Unlocked: The State of Search Engine 2025

Speaker 1 This episode is brought to you in part by Square, the easy way for business owners to take payments, book appointments, manage staff, and keep everything running in one place.

Speaker 1 Whether you're selling lattes, cutting hair, detailing cars, or running a design studio, Square helps you run your business without running yourself into the ground.

Speaker 1 My local coffee shop, Laurel Bakery, which is wonderful, although I wish they were open a little bit more hours, but that's okay. That's my thing.

Speaker 2 They use Square, and it shows.

Speaker 1 Checkout is super fast when they're open. Receipts hit my inbox instantly.
There's just something about businesses that use Square. They always feel a little bit more put together.

Speaker 1 Square gives sellers the flexibility to take payments wherever customers are, at the counter, online, even from a phone.

Speaker 1 With Square, you get all the tools to run your business with none of the contracts or complexity.

Speaker 3 Why wait?

Speaker 1 Right now, you get up to $200 off Square Hardware at square.com/slash go/slash engine. That's square.com/slash go/engine.
Run your business smarter with square. Get started today.

Speaker 1 This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Vanguard. To all the financial advisors listening, let's talk bonds for a minute.
Capturing value in fixed income is not easy.

Speaker 1 Bond markets are massive murky, and let's be real, lots of firms throw a couple of flashy funds your way in a holiday.

Speaker 1 Not Vanguard. What sets Vanguard apart is that their bonds are institutional quality.
And that's not just a tagline, it's a real commitment to your clients.

Speaker 1 Their lineup includes over 80 bond funds, actively managed by a global team of 200 sector specialists, analysts, and traders.

Speaker 1 Lots of firms talk about their star portfolio manager like it's all magic in one brain. Vanguard flips that script.

Speaker 1 Their approach is team-based, so every client benefits from the combined expertise of the entire group, not just one person.

Speaker 1 So if you're looking to give your clients consistent results year in and year out, go see the record for yourself at vanguard.com slash audio. That's vanguard.com slash audio.

Speaker 1 All All investing is subject to risk. Vanguard Marketing Corporation distributor.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 However, we were spending money. on reporting trips to pay people like fact checkers and sound designers who are helping us tell our stories.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And I thought we should have like a corporate style check-in every so often.

Speaker 1 So we scheduled what we called a board meeting, which was me and my collaborator, Shruti, 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 We get hundreds of people. Sometimes it nudges close to a thousand, which is the capacity for the room.

Speaker 1 We still take questions, but we also do commit pretty seriously to talking about the evolving mission of our show. Its health, its numbers.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 If you like it, if you'd like to join one live in in the future, you can sign up to be an incognito mode supporter at searchengine.show.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 3 Okay. PJ, are you nervous?

Speaker 5 Less nervous than usual, which still means relatively nervous. I would say, like, I'm at a 50%.

Speaker 5 Not at my total nerves capacity, just out of the normal nerves.

Speaker 5 Okay,

Speaker 5 should I begin?

Speaker 4 Let's do it.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 When the internet is good, there's nothing better. When it's bad, there's nothing worse.
That's not my line. I cribbed it from a famous speech by a former FCC commissioner named Newton Minow.

Speaker 5 It's his sentence. When he wrote it, he was talking about TV.
It was 1961.

Speaker 5 Minnow 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 This was before PBS, before NPR, long before cable.

Speaker 5 TV at that point really just meant game shows, Westerns, brain-dead comedies, and then 15 minutes of news a day.

Speaker 5 And Minnow, 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.

Speaker 5 The internet today, obviously, is our vast wasteland.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 We're being given something worse than what a lot of people actually want.

Speaker 5 I don't think it's that people are stupid. It's just that none of us are being given very many options.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 I wanted to talk a little bit about what's been going on behind the scenes the last few months at Search Engine.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And the thing was, our current contract was expiring, which meant we had to shop our show to podcast networks, ask them to give us a bunch of money up front so that they would then sell our ads.

