The HowStuffWorks Story Part One

this may or may not be the nine episode. I use a spreadsheet and I do a little plus one, and according to that, it's nine. So we're gonna treat it like it's the nine, because if it's not, you can just be comforted in knowing that there's no real significance to any particular number anyway. In other words, listen to every tech Stuff episode like it's or something. For today's episode, we're going to do something I should have covered hundreds of episodes ago. We're going to look at

the how Stuff Works story. It's a little different from how How Stuff Works works. I think I have done that episode in the past, but this is more about the story of the company, and it's a complicated one. For multiple reasons. Now, one of those is that we have two very different branches of the company these days. We have the website how stuff works dot Com. That's the that's the business that hired me oh so many years ago. It's the home to thousands of articles about

all sorts of topics. And then we have the podcast network, of which tech stuff is a part, along with other great shows like stuff you should Know, Stuff you missed in history class, and shows that aren't so great, like stuff they don't want you to know That's for you, Ben Bolan Uh and more. Uh. We have those two different branches. And now, even though I got hired for how stuff Works dot Com, I work for the podcast side. In this episode, I'm going to focus mainly on that

website side of the business. We will later on chat with our us in louder Milk. She is the head of the editorial department here at how stuff works dot com, and we'll learn all about the process of pitching and selecting and editing articles for the site, as well as how things have changed since she came on board, and we'll look at the company in general and how that's changed over the years. So actually we'll start with that.

The history of how Stuff Works dates back to nineteen and that's when Marshall Brain and yes that is his real name, decided to launch a website that would host

articles about how stuff works. Marshall Brain was born in nineteen sixty one and Santa Monica, California, and he attended a polytechnic institute over in New York, earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, and then went on to earn his master's degree in computer science at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina, and he became a computer

science professor there. Between nineteen six and nine. Two and ninety two, he founded a software training and consulting company, and in he began publishing articles online on his new web page, which he dubbed how stuff Works. Early articles mostly focused on technology. How a car engine works is

typically cited as the first article on the site. The truth is lost to antiquity or we just haven't been able to get a straight story to find out, but how a car engine works is typically the one we say, yeah, that that's kind of the first real how stuff works article, But others that came out that same year would include

how television works. How the radio spectrum works, how a thermis works, and Marshall Brain's site became popular and attracted lots of visitors, and in two thousand he decided he would hold around a venture capital funding in order to ramp up this website, because up to that point it had really been a hobby. He wasn't looking at it as a full business, but he saw the site grow and he formed a an entire business out of it.

He hired on a staff, he set up a headquarters in Carry, North Carolina, but he did find it challenging to create a business that had an ongoing source of revenue. He wasn't able to really figure out that part out, or or at least get the backing of advertisers to really make a go of it, and by the end of two thousand one he had to cut back on

about half of his company's staff. So while he had hired on a bunch of people after that first round of venture capital funding, that money didn't last forever and the revenue just hadn't come around yet, so he laid off about half the people he had had to hire. He couldn't get the advertising support he needed to keep the site going. He sought another round of venture funding, and in two thousand two, there's a private company that was called Convex that made an offer to buy How

Stuff Works, and Brain accepted. The price was the princely sum of one million dollars. The Convex Group was an entertainment and investment company. It was founded by a guy named Jeff Arnold. Jeff Arnold started his career doing starting several other businesses, but really was known for beating the founder of a website called web Md. Just been terrifying

people ever since. Whenever you have an ache, pain, or strange rash, you go to web Md and then you realize that you've got some sort of Venusian death cold or something. But he founded this company. It was wildly successful. However, it wasn't a runaway hit right out of the gate. Arnold actually left web md after the dot com crash that happened around two thousand, two thousand one, and he said that he just didn't feel like he could lead web m D through that that turmoil. He didn't have

the experience to do it. So insteady win and created the Convex Group. Now, the Convex Group was a company, like I said, that invested in largely entertainment ventures, and they acquired several other entities, so they purchased other companies. One of those was a company called lid Rock. Do you remember lid Rock. If not, here's a quick refresher.

Once upon a time, my dear listeners, there were movie theater chains in the United States in particular, but in other countries as well, that would include a c D that is, a compact disc. With certain drink purchases. The compact disc would fit into the lid of a gargantuan sized soft drink cup, which I'm sure was marketed as a small and the idea was that you would pop off the lid, take out the c D, and then you could discover new music, presumably by playing the CD.

If you can just discover it by looking at one. Your eyes are lasers in your robot. We had some of these lid Rock lids around the office. When I first started at How Stuff Works, it wasn't subject of some jovial conversation at points in the editorial department. Now I joined How Stuff Works Come in two thousand seven, and that was when it was still owned by the Convex Group. So I have some interesting memories are of

this time. I was actually part of the staff anyway, the Convex Group, but How Stuff Works with the goal of selling it for a profit further down the road. This was not a secret. It was not like it was coming as a shock to anyone. It was pretty much part of the deal when the Convex Group made the acquisition in two thousand two. It's just it took a few years to get to the point where they could sell it for a really good profit. In the meantime, the website grew. Now there wasn't time before I was

hired where things seemed really interesting to me. Now I never got to experience this firsthand. I just got to hear about this time, this wondrous, magical, mythical time. Before I got hired on there used to be a branch of the How Stuff Works site called stuff Oh, And this was meant to cover more whimsical and lighthearted topics, largely entertainment related topics. How Stuff Works was thought to

be more serious. It was going to explain stuff like refrigerators and computers and world finance, and STUFFO would answer really weird questions such as who would win in a fight? Superman or a Jedi. STUFFO existed from two thousand four to about two thousand six, and from what I heard, it was a lot of fun to work on, but it wasn't to last. By the time I was brought on, STUFFO was gone, and the the editorial staff of How Stuff Works itself had been through a really rough patch.

