Meet Klaviyo, the only CRM built for B2C. Join 167,000 companies like Paul Smith, Castor, MixTiles, who choose Klaviyo for better customer relationships and faster growth. Grow with Klaviyo B2C CRM at klaviyo.com forward slash UK. From the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Channels, Peter Kafka. That's me. I am also the chief correspondent at Business Insider. It was really nice to see a bunch of you in Austin last week. Thank you for saying hello.
today we've got a fun episode it's a podcast about podcasts don't worry it's about more than that really we're talking about how to make things in 2025 and how the resources you have and the restraints you have can shape the stuff you make So to do that, I talked to PJ Vogt. He is the host of the great Search Engine podcast. PJ is kind of OG podcast royalty. For a long time, he was the co-host of Reply All. It's one of the most acclaimed shows of the initial podcast boom.
That one ran for about a decade and we talk a bit about how it ended. But more interesting to me is how PJ thought about the next thing he wanted to do and who would own it and how he would finance it and what the market would support. And how all of that would mean he would have a very small staff and how that would affect the work he does and doesn't do at Reply All. So I think there's a bunch in here for anyone who cares about making anything to think about.
PJ is just a great thinker and talker, so you're going to like him. And also, I reconnected with Zach Mack, my pal and former Vox Media co-worker, to talk about a project he made more or less by himself for a long stretch. which you can hear right now. It's called Alternate Realities. You can hear it on NPR's Embedded podcast. It's also an episode of This American Life. It's very much worth your time. And I will let Zach tell you all about it himself.
So first, let's hear from PJ Vogt. I'm here with PJ Vogt. Hey, PJ. Hi. Tell us what your show is.
It's called Search Engine. We try to make sense of the world one question at a time. No question too big, no question too small, which just means, like, it's an explainer show. Some of the episodes are, like... scripted reported investigations with many voices and lots of reporting and then other times if the question is one that's more like something you would ask a mentor at a bar then it'll be a conversation with somebody
It's a great show. It's a hit. It's everyone's favorite show on the internet. That is very nice to hear. And I want to get really nerdy and talk to you about how you make the show, why you make it. how you make money, if you make money. It's a tiny bit of backstory. You were the co-host, co-founder of Reply All, huge hit show for many, many years. Then you weren't. That was what, 2021? Yep. How did you go from there to making this show, which is similar to Reply All, but different?
Well, so there was an intermediate show in between. I did a mini series called Crypto Island. And it was interesting, you know. Very 21, 22. Very 21, 22. And the feeling was like.
I was not sure what to do after Reply All. It was sort of like that show had been big and popular and it was also so much a product of the team that worked on it where it didn't feel like it was something that I wanted to try to like... make a facsimile of and then also i really did not want to work in like big podcasting because you've done it i've done it and like i really saw its upsides and i really saw its limitations and i just felt like
I want to try the other thing. And so my editor, Shruti Panamanini, who's the editor on Search Engine as well, we co-founded it together. I was like, I don't know what to do. I was pitching her on all these ideas. She was like, you're going to do a miniseries on cryptocurrency.
I was like, I have no interest in cryptocurrency. She was like, if you read about it, you'll have an interest in it. So I started reading. We did it. And it was really, it ended up being the demo process for Search Engine without realizing it in that. We were just the two of us for most of it, trying to figure out, like, how could you make something that feels like it will meet the expectations of audiences who have been taught?
to enjoy like very premium podcasting on a very un-premium podcasting budget um so i don't know like how granular and nerdy you want to go but there's just like a lot we learned i think it was 10 episodes but like the formal stuff that Search Engine does to make a small budget go a long way. Most of it, we were figuring it out there. That's exactly what I want to talk about. Because this is...
I've talked to plenty of people who make podcasts, but I really want to get into sort of how you make it and the economics. And I'm assuming that from the outside that sort of how you got here is both intentional and also you were sort of pushed here by the market, right? Because... Narrative podcasts. If anyone's listening to this, you understand what we're talking about. But, you know, that's what you think of serial, right? Highly produced stories.
told via audio. That's sort of what captured a lot of people initially when they first started hearing podcasts. What drives podcasts, what drives popular podcasts for the most part is the format. chat show. People who make podcasts love to make narrative podcasts. They kind of look their nose up at chat shows like this. But it's what the market...
And the chat shows are cheap because it's usually just a person talking to another person, sometimes with a staff, sometimes not. And narrative shows are – they're not movies, but they're projects that involve lots of people. Am I summing that up correctly? I agree, and I should say most of the narrative people are...
diplomatic enough to say that they don't look down their nose at chat shows, even if many of them do. I've worked with many of them, and if they don't say it outright, you get the vibe. But I, like, legitimately, most of my media diet is chat shows. It's most people's media. Yeah, I think that... During this sort of great narrative podcast boom of whatever, 2014 to 2022, there was this very, like, enthusiastic idea that the future of the medium was going to be...
Like, you know, if America can support a certain amount of magazines, it can support many more narrative podcast magazines. And clearly that's what people want. And clearly the thing we want to make is what the market will support. And like that turned out to be obviously untrue. When we started working on this, I mean, I should just say, like, I feel like not only did the market change, I don't know, like some great narrative got made a lot.
of stuff got made, though. And, like, I had so many conversations with people who were working in narrative who would say stuff like, well, so much of this is crap, but, like, my thing is so good. Right. Which is the... How everything is. Everybody feels about everything. Yes. In media. But there definitely was like a sort of cliche version of the narrative.
podcast that started with the reporter, producer, host saying, I had this question that I wanted to solve and I went off looking for the answer and in the end they kind of don't find the answer and then the product was the questions they had along the way. And if you try me in the court of narrative unfulfillment, I will be guilty some of the time. It's a feature of how difficult that thing is to pull off.
at the highest level and like sometimes you get it sometimes I haven't have you seen that BJ Novak movie about no I've been told that His podcast character that I will find resemblance to myself in it, which has made me avoid it. I mean, you're a white guy who makes podcasts in New York. So yeah, there's some of that. Yeah, there's like, we all sort of conglomerate. It's not a great movie, but it's interesting. I've been told to watch it.
But yeah, so we made this thing during the moment where there's tons of money and where you could actually make that into a sustainable show. The market shifted drastically. So what that actually looks like is that... There's way more shows competing for a growing but not that big audience, I don't think. And the ad market itself just cratered. Maybe...
CPMs might be half, sometimes a third of what they were in the boom. And so you're going to have to work harder to reach audience members who on a listen basis are going to be less valuable. And so the only way you can really solve that, like... Really Shruti's point of view in 2022, 2023, when we started piloting search engines, it has to basically be a weekly.