Speaker 5 This would be guaranteed income to make sure that no matter what happens with our listener subscriptions, the team here is guaranteed salaries and health care.

Speaker 5 So we had all these meetings with podcast networks. The podcast networks legitimately are mostly run by very nice people.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And then about a month later, we would get an email with their offer. Here is how much we can pay the show up front based on how we think next year will go for the business.

Speaker 5 And these offers, a sobering amount of them this year, were for much less than our current budget.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 In the language of money, they were saying that they think our mission is going to get harder from here.

Speaker 5 This wasn't an insult. This was just people acknowledging the thing we've all noticed, which is that we are now on a new internet.

Speaker 5 Not an internet predominantly made out of sentences, which is the internet where podcasts were born. An internet made predominantly of TV.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 The thing we make, search engine, does not have a natural home on this new internet.

Speaker 5 New listeners are not going to find us through a clip on TikTok or through a YouTube short.

Speaker 5 And those are currently the internet's front pages.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 As a business, obviously it's a bit of an obstacle.

Speaker 5 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?

Speaker 5 There was an expectation that if we were willing to do that, it would unlock more money.

Speaker 5 The money in video right now seems to be even bigger than the money that floated around podcasting a decade ago.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 On the audio side, the conversations would be about the most people could do.

Speaker 5 In the video conversations, none of which went very far, but they would have people asking, how much money do you think a search engine needs?

Speaker 5 And that question, just how much money do you need? I think anyone who makes stuff finds that question very intoxicating.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 I thought about a grill that I personally wanted to buy. I came up with comically large numbers.

Speaker 5 I know that a story about search engine going video plays in a very specific way in this room.

Speaker 5 This is a room for podcast diehards, people who are voluntarily paying for an audio only show, people who mostly like podcasts and do not want them turned into video.

Speaker 5 But the truth is, I am not against moving images.

Speaker 5 If there was a way where we could figure out how to make something that makes me feel the way Search Engine does, but in video, I would not be against it.

Speaker 5 Good TV exists, but we said no this time because we don't know how to get there from here.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 So this year, once again, we are what is now called an audio podcast.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 They've been great partners to us.

Speaker 5 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

Speaker 5 but to update you on some things that we did learn from this process one

Speaker 5 we really truly do not love the idea of making short form video There are people who do it well. I stare at my phone and see it.
But our team does not think in short form.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And for Search Engine, the show that we love making, that we get to make because of you, we are going to continue to push that show forward too.

Speaker 5 We are unhappy with the current internet. Our show is optimistic and curious.
We do not like to complain. We try to help.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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 just did insane numbers, was a simple interview.

Speaker 5 The title was, How do I use my phone less without meditation or self-discipline?

Speaker 5 For us, that is a big data point about where people are, where sentiment is.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 So I'm going to pause in a minute so that we can actually present our internal statistics here, like what the show looks like. We're going to measure its heartbeat.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 We are only going to get what we want if we make it ourselves. 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 1 Okay, we're actually going to take a quick break for advertisements.

Speaker 1 If you're on the main feed, I don't think I've ever ever forward promoted a slideshow before, but these slides have some very juicy details on them. Those slides after these ads.

Speaker 1 This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Give Well. When you give to a nonprofit, it's easy to focus on things like overhead, but what really matters is impact.

Speaker 1 That's why GiveWell, today's sponsor, spends thousands of hours researching which programs actually save or improve the most lives per dollar.

Speaker 1 With foreign aid cuts raising concerns for some of the world's poorest communities, GiveWell's team is digging into the real effects in real time, identifying highly cost-effective ways to help and sharing everything they learn for free.

Speaker 1 More than 150,000 donors have trusted them with over $2.5 billion.

Speaker 1 Evidence suggests these donations will save over 300,000 lives and improve millions more. Their research is free and they don't take a cut of your tax-deductible donation.

Speaker 1 To make a tax deductible donation today, go to givewell.org and pick podcast and enter search engine at checkout. Make sure they know that you heard about GiveWell from Search Engine.