All of the full time writers, except for one, we're gone. There's one remaining full time writer when I was brought on. That one full time staff writer was Tracy V. Wilson. Now she's a host of stuff you missed in history class. That might be where you're familiar with Tracy, But I had known Tracy from before I started How Stuff Works. I actually was a writer on a series of things that Tracy would also occasionally write for, and that's how

we knew each other. So I applied to work for How Stuff Works in late two thousand six, got an interview in early two thousand seven, and was hired on February fifteen, two thousand seven. At that time, Tracy and I were the only two full time staff writers, with Julia Layton writing Questions of the Day, and we'll talk more about that in our interview. With Alison lower Milk, the managing editor of How Stuff Works in just a few moments. Now, a few months after I joined, the

company began to reinvest in the editorial department. So it had gone through a dip where a lot of the people were either laid off or people left the job to go and do something else, and Tracy and I were the only two there. But they then switched where there was this reinvestment and the department began to grow and we started to hire new writers and editors. And some of those people are folks that you might be familiar with, such as Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant. They

came in on that first wave. So I was here first. I want that noted these days, they do host stuff you should know, a podcast of some renown. I do not begrudge them their success. They're actually amazing. They are talented, they are funny, they're wicked smart, and so they are

fantastic coworkers and great podcasters. Now, in October two thousand seven, this was less than a year after I had started at the company, we got the announcement that Discovery Communications, that is the company behind the Discovery Channel, the Science Channel TLC and More was going to buy How Stuff Works and then generally agreed upon estimate for the sales price, because these things are not always public, was two hundred

fifty million dollars. That's a pretty nice profit for that million dollar investment that was made back in two thousand two. I mean, also explain what life was like back then for the writers of How Stuff Works. Not in general, I mean, two thousand seven wasn't that long ago. You could probably remember it yourself, But if you were a writer in two thousand seven, particularly when Tracy and I were writing, we would write one article every two weeks

and we would just alternate. By the time Discovery was purchasing us, we had switched to writing an article every week, and we then had more writers and more editors, so we could actually publish more than one article every week. Because back in the day, if you went to House Stuff Works dot com and you looked at that front page, there would only be one new article every single week. If you went back the next day, there might be different articles listed on the home page, but they were

all previously written, they weren't new. So this was a moment where we were transforming that where we were trying to generate an entire web page is worth or a tire landing pages worth of new content every week, which was a big challenge. It was it was ramping up quite a bit, and it put a lot of pressure

on us as writers and editors. Now, How Stuff Works was intended to become a digital arm of Discovery Communications, and on the surface, it looked like it was going to be a really good fit because the content on Discovery was all about asking interesting questions and finding out the answers, which is, if you hadn't figured it out, what How Stuff Works is all about. Two And there were a lot of cool opportunities that popped up due

to Discovery being the owner of the company. So sometimes people had an opportunity to write for a television show or even appear on one. And there were also some things that were perhaps a little less positive, but that's to be expected with any major change in the company.

It's not unique to How Stuff Works. This was also, of course, during a time at Discovery when the channels began to create some content that met with let's say, mixed reactions, such as specials of Mermaids and Megaladon's that seemed to be documentaries but were in fact fiction that was a fun thing to live through and right for Under Discovery. How Stuff Works would also launch a new business podcasts now we're going to talk more about that

in episode nine one. But the major podcasts that we launched back in two thousand and eight would be Stuff you Should Know, Stuff You Missed in History Class, which was originally called Factor Fiction, and of course Tech Stuff and Marshall Brain also launched a short form podcast called brain Stuff. From two thousand eight until two thousand fourteen, how Stuff Works was part of the Discovery Communications family, and we produced podcasts and videos on top of continuing

to write articles about all sorts of topics. For a while, writers specialized in specific content categories, and I was asked and accepted uh to become deemed the head writer for computers and electronics because everyone else was scared of them. We're all a bunch of English Lit majors. But I argued that technology meant I had the easiest job of everybody, because here's a secret. Technology either works or it doesn't, so you just learn how it works and you explain

it and you're done. Whereas if you're covering any of those fuzzy social things, it gets way more messy and complicated. Josh Chuck, Robert Lamb and uh WHRs truly became senior writers at that time, and we helped shape the editorial voice in the direction of the website. We experimented with creating new experiences, such as with Android and iOS apps, and we collaborate with other parts of the Discovery digital network.

By Discoveries strategy for digital was changing, the company began to sell off or shut down various divisions within their digital network. It wasn't just how Stuff Works, it also was source Fed and others, and they decided to sell how Stuff Works. The company that bought How Stuff Works was called Blue Cora, and it paid a reported forty five million dollars for the site, which was obviously a huge drop in price and any two drop in price in fact from what Discovery had paid back in two

thousand eight. So I'm going to be real here. It was not easy to go through this transition. For one thing, when you see the company you love and work for sell for so much less than what it was value just a few years earlier, that's hard to take and most of us had no idea what Blue Cora even did. Some of the still don't. What it did do, mainly

is own other companies like Infospace. Infospace is one of those companies that has its own really complicated history, including a fairly shady past at one point, though the company of today does not resemble that older one at all. And maybe one day I'll do a full episode on the Infospace story, because it is interesting and it is tumultuous, and the company has emerged from that past and has

done incredible work. How stuff Works was meant to complement Infospace, which focused on search business, so they would do search advertising and search optimization. How stuff Works would end up being a great pairing. That was the logic. How stuff Works would create content, Infospace would at leverage its expertise with search to help how stuff Works take advantage of that search power, and it would become a mutually beneficial relationship. But then Blue Cora began to focus more on financial

services and less on Internet search. As the parent company's goals began to change, it became clear to the business owners that Infospace and with it, how stuff Works didn't really have a place at the table anymore. Now this is particularly interesting to me because Infospace created Blue Cora as a holding company. So Infospace created Blue Cora. Then eventually Blue Corus says, you know what, we don't need

Infospace anymore. This is kind of similar to how Google created Alphabet to be a holding company, a parent company for all of the Google sub companies. And so Blue Cora began to look for a company that might want to purchase Infospace and also take How Stuff Works along for the ride. That company would be one called open Mail. And yeah, this is really is a crazy complicated story. I know because I lived through all of this. Anyway.

