Unlocked: The State of Search Engine 2025

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 the 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 so often. So we scheduled what we called a board meeting, which was me and my collaborator Shruti ensuits 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 he weren't sure what the rules were so you couldn't be sure if people would break them. And as our independent podcast is turned into something like a very small business, we 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 a thousand, which 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'd like to join one live in the future, you can sign up to be an incognito mode supporter at search engine.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. Okay. Peter, are you nervous? Less nervous than usual, which still means relatively nervous. I would say like I'm at a 50 percent, not in 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. 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 Minnow. It's his sentence. When he wrote it, he was talking about TV. He was 1961. 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. 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. 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. 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 lost sheet, or a ratings book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland." The internet today, obviously, is our vast wasteland. 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 the people who 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 of 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 show to podcast networks, ask them to give us a bunch of money up front 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. Or 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. 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 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 was 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, and 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. 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. The thing we make, sir, Chen Zhen, does not have a natural home on this new internet. 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. Pass 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. When we were shopping the show, we had some meetings where some people would ask, would Sir Chen Zhen want to join the TV internet? 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. On the audio side, the conversations would be about the most people could do. The video conversations, none of which went very far, but they would have people asking, how much money do you think Sir Chen Zhen needs? That question, just how much money do you need? I think anyone who makes stuff finds that question very intoxicating. There's 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 the big budget. I thought about a grill that I personally wanted to buy. I came up with comically large numbers. I know that a story about Sir Chen Zhen going video plays in a very specific way in this room. 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. But the truth is, I am not against moving images. If there was a way where we could figure out how to make something that makes me feel the way Sir Chen Zhen does, but in video, I would now 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 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 have 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 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. And we think there's always going to be an audience for long form, whatever long form evolves to mean. In exchange 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, 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 episode that just did insane numbers, was a simple interview. The title was, how do I use my phone last without meditation or self-discipline? For us, that is a big data point about where people are, where sentiment is. 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 that we can actually present to 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 forum 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. 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. You're here because of you. I'm going to turn it over to Garrett, who has made you slides. 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 job before, but these slides have some very juicy details on them. Those slides after these ads. This episode of Surge Engine is brought to you in part by Mooby. If you're tired of endlessly scrolling through streaming algorithms designed for passive background noise. You need to check out Mooby. Mooby is a global film company, bringing great sentiments to the world, curating and elevating visionary filmmaking that's hand-picked always. It's the kind of platform for movies you'll actually watch, fall in love with, and keep thinking and talking about long after the credits roll. One of their newest exclusive titles is Teenage Sex and Death at Camp My Asma, directed by visionary writer, director, Jane Schoenrun, who you might know from. I saw the TV glow. It's a world-expanding, genre-bending wonder, starting Hannah Einbinder and Jillian Anderson. This story follows a young director trying to resurrect the faded camp My Asma/YourFranchise. But when she visits the original reclusive star, they spiral into this blood-soaked world of desire, fear and sheer delirium. If you can try Mooby free for 30 days at Mooby.com/SurgeEngine. That's m-u-b-i.com/SurgeEngine for a whole month of great cinema for free. Alright, 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 your 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. You can sort of see how the show grows in terms of total downloads over the course of the year. We're nearing the end of our 2025 season. What this slide shows is modest show growth in real absolute terms, total download terms. And while that might be, I think, calls 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 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 grow it 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. 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. 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. The other thing that was interesting, I thought, sorry, I didn't have a few games. It was like, and because I know some people will be listening to this, I 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 that Dave Investor is normally. The fourth one was another reported piece. Our micro-opostics 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. 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 out you bought. 