the floor to questions. Before I do that, I very sincerely just want to thank you. I think one of the big lessons of our time is that nobody is coming to save us. Our president is not going to create a new version of NPR for the internet. The algorithms are not going to tune themselves towards thoughtfulness. We are only going to get what we want if we make it ourselves.

• 12:28PJ Vogt?

  We are working very hard to do that for you. We're able to do it because you are helping us. Thank you for your attention. Thank you for funding us. We are here because of you. I'm going to turn it over to Garrett, who has made you slides.

• 12:45PJ Vogt?

  Okay, we're actually going to take a quick break for advertisements. If you're on the main feed, I don't think I've ever forward promoted a slide show before, but these slides have some very juicy details on them. Those slides after these ads.

• 13:06PJ Vogt?

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• 13:48PJ Vogt?

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• 14:18Speaker 02

  All right. Yes, we have our presentation materials. We're going to show you some internal metrics and statistics. We're going to show you some of the fun stuff that we got up to this past year and some hopes and dreams for next year. And then, pretty quickly, we're going to just jump into your questions. This slide is showing our year-over-year total download data. And so you see a little green line representing our 2025 episode data, our orange line representing 2024 episode data. And you can sort of see how the show grows in terms of total downloads over the course of the year. So we're nearing the end of our 2025 season. And what this slide shows is modest show growth in real absolute terms, total download terms.

• 15:02Speaker 02

  And while that might be, I think, cause for concern for some viewers of this slide, to us, it's kind of exciting because we entered 2025 knowing That it was going to be a difficult year. We were, we were, we did not have as big of a staff as we would have liked. And so what we were able to do was work with our ad sales partner to reduce the total number of episodes delivered across the calendar year. And so we're looking at this and showing that our show stayed the same size and even growed a little bit with fewer episodes. And so on a per episode basis, which we're going to show some statistics for on the next slide, our show continues to grow.

• 15:42Speaker 02

  And that continues to excite us as we pick and choose the ambitious episodes that we want to deliver to you guys. And we can actually go to the next slide. The next slide shows that per episode download number. So you can see year over year, we grew the show by something like 30,000 listeners per episode. And so in 2024, our average episode download was around 250,000. And that's over like a two month period. We measure that. So how many downloads does an episode get in a couple of months? In 2025, that was closer to 280,000. And then if you look at the right hand side of your screen, you can actually see the episodes in 2025 that did the best for us in terms of absolute total downloads.

• 16:26Speaker 02

  And as PJ said in his beautifully written top, our episode that performed the best was a conversation with a reporter about how to stop being so phone addicted.

• 16:37PJ Vogt?

  The other thing that was interesting, I thought, sorry, I didn't interrupt you, Garrett, was like, and because I know some people will be listening to this and won't be able to see the slide. But it was interesting, like the top five are how to stop being so phone addicted. Number two is a Dubai chocolate theory of the internet, which was another just conversation with Ryan Broderick that I think really hit for people. Third one was a reported piece, the Dave and Buster's anomaly. The fourth one was another reported piece, our microplastics really a problem. The fifth one was a piece reported by you, Garrett, the stupid little yogurt question. But it was cool. For me, what is exciting is like, I really love that the show is a hybrid. I love that week to week, it might be a conversation, it might be an investigation, it might be something in between.

• 17:19PJ Vogt?

  And it was cool to see that both of those types of stories were able to make, both of those forms could make things that people found valuable.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  Exactly. And while this slide shows you guys averages, those top episodes cross those per episode numbers. And yeah, they were just like little rockets.

• 17:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. Cool. Next slide is our top advertisers. PJ, take it away.

• 17:46PJ Vogt?

  Uh, I had a whole spiel about this. I had one spiel that I tried out and she was like, that feels quite bad. And then there's a different, oh, I remember this spiel. What's exciting for us about our top advertisers? So it's Viori, movie, Built, Groons, and Mint Mobile. Um, honestly, just that they're companies that keep returning. Like, that is a good sign. Like, it's a sign that you want to be, I mean, you want advertisers that the listeners of the show actually find valuable and interesting. And if the listeners find them valuable, they're buying the product. If the listeners are buying the product, the advertisers are coming back. So the repeatiness of it, as we decide for which brands to work with or not work with as advertising partners, like, it's a sign that maybe we're doing something right,

• 18:30PJ Vogt?

  we hope. Was that, that was the spiel, right, Shirley? That's an honest spiel. Okay.