Open Mail LLC was a data management and marketing technology company which purchased both Infospace and How Stuff Works for forty five million dollars, which also stung because now the company that was purchased two years previously for forty five million dollars was being sold with another much larger company

for a combined price of forty five million dollars. Open Mail would later rebrand itself into System one, and in August, System One announced it was going to spin off How Stuff Works as an independent company, and that's where we are now. In that time, Conald Burne has been my boss twice. He joined how stuff Works in two thousand seven, a few months after I started, and he headed up the company for several years until Discovery sold how stuff

Works to Blue Cora, and then we parted ways. Then, as how stuff Works became an independent company in sen he returned and now he's the boss again. So that's kind of interesting. Now I've got a whole lot more to say about how stuff Works the company, but first you guessed it. Let's take a quick break to thank

our sponsor. All Right, we're back now, I'd like to switch over to an interview I did earlier with Alison Loudermilk, be managing editor of how stuff Works, to talk about the voice of the site and how things have changed over the years. I am joined in the studio by Alison louder Milk, the managing editor over at how stuff

works dot com. Allison, I invited you here so that we could talk about the experience of working for how stuff Works, as well as the uh, the sort of stuff you do as managing editor, and kind of how the site itself has changed a little bit over time. We try to keep a consistent voice for the the website, so that we can have that sort of throughput, but it's uh, there are little things around the edges that change.

So first off, how would you describe how stuff works as voice to somebody if you were telling them and they had never visited the website, and you said, well, you know, it's it's a reference site. It's got tons of information about all sorts of topics. How would you describe the tone or the voice of the site, Jonathan, That's a great question and it's something we think about

a lot on the editorial team. UM. I think the most important thing to recognize about the folks who are here editing and writing for House to Works is that we are a curious bunch, and so we let our innate wonder of the world really drive what we're talking about. UM. We are always curious and we are always trying to get to the bottom of something. UM, and that can drive the conversation. Let's take let's take what's going on in the world today. There's a lot of political things.

House to Works is not, always, has not traditionally been a political site, but we will try to find the story, the explainer behind the politics, like how does that process work? Does a president have to live in the White House, things like that. UM, So we're always trying to look for the bigger picture of something that's happening behind the news. We started out very science and technically focused. Our big article, as I'm smiling right here and I'm waiting for you

to recognize, it is how car engines work. I mean, that's that's the big one. That's the gendery how stuff works, biggie. And we've gone on to do thousands and thousands of articles since then, and what does remain consistent over all of those articles is the curiosity and it's it's it shouldn't be superficial. We strive to never be superficial, but rather we're trying to get underneath and dig I mean, are there scientific forces at work? What is the theory?

What are what is the research out there? Um that has you know, investigated the topic at hand. We try to go for primary sources. We are factual. We try as much as we can to be unbiased, but of course we're coming from a certain point of view. So there is so much you can do on that front. Well, and I like to describe it sort of as you know, you're chatting with a super smart friend of yours at like a restaurant or something, or you know, some casual environment,

so it doesn't come across necessarily professorial. Right, It's not like a lecture. It's it's not dry like a typical reference book would be. But it's also not as flippant as some other sites might be. There's a there's a middle ground there. So and I'm not trying to dismiss or or talk trash about sites that are more uh, you know, they add more humor into their their work. I think there is value in that. That's just not

the voice of how stuff works. There's a little bit, but it's not like and this is the setup for a jokey joke, and now we'll throw in a factor to uh. There's some delicate line in between. That's the way I always felt that, you know, you wanted to feel like the article is taking you and treating you

as an equal as the reader. Right, Like we're not talking down to anybody, We're not trying to uh to come across as we're We are the Great Oracle, and you shall kneel before us, and we will bestow our wisdom and knowledge upon you, and you will be better for it, but still less than us and go away. Now that's not the way we wanted to have how

stuff works come across. And uh So it was always a challenge for me as a writer two find the elements in an assignment that got me interested, you know, engage that that sense of curiosity you were talking about, and would therefore energize me to write the whole piece. And sometimes, actually more frequently than not, the ones that I found more inspiring were topics that I initially thought were going to be terrible, like what can you give us an example? I mean, let's see, let I'll think

about that. Gosh, I wrote so many and it's been so long since I've written any but like I wrote some about cloud computing when cloud computing was still a buzz term that not very many people understood, and I was worried that it was just going to be super dry and really technical and that there wouldn't be anything interesting about it. And the more I learned about the

more I thought, this is actually pretty fascinating. The a this architecture works, the whole concept of it, the fact that we call it a cloud, but really you're information is still living on a computer in fact it's living on several computers. Typically if you have redundancy built in.