And it should be an explainer. And so we worked backwards from our understanding of the market and what could work. So you decided, one, we can't do a full narrative show with all the bells and whistles people are used to. Well, we could with the asterisk that. we wouldn't be able to be independent. Like, if you went to somebody and you said, finance me, and I am not sure, but I think I can build one more pure narrative show.
but it's going to be a pretty big upfront cost. And you're going to have to trust me for, I mean, sometimes podcasts aren't profitable. Those podcasts for three to five years. Maybe you could do it under those circumstances, but we really wanted to be independent. We really wanted to own it. And so then you can't be unprofitable for that long. And so you need to build something that could get to profitability faster. So there's two different tracks I want to take here. So first of all...
Before we get to ownership, I'm probably doing it in the wrong order. But your thought was, so we'll make this hybrid show. It'll be... kind of an explainer on the cheap, or it's a talk show with bells and whistles, and so intentionally creating it because you thought the sort of union economics work best for that. And there are examples of this.
this show, right? Like, This American Life is kind of like that show. Yeah, and the stuff that I was listening to and enjoying was interview shows. Like, I was listening to Ezra Klein. I was going back to Fresh Air. Like, I was listening to stuff where I was like,
I also just felt like narrative when it's great, I think it's amazing. I think you can communicate idea. I think you can communicate feeling. I do think it can like make all the high flying things people say about it. When it's great, it's great. When it's bad. It sucks. And one of the ways it sucks is that it can push you towards simpler, flatter ideas because the story goes first. And what I was enjoying about listening to chat shows is that
They can field more ideas. They're not tied to story in the same way. Like there's a, you can get to different places with interview. And so when we started piloting, we did it without any writing at all. And the problem is I'm not that good at it. And you either need to be... Not that good at the interviewing. No. Like, I need writing. I need editing. You need to have, like, really good domain expertise. Like, I want to hear this person on this subject every week with different people.
Or you're just like a polymath expert on everything. Or you're a comedian. And I'm just none of those things. Like, I'm a generalist who can report okay and write pretty well. And interview decently well, but not well enough that it's like... has a great structure that lasts for an hour unless I'm thinking very hard about it. So we tried to do straight interview. It wasn't working. Then it was like, OK, well, we'll do some cuts. Then I'll write between it. And the writing parts felt really good.
And then we sort of just backed into this hybrid where what was feeling good to make and what was feeling like we could make it was this show that was sometimes going to be a straight interview, sometimes going to be what in the NPR days would have been called a...
two-way with some writing, and then occasionally was going to do reported investigations. How long is that process of piloting and figuring stuff out? I think some people will be surprised to hear that podcasts have pilots, that you work at this before you actually show it to the normal.
to the rest of the world. We started in January. We started in earnest, I think, in February. We had a preview episode out early summer, and we published our first, like, the season really began, I believe, in August. I'm probably wrong about all those months, but that's... It was a few months of piloting. We wanted to get to 10 episodes, either like...
finished or could be finished in a week because our first year count was 40. And I talked to somebody in video game production and they said, well, if you're going to be weekly-ish, you really want to have a quarter of your things in the can first. And I was like, oh, that seems like a good rule of thumb. So we stole it. But just to make it clear, right, because there's the tech version of the MVP product, which is, you know, bare bones, get it out the door, let...
your audience, let your users tell you what's working, what's not, maybe the whole thing's going to fail, get it out there. For something like this, you actually are working at it for six months before you unveil it, and it's kind of pre-baked at that point.
Yeah, but it was sort of a tech mentality of like another difference in this era of podcasting from the last one is we don't. Somebody in tech once told me you ship your product early because your users are going to tell you more about it than you can figure out internally. And we.
published, we haven't really killed stories unless we found that their premise was wrong. We just sort of, the things we make, we ship, and then we learn about the thing we're making from how we feel about it and how it's received in a way that is less precious than in the previous era. I want to back up. You're going to hear this all at once because we're not cutting back and forth. You mentioned ownership. I was curious about that.
You leave Reply All. You want to continue doing podcasting. You're making Reply All for Gimlet, which eventually became Spotify. You say, I want to keep doing this, but I want to own the show myself. I don't want to go work for somebody else. Yeah.
that was important to you from the get-go? Yeah. Some of that, frankly, was about, like, the end of Reply All. I felt, Shruti felt, that we wanted to own the show because we wanted to be... able to make a show where if the company was going to make mistakes they'd be entirely ours and like more positively like we really wanted to make not just the
We wanted to own not just like, like Gimlet was a pretty easy place in most ways to make reply all. We had a lot of support, both like production support, editorial support, not a lot of interference, frankly. It wasn't like, oh, I'm finally going to be able to make my vision unmolested by capital. It wasn't that. But it was the feeling of like, let's set this place up the way we want it to be and the way the people who show up to work here want it to be. And particularly like...
What's been interesting about setting it up is that you start to see all the ways that people try to pull you towards decisions that aren't the decisions you want to make, that are maybe off of your values. very quickly and how enticing it is to make the choices you don't want to make. It's 21, 22, 23. It's sort of the last gasp of sort of the overfunding of podcasts. And then there's sort of a winter after that where all kinds of shows are getting cut and advertising.
advertising is going down. Did you have a chance to get a bunch of money to go make this podcast at another network? Not really. I mean, we had all these... conversations with all the different podcast networks. And I made the same pitch to all of them, which is, I want you to fund this and not own it. And they were like, that's really funny. We'll talk to you later. But the one thing in our defense is like we built a feed with Crypto Island. So we had listeners.
And the pitch we were making is we're going to be able to greatly increase this audience because we're getting off the niche of crypto and we're going to publish regularly. And so you should give us money and do like an MG deal.
I mean, MG is minimum guarantees. They're going to give you some money up front was what you were pitching. Yeah. Give us money up front and then you will get the right to sell and profit entirely from the ads until you've made your money back plus a little bit more. And then we'll do a split.
Most people were not interested, and nobody was like, here's a massive pile of money, and we own it. We were pretty explicit about what we wanted. Jenna Weiss-Berman at Odyssey was like, yeah, I'll do the deal with you. And I think it worked out. We've been a good partner to them. Like it wasn't a crazy thing to do. So Odyssey used to be what? Intercom. Intercom, which is a big radio company. Got into podcasting, a bunch of podcasting. So they're selling.
