Hi everybody,

The series we spent a year on is finally out. An ambitious, surprising, two-part series about the past, present, and rapidly arriving future of driverless cars.

We’re very proud of this work, and it’s prompted an outpouring of thoughtful emails from listeners, across a wide range of perspectives. Which always makes me feel like, “OK, we did something right with this one.”

If you haven’t listened, my promise to you is that even if you don’t think you’re particularly interested in driverless cars, you will be within the first five minutes. What the story will tell you is that they’re about to rapidly transform America, and it’ll tell you how and why and about the fight that’s taking place in a cinematic and entertaining way. If I do say so myself.

I’m going to drop the episodes below, but please read beyond the links because I’ve written a little bit about what I learned about my own biases working on this thing.

Also, our very first ad in our newsletter! Framer, one of our show’s sponsors, surveyed 1,900+ web professionals to figure out how teams build and manage their websites today and included the findings in a report. If you’re curious to see what they found, check it out here. And if you’re interested in advertising with us, shoot us a note at pjvogt85@gmail.com, subj: Advertising.

An under-discussed form of media bias

So, this is something to read once you’re done listening, at least to part one.

While I was thinking through the writing in these pieces, I noticed something about myself. Which is that it’s uncomfortable for me, in 2026, to tell a mostly positive story about a tech company. About Waymo, which has sprung out of Google.

Google is obviously a company that’s done both good and bad things for the internet and for the world. But honestly, I’m annoyed to catch myself writing that previous sentence, because it’s a truth everyone with a pulse already knows. I’m not saying “Google is good and bad” to inform you, I’m saying it to establish my own moral bona fides. I’m signaling.

I am doing this because in 2026, we’re living in a backlash to technology companies. A lot of that can be traced to social media, Silicon Valley’s dubious offering to the world. Some of it’s also about AI. As uncertain as AI’s ultimate effects are, the fact that the companies making it are promising vast job loss and also, maybe the annihilation of the world is not really helping Americans get super comfortable with the new technology.

But how do you report from within that backlash? How do you reasonably try to evaluate new technology when people are so pessimistic about technology’s offerings? And it’s not even just about the products! It’s also about the CEOs.

People who 20 years ago, arrived, presenting themselves as nerds with convenient inventions to make life more pleasant, and who have evolved, often into bulked-up, wannabe oligarchs, deranged and drunk on the internet products they’ve created, trampling through our democracy, destroying our newspapers, generally acting like the kinds of minor Roman tyrants who burned a bunch of stuff down before somebody stopped them.

In the face of all that, many readers and most writers seem to want tech journalism that is almost exclusively critical or pessimistic. But – we also have to just figure out, on a case by case basis, what to think about new technology. The problem is, if you want to read positive or even just neutral and informative coverage of technology, many of the places left to go are just cheerleading conducted by the tech CEOs themselves. Among my tribe, journalists, mostly on the east coast, the acceptable stance is mainly just: adversarial, always.

I struggle with that.

At our core, at Search Engine, we’re not pessimistic people. Our show is not a pessimistic show. We want to hold powerful people and companies to account. But we also recognize that technology often improves our lives. Even now.

Our show is trying to consider not just the downsides of tech, but the real ways it could solve, or at least soften our most intractable problems. We’re especially interested in physical technology. Machines. Tech journalists, me more than most, have just spent too much time treating tech as if it’s synonymous with websites, with social media. It’s not.

I guess the bias I’m circling and should name is this: when it comes to tech, there’s legitimate skepticism, and there’s also what I think of as surplus skepticism. Surplus skepticism comes from wanting to abide by social consensus, to prove you’re not a sucker. Online, it’s always safer to critique than to appreciate. I pride myself on caring less about consensus than I did when I was younger, particularly ill-considered consensus. But I felt social discomfort while I was working on these pieces. And it made me wonder where else I’m feeling it but not admitting it to myself.

I don’t know. Some of the subtext of these two episodes is me and the Search Engine team grappling with all that. The story of autonomous vehicles is really just beginning. In ten years, if the tech succeeds, maybe it’ll become enshittified.