Speaker 1 Again, that's givewell.org to donate or to find out more.

Speaker 1 This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Rosetta Stone. Planning a trip soon?

Speaker 1 I've been brushing up on my Spanish with Rosetta Stone, and honestly, it makes traveling so much more fun. Greeting people in their own language, even just a little, completely changes the experience.

Speaker 1 Rosetta Stone has been trusted for over 30 years and helps you learn naturally, starting with words, moving to phrases, and then full sentences. I love how flexible the lessons are.

Speaker 1 You can do a quick five-minute session while waiting in line, or a longer one when you have the time. Plus, this is a perfect non-clutter gift.

Speaker 1 No shipping, no wrapping, just a thoughtful experience that really lasts. Don't wait, unlock your language learning potential now.

Speaker 1 Search engine listeners can grab Rosetta Stone's lifetime membership for 50% off. That's unlimited access to 25 language courses for life.

Speaker 1 Visit rosettastone.com slash search engine to get started and claim your 50% off today. Give a gift that keeps giving.
Go to rosettastone.com slash search engine and start learning today.

Speaker 1 All right.

Speaker 4 Yes, we have our presentation materials. We're going to show you some internal metrics and statistics.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And what this slide shows is modest show growth in real absolute terms, total download terms. And while that might be, I think, cause for concern for

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 We did not have as big of a staff as we would have liked.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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. And that continues to excite us as we

Speaker 4 pick and choose the ambitious episodes that we want to deliver to you guys. And we can actually go to the next slide.
The The next slide shows that per episode download number.

Speaker 4 So you can see year over year, we grew the show by something like 30,000 listeners per episode.

Speaker 4 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?

Speaker 4 In 2025, that was closer to 280,000.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 5 The other thing that was interesting, I thought, sorry to interrupt you, Garen, was like, and because I know some people will be listening to this and won't be able to see the slide.

Speaker 5 But it was interesting, like the top five are how to stop being so phone addicted.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Third one was a reported piece, The Dave and Buster's anomaly. The fourth one was another reported piece, Are Microplastics Really a Problem?

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 I love that week to week, it might be a conversation, it might be an investigation, it might be something in between.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 3 Exactly. And while this slide shows you guys averages,

Speaker 3 those top episodes cross those per

Speaker 3 episode numbers. And yeah, they were just like little rockets.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 Cool. Next slide is our top advertisers, PJ, take it away.

Speaker 5 I had a whole spiel about this. I had one spiel that I tried out at the truth.
She was like, that spiels quite bad. And then there's a different, oh, I remember this spiel.

Speaker 5 What's exciting for us about our top advertisers? So it's Viori, Movie, Built, Groons, and Mint Mobile.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 the listeners of the show actually find valuable and interesting. And if the listeners find them valuable, they're buying the product.

Speaker 5 If the listeners are buying the product, the advertisers are coming back.

Speaker 5 So the repeatingness of it, as we decide sort of which brands to work with or not work with as advertising partners, like it's a sign that maybe we're doing something right, we hope.

Speaker 5 Was that, that was a spiel, right, Shirley? That's an honest spiel. Okay.

Speaker 4 This slide is talking about

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And so the last time we got together in this exact kind of format was about a year ago, almost to the day. And in that meeting, we had some things that had been

Speaker 4 somewhere on the spectrum of like frustrating us to

Speaker 4 really annoying us.

Speaker 4 And those things that we talked about in 2024 were studio space.

Speaker 3 We got a new studio. Hello.
Thank you, Odyssey.

Speaker 4 We are sitting in it right now.

Speaker 3 Yes. So we are

Speaker 3 Exactly in a studio, four of us, Emily, Garrett, Armin, and I, all with mics with with lighting, which is really exciting.

Speaker 3 And yeah, recording this. So that's been a huge boon.
And

Speaker 3 video and social,

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 like channel on TikTok and YouTube. And so we worked with them to do a little video for the Dave and Busters anomaly, where there was an iPhone mystery that we were trying to solve.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Too few hands.