I'm not going to go into that. I've done full episodes about it, but I found it very interesting, whereas there would be other ones that maybe I thought going into it, oh, I can't wait to write about this, and then maybe two pages into the article, I thought, oh, this is gonna be harder than I imagine, because even though I was excited at the beginning, when I start looking into it, either there is a lack of compelling information out there for you to write a sizeable article,

or you just haven't found the right the right entry point. And one of the ways we try to prepare ourselves when we're getting ready to start an article, as we send out an initial approach, which is, yeah, it's a fun process that Jonathan Strickland is infamous for ignoring of the initial approach, though, that's typically where we create a

list of questions we feel the article should answer. Most of the time, sometimes it's something else like it maybe like we've got this idea for a list of really important examples of a particular category. There's one that went around just recently. They got a lot of feedback and uh, and in that case, it just ends up being people listing. I mean, I guess I could, right, I mean, that's

the one I'm talking about right now. Where it was it was it was musicals that are that we're particularly important for the art form of musical theater, right, and so people started. It's more activity than I've seen in quite a while. And honestly, and I actually engaged in this one. I argue that The Fantastics should be on that list because it was the longest running off Broadway musical of all time, and therefore it deserves a place on that list. Also, Jerry Orbach was in that and

he's amazing. So that sort of thing. You get those initial approaches. But most of the time, our initial approaches are questions that we think the article should answer. And I love that process because it shows it shows kind of how everyone thinks based upon the questions they tend to submit. So let me give you a classic Tracy submission C V. Wilson, where the co hosts of Stuffy miss in history class. She I believe now is the most senior of all How Stuff Works employees. I think

that she's got She's been here the longest of everybody. Um, and she was when I joined, one of the the only other staff writer on staff, the only two. Yeah, you can find a ton of our articles still on the site, anything from how dinosaurs work to all sorts of staff I remember she was working on silly string when I first started, and I remember magnets almost broke her brain how magnets work almost broke I'm let's be fair.

The insane clown posse. He couldn't figure it out. But Tracy, she sat down, she finally, you know, she was able to suss it out at the end, and so that article does exist. But something that Tracy is is very much known for is if you have any sort of article that has any sort of remotely scientific aspect to it, she will submit the question of what are the physics that guide this or what is the science behind this?

Like if the questions if none of the questions that are on the list already, because usually, as a writer or editor, come up with a list of them and you submit it to everybody else and then you say,

what else am I not thinking of? If you have not included that science based aspect, don't worry, She'll she'll definitely submit that that's kind of her go to I have one that's stuck in my head um And I think maybe even Chuck Chuck Bryant made the joke when it went out and it was about kayaking and we were going to write how kayaking works, and I think he chokingly submitted to the initial approach email threat what you'll forget about the science of kayaking? Like ha ha,

And sure enough there's Tracy chumming in on that. Yeah, I mean fluid dynamics, right, I mean, come on, that's an important part of physics. So yeah, it's it's we joke about it a little bit because there is this sort of culture here at how stuff works that you know you you when you're immersed in it, you begin to really get a sense of of what is important to each person based upon the kind of questions that they typically will submit. Not all of them are falling

into exactly the same category. It's not like, oh, well, here comes the pop culture question from so and so because they're the pop culture person. It's not quite that specific, but it is kind of funny to see those sort of submissions. I think the big thing about how staff works is that we trust the readers to understand any subject. We think that we are able to explain it, and

we think readers should be able. Um. We think about our readers are smart enough, um to understand it too, And I mean that can be everything from particle accelerators to kayaking, like we're just talking about. We put the onus on the writers and the editors to explain the subject in a way that people can appreciate. And I think that I think that everybody should be able to

ask questions about the world and have him answered. And that's really what we're about, right right, And we we don't want as writers or editors to walk away from an article with a question unanswered if in fact, there is an answer for that question, because that means someone out there is going to ask it and the article didn't answer it, and that means that we failed on our part in this In this process, this is a relationship that we've built with our audience, and uh, you know,

we try our best to make sure that we are we have a representative list of questions that we think this article needs to answer. Sometimes that does fall through, but we also will go back and will edit articles and include more information, uh, in order to address that when it's when it's appropriate. So it's you know, it's it's an interesting relationship. And speaking of those, I want to talk a little bit about your relationship with the company.

When did you start at How Stuff Works? I started in January two eight, and I started with a whole group of people. Um, Kristin Conner, she was formerly the host of stuff Mom never told you, Molly Edmonds, they were the original too on that. Amanda Arnold, she was an editor a long time for The Adventure, A really great soul. Um. Also Jennifer Horton, she was for a little bit. She had a shorter stay with How Staff Works. And I'm trying to remember who else there was somebody

else there's six of us, was there? It would have been Toothman? She was later right, Jessica to Ja Toothman, one of our in house writers. Yeah. So to give you an idea of how long I've been with the company, I started when my daughter was seven months old and I am now still with the company and she is ten. Yeah. So I had been with How Stuff Works for a little less than a year when you came on, and uh, I was just thinking, who are these up starts coming?

In on coming in on my playground. Gosh darn it. No, I was excited because again, like when I started, it was just two staff writers, Tracy and myself, and that

was it in fact when I started. So when I started How Stuff Works, we had one article, one full length article go up every week, which meant that we each Tracy and I had two weeks to research right, submit, rewrite and any article and then it would go up, you know that following like the Friday, and then two weeks later the next one that we would write would go up on that Friday and two weeks. So we alternated. Tracy would have one week, I would have another week.

But having two weeks to research, right and refine an article was amazing. It was a huge amount of time. And there's uh, there's a joking law. It's kind of like, um, you know how you you have all these different supposed rules that kind of guide the universe, but really it's just us kind of making stuff up. One of those says that the amount of work you have will fill up whatever time it is that you have available to it. It doesn't matter how short or long the time is.