• 18:38Speaker 02

  This slide is talking about, uh, the pain points that we were experiencing last year, this time that we had this board meeting, and our updates on those pain points today. And so, the last time we got together in this exact kind of, uh, format was about a year ago, almost to the day. And in that meeting, we had some things that had been, uh, somewhere on the, on the spectrum of like frustrating us to, uh, to, uh, really annoying us, uh, in, in those things that we talked about in 2024, where studio space.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  We got a new studio. Hello. Thank you, Odyssey.

• 19:12Speaker 02

  We are sitting in it right now?

• 19:14Speaker 01

  Yes. So we are, um, exactly in a studio, four of us, Emily, Garrett, Armin, and I, uh, all with mics, with lighting, which is really exciting. Um, and yeah, recording this. So that's been a huge boon. And

• 19:31Speaker 01

  Video and social. That's one where we made no headway, though we did have one experiment we did with the folks that make Trackstar, which is a very cool like channel on TikTok and YouTube. And so we worked with them to do a little video for the Dave and Buster's anomaly, where there was an iPhone mystery that we were trying to solve. And so they, you know, did a thing with PJ where they stopped people on the street and told them about this little glitch in the system, asked people what they thought was going on. And we saw that that episode, which was doing well already, I think, got like a nice little bump off of just like people finding it via TikTok. So that was one thing we did.

• 20:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  Too few hands.

• 20:18Speaker 02

  Too few hands. So we were in the process of trying to slowly and mindfully find new people to work with. And very excitingly and immediately, helpfully, we found Emily Malter, who is sitting to my left and is also on camera here. Emily joined our team as an associate producer this year. We've also had the opportunity to work with a few additional freelancers here or there and immediately feeling both energized and more capable as a team. So Emily, welcome.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  Exciting.

• 20:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm so thrilled to be here.

• 20:51Speaker 02

  And then the last one, which will forever be on the slide, is just growing the show. And PJ, you want to, you want to talk to this one?

• 20:59PJ Vogt?

  Yeah, I mean, it's funny. I feel like we, there's like, we're at a funny point. We're like a heavy lightweight show in terms of audience. Like, we're, we're at the point where my theory of podcasting is that at the size we are now, the show can start to grow organically as people recommend it. Like, one strategy for growth is just like, you try to do great, high-impact stuff. And that's the type of thing where somebody on a road trip or in a car or in a text message thread says, you have to listen to this episode. I learned something. It made me think, it made me feel. It settles an argument we were having. It opens an argument we can have, whatever.

• 21:43PJ Vogt?

  That is a nice place about where we are. The truth, though, is like, to get to a more... Easy, easy to be ambitious. Like, just the place where I'd like to drive us to, I think the place we're all trying to drive to, I think we still have to be figuring out what are the levers on this internet as it exists right now to put the show in front of more people. 10 years ago, when the podcast market was less fragmented, you were just like, it was a bunch of shows promoting their work on each other's shows, and it worked surprisingly well. We did some of that this year, we're doing a bit more, but I think that we're gonna have to start to think about things like the Dave and Buster's video we did, where it was

• 22:26PJ Vogt?

  like, one short video clip that threw at the podcast, but was very much like a different billboard on a different part of the internet highway, sending people towards the show. So I think we're trying to, you know, it's hard about a lean, sort of like, non, like, huge venture scale business, it's like, every new idea the show has, somebody in the show has to do. And we're lucky in that we have a bunch of really ambitious people who are ambitious about making the show great, but I think going forward, next year it'll be, how do we think about the internet as it exists right now, and getting our work in front of people who might love it?

• 23:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, and speaking of next year, there's another very exciting thing that has happened in the search engine universe in the last 48 hours, and PJ's gonna tell you about it.

• 23:10PJ Vogt?

  Oh, yeah, so our two-part series on Burgheim, the nightclub in Germany, the options for that have been purchased by Bo Nye and Matt Rogers, who are going to turn it into a movie, like a feature movie, which we are so excited about. It's such a bizarre, funny outcome, we're such fans of theirs, we're just really like, stunned and happy, and, you know, when you make things, they don't feel very real, they feel like, you know, we're in a room together, the search engine team, trying to amuse each other, trying to come up with things that are worthwhile, and then we throw them into

• 23:53PJ Vogt?

  the vast void that is the internet, and sometimes it feels like a vast void, and sometimes the void is like, "We're making a movie out of that one." You're like, "Oh, that's weird." Okay, so we're very happy.