And maybe in ten years, the current Waymo CEOs, Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov, will be bombarding us with ads, or traffic, or maybe they themselves will be gorged on super-peptides and their own egos and be annoying and inescapable.

If it happens, we’ll cover it. But right now, as far as I can tell, they’re people making something new. Something new that we’re trying to evaluate on its own merits.

Thanks for reading,

PJ

Hello!

A new one for you.

Two decades ago, bodybuilders on niche internet forums started injecting peptides. Now they're in the secret mini-fridges of some teenage boys. How did they get there? We track their crooked path from Silicon Valley to jaw-smashing influencers.

Further Reading

Jasmine Sun

You can subscribe to her Substack here…

@jasmine’s substack

an anthropology of disruption 📍 essays on AI and Silicon Valley culture

By Jasmine Sun

And you can read Jasmine’s NYT peptides piece here

Ezra Marcus

His website

His peptides piece (”Life on Peptides Feels Amazing”)

Thank you for listening! I like to ask questions each week in these, because I am curious about what’s on your minds. I don’t want to ask people about their medical choices, so I’ll ask this instead: please share the strangest (or most gray market) thing you’ve bought online. Please don’t confess to crimes online. That’s standard advice at this newsletter, but also a specific ask this week.

Thank you for listening! We are re-airing one of our favorite episodes tomorrow, so I’ll be on your feed but younger and more vivaciously.

PJ

Hello! We have a new one for you.

A simple question leads us on a journey from the bowels of New York City through the courtrooms of South Carolina to the disgusting truth.

Please share the most ambitious thing you’ve tried to flush down a toilet in the comments!

Hello, and happy Saturday,

A new one for you!

For the past year, there’s been a steady drumbeat of headlines about Venezuela. Now the US has invaded, arrested its president, and put itself in charge of things. To understand how we got here, we talked to Venezuelan historian Alejandro Velasco, who grew up there and has spent years trying to understand why a country with so much promise has proven so difficult to govern.

⁠The Many Faces of Chavismo - Alejandro Velasco⁠

Barrio Rising - Alejandro Velasco

Things Are Never So Bad That They Can’t Get Worse - William Neuman

⁠Our Forkiverse Experiment Continues

Last week, we here at Search Engine combined with our friends at the podcast Hard Fork to make a very tiny social media website called The Forkiverse. We did this because we are very curious about an alternative form of social media called the fediverse.

This week, on Hard Fork, I joined Kevin Roose and Casey Newton to discuss the micro-dramas, challenges, and joys of our early days as social media moguls. Check it out here if you’re curious!

And The Forkiverse itself continues to churn along! Pop in if you want to say hi, I am continuing to approve new user requests up until the server breaks. So far, so good. So far.

See you early next week with part two,

PJ

Happy Friday!

And welcome to our first episode of the new year.

Our present version of the internet is arguably the worst it’s ever been. Which means – any shot at changing things, even an unlikely one – is worth trying out. Three podcasters who’ve spent years critiquing social media companies try to build their own small alternative social media.

A collaboration with ⁠Hard Fork⁠’s Kevin Roose and Casey Newton. Join ⁠⁠The Forkiverse⁠⁠ here.

See you in the Fediverse!

We’ve had folks joining since this morning. There are all sorts of wrinkles, of course, which is part of the fun. For instance, if you add an account, do check your spam for our sign-up email! Relatedly, if anybody has some free time and wants to volunteer to help with tech support… let me, Kevin, or Casey know in the Forkiverse.

But wrinkles aside, it’s so far been quite fun for me. It’s nice to chat with strangers in a bot-less mini-world. We’ve been making bad fork jokes and swapping extremely low-resolution images of our lives. See you in there, maybe.

yours on the internet,

PJ

Hello!

It’s our final story of the year, a very silly and strange one.

A man walks into an airport body scanner, and with eerie consistency, the machine flags the exact same part of his body. What could be going on? Search Engine investigates a Bermuda Triangle.

Please share in the comments below any light-up anomalies you’ve experienced at the TSA! Our inbox has been filling with such stories already.