It's it could be the exact same amount of work or the same output. But if you have two weeks to do it, it'll take two weeks to get it done. If you have forty five minutes to do it, it'll take forty five minutes to get it done. Ah, we had two weeks to write an article, and it was

a single article per person. We also had another person who is writing questions of the day, which were super short, as we're one page, typically Julia Layton, who would write one page articles that would try and answer a basic but interesting question, and that actually has been a throughput for how stuff works as well. We've had that kind of approach of we've got this question that we just want to know the answer to. Let's assign that to someone and find out what the answer is because that's

kind of a cool thing. And we've done that in podcasts, we've done that in articles, we've done in blog posts. But things have changed since then when you joined. By then it had already changed a little bit. Sure, people were really excited because we have a Discovery acquisition had been announced and shortly thereafter I was completed, So there's a lot of excitement around that. Yeah, there's a lot of trepidation but also excitement because suddenly we were going

to be part of a much larger media company. We weren't entirely certain how that was going to play out, but it ended up being really an interesting experience. And I mean, you know, everyone says, oh, I used the word interesting, and that could be neither good or bad. Both happened. I mean, there were good things with the Discovery relationship. There were things that were not so good,

depending upon where in the hierarchy you were right. So one of the examples of something that might have been a little frustrating was that we would occasionally get requests to write or record information about some related Discovery topic, and that put the challenge on us to find a way to do it where it didn't just come across as an advertisement for a Discovery show. And uh, sometimes that was not so hard, because Discovery covers a lot of stuff that is very much aligned with the sort

of things that how Stuff works covers. Sometimes it was more challenging where you really the request was, well, it's essentially gonna be this is gonna be about the show. There's not much I can do about it other than to make sure I do the best job I possibly can creating this piece of content so that it serves both the site and Discovery properly. Uh, and that's always delicate. I assumed that, Uh, you know, you came in right at the beginning of that relationship. I'm sure there were

times during it that were more challenging than others. Yeah, Robert and I are worked on this show, produced pieces for the this awesome series called Life and it was adaptation of the Attenborough BBC serious that they've done and it was a lot of fun and he got to interview some of the directors and main characters involved, and it was super interesting stuff which is all about it very very close to you how stuff works. Core just questions about animals and how the world works and the

ecosystem and the you know, the inner workings. It was. It was very fun. We enjoyed it a lot. That was great. There were other times where and I mean, I'm just going to speak frankly here because it's my show, but there were other times that we're probably a little more of a head scratcher, at least for me, things like walking into a meeting and another conference call is

still kind of going on. But it wasn't being concluded, and so we had this weird kind of mixture of people inside the room, and I remember hearing an actual conversation about the ramifications of John and Kate divorcing, uh for the whole John and Kate plus eight show, and hearing executives talking about how that was going to affect business deals, and it just that's when it hit me. I thought, I don't I don't want to be in

this room right now. I want to get out of this room and now I will come back when this conversation is over, because it didn't have anything to do with me, that was not part of what I was working on at all. But it was one of those little reminders that sometimes these relationships have downsides from a from a writer's perspective, if you like. Again, we were all trying to serve how stuff works first and also serve Discovery because Discovery owned how stuff works at the time,

and it wasn't always an easy thing to do. Uh. I remember Julie Douglas of Stuff of Life and just a really all around great producer right now. She I remember hearing her in the Cube over interviewing Michelle Dugger, and that was always interesting. Yeah, yeah, we had some uh, you know, we we had some little rough spots there. We also, oh uh, I mean, there's no secret that

the way the web works is through web advertising. And we had some really big deals with various manufacturers companies that were wanting to advertise on how stuff works, and they were very very good, big deals, but early on we had not really created the strategy for how to do that in a way that was responsible so that we wouldn't h end up alienating our own user base, our own audience. So there were some some tough learning

curves there. Yeah, it was the dawna of sponsored content for how staff Wricks and a lot of other people had started doing it, and how to do it right and exactly what you're saying, how to balance editorial calendar

so that we are serving a lot of different stakeholder needs. Yeah, and you didn't want to have a moment where someone visits the website and it's just absolutely dominated by a single topic, because then you start thinking, we do not think my thatch And I was thinking about towing, I wasn't I wasn't necessarily going to say it, but as how towing works, oh man, I had to write maybe eight or nine articles about towing and um. Again, this was one of those things where we had made a

promise to an advertiser. I mean, it was all it all made sense on paper. The problem was in actual practice it became very challenging to do because you realize, well, if we go down this road too far, it starts becoming like a content farm where we're just churning out like low quality content in order to meet a demand from an advertiser, but that in turn is not going to necessarily be much value to our readers. We never, I never felt like we actually went down that way.

I never think so either. I think we did some high quality to articles. I mean, you know, it's it's funny to say, but I mean like we took that seriously. We did. We did not want to have an article go out that we did not feel proud of, even in challenging circumstances where you're thinking, like, I don't I don't want to write the same article five times. But this, this topic is very similar to the one I just finished.

It was it made a challenge as a writer to create an article that would be just as compelling, or just as interesting, or just as informative certainly just as

accurate as all the others it was. You know, we after that, we got a lot better at figuring out how to present these packages so that we could serve all of the customers, if you will, uh, the way they needed to be, so that we can make sure that we were delivering information that our readers were going to find interesting, that they would find helpful, that we were going to create opportunities for the advertisers to be able to show their ads against something that they were

comfortable with, that they were you know, proud of, and and something that we felt again didn't betray the spirit and voice of how stuff works. And so it took a little while, like I said, was a rocky start. But shortly after that there were certain certain big topics that for a while you didn't want to say out loud in the house Stuff Works office. Towing would be one of them. Skin clean cleansers was another. Right, Yeah, no, I I wrote one. I'll tell let me tell an

embarrassing story about myself with writing. So Jonathan sometimes has reading comprehension pension issues. It turns out, especially an email because there was a list of assignments that went out. Actually, I think this was in a spreadsheet. There's a list of assignments that went out about skin cleansers, and there were two very very very similar article titles. One was about skin cleansers and one was about a very much related topic, but it wasn't skin cleansers. It was some

other skincare type of product. But both of them were supposed to be five top five gluten freeing about free back then. Oh yeah, So I got first of all, multiple multiple issues I had with the article. But but one, the one that I made the mistake on I'll get that all the way is I wrote the wrong article. I wrote one that Josh Clark had been assigned he got because we there were two articles, like I said, that had very similar titles. I grabbed Josh's and Josh

also wrote Josh is as Josh should have done. Uh. And so we actually had two top five gluten free skin cleanser articles come out, and the one I was supposed to write, which was also a gluten free skincare thing, but it wasn't cleansers. I can't remember what it was.