Speaker 4 Too few hands. So we were in the process of trying to

Speaker 4 slowly and mindfully find new people to work with. And very excitingly and immediately, helpfully, we found Emily Maltaire, who is sitting to my left and is also on camera here.

Speaker 4 Emily joined our team as an associate producer this year.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 6 I'm so thrilled to be here.

Speaker 4 And then the last one, which will forever be on the slide, is just growing the show.

Speaker 4 And PJ, you want to talk to this one?

Speaker 5 Yeah. I mean, it's funny.
I feel like we,

Speaker 5 there's like, we're at a funny point. We're like

Speaker 5 a heavy, lightweight show in terms of audience. Like we're, we're at the point where

Speaker 5 My theory of podcasting is that at the size we are now, the show can start to grow organically as people recommend it.

Speaker 5 Like one strategy for growth is just like, you try to do great, high impact stuff.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 It settles an argument we were having. It opens an argument we can have, whatever.

Speaker 5 That is a nice place about where we are. The truth, though, is like to get to a more

Speaker 5 easy, easy to be ambitious,

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 We did some of that this year. We're doing a bit more, but I think that we're going to have to start to think about things like the Dave and Busters

Speaker 5 video we did, where it was like one short video clip that threw it to the podcast, but was very much like a different billboard on a different part of the internet highway setting people towards the show.

Speaker 5 So I think we're trying to, you know, what's hard about a lean sort of like non-like huge venture scale business is like every new idea the show has, somebody the show has to do.

Speaker 5 And we're lucky in that we have a bunch of really ambitious people who are ambitious about making the show great.

Speaker 5 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?

Speaker 4 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 is going to tell you about it.

Speaker 5 Oh, yeah. So our two-part

Speaker 5 series on Bergheim, the nightclub in Germany, the options for that have been purchased by Bon Yang and Matt Rogers, who who are going to turn it into a movie, like a feature movie,

Speaker 5 which we are so excited about. It's such a

Speaker 5 bizarre, funny outcome. We're such fans of theirs.

Speaker 5 We're just really like

Speaker 5 stunned and happy. And,

Speaker 5 you know, when you make things, they don't feel very real.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And then we throw them into 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.

Speaker 5 You're like, oh, that's weird. Okay.
So we're very happy.

Speaker 5 Is that a good description of our mind state? Am I missing anything, Garrett?

Speaker 4 Beautiful.

Speaker 3 Absolutely beautiful.

Speaker 3 Someone asked in the chat, will we be involved with the production?

Speaker 5 I don't, we, 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.

Speaker 5 But like,

Speaker 5 yeah,

Speaker 5 my hope and expectation is that they do something we can't imagine with it.

Speaker 3 We do get a credit, which we're super excited about. There will be somewhere,

Speaker 3 you know, in the movie based on this podcast episode credit.

Speaker 4 It's very exciting.

Speaker 4 Okay, we're going to turn to some incognito mode statistics.

Speaker 4 But once again, we just want to say thank you before we do that. We get to make the show because of everyone on the Zoom.

Speaker 3 So thank you.

Speaker 4 Incognito mode, the premium subscription, about 2.5% of our total listeners subscribe to be a paid member of the show, which is a really exciting number for us to see.

Speaker 4 And those 2.5%

Speaker 4 of our listeners represent like a pretty significant chunk of our budget.

Speaker 4 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 contributing to the thing that we are making.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I did want to add that it was a

Speaker 3 big,

Speaker 3 mildly stressful year for us in terms of our paid subscriptions, which is we switched

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And I know there were some kind of, as happens with these sorts of switches, some like technical issues, some folks having trouble,

Speaker 3 you know, accessing their new premium feed because the old premium feed, the old platform had not been removed. And so anyway, thank you guys for sticking with us.

Speaker 3 Apologies for anything that was annoying. I also had trouble connecting my feed.
So I personally experienced what you did.