• 24:05PJ Vogt?

  Is that a good, is that a good description of our mindset? Am I missing anything, Garrett?

• 24:08Speaker 02

  Beautiful, absolutely beautiful.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  Someone asked in the chat, will we be involved with the production?

• 24:14PJ Vogt?

  I don't, we, what we said to them, what I said to them is, we have gotten to tell our version of the story, you should tell your version of the story. If we can be helpful, we've offered, but like, um, yeah, I, my, my hope and expectation is that they do something we can't imagine with it.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  We do get a credit, which we're super excited about. There will be somewhere, um, you know, in the movie, a based on this podcast episode, uh, credit.

• 24:40Speaker 02

  It's very exciting. Uh, okay, we're gonna turn to some incognito mode statistics. But once again, we just wanna say thank you. Before we do that, uh, we get to make the show because, uh, of everyone on this Zoom. So, thank you.

• 24:55Speaker 02

  Incognito mode, uh, the premium subscription, about two and a half percent of our total listeners subscribe, uh, to be a paid member of the show, which is a really exciting number for us to see.

• 25:07Speaker 02

  And those two and a half percent of our listeners represent like a pretty significant chunk of our budget. And so, we really do get to make the kind of show that we make because of the small but mighty number of listeners who are, who are contributing to the thing that, uh, we are making.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did wanna add that, um, it was a, a big, mildly stressful year for us in terms of our paid subscriptions, which is, we switched, uh, subscription platforms. And so, we used to work with, we launched our subscription program with one company, and this year in March, we switched to another company called Supercast. Uh, and I know there were some, kind of, as happens, uh, with these sorts of switches, some like, technical issues, some folks having trouble, um, you know, accessing their new premium feed because the old premium feed, uh, the old platform had not been removed. And so, anyway, thank you guys for sticking with us. Apologies for anything that was annoying.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  I also had trouble connecting my feed, so I, I personally experienced what you did. Um, but yeah, all in all, it's been great. We're super happy with where we're at.

• 26:19PJ Vogt?

  Yeah. And as I was, it's funny, we like, it took us a while to sort of troubleshoot the source of the, the, the problem. And it meant that for months, every weekend on Sunday, I would just sit down at my laptop and try to like tech support listeners who couldn't get their feeds to work. It has been really nice having that not happen anymore. Not because it wasn't nice to talk to listeners, but because one, I actually didn't know how to fix the problem at all. And then two, I just had such a sense of like catastrophic worry that, you know, for the most part, a podcast is a thing we know how to make. And we had sort of invented a second product and the idea that we were causing dissatisfaction was so, so such a bad feeling. And I think there's always going to be stuff at the margins,

• 27:04PJ Vogt?

  but I think that it is now working and that is a vast relief.

• 27:13PJ Vogt?

  We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we open the floor to our listeners and we talk about questions we failed to answer, stories that crashed and burned, and yes, yes, no.

• 27:34PJ Vogt?

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• 28:17PJ Vogt?

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• 28:46PJ Vogt?

  And with that, we're gonna transition to your questions. And so Emily, is there one we should start with?

• 28:52Speaker 03

  Sure. I saw kind of a bit of a conversation in the chat about our America versus China episode, specifically about titles. I was wondering if Jocelyn wanted to come off mic.

• 29:04Speaker 04

  How do you hang in here, Mimi?

• 29:06PJ Vogt?

  Yeah, we can hear you.

• 29:07Speaker 04

  What's up? This is really fun. This is the first time I've joined one of these, but I'm a huge fan of the show. I think my question was, do you ever test titles ahead of publishing? Work in marketing, so we do a lot of pre-testing and it seems like a simple way to maybe optimize to get people to download.

• 29:25Speaker 03

  That is such a good question.

• 29:28PJ Vogt?

  It's funny. I mean, there's like an official answer and an unofficial answer. The official answer is no, only because that like unlike most, like if you worked at BuzzFeed in 2015, my understanding was everything people published was at least A/B tested and often more, you know, they would pitch a bunch of headlines, they'd put the thing out and then very quickly they'd get data on what was getting clicked more and that would become the headline.

• 29:52PJ Vogt?