They're selling the ads for the show. Yeah, they sell the ads for the show. Jigsaw is the production company you're working with? Yeah, it's slightly unusual. So Shruthi had already been... working at jigsaw she's head she's head of audio there this is a production company created by alex gibney they make great films usually documentary stuff and so it was sort of like how do we split her time which is full time running jigsaw audio and working on a bunch of their film stuff
and let her work on Search Engine. And so it's not that we're taking Jigsaw producers. They don't have on staff audio producers. But basically, it has led us. have truthy work on this in a way that everybody's comfortable with. We sort of look for synergies where it's like, are we making something that could be a film? Do they have a film that could be a podcast? And we've used their office space and their studio. It's been pretty good.
So you have two corporate partners. Two corporate partners. And you own the show outright. It's a little confusing, but yes. Yeah, that's good. I mean, is this sort of the scenario you imagine? I'll have one people selling ads and another group that I'm attached with on films, but we'll own it. Or again, did you sort of end up there?
Ended up there. Ended up there. It was just like, how do you make this work? And like, which parts are actually important to you? You and I are sitting in a room that used to be a podcast studio and is now... Still called a podcast studio, but it's a television studio. There are three cameras here and a whole bunch of lights. I can't figure out how to turn off and the whole set. Yes. You don't do video. Now. I keep getting told that we all have to do video in podcasting.
I think that we mostly do all have to do video and podcasting. I don't think that what I do translates. I think we'd have to change the show significantly to make it work. Is this an ongoing discussion? Not really. You know, when we thought it was an interview show, we talked about video. Then we realized it wasn't a straight interview show. The only thing that's thrown me a little bit is Ezra Klein has jumped to video, and I feel like... he's been able to transition
audio essays to video in a really... It's very jarring. He looks right in the camera. He's got that very aggressive beard. He's bulked up in the years since I've seen him. But I think it works. I think it looks good. And I've been like, oh, if he can translate that to video, maybe... Maybe a smart producer would sit down with us and say, this is more possible than you realize. For now, the way I feel is we are doing something that is niche. We are doing something that is counter trend.
I feel okay with that. I feel like there should be people doing the thing that's counter trend. I mean, for you, is it sort of an aesthetics thing? Like what I, yes, you could put a camera in my face while I talk, but that's not. Doesn't make sense to me as a consumer of this product or like there's really a genuine difference between listening to something and watching something and trying to have it both ways. You can't do that. The draw of it would be that.
the deals are bigger and you get fed into the algorithm. Like more people will find your work if you're being pushed through YouTube than if they're having to find you on Spotify or Apple. The downside is, yeah, I think that interviews where the camera isn't there. have a more they're looser and they feel less like they feel more intimate to do i don't like
having my face on the internet. I don't like the feeling of it. I don't like thinking about the way that I look. I don't feel self-conscious about my voice. I do feel self-conscious about my face. I'm sure I could get over it. I had a conversation with a YouTuber about it a few months ago, and he just looked at me and he said,
Well, you're just going to have to answer for yourself the question of what's enough. And what do you actually want from what you're doing? And if what you want is to make the most possible money, you should go to video. Is that what you want? And it's not. Like, I want to make a show that's sustainable, that pays the people on it, that can get more ambitious over time. But I think I know what we're making, I think. And it's not even, I think it will evolve from where it is now.
But I think we're in the sort of throwback vintage factory making a very specific kind of product for hopefully a growing audience that appreciates it. I feel the same way. And then periodically I'm like... I just, from the outside, I just have to look like a fucking idiot. I have to look like the guy is saying, what, my horse and buggy is perfectly fine. Why would I want to go so fast in an automobile? I, uh...
I've had that. Like, are you sure? Are you sure that the wagons? I mean, and like, whatever, we're not all going to get, um, Kelsey brothers deals or whatever, but like, yeah, I don't. Maybe in six months, all it would take is one meeting with one producer who said, no, no, no, we can take, you know, we did a piece last spring about, but at the time, there was this huge proliferation of illegal.
cannabis stores in New York City. They've sort of been stemmed out a little bit. And it was just like a lot in a kind of crazy way. It was a good episode. Thank you. Two episodes. I've listened to it. We were like, what happened? What was the, what were the policy decisions that led to this strange cannabis equilibrium? If someone were to say to me like,
Without you doing more work or thinking much harder, I can turn that into video and it will be as entertaining and true as the audio thing. I would do it. I just like... That I can't imagine how you do it. Now you're making a movie. Yeah. And if you're making a movie, you have more impact, you have more reach, maybe it's more vivid, and...
There's releases and budgets and all this time and all these other people. And what's nice about podcasting is you can go fast and far. And you can give somebody, not all of, but a lot of the feeling of having watched a good movie. But you can do it in five weeks. One thing I think a lot about is because of the pandemic, everyone got used to doing these interviews with a camera in front of them. Yeah. They're doing remote. And now...
The majority of time when I'm setting something up with a podcast, if there's a PR person involved, they will always ask, Is there going to be video? Where is the video going to be distributed? And that is a complete change. There was no expectation there was video. Now they all sort of assume there's video. So part of me thinks, all right, the people I'm interviewing are ready for it. That's OK. But I keep thinking. There's lots of people that I want to talk to who won't.
be good on video or won't be comfortable on video. Or if I only talk to people who are sort of ready for video, then I've really limited the people I can talk to. And I'm already limiting people I can talk to by who's good at talking, who's a good speaker. And so you're narrowing it, narrowing it, narrowing it to people who basically look good on a screen. But then it's strange because you think, okay, if you think of these jobs as...
I mean, they're not entirely just this, but if you think of them in some ways as service jobs, like your job is to help strangers understand things. Well, where are the, where's the audience? And like our internet that we. professionally matured on is a text internet it's like a text and audio internet and it's clearly now a front-facing camera internet and I feel like
Like J.D. Salinger for just not being on TikTok. I feel like this grumpy, strange hermit because I just want to... record my voice for it if we wait long enough maybe like it comes around and then we become like cool old timey podcasts the way the kids are into vinyl these days
Maybe. My younger son got into vinyl and I'm like, oh, that's fair. And then I realized vinyl is now $40. Vinyl is $40? Yeah. Because you're buying a totem. Yeah. And also, yeah, they can get away with charging you 40 bucks for...
And is your kid putting vinyl on a turntable and listening and flipping the record? Yeah. I mean, as a novelty. We could have careers for a long time, though. It's connected to blue teeth, and that's great. We'll be right back with PJVote, but first, a word from a sponsor. Meet Klaviyo, the only CRM built for B2C. If you're running a business, it's about revenue, right? And keeping a store, steakhouse, or even a stadium filled with happy repeat customers can be hard.