Speaker 3 But yeah, all in all, it's been great. We're super happy with where we're at.

Speaker 5 Yeah. And as I was, it's funny.
We like, it took us a while to sort of troubleshoot the source of the

Speaker 5 problem. And it meant that for months, every weekend on Sunday, I would just sit down at my laptop and try to like

Speaker 5 tech support listeners who couldn't get their feeds to work. It has been really nice having that not happen anymore.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And the idea that we were

Speaker 5 causing dissatisfaction was so, so, such a bad feeling. And I think there's always going to be stuff at the margins, but I think that it is now working and that is a vast relief.

Speaker 3 We're going to take a quick break.

Speaker 1 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, yes, no.

Speaker 1 This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Quince. With the holidays coming up and temperatures dropping, I've been relying on Quince to keep my wardrobe simple, stylish, and reliable.

Speaker 1 They're Mongolian cashmere sweaters, only $50, unbelievably soft, and they look way more expensive.

Speaker 1 Quince covers all the essentials, all made from premium materials by trusted factories that meet high standards for craftsmanship and ethics.

Speaker 1 By cutting out the middle men, they deliver luxury quality pieces at a fraction of the price. And if you're gift shopping, Quince has you covered beyond clothing.

Speaker 1 Home, bath, kitchen, and travel items that make perfect presents for anyone or yourself. Get your wardrobe sorted and your gift list handled with Quince.

Speaker 1 Don't wait, go to quince.com slash search engine for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada too.
That's quince.com slash search engine.

Speaker 1 Free shipping and 365 day returns, quince.com slash search engine.

Speaker 1 This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Groons.

Speaker 1 The holidays are magical, but let's be honest, they're hectic. Between travel, parties, and all the indulgent treats, it's easy for your health goals to slip.
That's why you should try groons.

Speaker 1 They're a daily pack of gummies that pack everything you need. Not just a multivitamin, a greens gummy, or a prebiotic, but all of that together.
And they taste amazing.

Speaker 1 You can grab your gummies each morning and feel good knowing you're hitting your nutrient goals without overthinking it. Each snack pack includes six grams of prebiotic fiber.

Speaker 1 That's more than three times the fiber of leading greens powders and more than two cups of broccoli. Groon supports your gut immunity, energy, cognition, and even beauty.

Speaker 1 It's vegan, nut-free, gluten-free, dairy-free, and free of artificial colors or flavors. And of course, Groon's ingredients are backed by over 35,000 research publications.

Speaker 1 There's also Groon's Kids, so the little ones can get the same all-in-one nutrition. Get up to 52% off with code search at groons.co.

Speaker 1 That's code search at gru ns.co

Speaker 1 This episode of Search Engine is brought to you apart by 1-800 contacts. You ever get that mini heart attack when you realize you're on your last pair of contacts? I certainly have.

Speaker 1 Scrambling, digging out those ancient classes that I have not touched in years, panicking, wondering if I'm going to make it through the day, total chaos. Which why I switched to 1-800 contacts?

Speaker 1 Seriously, it's a game changer. I can renew my prescription online in under 10 minutes with their express exam.

Speaker 1 Then my exact contacts, the ones my doctor prescribes, show up at my door with fast, free shipping. They even have a best price guarantee, free returns, and perks like free torn lens replacement.

Speaker 1 I have genuinely been using 1-800 contacts for years. I find them super easy to use.
It takes all the stress out of running out of contacts.

Speaker 1 Whether you have a strong prescription or astigmatism, I have both. Getting contacts does not have to be a hassle.
Let 1-800Contacts get you the contact lenses you need right now.

Speaker 1 Order online at 1-800Contacts.com or download the free 1-800 Contacts app today.

Speaker 4 And with that, we're going to transition to your questions. And so, Emily, is there one we should start with?

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 5 Howie, can you hear me?

Speaker 4 Yeah, we can hear you.

Speaker 5 What's up?