  RSS publication, as far as I know, doesn't offer anything like that. And you kind of can't tell like clicking because for the most part, it's just like going to people's feeds. Although that's not true, actually. You can tell. What we have done a couple of times is we've published an episode that we really liked and we felt like it wasn't getting enough listeners. Like, all of our episodes tend to be within a pretty tight band, but we've been like, that really felt like it deserved more. And then I think twice in the past year, like two weeks later, we've gone back and just changed the title. The, there's one about teens and AI use for homework that had like a kind of like cutesy, nonsensical, evocative title that I'd been into

• 30:35PJ Vogt?

  and people weren't really listening. So we changed it to something that was sort of like, here's what it's really about. And then I feel like the one we did about weighing cats versus birds got changed a few times. Yeah.

• 30:48Speaker 03

  Awesome. I wanted to call on Jared. You had a question about using short clips. If you want to come off mute and ask that.

• 30:57Speaker 05

  Hey PJ.

• 30:58PJ Vogt?

  Hey Jared.

• 30:59Speaker 05

  You were talking in your opening statement about keeping the podcast long form.

• 31:06Speaker 05

  Is there an opportunity or downside to potentially like clipping the current long form?

• 31:14Speaker 05

  Podcasts format and using it to reach out to

• 31:20Speaker 05

  a wider audience or people that are maybe like stuck in that

• 31:25Speaker 05

  short form area of the internet to maybe bring in new audience members?

• 31:30PJ Vogt?

  I think it's a great idea. I mean, we've been, we've been talking about it a lot internally. Like my feeling right now as someone who really does, and I I hate when people are like, there's a good type of media and there's a bad type of media and the good types of type we're making and the bad types, all the other stuff, but like, I do like long form stuff. I've noticed that there are some long form shows, video interview shows that are figuring out how to clip and exist on the short form internet. I want us to do it. I just want us to do it in a way where like, like it feels like it's a true advertisement of the thing it's advertising, you know, like we're not grabbing something out of context where when you come back, you're actually disappointed by what you find, but also where it feels like something that is

• 32:11PJ Vogt?

  cool and entertaining. If you encounter it on Tik Tok or on Instagram reels, like not something where it feels kind of slapped together and like we were just trying to get to a minimum viable video, but like something that looks entertaining, beautiful, thoughtful, whatever.

• 32:30Speaker 03

  Cool. Um, I saw a question from Chris about AI. If you wanted to come up with me.

• 32:39Speaker 06

  Hey, yeah, I was just asking questions about the equipment and the tech and the platforms and how you guys are looking at it, both in terms of increasing the efficiency and the productivity as well as where you've seen it not work.

• 32:56PJ Vogt?

  Oh, just like AI as a tool?

• 32:58Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 33:00PJ Vogt?

  It's interesting. So AI weirdly, obviously like AI is both a useful and highly, highly, highly polarizing technology in America. People are worried both about job loss, but also just like, are these tools that used maybe correctly can help us research and think and used incorrectly can swap out critical thinking skills we desperately need? So we use it, but we use it carefully. The place where almost every podcast is, including ours, has started using it over the past, I don't know, it's been like six or seven years now, is that Descript. The way it used to work is you would conduct like a two, three, four hour interview. And then afterwards, you would sit down, listen to your tape,

• 33:43PJ Vogt?

  and just manually type all the words from the interview, which was like, cool and also immensely not cool. You got to sit deeply with your tape and your brain dried out and rotted while you did it. Descript auto transcribes using AI. So, so it will like, take the audio, turn it into text. Everybody uses it. Everybody likes it. It seems relatively not controversial. And you can with Descript, make like, you can do the audio editing we used to do in Pro Tools, largely in text, which I really like. I really prefer. The other place I use AI a lot is like, similarly to how I would use Wikipedia as a first stop, but not a last stop, research tool. Like, I'll ask it to spin something up for me and then

• 34:26PJ Vogt?

  I'll go to the primary sources because as I think a lot of people know, AI can have a tendency to deeply hallucinate.

• 34:35Speaker 03

  Awesome. I was wondering if Dylan wanted to come off mute to ask us about the questions we've failed at.