But with Klaviyo B2C CRM, you can bring your customer data, marketing, service, and analytics together to build lasting customer relationships that keep them coming back. Visit klaviyo.com forward slash UK to join more than 167,000 brands using Klaviyo to grow. And we're back. So let's talk about the actual economics of the show. We talk about the structure. So you make 40 shows a year. Yes. How big is the staff? There's four of us full time. It's me, my editor and two producers and one sort of.
part-time Armin Bazarian who does both like the sound mixing and the music. So four full-time plus someone freelance, and I assume you bring in people periodically to help with different kinds of projects? We work with fact-checkers, and then we'll have contributors do stories. But it's like, I mean, even for this era of podcasting, even for this show designed to survive in this era of podcasting, it is like a very lean.
And that's all hands on deck to produce basically one show a week. Yeah, exactly. And that's full time. Yes. Do you make money? Are you profitable? We are very... close to profitable like basically what's going to happen right now is we're going to i think get a little bit more headcount which will take us away from profitable but like
Imagine a ticker just going between black and red. If we had to be profitable, we would be profitable. And is that all revenue from ad sales that you're splitting with with Odyssey? No, this is the craziest thing that's happened is it's two thirds.
ad revenue and then i think six months into the show we announced that we were doing a premium tier which really does not the most significant thing it offers is support the show people get ad free episodes they get some bonus stuff but it's really support the show they like what you're doing they're giving you some money there's no expectation on their end that you're going to get a special audience with pj
We offer that stuff. Like we're doing a salon at some point for the like super subscribers. I should not say that out loud because we do actually have to do it. But they really seem to be doing it to support. And it's a third. Like it really took us from. The first year of the thing, you're just like, is this a folly? Is this going to be a big public failure?
It took us over that, which is crazy. And was that part of the plan? Like, we'll have some audience support from the get-go? It was part of Shruthi's vision of the plan. Shruthi felt that what we should really be doing is 50-50 between ads and subscriptions. I was very skeptical.
And I was wrong. When you were doing Reply All, was anyone giving you money then from the audience? There was a Gimlet membership that was never very loved, but I think it was harder to ask people to subscribe to a network than to a show. Um, and I think there was a feeling from Matt and Alex, I don't want to speak for them, but I remember a feeling at the time that they want to differentiate themselves from public media. Yeah. And so I think like turning around and saying like,
hey, chip in for this venture capital-backed company, felt strategically or spiritually wrong. And so you thought you would do it. You turned it on. Did it click right away, the audience support? It did. A lot of people came in right away. And then the surprising thing was it has mostly just kind of kept going. What I was told, and this is the most interesting thing I've learned about audience support.
There's all these companies that will be a vendor that will just sort of process your subscriptions. Like the same way there's Substack for print. There's Supercast. There's Supportingcast. I think there's others. You can go to Patreon.
And so you have these meetings and everyone's really friendly and you can do a little bit of information gathering. And at some point from somebody, I was just like, what is the actual conversion range? If you're not- I have 10,000 listeners. How many of them are going to pay me?
And I think whoever said this would regret having said this to me. But they were like, it's really probably between 2% and 5%. That's what I would have guessed. Unless you destroy your free product. You know what I mean? But 2% and 5%. can be really meaningful. And what we've found is that, like, if you hawk the thing constantly and you talk about how the lights are barely on and, you know, like, you're wearing threadbare clothes, whatever.
It nudges it a little bit. If you casually mention it exists, like there's not that much of a difference unless I think you were really, really committed to making it great. And one of the things I'm curious about in this sort of more mature version of our show is what does it look like to make it great?
Like, I think it's live events, honestly. Like, how do you give people something that they actually would feel like they're missing out on if they didn't do it? But it's an easy thing to turn on. And if you're the kind of outfit where you really clearly are independent.
And we're clearly, you're not just like, give us more money because we'd like to have it, but like support us if you want us to exist. I think that pitch is pretty clean and honest and effective for the people who it's going to like, basically. In any human population, there's a certain amount of altruists and it's two to five percent. Altruists slash hardcore fans slash whatever. Yes. It's weird because the same numbers convert for like Candy Crush players.
that's so funny yeah or kind of any of those products where it's free to play and they expect this they expect a very small minority to actually spend money and then
If you really want to nerd out on this, you can go. There was a minute when Candy Crush was part of a public company called King, and you could go look at... their numbers and you could see exactly the price again was two to five percent were payers and then within that it was like whales in las vegas like a very small percent of those people were
we're spending all the money, like compulsively and sadly and gross, right? Because like, why would you spend thousands of dollars to play Candy Crush? Well, and I think one of the things that honestly I think about is presumably anything that has a fandom. has its version of Wales. You know what I mean? There's people who really love the thing so much. And I feel like I want to make sure that we're giving people the opportunity to the opportunity.
the profitable opportunity that like, if people want to pay to keep the thing alive, I want to open that door. I don't, I want to create though. I think a media piece of media should serve its audience as equals. Like, I don't think you should feel as a listener, like there's.
important listeners there's stuff that i'm missing that's behind the the vip rope over there i don't love it and i certainly don't want to feel like there's one super fan and they're the best and we're somehow they've like willed their home to us and I don't know. It's just you want to think of your audience as one group of people that you're treating pretty equally to the degree that that's possible. Right now you're making 40 episodes for people and change per episode.
When you've got a screw that small, What does that prevent you from doing? You guys don't travel generally for these shows. We don't travel. You went to Germany once. You kept referencing all the time to go to Berghain. Is that the? Berghain, yeah. Berghain, the club that both Elon Musk can get into, and I'm sure I could not.
get into as well you'd be surprised um maybe i maybe there would be some kind of niche niche appeal for me but generally you're not traveling generally we're not traveling and in fact anytime the show has had travel reporting it's been because I had a social commitment or vacation and I just reported on the thing so we're not traveling I mean the real thing with podcasting narrative podcasting is your budget is just production hours it's like
If you have a staff of 10, we would have six more people to run after stuff, try stuff, do interviews that might not work, do pieces that had more interviews. And so at 40, you have to do more things where... you're relatively sure it's going to work and you're relatively sure it's going to work quickly. And then we just try, and this is less strategic and more by intuition, to make sure that at any given time.