A sale on Incognito Mode subscriptions??

I mentioned this on-air, but we are running a very brief holiday sale (twenty percent off!) on Incognito Mode memberships. Bonus episodes, merch discounts, no ads, and more! Buy it for yourself or buy it as a gift, or … buy it as a gift for yourself. I don’t make the rules.

I may (may!) have one more email in your inbox before the year’s over. But in case not — thank you so much for hanging with us in 2025. And we’ll see you very soon with new stories.

Yours on the internet,

PJ

Happy Saturday everybody!

We’ve got a two part story for you this weekend from reporter Sruthi Pinnamaneni.

Tech billionaires have made an enormous bet on AI, the biggest bet that tech has made on anything in a very long time. Reporter Sruthi Pinnamaneni goes on a journey – from Data Center Alley to the shadow of Colossus – to see what the money’s being spent on, and to learn what happens if things go wrong.

In part two of our story about Elon Musk’s growing data center empire, we visit the battle between people in Memphis and xAI. And we try to understand a strange, untested assumption at the heart of the AI financing boom.

Further reading

How Elon Musk’s Supercomputer Freaked Out AI Rivals - Anissa Gardizy

A YouTube video showing the inside of Colossus 1

XAI’s Unusual Dealmaking to Fund Musk’s Colossus 2 - Miles Kruppa

Paul Kedrosky’s Newsletter

Sam Hardiman’s reporting on Colossus 1 & 2, Sam Hardiman’s X account.

This didn’t make it into the story but Sruthi really enjoyed this WSJ article about the conference in ‘The Big Short’ drawing record crowds this year - They Crashed the Economy in 2008. Now They’re Back and Bigger Than Ever.

Why the deep learning boom caught almost everyone by surprise - Timothy B. Lee

Hope you all enjoy this one, a lot of work went into it. A question for you this week — where are you on the general fear versus optimism gradient on AI? And (crucially) how different is that from where you were a year ago?

See you next week with a new one,

PJ

Hello!

We have a new one for you.

A reporter spends a year diving into a subculture of young men online who unite around their extreme commitment to constant, unadulterated porn consumption. Why are they doing this, what is it doing to them, and what does their existence tell us about the internet we’re all stuck on?

⁠The Goon Squad⁠ by Daniel Kolitz for Harper’s Magazine

⁠Daniel’s Twitter⁠

⁠Support Search Engine!⁠

A musical gift from Armen Bazarian

A great number of listeners wrote in after our episode, “The Obituary,” asking where they could find the piece of piano music that closes the episode. It’s an Armen Bazarian composition, and he has graciously uploaded it to his Soundcloud. There are a few more treats there for your ears.

A question for you (yes, you)

This week, in the comments, please share stories of your own (non-pornographic) internet habits you would prefer to break.

Keeping the newsletter brief this week. We will be back with a story which we’re quite excited to share in two weeks.

thanks,

PJ

Hello everybody,

Happy Halloween! We have a new episode for you. It is not especially spooky, but it is very interesting.

People review everything, but they almost never review what it’s like to live in another country. Until now.

We interview Dan Wang, a writer who’s lived in China, covered China, and has had to choose between life here and there. What are the misconceptions Americans have about China? And what should America be copying or not copying from China right now?

• Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang

• Dan Wang’s website

  • A few of Dan’s year-in-review letters - 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020,

  • A list of books Dan likes

• Review, with Andy Daly

  • Forrest reviews addiction

  • Forrest reviews eating 15 pancakes (and 30 pancakes)

• A multilingual rendition of L’Internationale from Tsinghua University

  • Featuring a pop-punk verse midway through

• Li Zaidong, the politician who spent $21 billion trying to create a ski destination

  • CCTV documentary

• Chinese Infrastructure

  • Here’s what the Three Gorges Dam looks like - the largest hydro facility in the world

  • The world’s tallest bridge, the Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge - here it is under construction

  • Video of driving on highways through Guizhou

• The proposed wind farm off the coast of Cape Cod that the Kennedys (and other locals) fought against

• Xi Jinping’s great coif of hair

Commentariat! Please consider sharing either: a review of the place you live, on a five-star scale. Or else your Halloween costume plans, or your kids’.