I never wrote. They just decided not to have me write that one, probably because my page zero, which is our our landing page, our first page, as people would see if they went to The article explained why a gluten free skin cleanser was totally not necessary in the first place, because you don't absorb gluten through the skin. You can, it's the molecules are too big. You have to ingest it. So unless you're eating your skin cleanser, the issues you have with gluten would not be a

problem with these products. Therefore, the list is superfluous, and I have a feeling that that attitude probably meant that they didn't want me to write the real article later. And is that batch of articles the ones that gave your skin it's current rosy glow? Oh yeah. That that and just the fact that I'm I'm practicing My plan is that when I'm I'm ready to retire, I'm gonna segue into being Santa Claus. So I want to make sure I have those rosy cheeks going when I get there.

So it's just it's it's a gradual I don't want it to be a shocking transformation. So I'm planning ahead now and we're just gonna very gradually get there. But I'm gonna be a really off Santa Claus because I'm also you know, working hard. Um, So tell me a little bit about like how you've seen the site kind of change since you started. Obviously we've gone through different corporate owners and that has been a big part of it. But just your your experience as being an editor, how

is that evolved over the years. Well, the mode of storytelling has changed. I think that's a really important thing to note. Just as other publishers have embraced different forms of telling the story, we have as well. I think we're truly multimedia now. And most importantly is podcasts. Back in the day we had we started podcasts. Jerry was here and the original stuff you history class with Candice and before and stuff you should know, and that all started.

I mean that was a long time ago. And the video guys were always here I should say video team. Um, they were always here doing wacky stuff. I remember Tyler, one of our producers now and now an audio engineer. Correct, he remember him walking around in that green suit in the office. Oh yeah, we had him in the green man suit. Yeah. We did this thing where it was the invisible man does something and so we would shoot Tyler against a green screen key him out entirely, and

then you have an invisible man thing. But once in a while you just walk around the office. There's Tyler in the green man suit going around. Yeah. So we've had a couple more avenues of storytelling open up, and my job as an editor is to figure out what the best experience is, what should draw what what is the story, and what's the best way to tell it, Who is the best person to tell it, who's the best editor? When? When should I go out? How much space do we need to give this topic to breathe?

Should it be short? Do we need to get this out today because we really needed to be part of the conversation or do we need to give it a little bit more time and space and and thought, Um, when you were talking before, Jonathan about how you had

about two to write that article. There is very much a conversation going on right now about a return to slow journalism, if you will, that the pace of articles is too fast, and that we should be more careful and just pay articles they're proper do in terms of time and space and word count and sources and all of that stuff. So, in a weird way, a lot of these things have come full circle. It's still about the story and it's just about the best way to tell it um and staying true to the how Stuff

works for us, those are really the important things. So I mean, right now, you know we can embed a podcast. Hey, we're doing something about artificial intelligence. Great. I know a guy who has covered article sal intelligence a lot. I'm going to grab a podcast here, and I think if somebody is interested in listening to a little bit about it, like great, they'll be able to read it, They'll be able to hear it whatever way they learn best. They will be able to get information about this topic that

is relevant to their lives. One, And to your point about the slow journalism thing, like when we when I started, the goal for How Stuff Works was that we were every piece of content we were creating apart from the well even questions of the day. Really, they were all supposed to be evergreen, right. These were all topics that would be something that someone three or four years from now would go back and be able to read and

it would be just as relevant to them. Obviously, once they made me the the head writer for the Technology Channels, I realized how impossible a task that is for technology because things just changed so quickly. If you want any proof, go back and read any of the computer articles on how stuff Works dot com and just look at the little technical specs that I get that get thrown out as examples because you'll sit there and if you start seeing processor speeds listed in the mega hurts instead of

the giga hurts, you're like, wow, when was this article written? Like, well, probably more than a decade ago. Um, But I mean the foundation of the article is still absolutely accurate. It's just that the details have changed because the the scale of technology has changed so much. But uh, that was

sort of the goal, right. We wanted to make sure that the articles we were writing were things that weren't so mercurial that by the time we are ready to submit an article, the facts of the matter had already changed, therefore necessitating a revisit to what we had just written. Uh. Then we've gone through phases like we did House Stuff Works Now. For a while, where we were it was much more rapid turnaround. It wasn't quite breaking news. We

weren't We weren't investigative journalists or anything like that. We're giving more context two things that we're in you know, kind of in the conversation in the news very much the way tech Stuff Daily is. If if any of my listeners have listened to Text Stuff Daily, that's kind of a tech Stuff version of that same idea, where we take things that are kind of being talked about and give more context around it, but it's not in itself a breaking news show. That was that we're just

not set up for that. That's not the way we work. We don't are no, our publishing tools wouldn't support it. You are. Publishing tools aren't meant to support that. Our editorial process is not meant to do that. So seeing this return kind of to the slow journalism, I think that that whether that happens or not, I think that that certainly plays more to the strengths of what we built this company around. Um. Not that I think that

there's no value in giving context to breaking stories. I think there is, but it just it's just, uh, it's more challenging based on the tools that we have at our disposal than the kind of traditional I'm going to really break down how X works and and really understand it at a fundamental level and then explain it. Um, do you remember what it was like interviewing for House Stuff Works. When you first came in, I very much do. Uh, this is funny. It was right around so I came

on in January two thous eight. As I said before, so my interviews, I kind of just sent in my resume on a whim. I applied for the writer position, and I had just finished my master's at U g A and communicating mass Communications, and I was like, yeah, maybe I'll try to try my hand at this writer thing.