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. Yeah. Cool. Next slide is our top advertisers, PJ, take it away. I had to hold a spiel about this. I had one spiel that I tried out. I was sure that she was like, that spiel is 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 Vuri, movie, built, groons, and mint mobile. Honestly, just that they're companies that keep returning. Like that is a good sign. Like a design 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 valuable, they're buying the product. If the listeners are buying the product, the advertisers are coming back. So the repetitiveness 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. Was that, that was the spiel, right, really? That's an honest spiel. Okay. This slide is talking about 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 format was about a year ago, almost to the day. And in that meeting, we had some things that had been somewhere on the spectrum of like frustrating us to really annoying us. In those things that we talked about in 2024, we're studio space. So we got a new studio. Hello. Thank you, Odyssey. We are sitting in that right now. Yes. So we are exactly in a studio. Four of us, Emily Garrett, Armin and I, all with mics with lighting, which is really exciting. And yeah, recording this. So that's been a huge boon. And video and social. That's one where we made no headway. Though we did have one experiment we did with the folks that make track star, 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 did a thing with PJ where they stopped people on the street and told them about this little glitch in the system as 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. Two few hands. Two few hands. We were in the process of trying to slowly and mindfully find new people to work with and very excitingly and immediately, hopefully we found Emily Malter who was 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 there and immediately feeling both energized and more capable as a team. So Emily. Yeah, I'm so thrilled to be here. And then the last one which will forever be on the slide is just growing the show. And PJ, you want to talk to this one? Yeah. I mean, it's funny. I feel like we're out of any point. We're like a heavy lightweight show in terms of audience like 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 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. 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 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 going to have to start to think about things like the Dave and Buster's video we did, where it was like one short video clip that's through the podcast, but it was very much like a different billboard on a different part of the internet highway setting 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 is like every new idea the show has something the show has to do. And we're lucky that we have a bunch of really ambitious people who are ambitious about making the show right, 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. 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. Oh, yeah. So our two part series on Bergen, the nightclub in Germany, the options for that have been purchased by Bonyang 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 use each other trying to come up with things that are worthwhile. 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. Yeah, that's weird. Okay. We're very happy. Is that a good description of our mindset? Am I missing anything Garrett? Beautiful. Absolutely. So someone asked in the chat, will we be involved with the production? 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, yeah, I, my, my hope and expectations that they do something we can't imagine with it. We do get a credit, which we're super excited about. There will be somewhere, you know, in the movie, based on this podcast episode, credit. It's very exciting. Okay, we're going to turn to some incognito mode statistics, 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. So thank you. Incognito mode, the premium subscription, about two and a half percent of our total listeners subscribe to be a paid member of the show, which is a really exciting number for us to see. 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 we are making. Yeah, I did want to add that it was a big, mildly stressful year for us in terms of our paid subscriptions, which is we switched 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. And I know there were some kind of as happens with these sorts of switches, some like technical issues, some folks having trouble, 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 apologies for anything that was annoying. I also had trouble connecting my feed. So I personally experienced what you did. But yeah, all in all, it's been great. We're super happy with where we're at. Yeah, and as I was, it's funny, we like, it took us a while to sort of troubleshoot the source of 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 got their feed 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 the 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, but I think that it is now working and that is a vast relief. 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 fail to answer, stories that crashed and burned, and yes, yes, now. And with that, we're going to transition to your questions, and so Emily, is there one we should start with? 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 Mike. How would you hang in here, Mimi? Yeah, we can hear you. So, 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 your 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 downwind? That is such a good question. It's funny. I mean, there's like an official answer and an unofficial answer. The official answer is no, only because 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. 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 times is we've published an episode that we really liked, and we felt like it wasn't getting enough listeners. All of our episodes tend to be within a pretty tight band, but we've been like, that really felt like a dessert more, and then I think twice in the past year, like two weeks later, we've gone back and just changed the title. Here's one about teens and AI use for homework that had a kind of like, cutesy, nonsensical evocative title that I'd been into, and people weren't really listening, so we changed 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. 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. - Hey, Jared. - You were talking in your opening statement about keeping the podcast long form. Is there an opportunity or a downside to potentially like clipping the current long form podcasts format and using it to reach out to a wider audience or people that are natively stuck in that 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, 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 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 it feels like it's a true advertisement of the thing it's advertising. You know, we're not grabbing something out of context where when you come back, you're actually disciplining 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, reals, 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. Cool. I saw a question from Chris about AI. If you wanted to come off mute. 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. Oh, just like AI as a tool. It's interesting. So AI weirdly, obviously, 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 use maybe correctly can help us research and think and use 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 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 transcribed using it. 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 and not a last stop research tool. 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. - Awesome. I was wondering if Dylan wanted to come off mute to ask us about the questions we've failed at. - Hi. Although my first time joining huge fan of the show. Yeah, I was wondering, 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 that 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. - Truly, that's such a you question. What do you think? - 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 just like sat on the shelf for ages 'cause we just couldn't figure it out. 