• 34:45Speaker 07

  Hi. Also, my first time joining. Huge fan of the show. Yeah, I was wondering, I'm, I imagine you get a lot of questions that you aren't able to answer for whatever reason, like you weren't able to get the right interview or you weren't. But there might be like interesting components of those questions. And I'm wondering if you've ever considered like, I don't know, creating some kind of mashup episode of like, here are all of the questions we weren't able to get to a final answer to, but there was this really interesting nugget that came from it. Because I'd be interested in knowing, not only why you failed to answer that question, but also to hear some of those like nuggets that you have in the can that you weren't able to share.

• 35:23PJ Vogt?

  Truly, that's actually a you question. What do you think?

• 35:27Speaker 01

  We are such a tiny show that I honestly, I feel like if there's one really excellent moment in an interview that we will try our damnedest to save it. There's an episode we put out last year, which sat in, uh, just like sat on the shelf for ages because we just couldn't figure it out. It was, um, if you guys have heard the, why would you buy luggage at the airport luggage store? There's a moment at the end of that interview where you hear PJ like interrogating, uh, our expert on the fact that he himself had bought luggage at the luggage store. And it was really like, it made me laugh every time. And I was like,

• 36:08Speaker 01

  we have to find a way to do this. And so we kind of created this, uh, extensive history of commerce at the airport. And then the whole thing kind of just fell into place. And, um, really, I, you know, loved the episode. So I feel like a lot of things, it's, uh, the beauty of being able to write, um, on the show and not just interview people is that if something is missing, we can fill it in with our own words. So there, there are certainly episodes that have been sitting on our docket. There's one that, uh, Garrett's gonna, uh, give me a look when I say this Ticketmaster, where there's an interview we did with an expert, with a historian who I just really enjoy it. But for us, it's

• 36:50Speaker 01

  how do we elevate this beyond just like a history, a fun history of a company to like answering a question that people have right now. Um, so sometimes we, you know, we're like looking for the right hook or the right extra little shiny bit to add, um, to the thing. I'm trying to think, is there a question where we just dumped it, but, but we loved it. We just couldn't, we were talking about one yesterday about volcanoes.

• 37:14Speaker 02

  Volcanoes. I was thinking about the arson one, a lot of fire related.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Well, let me tell the volcano one because I'm, I'm determined that we found a way to do this. Uh, somebody asked us, like, why can't you just throw trash into a volcano? Like, why can't we just deal with our trash that way? And I, yeah, I find that question so charming. I think most of our team does. And it's like, well, what's the, what are the pieces you need for that? One. Yeah.

• 37:37PJ Vogt?

  We're also just still young enough as a show where very few things have we like fully relinquished. We have a lot of things that are sort of like, ah, we've put it on the shelf. Maybe we'll go figure it out someday because it's charmed us enough to like, keep it in the mix. And I think we still have enough hubris to suspect that we'll figure out a way to make all of them work eventually.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  The arson one, though, it did. It was a fascinating story where it was a very deeply personal one where somebody told PJ about a case of arson in their town and the.

• 38:09PJ Vogt?

  It was like, it was like a very, it was a very interesting, essentially true crime story, but they realized that there were people close to the story that just didn't want the story on air. And so it was a thing where it's like, if we were like ruthless, like tabloid reporters, we would have gone after it. But it's like human beings who would prefer not, their story not be on the air. Like, we don't, there's other stories we can do.

• 38:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:32Speaker 03

  Cool. I saw quite a bit of love for the Colossus series in the chat. Ron, do you want to come on and ask your question?

• 38:40Speaker 06

  Sure. Hello. I was just curious how long you spent working on that two-part series? And comparing that to the lead time, how much time you're spending working on, say, the stories, the episodes that are based on a question where PJ is mostly just doing a two-way with a guest.

• 38:58Speaker 01

  Great question. PJ, I'm going to out you here. So I started getting interested in data centers about a year ago. I had a really interesting dinner with a good friend who works for an engineering firm. He does like acoustical engineering and he usually works on, you know, I've known him for many years. And he does like gorgeous concert venues and like incredible, like just these really exquisite sound-focused spaces. And he told me that like, all of his work, it went from being like a couple of data centers here and there to like, all of his work was just on data centers, like big tech companies hiring them to minimize the amount of sound that was coming out of data centers. And I found that to be such an interesting.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  Surprising tidbit. This is before data centers kind of took over on the news. And I tried for a good several months to get PJ interested. I mean, to give PJ some, a lot of credit. It's like, there's many stories that he ends up doing, not necessarily because he was the, the kind of enthusiastic person, but other people on the team were enthusiastic and he's like going along with it. But, you know, it's on him to make it good and we all work together, but you know, he has to kind of like summon up the curiosity to make it like his own. And with data centers, he just couldn't do it. So I had to take, I was