And Tracy saw my resume and she gave me a shout and she said, hey, why don't you why don't you try out for the editor position, which, thank you, Tracy, that proved to be a really good move, Thank you, Tracy V. Wilson Um. And so I came in and I was right before the holidays, and I interviewed. I interviewed with Katie, who used to be our old health editor. Yes, yes, and she was the one who originally coined me a loud she. I interviewed with Connell. I interviewed with Tracy.

I remember sitting in Connell's office and this is sort of embarrassing and also not and and like talking to him across this big desk and he was the class at Corner office, and I was like, you know what, I'm gonna get your job someday. And I kind of did, Yeah, you kind of did. It's funny because Connal was part of the company for a long time, then he was not, and now he is again. Sure is he's sending up that fantastic podcast we've got going on. Yep, yep. So

it's great hearing that story. I remember when I came on it was very similar, although different people. Connell had not yet joined the company when I when I was hired. Um, but you know, thinking back on that now, I remember sitting down and having this discussion and then I think

the thing that maybe sealed the deal for me. It's hard to say because obviously I wasn't in on those conversations, was that I said, listen, if you guys don't hire me, and this is kind of what I do anyway, Like I like to learn things and then I like to talk about the stuff I learned with people, and then you like to talk. Yeah. I know it really comes through as a shock, uh, the guy who has all the solo podcast stuff shows, But yeah, I I said, like,

this is what I love to do. And if I were hired here, I get to do it for a living. And that's fortunately how it worked out. It's the job for me changed dramatically over the years. There was originally, like I said, I had two weeks to research and write an article. Eventually that got knocked down to one week to research and write an article. Then it became one week to research, write an article and a companion article. You never had to find the pictures. You never had

to upload it editor ever. No, once Chris became my editor, Yes, but I had other editors before Chris, because I had Candice and I had Shannah, and uh yeah, I had I had editors where I had to find all that stuff. Once I got Chris, Yes, I was on Easy Street. Ye were he were hooked up by Chris. Chris Chris Palette. Let me tell you all right, you guys who have listened to this show for a long time, you know who Chris Palette is. He was my original co host.

Chris Pallette as an editor was a writer's dream come true. Because I would submit a draft to Chris. He would do all the work to get all the images. He would write the captions for the images, he would do all the edits himself, like if there were any problems with the article, yo, he'd solve it. And I only occasionally would get an article back where he would have a question like, hey, could you explain this a bit more? Like? That was so rare. It was essentially I would hand

it off to him and I was done. I could go on to the next thing. Um, I'm not just saying this because I'm on your show. Your copy is generally pretty clean. I will say that as an editor. That's that's good to know. I still occasionally have trouble with passive voice. I got really good at knocking passive voice out of my writing for a really long time, but then I went for a good stretch without writing, and then passive voice crept back in. Uh So, what

what excites you about working at? How stuff works? Like when you think about your job, what is it? What's the stuff that brings you great joy? The people here

really working with the team I do and in the topics. Um, When we first moved to the Atlanta area early two thousands, I moved with my then fiance and he was taking a job at CDC, and I had a lot of respect for CDC and really thought I would go into health communications, and sort of my dream job was to work at the Centers for Disease Control in some sort

of communication role. And I have since come to realize that how stuff works is a very unique place to work, and that you never know what we're going to be talking about. It has made my life and my world perspective so much bigger than it was. I think honestly, it's helped me be a better parent. It makes me ask questions about things, and my kids, like I will constantly ask them things about, well, how does that work? I mean, all of my friends tease me if they're like,

how does that work? Alis, And I mean we all get that question for all of our peeps. Oh yeah, No, whenever we have any kind of technical glitch here at the office, like let's say the the internet connection goes down, then immediately you know you're going to get lots of people making jokes about how we should be able to fix everything. Uh, sometimes things are outside of our control. Sometimes you have to really chase down where a problem is.

But ultimately you also have to remember we spend intense amount of time researching and writing and editing these things, and then we have to turn around and do something totally different, another completely different topic, sometimes sometimes radically different topic.

And you can only hold on to so much information for so long before you are starting to overwrite old Like people will talk to me about an article I wrote back in like two thousand ten, Li said, though that data is gone if I held onto any of it. It's just through the fact that I never got around to overwriting that particular little sector of my brain. Uh. But yeah, like you say, the people here are great. We've had some amazing folks work here something many of

them still working here. But like, throughout the years, we've had a lot of talented writers and editors and illustrators and podcasters and videographers, like, just so many amazing people, some of whom still work in this building, just not at this company. We run into some of them occasionally because they work right down the hall. It's just kind of cool and we'll reminisce. So, yeah, it's it's great to have you on to kind of have this personal

touch with how stuff works. You know. The whole episodes nine hundred and one, I wanted to make sure kind of gave a feel for what this this entire experiences like for us on this side, you know, the people who are working so hard to try and create really interesting content based on things that we personally find fascinating and and that covers the entire spectrum of the human experience, from the cosmological to the microscopic too, you know, fashion

to finance, all of that is fascinating. And for those of you out there who have never gone to How Stuff Works dot com, I'm sure there's some of you who have only experienced this through the podcast, I urge you to go to how Stuff Works dot com and you know, poke around a bit, see some read some articles, check out some stuff that you're interested in. Do you do you, Alison? I hate to spring this on you. Do you have a favorite article? I have a lot

of favorites. Yeah. Um, Honestly, I'm going to say that this article that Eve's Jeff Cote and editor and now she's moved to the podcast side wrote she edited and Ed grab who's a long time writer and he he wrote it and it's on how nepotism works and got his nephew to write that nice one. Um. I thought it was just classic how staff works in that I thought the topic would be pretty straightforward nepotism kind of