Speaker 7 This is really fun. This is the first time I've joined one of these, but I'm a huge fan of the show.

Speaker 7 I think my question was: do you 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.

Speaker 3 That is such a good question.

Speaker 5 It's funny. I mean, there's like an official answer and an unofficial answer.
The official answer is no,

Speaker 5 only because that, like, unlike most digital, like if you worked at BuzzFeed in 2015, My understanding was everything people published was at least AB tested and often more.

Speaker 5 You know, they would pitch a bunch of 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.

Speaker 5 RSS publication, as far as I know, doesn't offer anything like that.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 What we have done a couple times is we've published an episode that we really liked and we felt like it wasn't getting enough listeners.

Speaker 5 Like all of our episodes tend to be within within a pretty tight band, but we've been like, that really felt like it deserved more.

Speaker 5 And then, I think, twice in the past year,

Speaker 5 like two weeks later, we've gone back and just changed a title.

Speaker 5 Um, 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, and people weren't really listening.

Speaker 5 So, we changed it to something that was sort of like, Here's what it's really about.

Speaker 5 And then, I feel like the one we did about weighing cats versus birds got changed a few times.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 6 Awesome.

Speaker 6 I wanted to call on Jared. You had a question about using short clips.
If you want to come off mute and ask that.

Speaker 5 Sure. Hey, PJ.
Hey, Jared. You were talking in your opening statement about keeping the podcast long form.

Speaker 5 Is there an opportunity or a downside to potentially like clipping the current long form

Speaker 5 podcast format and using it to have reached out to

Speaker 5 a wider audience or people that are maybe

Speaker 5 like stuck in that

Speaker 5 short form area of the internet to maybe bring in new audience members. I think it's a great idea.
I mean, we've been talking about it a lot internally.

Speaker 5 Like my feeling right now, as someone who really does, and I hate when people are like, there's a good type of media and there's a bad type of media.

Speaker 5 And the good type's the type we're making and the bad types, all the other stuff. But like, I do like long form stuff.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 I just want us to do it in a way where like,

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 when you come back, you're actually disappointed by what you find, but also where it feels like something that is cool and entertaining if you encounter it on TikTok or on Instagram reels, like not something where it feels kind of slapped together and like we were just trying to get to minimum viable video, but like something that looks entertaining, beautiful, thoughtful, whatever.

Speaker 6 Cool.

Speaker 6 I saw a question from Chris about AI. If you wanted to come off mute.

Speaker 8 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

Speaker 8 increasing the efficiency and the productivity, as well as

Speaker 8 where you've seen it not work.

Speaker 5 Oh, just like AI as a tool?

Speaker 5 It's interesting. So AI weirdly, obviously like AI is both a useful and highly, highly, highly polarizing technology in America.

Speaker 5 People are worried both about job loss, but also just like, are these tools that

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 The place where almost every podcast is, including ours, has started using it over the past,

Speaker 5 I don't know, it's been like six or seven years now is that the script, the way it used to work is you would conduct like a two, three, four hour interview.

Speaker 5 And then afterwards you would sit down, listen to your tape, and just manually type all the words from the interview, which was like cool and also immensely not cool.

Speaker 5 You got to sit deeply with your tape and your brain dried out and rotted while you did it. Descript auto-transcribes using AI.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 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,

Speaker 5 make like...

Speaker 5 You can do the audio editing we used to do in Pro Tools largely in text, which I really like.

Speaker 3 I really prefer.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Like I'll ask it to spin something up for me and then I'll go to the primary sources because as I think a lot of people know, AI can have a tendency to deeply hallucinate.

Speaker 6 Awesome. I was wondering if Dylan wanted to come off mute to ask us about the questions we've failed at.

Speaker 5 hi also my first time joining huge fan of the show um

Speaker 5 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 aren'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

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Truly, that's such a you question. What do you think?