• 40:19Speaker 01

  like, fine, I will report a story then. And so it, it's been a year, I would say concentrated work effort, maybe closer to like four or five months. It is difficult because I am editing every episode. Of course. So yeah, it's kind of a trying to work on this, trying to work on other things. But then, once I was really deep in the reporting, that Russ's team, the story was delayed. We went to Memphis quite late in the process and added an entire section to the story. And so the Russ's team would kind of really come in and like that Gooner episode saved us a lot of times. I love it, but it was really one where PJ's like, you need something? I can rustle it up in days.

• 41:05PJ Vogt?

  And it was fun just to say like, as a person on the team trying to support on Colossus, like, you know, the challenge of a relatively low budget, hybrid narrative show in 2025, and I'm sure also in 2026, it's like, you're constantly looking for ways to ease production. You know, is there an idea for a really great conversation you could have that can buy you more time? So oftentimes the question is like, how do we make this easier? But then you also have to have a little part of your brain that's like, yeah, but how can we make it harder? Like, what are the things that are worth?

• 41:36PJ Vogt?

  You know, the production time we're buying ourselves and Shruthi, who like a great editor pushes certainly me, I think the entire team with her curiosity. Like you don't want to come back with less than she wants to know about. You don't want to not be able to answer a question. You don't want to have to say like, oh, we didn't call that person who could have been great. You don't want to have like not designed like the most perfect sound cue. Like we're all sort of like building to her vision. And it is really fun like when Shruthi's in the reporter seat, like her desire to really understand and really go there and really push it is like, it's like both challenging and like, you know, one of the reasons we make a show like this is to be able to really like go after stuff in a serious way.

• 42:19PJ Vogt?

  So it's fun to, to lean into like serious reporting ambitious ambition on a story. Just as it's also fun to like do the breezy stuff.

• 42:28Speaker 03

  Okay, we're going to do one more question. Ryan had a question about segments on Search Engine. If you want to come off mute.

• 42:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, sure. Yeah, I don't mean to compare Search Engine to Reply All for obvious reasons, right? I mean, it's a totally different show, but there's some, some constants between them. It just always felt like you had this segment, Yes, Yes, No, that was sort of intentionally different than the core investigative stories that was the base of Reply All. And they were like neat to have just pop up in the regular feed. Like I know you guys are doing them for incognito mode, but it was, it was a nice sort of mix. And I was wondering if you guys had considered something like that for this show as like a regular segment.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  So this is a question really close to our hearts. I'm, I'm going to answer with PJ. I'm sure you have something to add. So we, obviously PJ and I came out of Reply All. There were things that worked beautifully about that show, some things that were much harder, just in terms of production. And so I think coming to Search Engine, I mean, the very concept of Search Engine is how do we do some of the things that we did at Reply All, but much easier? Like, which is how we came up with an explainer show. So it's like, you know, something that is very question driven, but an answer that uses a lot of archival, maybe just one interview, but if we really need to, like a couple of

• 43:53Speaker 01

  interviews, that was the original concept. And so Yes, Yes, No is really just that. As a person who produced a lot of those. Uh, segments, you know, you try to pick a question that has, or you try to pick a tweet, you know, but just translate that to question in the search engine world. You pick a question that has like layers to it, like different, you know, the ability to move from one's like world to another. Has like some characters ideally and archival. So if you go back and listen to Yes, Yes, No, it's like the ones that I think really sung had like humor, had like funny tape, had stuff that we were finding off the internet. To, to build into something that felt like more than a conversation with just, you know, three dudes in a room.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  So yeah, that, that is search engine. It is, when we can pull it off with just one voice, like something like the Gunner episode was Daniel talking to PJ about an interview that he, I'm sorry, about a story that he reported it for, you know, several months. And he's a great talker. It's funny. There's some archival we were able to use because he had interview clips from some of the folks who gave us permission to use it. We were able to use the music from the PMVs. That was really disturbing and great. So you get what I'm saying? Once you see that that's the template, you kind of can, uh, like see how a lot of these episodes are, how we think through them. The problem, and this was the problem we ran into with Yes, Yes, No, it's two.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  It's really hard to find the right ones and often things will go wrong. There's no such thing that we've ever really figured out. That is just like an easy, replicable, always like, you know, no production hitches type format.