a bad thing. And then ed got into really the history of nepotism and how you know, you have these forces that are opposing you have um, you know, sort of you have non nepotism and you have nepotism. You have a smooth transition to power that's occurring if you're passing power to say, your son, and you sort of have this eroding faith in the public and the public institutions if you get nepotism to heavy. But anyway, the whole point of the story is that this article really

did more than just a superficial treatment. He got in there and he talked about it, and he talked about

the popes. Actually it sprang from the Latin for nephew because the popes wanted to have some way to recognize their illegitimate sons, and so they used to pass on prime positions within the church to uh to their to the people, right to their to their their their sons that they could not actually publicly acknowledge because one of the things about being pope, you know, I'm not supposed to have a whole parcel of kids, at least not later on in the in in Catholicism. Yeah, that's great.

I mean, like I said, there and try and think about my favorites, like I there's there's one that I have a favorite because of how frequently Connal would reference it, because I just think it was funny that that was his go to article to reference whenever he talked about like an article about something cool, which was quantum suicide. Oh yeah he did. He talked about condum suicide all

the time. Quantum suicide was like the phrase from Connal like if you want to something like, yeah, you know, we write cool articles like you know, quantum suicide, Connell. You know, We've got like a thousand other articles on the site. But yes, Josh did a great job with quantum suicide. I don't want to take anything away. It's really great. But from my own personal favorite, I wrote so many that I really loved and yeah I do,

I do, but but not as frequently. But I'll go to a classic one, like there were ones about the Necronomicon and Cathulhu that I had a lot of fun writing. But the one that I think is my favorite out of all of them, and it was one I had to fight for, was how Area fifty one works, and uh, the reason I had to fight for it was not because of the topic. That was that was a sign to me we had decided we wanted to do it.

I wrote it, but I included so many different sections that were outside of just the base, the Groom Lake base part of that discussion. I included things about the community around it and the various conspiracy theories that popped up around it, and the culture around Area fifty one, And to me that was also just as fascinating as

all the top secret stuff. And I got a little bit of a pushback originally because they said, well, this is a much longer article than what we typically will Yeah, And I said, but I really feel like if you don't put that in there, it's not really about how Area fifty one works, because to me, it's a bigger story than just the mechanics of running a top secret

research and development airbase. And eventually they I don't know if my arguments convinced them or they just felt that it was going to be too much work to cut it down, so they published it. Pretty much. The whole article the way I wrote it got published and it's still up there at how how stuff works dot Com. So if you want to read a classic Jonathan Strickland article, it's how Area fifty one works, and uh still one

of the most. Like. I actually like that kind of relationship to between writers and editors, where you together your goal is to create the best article possible. Sometimes that means pushing back. Sometimes the editors are absolute right, and I mean there were times where they made decisions and I was like, oh, I'm so mad, and then like three weeks later, I know that was the right call. Uh. And then sometimes the writers are able to justify their

choices and that's great too. So it's been a fantastic experience. It's also been great having you here than for having me. Yeah. Absolutely, I very much appreciate your time. Alison Lowermolke, the managing editor of how Stuff Works dot com. Every time you go and you read something amazing, just remember that somewhere Alison was yelling at somebody to write it. I want to thank Allison again for her time, and I want to finish up this section of the show with a

few more thoughts. How Stuff Works is truly an incredible place to work. I learned something new every week, and then I have the honor of sharing that with a wider audience, and I take that very seriously. It is fun one, but it's also something that I think is really important to keep in mind that this is a responsibility. Anything that lets us engage our curiosity is something I

feel should be encouraged. And like Allison said, it really working here trains you to be a critical thinker, which is a skill that I think has a lot of utility outside of just writing articles. I also think it's important to point out that while the site has been through numerous major changes of ownership and with different directives and different goals, we always tried to create the most reliable, informative and entertaining articles, podcasts, and videos that we can manage.

I know I speak for everyone when I say we take this very seriously, and it goes well beyond the editorial staff. So that's where I have my experience, obviously in the editorial department, but we also have folks and sales and marketing and web development, and they're constantly working to improve the company in various ways, and I would not be able to do what I do without all of those people. In our next episode, we're gonna revisit How Stuff Works, but we're gonna do it with an

eye on the podcast side of the business. I'll be joined by Josh Clark of Stuff you Should Know Fame to talk about his experiences in the podcast world as well, so you do not want to miss that episode. Thanks for listening, and for those of you who have been with me for all nine hundred episodes so far, a huge thanks to you guys. You've had to listen to more Jonathan Strickland than any sane person should ever endure. But seriously, you guys mean the world to me. I'm

extremely thankful for your support. I'm looking forward to recording nine hundred more. I'm not going anywhere, so get that thought out of your heads now. If you have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, maybe there's a technological subject you feel I have overlooked for long enough and gosh darn it, I need to fix that. You should let me know in a nice way, preferably, and

you can do that via email. The address for the show is tech Stuff at how stuff Works dot com, or you can drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle for the show at both of those is tech Stuff hs W. We've got an Instagram account now, and we've got an amazing person named Crystal who is she's the steward of that Instagram and she's she's kicking technological but folks, So if you don't subscribe to the

Instagram account for tech stuff, you need to go do that. Also, remember I live stream these typically not today, but usually and you can catch the live stream of tech stuff at twitch dot tv slash tech stuff, and you can be part of the audience and even chatting the chat room, and maybe the person who has been quietly sitting in this room this entire time, the moderator for the Twitch live stream chat will be there to greet you or kick you out if you're a jerk, because Cat's awesome

and guys, I will talk to you again. Release soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is that how stuff works dot Com