Thank you, and we’ll see you soon.

PJ

Happy Friday!

We’ve got a new episode for you, but before I tell you about that — we also have an online live event today. 12PM Eastern time, I am taking unanswerable questions live with Kelefa Sanneh. I’m gonna get my brain’s butt kicked.

This is for those Incognito Mode listeners who have signed up at searchengine.show, if you haven’t, you still can. The link to join will go out at 11AM, so if you’re signed up by then, you’re in.

Okay, onto this week’s episode:

The Rage in the Cage

Can you tickle your way to victory in an MMA fight? An investigation into a sports scandal with journalist Pablo Torre

• Mason Lewis vs. Tim Fargo | TITLE FIGHT RAGE IN THE CAGE 24

  • The scandal in question begins around the 7-minute mark

• The Ultimate Fighter, the TV show

  • Season 1’s Best Moments

  • Dana White’s expletive-laden speech to Season 1 contestants

• Joe Rogan’s first appearance as a UFC commentator

• Joe Rogan Experience #2255 - Mark Zuckerberg

  • Mark Zuckerberg and Joe Rogan discuss masculinity and mixed martial arts

• Big John McCarthy: 25+ Years of MMA Ref Stories

• Pablo Torre Finds Out | Why Isn’t There Tickling in MMA? An Investigation

  • Two other episodes we like: Pablo’s interview with Ezra Edelman, and his wonderful story about the richest owner in sports, the silent superstar, and the rotten apple tree

The newsletter is mostly here right now to remind people that a new episode is out and to provide a place to make comments. Of course, please be polite, both to each other and to us, and try to assume good intentions.

Hope you enjoy this one.

Yours on the internet,

PJ

Hello Search Engine World,

A new one for you!

The makers of the medical drama The Pitt have been sued. The allegation: that the show is an unauthorized copy of ER.

This week, investigative reporter Nicholas Kulish walks us through the ensuing drama, reads us the possibly damning private emails, and finally helps us decide where inspiration ends and theft begins.

⁠Is ‘The Pitt’ Really an ‘ER’ Spinoff? - Nicholas Kulish⁠

⁠Sign up to be a premium subscriber at searchengine.show!

Also, do you have TV recommendations?

I’m going to watch Adolescence. I was avoiding it because it seems like a lot but everyone who has watched it agrees that it’s both a lot and also worth it.

Please share in the comments below your recommendations for new TV that you’re enjoying!!

I feel like a person who has been wandering some vast content desert, desperately seeking some TV to watch. If you enjoyed something recently, please drop in the comments. I need an oasis.

Thank you.

Your correspondent on the internet,

PJ

Hello, hello,

A new one for you.

Not long after Alex’s wife Whitney dies, he looks at her obituary and discovers something strange. A sect of people online has hijacked her story and turned it into a disturbing conspiracy theory.

As always, if you have comments about the episode (or thoughts about the current state of the internet) please leave them below. We don’t often chime in, but we follow the conversation here.

About the art in the newsletter this week

All the art this week is from the talented artists at Project: Onward, in Chicago. They’re a non-profit studio and gallery that works with and exhibits artists with disabilities. Whitney, who this week’s story is about, worked there.

Also, most of the art in this newsletter is for sale!

(I should say, it is for sale *for now.* I picked art that I like and would like to buy, but I absolutely invite you to swipe them ahead of me. When else do you get to snag something from the shopping cart of your friendly neighborhood podcast host?)

We’ll be next week with another episode for you. I mentioned this at the top of the show, but if you’re subscribed to Incognito Mode, we have a rare and fun on-mic conversation with our show’s editor, Sruthi Pinnamaneni, coming at you this week.

See you soon,

PJ

Oh, also, sorry. One last piece I really liked from Project: Onward.

Okay, okay that’s all for real. See you next Friday.

Hello!