There's a couple of things we're working on that we're gathering string on that take time that feel like one of the big ones. But the weird thing about the show, when I was working on Reply All, the theory of how to grow that show was... You did a bunch of doubles, like in baseball terms, like just like stand up doubles, decent episode, had a couple of funny moments, not going to change the world. And then every once in a while.
and people never knew as a listener when it was going to happen, you'd do a big, crazy reporting quest. And people would be like, holy crap, I didn't expect that. And they'd share it with their friends. And then they'd come up, they'd come for those episodes and they'd stay for the camaraderie or the vibe or whatever.
With Search Engine, when we've gone on these sort of quests, you see it in the numbers. They do better. But the better conversations also do better in a way that I did not understand. And I'm still kind of wrapping my mind around. I mean, how much are you looking at your numbers and going, oh, well, let's do more of that?
That topic, that style, that thing, that did really well, that popped. Or they all kind of do about the same. Or you can't – if we knew what the hit was, we'd only make hits and nothing works like that. I have a – the more of a belief that I usually, the amount of excitement I have working on the thing.
and the team has working on the thing equals audience response, which is great. I watch the numbers definitely to check just like, am I still right? And where am I wrong? The numbers are all about the same. It's not huge breakout anywhere because it's subscription, but. You see it, and there's been a few this year where I was very confident, like, this one's going to kill, and then it's done fine. And that's always good to know. If you had more money, I doubled your budget.
Eight people, 10 people. Like what is something tomorrow that you go out and go, we couldn't do this before, now we can. It would just be more two-part reporting projects. Like the weed stores, two-parter we did. There's stuff in New York City that I'm curious about. There's like a big development fight happening in South Brooklyn. And sometimes our show just makes itself a New York City reporting show and forces people to listen to it and they mostly tolerate it. I would do more...
There was like, we got a listener inbound about a, it was sort of like a mysterious arsonist in a small town in New England. where i was like yeah if you had a reporter who could spend four months working on that i think it would be fun to be a true crime show for 10 minutes we always like genre experiments but it's sort of unless everyone's willing to talk right away you're just like ah that's like an expensive bet
So it'd be more reporting projects. But I also think as the show grows, I don't want to abandon. I like that it's a hybrid. I like that it's an interview show. It feels, I don't know. Some of the listeners are definitely like, half the time disappointed. Most of them, I think, understand what we're up to. And I want to make the show for those listeners who understand what we're up to. It seems to me that in many of your episodes, and listen to everyone, one hack you do is you...
The people you're talking to are often professional podcasters. Yes. Or at least talkers or writers. And sort of they've either done some of the research. It's literally what they've done and they're sort of telling you about it anyway. Or they're just listening to days, right? The guy who wants to.
to make a barbecue scrubber in the US. It's a great episode. You should go listen to it. He's also a professional YouTuber, right? So he's like, of course you want that guy on the show because he knows how to talk to you. I mean, that guy, not only does he know how to talk, it's like he's been gathering archival. Like, that's like a real, yeah. Yeah, when he's like going around the plant watching his...
friends' kids or those partners' kids, but that's stuff that he accumulated on his own. You guys didn't have to go out there and get that. No, he sent a timeline of his production process. I was like, man, if every subject you ever interviewed had a functional timeline with Archival...
We can make 50 episodes a year. And the flip of that, right, is that if you rely on those people, then again, you're only getting a certain kind of participant. And it can feel canned. It can feel like there's questions that we run after where...
Genuinely, at the beginning of the reporting process, I feel like I deeply want to know this as a person and I have no idea what the answer is. And there's ones where you're like, we should do something about inflation. I find inflation confusing. If we talk to an economist who has a podcast.
that talks well on the podcast, we will have something. And this week will be not so hard and we can buy ourselves time for a quest that genuinely starts in a place of not knowing. But the thing that's so frustrating and also cool about the podcast is that... The episodes that we care the most about that are the hardest to make almost always have the best listener response and the ones that are a little bit easier.
tend to have a cooler response and so of course it pushes you over time to just want to do what's hard. There was a period. You still hear it sometimes. General people don't know the business that well. It's like, oh, the way we're going to make money in podcasting is we're going to turn these things into TV shows. Yes. Gimlet, that was a big push for them. And you'll still hear it. And people do.
still turn podcast ideas into things that eventually become movies or television shows is that of interest to you I always felt like it was kind of a distraction I feel like for the people who it works for that's great like there's entire podcast companies that seem to have really figured it out where they're just like a pipeline and they're finding great ip and telling the stories well in a way that's so cinematic that it works but it always felt to me a little bit
too fragile to be at the mercy of a whole different economy, where if Hollywood slows down, you're in trouble. If they decide they're over your genre, you're in trouble. I don't know. Do I actually believe what I'm about to say? I feel like, at least with books, I can tell when I've read a piece of fiction that was just designed to be a film. I don't know if that's true with podcasting or not, but the stuff we like... There was a guy at Wired who only wrote magazine articles that were...
Optionable, basically. Really? He was really good at it, too. I mean, and there's an argument that's fine. It's like the Wired readers get an amazing story that is going to get optioned. The, like, Hollywood gets a film. Like, it's not bad. It's just... I like doing stuff that's kind of small stakes and weird and personal. I'm always surprised when people want to adapt.
our stuff it happens and it's great and please like give search engine money to make more podcasts but i'm always surprised when people can hear a movie and something that we're doing it feels like it's
What's your dream project that you have not been able to tackle for time or money or both? I feel envious of people who get to step away from regular production and work on... a miniseries for a really long time i think sometimes those things can feel more writerly and i really like the writing part of the process like s-town which i would not try to make but to have the amount of time to make something that
was inspired by that would be really cool. I'm not sure that that's where my career is pushing me, but that's always the fantasy for me. Did you watch the podcast election discourse that started last summer and continued through last fall? Maybe people moved off on it and people sort of wonder what Joe Rogan's, you know, but he's a video. Is it a video? Is it podcasting? Why is Donald?
Trump spending all his time on podcast? Why isn't Kamala Harris doing more of that as someone who's been in this world forever? What was your reaction watching that? I thought it was weird. Honestly, like I was just like, of all the things you could say about this election, and there's like a lot of things to say. I think it was true that on the left, the moment where Ezra Klein...
went in the New York Times and said, I think Joe Biden's too old. I think that was meaningful. And I listened to Trump on a lot of his appearances. And it was a moment where I understood why the people who like him... like him more clearly than I do filtered through the media in which I normally encounter him you know he was like on Theo Vaughn it was like him and Theo were just kind of orbiting each other's eccentricity in a way where I thought most of the Democrats I follow would just be...
a little bit too uncomfortable. It felt the most real of any presidential interaction I've seen in a long time. Yeah, there's a part where he's asking Theo Vaughn about, like, what cocaine's like. Yes. Was it something? I can't remember the line. It was so good. It's like, turn you into a damn owl. I think that's the line. Theo Vaughn has a, I don't know if it's accidental or intentional, but there's a poetry to some of his jokes that's very strange.