Speaker 3 We are such a tiny show that I honestly, I feel like if there's one really excellent moment in an interview, we will try our damnedest to save it. There's an episode we put out last year, which sat in

Speaker 3 just like sat on the shelf for ages because we just couldn't figure it out.

Speaker 3 It was, 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 our expert on the fact that he himself had bought luggage at the luggage store.

Speaker 3 And it was really like, it made me laugh every time. And I was like, we have to find a way to do this.
And so we kind of created this extensive history of commerce at the airport.

Speaker 3 And then the whole thing kind of just fell into place. And

Speaker 3 really, I, you know, love the episode. So I feel like a lot of things, it's

Speaker 3 the beauty of being able to write

Speaker 3 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 are certainly episodes that have been sitting on our docket.

Speaker 3 There's one that Garrett's going to give me a look when I say this, Ticketmaster, where there's an interview we did with an expert, expert, with a historian who I just, I really enjoy it.

Speaker 3 But for us, it's 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?

Speaker 3 So sometimes we, you know, we're like looking for the right hook or the right extra little shiny bit to add to the thing.

Speaker 3 I'm trying to think, is there a question where we just dumped it, but we loved it. We just couldn't.
We were talking about one yesterday about volcanoes.

Speaker 4 The volcanoes one. I was thinking about the arson one, a lot of fire related.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 Well, let me tell you the volcano one because 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?

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And it's like, well, what's the, what are the pieces you need for that one? Um, yeah.

Speaker 4 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, uh, we've put it on on the shelf.

Speaker 4 Maybe we'll go figure it out someday because it's charmed us enough to like keep it in the mix.

Speaker 4 And I think we still have enough hubris to suspect that we'll figure out a way to make all of them work eventually.

Speaker 3 The arson one, though, it did die. It was a fascinating story where it was a very deeply personal one where somebody told PJ about

Speaker 3 a case of arson in their town and

Speaker 3 the

Speaker 5 it was like a it was like a very

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Like we don't, there's other stories we can do. Yeah.

Speaker 6 Cool.

Speaker 6 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?

Speaker 3 Sure. Hello.

Speaker 2 I was just curious how long you spent working on that two-part series

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 3 Great question. PJ, I'm going to out you hear.
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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And he told me that like all of his work, it went from being like a couple 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.

Speaker 3 And I found that to be such an interesting,

Speaker 3 surprising tidbit.

Speaker 3 This is before data centers kind of took over on the news. And I tried for a good several months to get PJ interested.

Speaker 3 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 kind of enthusiastic person, but other people on the team were enthusiastic and he's like going along with it.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And with data centers, he just couldn't do it.

Speaker 3 And so I had to take,

Speaker 3 I was like, fine, I will report a story then.

Speaker 3 And so

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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, the rest of the team, the story was delayed.

Speaker 3 We went to Memphis quite late in the process and added an entire section to the story. And so that Russ's team would kind of really come in.
And like that Gunn episode saved us a lot of times.

Speaker 3 I love it, but it was really one where PJ is like, you need something. I can rustle it up in days.

Speaker 5 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 is like, you're constantly looking for ways to ease production.

Speaker 5 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?

Speaker 5 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?

Speaker 5 you know, the production time we're buying ourselves. And Shruthi,

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Like when truth is in the reporter's 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.

Speaker 5 So it was 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.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 5 Yeah, sure.

Speaker 5 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

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And I was wondering if you guys had considered something like that for this show as like a regular segment.

Speaker 3 So this is a question really close to our hearts.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 There were things that worked beautifully about that show, some things that were much harder just in terms of production.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 So, it's like, you know, something that is very

Speaker 3 question-driven, but an answer that uses a lot of archival, maybe just one interview, but if we really need to, like a couple interviews, that was the original concept.

Speaker 3 And so yes, yes, no is really just that. As a person who produced a lot of those

Speaker 3 segments, you know, you try to pick a question that has, or you try to pick a tweet,

Speaker 3 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 like world to another,

Speaker 3 has like some characters ideally, and archival.