This Friday, we are having a live conversation on Zoom with Sruthi Pinnamaneni, Search Engine's co-creator and editor. This is part of a Friday lunch series we started this summer, our inaugural episode was with Jonathan Goldstein of Heavyweight.

We'll be talking about the show, and the current state of podcasting. But also, knowing Sruthi, probably also Chinese food, nuclear power, driverless cars, and the music of Bjork.

We'll also be taking some of your questions! And we will be eating fried eggs. 

This Friday, September 12, at 12pm EST. These events are for subscribers only. We use the money from our subscribers to pay for nearly forty percent of our budget (thank you!) 

We'll send out a Zoom link to all of our active subscribers Friday morning at 11am EST.

If you are not currently an Incognito Mode Subscriber, you can sign up before Friday at searchengine.show.

We’ve also recently turned on subscriptions directly through Apple Podcasts, but unfortunately that platform does not give us a way to invite people to these Zoom events. So our Apple Podcasts listeners can hear this conversation later, when we publish it as audio, but they cannot join us live. A little annoying, but we’re glad to have these Apple Podcasts subscriptions online. If you want this to change, please email Apple Podcasts!

Okay! Hope to see you Friday. Please bring eggs.

Thanks, 

PJ 

Happy Monday, everyone!

Garbage Day's Ryan Broderick traces the rise of this goopy green chocolate, and explains how Chinese social media is beginning to tug on US culture in unexpected ways.

The video that started it all.

⁠Support Search Engine!

Sorry this newsletter is coming to you a bit late, I have only myself to blame. But! We’ve got a new episode for you this Friday, in just a few days. Excited to be back in your feeds.

PJ

Hello, hello, hello,

Greetings from the beginning of summer’s dramatic third act. The part of the season where the plot threads finally come together, the theme becomes clear, where soon enough, the credits will roll (they’ll look like leaves).

But first:

Are microplastics really a problem?

Our listener Louisa is very annoyed by her sister’s preoccupation with keeping her children away from microplastics. Louisa wonders: are people with microplastic anxiety kind of overdoing it?

Search Engine investigates.

Some recommendations from July

We had a whole month out of the studio. I found myself with time to think, read, talk to people, watch and listen to new things. It was wonderful.

Some recommendations!

I watched Eddington and thought it was very sharp. It’s so hard to make art about the internet, but this worked for me. Dark, funny, surprising and it somehow managed to capture and clarify a lot of what life online felt like, in 2020 and afterwards.

I laughed, I yelped, I made a weird surprised bark noise (this at the one quick scene that happens on a jet.) Also, crucially for me, Eddington is not a horror movie, so it was something that I could actually watch.

I’m reading Lost and Found, one of those books you find yourself reading as slowly as possible, hanging out in the sentences like they’re a very nice hotel room.

I heard about it from this interview. (I also recommend the interview, which is one of those rare book interviews that doesn’t repeat the book much and stands alone as a very worthwhile listen.)

I rode the ferry a few times from Brooklyn to Manhattan, which you should do if you find yourself in New York while it’s still warm.

I bought a pair of big pants but was too nervous to wear them right away, which is a mistake. Into King Tut’s tomb they go. I guess this is more of a warning than a recommendation. If you buy something weird, wear it before you lose your fragile nerve. And if you see me in public in big pants, please come up to me and say: “those pants look remarkably normal on you, you’re being very normal here right now, please continue to feel normal.” I think something like that could help.

Here are some songs that friends and algorithms sent my way, and which I listened to a lot:

What else? I met some dogs, saw a lot of friends and found myself, at the end, standing at an airport luggage carousel where, somehow, everyone but me apparently may’ve had the exact same suitcase?

Very curious.

That’s all from me this week. We’ll be back with a new one for you this Friday. Thank you for reading. Please tell your friends, family, workplace HR department, and acquaintances that we are back.

Happy to be here for another year,

PJ

Hello Search Engine Nation,

This is it! Our final episode of Search Engine’s second season.

A journalist finds out that many of his vaunted mentors are seeing a psychic. The same psychic. He decides to pay her a visit.