Um, there's this riff where he's talking about Brazilian jujitsu. That's one of the best 45 seconds of writing on someone's feet I've seen in a very long time. Um, but yeah, I mean like, yes, do, does it, uh,
Are podcasts important in politics now because it gives people a place to talk long form in front of people with huge audiences that are not going to be very adversarial? On the right, definitely. On the left, like, I don't know. It felt... the fact that kamala didn't go on joe rogan i'm sure was not what decided the election listening to trump and how comfortable he was on rogan
The thought I had was it's hard to imagine the Harris campaign doing this. And maybe that's a problem. And there's some backstory about how she wanted to do it. But Rogan didn't really want to do it. But I also just can't imagine. I don't know her at all, just watching her, that she'd be comfortable talking at length. And also it's a double standard, right? Which is Trump can say up is down and black is white. And nobody cares. No one cares. And if she misspeaks once.
over the course of however many hours, she's going to get pilloried for it. Also, she's going to have a harder time with Rogan because if you're on the left and you talk to him, there's more, what does my audience think about the thing he just said? Yeah. And do I need to...
Do you tell him that actually vaccines work? Yes. So I can imagine for all sorts of reasons. But yeah, I think it was a little bit, I was like, I think this is media talking about the part that media is interested in. But it's not that I didn't think it was true. I was just like.
The podcast election. I think it's a bunch of different other types of elections, too. So you've been running this independent media project for three years now, right? Yeah. Anything you would have done differently if you go back and start over? Everything. Which things are like, okay to say bubble quick. Oh God. It's like its own podcast. I, we've made a lot of mistakes. Like, I think like.
I have a lot more appreciation for people who run businesses. I have spent years being the artist baby side of it. And you're just like, oh, it is its own art. It is its own creativity. It's really hard. Struthi does most of it at Search Engine. I contribute.
Let's give something out of Shruti's full name. Shruti Penamaneni. I mean, she's both editing the show and running the business of the show. But I have more visibility into that and more decision-making than I did. And it's really hard. And you make...
You just negotiate something wrong and you're like, oh, that was 10 percent of our budget. Does that make you go back to however many years ago when you were the difficult employee? Oh, my God, I gave this person so much crap and they were right or I didn't understand what they were doing. I've apologized.
Yeah. And then also just like the amount of times where I was like, well, I don't think we can do that many episodes because I don't think they'll be that good. Sure. Just make them. I think. So, yeah, just a greater appreciation of how hard the business is, a greater appreciation in some cases of like.
Just reading small contracts carefully, like spend the money on the lawyer, even though the lawyer feels expensive. It's like way more expensive to not have a lawyer. Nothing horrible, but like little stuff. The thing we did the rightest that I'm the happiest about.
Nobody interviews Ira Glass about how he runs a business and they should. He's like very thoughtful about the business side of this American life. One of the things that they do is they have an enormous employee handbook that really sets out the... worldview of the business and the editorial of that show. And we did a similar thing with ours. And a lot of it was about kind of not, I mean, both here's the days off and here's what private hearing looks like, but also like.
Here's what you should do if you disagree with someone editorially. Here's what you should do if somebody said something in a meeting that felt kind of screwed up to you, but you're not sure what their intention was. Like, here's how we want to disagree.
Normally I think of those handbooks as some combination of here's literally like to find out where the bathroom is. And the rest of it is just legal ass covering. We have to tell you this stuff because eventually if we end up in a courtroom, we have to say that we made you read this book and you signed it.
And so we've got that on our side. We have 60 pages for that. And it says, you know, you can't get high at work. And, you know, this is what it would look like if you were on a performance improvement plan or whatever. And then it's like 40 pages of like... What's editorial culture? Because I think that stuff in the earlier part of my career, I thought was so corny, but now I think is really important. So is...
So we've talked about you leaving Gimlet a couple of times. You basically would say you were canceled. You were forced out. You left. Employees were complaining about the workplace culture in general. You're part of it. How much of that employee handbook you're talking about? about sort of setting up expectations is a direct connection to that experience at gimlet oh a lot of it i mean i think my experience at gimlet it definitely shaped wanting to set up
a workplace that felt, I don't know, as good as we can make it, as thoughtful as we can make it, knowing that the institutions humans build have human problems. And then just also, weirdly, the show a lot is...
Not about cancel culture or anything like that, but I think everybody who reports would benefit from the experience of being reported on. I think it really makes you... One of the things we used to do at Reply All That I'm... in retrospect not super happy with is like we had a segment on the show called yes yes no
where we would do internet culture explainers. And it was just a fun, breezy way to say, this thing happened. This person stepped in it, and some people said this, and some people said this. This guy fucked up on Twitter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like, these people felt this way and these people felt this way and here's all the good jokes and then we'll say something trenchant and get out. It's like TV recaps, but for real lives. We didn't call the people.
And it was okay, we thought, because they'd given comments elsewhere, reporting it happened elsewhere. And I think, like, in this phase of my career, I really want to do reporting that is really curious about all the people in the story. It's not like pattern matching where even if somebody is immensely powerful and you think they would never care about our dinky little podcast, like, we'll reach out.
We'll reach out every time. And it complicates our stories a lot. And I feel really good about that. The asymmetry between the person telling the story and the person whose story it is, it's really tricky. You can never really, I think, solve it. satisfactory for anybody, but I think more people should be conscious of it. Yeah, and it's funny. I think there's this default. I certainly had this as a younger journalist where I thought that when in doubt, adversarial journalism is better.
the less the person you're interviewing knows about what you believe. And your responsibility is to the audience, not to the person. Yeah. And what I've learned is like, while there are totally interviews that are appropriate adversarially, and like, it's not like if you have a...
really have the goods on a company that's been you know dumping toxic waste in a kindergarten like you're gonna let them know late because you don't want them to front run you sure if that's not what's happening the amount of times where doing like a no surprises call where you say to somebody, we talk about you in the story. This is what we say. This is how we characterize it. What it does to my writing, our writing, in terms of taking cheap shots out is pretty immediate.
And also you just get to a more complicated truth. When you have to say to the person, this is what I'm about to say about you publicly, you end up with a different story. And I think that is service to the listeners, readers, whomever. Like, yeah, we like, because it is easy to say shit.