Speaker 3 So, if you go back and listen to Guess Jos Knows, 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 build into something that felt like more than a conversation with just, you know, three dudes in a room.

Speaker 3 So, yeah, that is search engine.

Speaker 3 It is when we can pull it off with just one voice, like something something like the Gunner episode was Daniel talking to PJ about an interview that he, I'm sorry, about a story that he reported for,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 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 Yasius Knows too, it's really hard to find the right ones.

Speaker 3 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,

Speaker 3 you know, no production hitches type format.

Speaker 5 I agree with all that.

Speaker 5 And like, yeah, I think like, I think one of the, first of all, obviously, I just know we're randomly chosen by Alex Bloomberg. I don't know if this is like figuring out anything.

Speaker 5 I think the place where this show actually tries to be an homage that, as Shruthi was saying, is like, we're doing a lot of topical explainers and trying to pick ones that

Speaker 5 are sort of like

Speaker 5 one of the modes that I think this show is in is very recent history. Like we're a history show about things that happened six months or two years ago.

Speaker 5 I think the other part though that you might be pointing at is one of the things Reply All did, I think, well,

Speaker 5 was

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And we've leaned away from that with Search Engine. Some of that is a function of, I don't know if I co-host,

Speaker 5 but it's also like a pretty intentional production decision, just because

Speaker 5 sort of the

Speaker 5 thing that Reply O was a little bit unfortunately legendary for was being a show that required a lot of production hours to make.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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 Mike Talent.

Speaker 5 It's immensely hard on the production staff, um the editors and people behind the pro tools monitor so we've done it a little bit like i hear that hybrid sometimes like in our episodes with manny no and devin like when garrett's on mic you'll hear stories and conversation being told but it is hard it's really hard and we want to make this show so that it's sometimes hard but not always hard um

Speaker 5 I think it's funny. There's one thing we're working on that is going to go out in January that is like,

Speaker 5 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 conversationally, like they move between analysis and comedy very quickly.

Speaker 5 And it's about an internet experiment. Like, I'm to see, we learn a lot about the show by the emails we get and the feedback we get.

Speaker 5 It's not like reply all redux or anything, but the one thing I hear people missing in questions like that is is like the feeling of an active hang that you're learning from.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Not to, can you hear me trying to make like the gentlest promise possible?

Speaker 3 I mean, the buy,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 5 But I just want to be careful. 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.

Speaker 5 They are like singular, weird talents. Like, you, sometimes people will be like, I missed a segment.
I'm like, well, people made that segment.

Speaker 5 And like, those people are working on different things now. If I, if I called Alex Bloomberg at like the play, he's like trying to save the world with like green climate technology.

Speaker 5 I was like, we got to get the gang back together. He'd be like, no.

Speaker 5 But yeah, we're trying to. We're trying to make sure that we honor the spirit of things people might miss.

Speaker 3 Absolutely. I just meant like from a production standpoint.

Speaker 1 How dare you?

Speaker 3 I'm so sorry. Just erase what I said.

Speaker 5 Can't, it's on the internet. Garrett, you got anything else?

Speaker 4 I have nothing else. Does anybody else on the team have anything else?

Speaker 3 PJ, just

Speaker 3 take us away.

Speaker 5 I know I started this way, but

Speaker 5 really, truly,

Speaker 5 thank you. This is, we are, we are counter trend right now.
We are making an audio show with listeners of poor. We may as well be like in the 1970s.

Speaker 5 And we are,

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And with that, we'll see you at the next board meeting.

Speaker 3 Bye, guys. Bye.

Speaker 9 Make your home smell as good as it looks with Pura4, the smart fragrance diffuser that lets you control your scent from anywhere.

Speaker 9 Choose from hundreds of premium fragrances, schedule your favorites, and set the perfect mood for every moment. And right now, get yours free when you've subscribed to two cents for 12 months.

Speaker 9 Don't wait, this limited-time offer won't last. Try it risk-free for 30 days.
Now at Pura.com.