See more of Dan's work at ⁠the 10% Happier podcast⁠, and find his guided meditations at ⁠DanHarris.com⁠.

⁠Support Search Engine!

Further Reading

10% Happier - Dan Harris

Laura Lynne Jackson’s homepage

Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart - Mark Epstein

This is our last episode with our wonderful intern :-(

We were very lucky to work with the brilliant and kind Oscar Noxon. And we are sad to see him go. Here’s a piece he published in June about campus protests at Columbia.

A summer programming note

Thank you to everyone who listened this year! We’re going to rebroadcast some classic episodes in July (unless you’re an Incognito Mode subscriber, no reruns for Incognito Mode listeners).

We’ll be back in August with new episodes for you.

Please have a nice summer, and find some sand for your toes if you can. Feel free to share this week your quiet, unprovable beliefs or intuitions, or stories about the beliefs your friends hold that you struggle with.

Thanks for listening,

PJ

Hello and happy Friday!

We’ve got a new one for you.

A woman gets a disquieting piece of information about her pregnancy, and turns to technology to try to control her future.

Support the show!⁠

Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age - Amanda Hess (⁠Amazon⁠ / ⁠Bookshop⁠)

The newsletter exists to remind people when a new episode is out and to provide a place to make comments. Please be polite, both to each other and us, and try to assume good intentions. If you’ve had experiences with genetic tests, or experiences waiting for health results — positive, negative, strange — please share! And please be especially thoughtful this week about treating each other with respect since stories like that can be pretty vulnerable.

Thanks for listening, wishing you all the tangerines in the world,

PJ

Happy Friday, we’ve got a new one for you.

A high school teacher has a question, but he wants his skeptical teenage students to answer it. Reporter Garrott Graham rides along as they investigate the corporate behavior of an international yogurt brand.

• Lycée Français de New York

• La Fermiere (US & French websites)

• Dr. Shelie Miller - “Five Misconceptions Surrounding the Environmental Impacts of Single-Use Plastic”

As usual, this newsletter is here to remind people that a new episode is out and provide a place to make comments. Please be polite, both to each other and us, and try to assume good intentions.

Also, just to note a happy occasion: this is our first reported story from our show’s senior producer, Garrott Graham.

While Garrott’s voice will be familiar to Search Engine listeners, this is his first time reporting an entire story. Garrott is a force of nature behind the scenes here. His imagination, intellectual drive, and joy animate much of the show you hear from week to week. So it makes us happy to see him on the air reporting a story out. Please wish Garrott a happy first story!

Enjoy your weekend! We’ll have a new one for you next week, too.

PJ

Hello! We announced this on the show, but in case you missed it. We’re doing a live event today, at noon with Heavyweight’s Jonathan Goldstein.

The details — we’re going to chat for about an hour and eat lunch. I have suggested people should bring falafel, but nobody’s going to check you for chickpeas.

The link will be sent out around 11AM to everyone who is signed up for Incognito Mode. If you’re not a member, you can sign up at searchengine.show.

If you run into any hiccups, shoot us a note at pjvogt85@gmail.com. We plan to release the audio of this for our Incognito Mode subscribers after the fact, so if you can’t make it, your curiousity can still be sated.

Thanks!

PJ

Happy Friday!

We’ve got a new one for you.

This week we ask a slightly absurd question – is there technology to stop you from using addictive technology? Which leads to some surprising answers. New developments in the anti-technology field, and a partial history of how our phones got so oppressive.

• David Pierce | Find him on Bluesky, Threads, and The Verge

  • Hear him on The Vergecast

  • Read his 2015 Apple Watch story here: Apple Watch: The Secret History of the iPhone Killer

• Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

• Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity | Journal of the Association for Consumer Research

• Products mentioned: 10 ft long USB cable, The Light Phone, Boox, Brick, One Sec.

The newsletter is right now to remind people when a new episode is out and provide a place to make comments. Please be polite, both to each other and us, and try to assume good intentions.

Also, this week: if you have additional strategies, or technologies, please share them in the comments!

Hope you enjoy this one.

Happy Friday,

PJ