And it's really scary when you picture the person. But even our podcast, which to me feels very small, you know, like the people we talk about into a microphone are going to have to walk around in their communities. They're going to have to deal with...
this little version of them we've drawn. Yeah, it's one of your 40 shows that year, and for them, it's their whole life. Yeah, yeah. And I feel like you never get it perfectly right. Everybody makes mistakes, but it feels really important, and we try to do a good job of it. One more Gimlet question for you. I was going back and reading stories about that time. not a novel observation, but such a striking change between the workplace culture and the just political culture of 21, 22.
where we are now, right? Where the Department of Defense is getting rid of the Enola Gay picture because it has the word gay in it, right? You can debate how much of a sea change there really is. But do you think, do you spend time going back to 2021 and going, Boy, if this was 2025, none of this would have happened because we just don't have that kind of discussion in the workplace right now. Honestly? I mean, of course. But I think what, like...
There's a lot of labels like it's weird. It's hard to even talk about 2021 because the language itself has been so infused. But one way you could tell the story of that moment is that. There were a lot of conversations that maybe in the past people wouldn't have been able to have it all they wanted to have. But we didn't actually have very productive or healthy ways for people to have these disagreements. And once those disagreements hit the Internet...
anyone's ability to reflect, come to like an agreement, come to any kind of piece, it's just out the window. And I think if you're in one of those situations and then you end up having all these conversations with other people who experience them. One of the understandings I came away with is that a lot of things that looked like deeply political and cultural were oftentimes better understood as just disagreements between people and about personal relationships. And so like, yeah.
In 2025, if somebody says, I think this person just acted badly in a workplace, is that going to knock somebody off the internet, help? have all these consequences for a company, et cetera, et cetera. Institutions have figured out how to not let conflicts rend them apart, but I think it's still important to be able to...
I think 2021, we were like, these things are important. We need to do something about it. I don't think the way the system reacted was very good for institutions or the people in them. The counter reaction, though, is very hard to celebrate. It's terrible. The people who were like, oh, this goes too far. I don't think we're asking for whatever this is. And so I don't know, like personally for me, my takeaway was with a small institution.
that talks a lot about values and cares a lot about conflict resolution. You don't have to get to a place where even if someone could go on Twitter and lodge a sort of HR complaint with Twitter, they'd want to. We'll see. But... It's something that I think about every day. Thank you for talking to me about it. I appreciate it. Yeah. PJ Boat, your show is great. What's the next episode on? Well, the one we put out today, I would love for people to check out. It was...
It's about a gentleman who was like, what happens if you just try to manufacture something in America? Even though everybody says... that wages are too high and it's impossible. And like, we've lost all the skills and tooling. Like what if you just tried? Um, so it's called the puzzle of the all American barbecue scrubber. It's excellent. Thank you.
That's excellent. Can you tell me what next week's is? Next week is about, we're interviewing science reporter, science journalist Carl Zimmer. He has this book called Airborne, but there's one story in it that's really good, and it's basically about how...
The fact that influenza can spread contagiously through the air is something that health authorities didn't acknowledge until December 2020, but it had been discovered in the 1930s by this brilliant married... scientist couple and part of the reason it was not it had not become consensus is because this couple was so annoying and difficult that people did not want to deal with them
which I find to be a wonderful fable. Okay, you got range. You've just demonstrated it right there. I'm a fan. Thank you for coming. Thanks. Thanks again to PJ Vogt. I'm really glad we did that. In a minute, you're going to hear from Zach Mack. But first, a word from a sponsor. This week on Unexplainable. I, like, decided at some point in high school that I would dedicate my life to trying to do as much good as possible.
How a group of moral philosophers started a movement. I think it appeals to young people. I think it feels like you can do anything. Whose mission? I think AI is one of the biggest threats, but I think we can aspire to guide it in a direction that's beneficial to humanity. To prevent the AI apocalypse. I'm like, damn, I think I can actually move the needle on this. Good Robot, a four-part series about AI from Julia Longoria and Unexplainable, wherever you listen. Hey, Zach.
Hey Peter, what's going on? This is giving me pandemic flashbacks. We spent a lot of time looking at each other on the internet talking about podcasts. That's right. We made a series of Land of the Giants together and then I've made a couple...
recode media appearances. I miss you, Zach. We're here to talk about a thing you made. It's called alternate realities it's a podcast series you can also hear a one-off version about this american life it is about following someone who has lost their mooring and become a conspiracy person and there's a bunch of these stories out
Why is yours different? Mine is different because it is... about my father who has sort of fallen down the conspiracy rabbit hole and it tracks very closely the impact that his beliefs are having on my family and it's sort of the story sort of centers around My father, a little over a year ago, challenging me to a bet. So basically, we had been arguing about conspiracies for a long time, having these circular arguments that they were never going anywhere.
and it sort of came to a head a year ago when he challenged me to a bet for ten thousand dollars on 10 of his conspiratorial predictions. He said 10 things would come true by the end of 2024 and that he would bet me $10,000 that they would. I took that bet, but I also immediately realized... This is probably a podcast. And I asked if he was willing to take part in interviews throughout the year. And he was enthusiastic about that idea. He was very on board. And so we did it.
And the entire family participated. And so you just hear how it plays out, how the bet plays out, and how his beliefs continue to impact our family. We should say this is very good. Everyone should listen to it. If you're listening to this podcast, you should listen to Zach's podcast. It almost sounds like your dad threw osmosis. Just... picked up on how to how to pitch a perfect podcast uh premise so i mean on the one hand it's a very touching and serious and and
I don't want to spoil it, but it's a real thing you did here. But it's also a classic stunt. Right. Like it's literally we're going to do a bet. We're going to record it. We're going to talk to people like this. This could have been a Howard Stern gimmick. This million different ways this could have gone. Why do you think your dad wanted to do something like this to begin with? How do you think he wanted to document it?
Yeah, I mean, he did me a huge favor. He gave me stakes. He gave me a deadline. There was drama and characters. All the things you sort of look for and hope for. All the things that you taught me how to do when we were doing there. Like, well, what's this character going to say? And what's this scene? Like, your dad just... laid it all out for you. He did it. Why did he want to do it? Because I think because for so long we were just having these arguments that weren't going anywhere.