• 45:40PJ Vogt?

  I agree with all that. And, and like, yeah, I think like, I think one of, first of all, obviously that's just knows we're randomly chose my house. I don't know about this, like picking everything.

• 45:52PJ Vogt?

  I, I think, I think the place where this show actually tries to be an homage that as Trudy was saying is like, we're doing a lot of topical explainers and trying to pick ones that are sort of like, like one of the modes that I think the show is in is very recent history, like we're a history show about things that happened six months or two years ago. I think the other part though, that you might be pointing at is one of the things where pile did, I think, well, uh, was you could feel like you were learning and hanging out at the same time, that it would be sort of like you'd be hearing conversation, but the conversation would be narratively structured. And we've leaned away from that with search engine. Some of that is a function of. I don't have a co-host, but it's also like a pretty intentional production decision

• 46:37PJ Vogt?

  just because sort of the, the, the thing that Reply was a little bit unfortunately like legendary for was being a show that required a lot of production hours to make. And some of that was about a bunch of particular people being particular, but a lot of it was just about when you're trying to both preserve the funny improvised, real things that happen in a conversation, but wed them to the best possible narrative structure for explaining something, the way you do that is by working lots of hours. Like it's just, it's immensely hard, not on the performers, like the on mic talent, it's immensely hard on the production staff, the editors and people behind the Pro Tools monitor. So we've done it a little

• 47:20PJ Vogt?

  bit. Like I hear that hybrid sometimes, like in our episodes with Manny, you know, and Devon, like when Garrett's on mic, you'll hear stories in conversation being told, but it is hard. It's really hard and we want to make the show so that it's sometimes hard, but not always hard. I think it's funny, there's one thing we're working on that is going to go out in January. That is like, you know, to label a somewhat benighted genre of podcasts, it is three dudes talking, but the two other dudes who aren't me are brilliant and funny and really light on their feet. Sort of conversational, like they move between analysis and comedy very quickly. And it's about an internet experience, man. Like I'm

• 48:02PJ Vogt?

  to see, we learn a lot about the show by the emails we get and the feedback we get. It's not like Reply all redux or anything, but the one thing I hear people missing in questions like that is like the feeling of an active hang that you're learning from. And while that's not a place we want to drive to, it's a place we want to visit sometimes. And I think that story might visit it a little bit. Not to, can you hear me trying to make like the gentlest promise possible?

• 48:30Speaker 01

  I mean, the buy, the theory of the buy chocolate was absolutely a yes, yes, no. Like there's no, it's just PJ and Ryan, you know, and Ryan's explaining. To him.

• 48:41PJ Vogt?

  But I just want to be, I don't want to say absolutely, because it's just like, I want to be respectful to like, I don't know, like, I made that with Alex and Alex, they're like singular weird talents, like you, sometimes people will be like, I missed a segment, I'm like, well, people made that segment and like, those people are working on different things now, if I, if I called Alex Blumberg at like, the place, like, he's like trying to save the world with like green climate technology, I was like, we gotta get the gang back together, he'd be like, no. But yeah, we're trying to, we're trying to make sure that we honor the spirit of things people might miss.

• 49:10Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I, I just meant, like, from a production standpoint.

• 49:13PJ Vogt?

  How dare you?

• 49:16Speaker 01

  I'm so sorry. Just erase what I said.

• 49:21PJ Vogt?

  Yeah, it's on the internet. Garrett, you got anything else?

• 49:24Speaker 02

  I have nothing else. Does anybody else on the team have anything else?

• 49:29Speaker 01

  PJ, just, uh.

• 49:30Speaker 02

  Take us away, PJ.

• 49:32PJ Vogt?

  I know I started this way, but, uh, really, truly, thank you. This is, we are, we are counter trend right now. We are making an audio show with listener support. We may as well be like in the 1970s. Um, and we are, I just, we all are aware of how lucky we are and thank you for creating that luck. Thank you for being here. We're immensely grateful for you all. And with that, we'll see you at the next board meeting.

• 50:01Speaker 02

  Bye, guys.

• 50:02PJ Vogt?

  Bye.

• 51:08PJ Vogt?

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• 51:50PJ Vogt?

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