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 interrogating 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, we have to find a way to do this and so we kind of created this extensive history of commerce at the airport and then the whole thing kind of just fell into place and really I love the episode. So I feel like a lot of things it's at the beauty of being able to write 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, there's one that Garrett's gonna give me a look when I say this ticket master where there's an interview we did with an expert with a historian who I just really enjoy it 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. So sometimes we were like looking for the right hook or the right extra little shiny bed to add to the thing. I'm trying to think, is there a question where we just dumped it but what we loved it, we just couldn't, we were talking about one yesterday. - It's about volcano. - The volcano's one, I was thinking about the arson one, a lot of fire related to the related thing. - Oh yeah, well let me tell the other volcano one 'cause I'm determined that we find a way to do this. 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 are the pieces you need for that one? Yeah. - 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, we've put it on the shelf, maybe we'll go figure it out someday because it's charm just 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. - 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, 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. We don't, there's other stories we can do. - Yeah, 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? - 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's mostly just doing a two-way with a guest. - 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, I've known him for many years, and he does like gorgeous concert venues and like incredible, just these really exquisite sound-focused spaces. 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 the sound that was coming out of data centers. And I found that to be such an interesting, surprising tip that this is before data centers kind of took over on the news. And I tried for 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 kind of enthusiastic person, but other people on the team were enthusiastic, and he's like going along with it. But it's on him to make it good, and we all work together, but 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 was like fine, I will report a story then. And so it's been a year, I would say, concentrated work effort maybe closer to like four, 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 that 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 is like, you need something, I can rustle it in days. - It was fun just to say like as a person on the team, trying to support it on classes. Like, you know, the challenge of a relatively low budget, a 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're gonna 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. It's like, yeah, but how can we make it harder? Like, what are the things that are worth, you know, the production time we're buying ourselves? And Shruti, who like a great editor pushes, certainly me, I think the entire team with her curiosity, like you don't wanna come back with less than she wants to know about. You don't wanna not be able to answer a question. You don't wanna have to say like, oh, we didn't call that person, who could have been great. You don't wanna 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 Shruti'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 the 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. So it's fun to lean into like, serious reporting ambitious, ambition on a story. Just as it's also fun to like, do the breezy stuff. - Okay, we're gonna do one more question. Ryan had a question about segments on search engine. If you wanna come off mute. - Yeah, sure. Yeah, I don't mean to compare search engine to reply off 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 face 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. It's like a regular segment. - So this is a question really close to our hearts. I'm gonna answer it 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 or apply 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 interviews, that was the original concept. And so yes, yes, no, is really just that as a person who produced a lot of those segments, you know, you tried to pick a question that has, or you tried 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, it has like some characters, ideally, and archival. So if you go back and listen to guest's notes, 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. So yeah, that is search engine. It is, when we can pull it off with just one voice, like something like the Gooner 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 'cause 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 got what I'm saying. Once you see that that's the template, you kind of can, 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 the SSNOs too, 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. - I agree with all that. And like, yeah, I think one of, first of all, obviously, SSNOs were randomly chose my house, but I don't know about this big end or anything. I think the place where this show actually tries to be in homage to that, as Shrewdy 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 this show is in is very recent history. Like where 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 Repile did, I think, well, 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 Serge Engine. Some of that is a function of anarcho-host, but it's also like a pretty intentional production decision just because sort of the thing that Repile was a little bit unfortunately 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 of being particular, but a lot of it was just about when you're trying to both preserve the funny, improvised, real things that happened in 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 bit, like I hear that hybrid, sometimes like in our episodes with Manino and Devon, 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. I think it's funny, there's one thing we're working on that is gonna go out in January. That is like, you know, to label a somewhat benigned 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. 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, it's not like, reply all reducks 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? - I mean the buy, the theory of the buy chocolate was absolutely a yes, here's no, like there's no, it's just PJ and Ryan, you know, and Ryan's explaining to him. - 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, they're like a singular weird talents. Like sometimes people will be like, I miss a segment. I'm like, well, people have made that segment and like those people are working on different things now. If I, if I could call it Alex Blumer, get like the place, he's like trying to save the world to like green climate technology was like, we got to get the gang back together and 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. - Absolutely, I just met like from a production stand. - How dare you. (laughing) - I'm so sorry, just erase what I said. - Yeah, it's on the internet. Garrett, you got anything else? - I have nothing else. Does anybody else on the team have anything else? - PJ, just take us away. - Did you? - I know I started this way, but really truly, thank you. We are counter trend right now. We are making an audio show with listeners support. We may as well be like in the 1970s and we are, I just, we all are aware of how lucky we are and thank you for creating that look. Thank you for being here. We are immensely grateful for you all. And with that, we'll see you at the next part of meeting. Bye guys. - Bye. - Bye. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)