And I think we were both frustrated and both talking past each other and unable to hear each other. And so he reached for a big, dramatic... change you know how can we we change this conversation it's sort of like what happens anytime two guys get into an argument about something right it eventually leads to either a bet
We're boxing, right? Those are the two outcomes. And eventually for us, it led to him being like, well, let's put some money on it. It's a put up or shut up like ego pride square off, you know? I mean, yes. I don't know anyone who's gone... Well, I know a few people who have gone down the rabbit hole. I just don't know them as well as you know your dad. But my sense of a lot of that stuff is it's one thing to make predictions and say this thing is going to come or that RFK Jr. or RFK.
was it RFK or RFK Jr. has been... There's like a whole bunch of weird, crazy QAnon stuff. But, you know, people would find a reason to explain why the thing they said was going to happen actually isn't going to happen or happen in a different way. Right. And your dad puts himself in a position and this is not. Like he makes a bunch of really QAnon inflected predictions that don't come true because they're not connected to reality.
Did you ever get the sense at some point that he wanted to back out when he knew this wasn't going to work out or maybe thought the whole taping it idea wasn't such a good one? Were there exit ramps for him? You know, he never expressed... wanting to back out or change the bet i think if we hadn't made the actual bet he would have continued to change what we were arguing about right as as the
year went on, you heard him sort of start to hedge or change the timeline. I think what's really common with conspiracy theorists or people who make these bull... bold proclamations about the future. When it inevitably doesn't come to pass, they just say, they all say the same thing, which is, oh, I got the timeline wrong. They don't really admit to being wrong. They just say, I got the timeline wrong. So he was starting to do that.
But that was as much, you know, he agreed to the $10,000. He agreed to this very specific... set of circumstances that needed to play out and that that and that was his proposal too it wasn't it wasn't me proposing it he did it so he he always stuck to it and he never expressed any
regret or real trepidation about it and and even after he's heard it now he he didn't think it was like a hit piece on him or anything like that he felt like it was he doesn't feel embarrassed by the fact that he predicted x y and z and none of those things happened not even close seemingly no I'm sure he does a little bit but he he's not no it's not like a big issue for him so your dad gives you the gift of this great
podcast premise and then agrees to participate in the podcast like you mentioned your mom's in it your sister's in it you know again i don't want to uh uh spoil the the show but like they have a strained relationship with your father and so just because he's going through this and just because you're a professional podcaster so you can't not document it how did you get them to participate because again it's it's very intimate and you know i don't know that
I'd want anyone in my family to be in a podcast like this. Yeah. I think first of all, my mom and sister are just very supportive of what I do. They listen to a lot of my work and they trust me. Had they been in your shows before? They have not, no. I've never done anything personal before. I never report on my own life or family before. I'm usually running around with you talking about tech. Streaming wars. Yeah, and streaming wars, all that stuff. So I'm never turning...
the mic on myself usually. But my mom and sister, they were on board because they support me and they trust me. And they also felt like they were out of ideas as to how to talk to my father, how to reach him. And so they felt like this was like a Hail Mary pass at the end of the game. It was like, we're down late. Might as well just... Chuck it up there and see what happens.
So I listened to the shorter version of this via This American Life. And at the end, Ira Glass runs through credits for the show. And he says, a bunch of people worked on this show from This American Life, but also, you know, the folks from the NPR Embedded group where you have the longer version. And he goes on to list, you know, there's this fact checker or this person and this researcher. And it reminds you that you need a lot of people to put a project like this together. On the other hand.
It sure seems like you did this thing entirely by yourself. Like the three people that you, and I guess there's more than three people, but you know, it's, you're interviewing your family sort of either in person or over the phone. Is this. Is this an example of you need a lot of people to make an excellent podcast or you can do it by yourself? I would say the answer is both. The answer is both. And it started with...
Me and a couple of people, like I originally was making something for Tribeca Audio, you know, like Tribeca Film Festival, they have an audio component. And I wanted to just make something on my own. So this story sort of dropped in my lap. And I was like, oh, great. I'm going to make something here. turn it into Tribeca Audio. So I did that mostly on my own. I had a little bit of help from some people in my life and I made together, made a 40 minute pilot.
essentially. That is most of what you would hear in the first episode of the NPR series. From there, I turned it in and then it got passed around very quickly. It landed in the hands of This American Life. They wanted to do it. And then shortly after NPR got a hold of it, wanted to do it as like a somewhat larger series. So once NPR came on board.
I had an editor. I had an executive producer. I had two producers. People were helping me with research. They were helping me with editing. They were helping me... you know, score and just put together the whole thing or envision the arc of the series. And then I also separately got to work with This American Life. So this story went through...
Two staffs and two separate editorial processes at two separate companies. But most of the work, a lot of it was happening with the NPR group. And then it came over to This American Life. And so things were already in good shape. Even then,
Their editor had a lot to do with it. Like my editor, David Kessenbaum had a lot to do with it. And Ira Glass was very involved. He spent a lot of time. He's actually way more involved in stories than I realized. So yeah, I got to work closely with a lot of people. But yeah, there were.
there were a lot of people involved in in seeing this thing through yeah i guess i guess like you could have if i'm trying to think of in writing the writing analogy like you could have just written this entire thing by yourself and plopped it up on a blog platform Or you can work with the remaining professional magazines that work out there and talk to editors and get legal help and all of that.
It's kind of like that. Zach, I want to make sure I promote this correctly because the whole point of this is more people to listen to your excellent podcast. They are finding it, by the way, already, it sounds like. People are finding it. It's doing quite well. And it's getting written up. It's on all the lists. I've gotten hundreds of emails.
You don't need me to promote this, but it's called Alternate Realities. Correct. You can listen to it on NPR's Embedded Show, and then you can hear the one hour cut down version on This American Life. Yes, that is correct. I got it right. Yes. And on This American Life, it's called... 10 Things I Don't Want to Hate About You is the title. So it's from a few weeks ago. And yeah, but...
Check it out on the embedded podcast series for NPR because it's only three parts. It's only a 90-minute series. Look, it's right in the wheelhouse of anyone who's listening to this podcast. It touches on, obviously, the way we consume media, the way the technology enables. as that. Screw all that. If you like a good story, it's a great story. Zach Mack, great to see you. Thank you so much, Peter. Good to see you. Thanks again to Zach Mack. So good to see him. Thanks again to PJ Vogt.
Thanks again to Jelani Carter, who edits and produces this show. Thanks to our advertisers who bring it to you for free. And thanks to you guys for listening. See you soon. Join 167,000 companies like Paul Smith, Castor, Mixed Tiles, who choose Klaviyo for better custom relationships and faster growth. Grow with Klaviyo B2C CRM at klaviyo.com forward slash UK.