PJ Vogt investigates one question a week, from GLP-1 drugs to driverless-car policy.
Search Engine follows big public arguments back to the human scale. Recent episodes move from GLP-1s and gray-market peptides to driverless cars, war spending, AI tools, and a child's unsettling food question.
PRESS PLAY
Search Engine is hosted by PJ Vogt, who opens each episode with a specific question and works through it using either a one-on-one interview or a longer reported narrative. Some episodes are conversational interviews with a single expert, such as physician Rachel Bedard on GLP-1 drugs or Harvard public-finance professor Linda Bilmes on the cost of the Iran conflict. Others are narrative documentaries built from field reporting and testimony, including a two-part history of driverless-car technology and an account of Boston's political fight over Waymo. Guests are typically journalists, academics, or people with direct professional experience in the topic at hand, including author Dan Wong on Chinese governance, journalist Ezra Klein on political polarization, and reporter Joseph Cox on the FBI's Anom encrypted-phone operation. Recurring subject areas include public health and pharmaceuticals, war costs and public finance, geopolitics, labor displacement from automation and gig-economy platforms, and US political polarization. The show occasionally covers true-crime and surveillance-technology stories, framed as investigative narrative rather than procedural crime recounting. Producer Emily Maltare contributes reporting to some episodes, and Vogt periodically references other podcasts, including This American Life, within episodes. Individual episodes run roughly 40 to 70 minutes and mix narration, interview tape, and sponsor reads. The show suits listeners who want explanatory, deep-dive journalism on policy, technology, and health topics rather than headline-level news coverage. There is no fixed weekly beat; each episode is organized around whatever question the reporting team pursued that week, so subject matter varies more than shows built around a single genre.
Made for: Listeners who want in-depth, reported answers to a single real-world question each week, spanning health policy, technology, labor, and geopolitics.
What sets it apart: Unlike beat-specific news or true-crime shows, each episode is organized around a single reported question and can shift genre entirely, from a medical-policy interview to a narrative investigation of an FBI sting.
We try to make sense of the world, one question at a time. No question too big, no question too small. Hosted by PJ Vogt, edited by Sruthi Pinnamaneni. Named one of the best podcasts of all time by Time Magazine
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
PJ Vogt turns questions about technology, medicine and government into reported stories that connect institutional choices with their human consequences.
Search Engine turns deceptively simple questions into reported narratives about technology, power, health and public spending. PJ Vogt approaches driverless cars through their development and their effect on working drivers, while other episodes examine encrypted phones used by…
PJ Vogt follows a question past the obvious answer, where your certainty starts accruing late fees.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
War gets expensive when debt, discretion, and contractors absorb the bill.
Search Engine turns the Iraq and Afghanistan war bill into a plain, readable account of how modern war spending moves through debt, flexible Pentagon accounts, and contractor-heavy budgets.
A sharp reset on GLP-1s that shifts the story from body talk to real-world stakes.
PJ Vogt treats GLP-1s as a story about more than weight loss. He keeps circling the question of who gets scolded, who gets ignored, and what gets lost when a hot argument takes over the room.
A sharp Boston story about driverless cars, worker anxiety, and the politics behind promises of safer roads.
Search Engine puts a human driver at the center of the driverless car debate. Abdi Aziz has spent decades driving in Boston, long enough to remember when taxi work felt like a real career and when Uber first showed up at Logan with an app, a phone, and a promise that drivers…
A sharp origin story for self-driving cars, built around the moment an expert runs out of reasons to say no.
Search Engine turns a simple question, whether humans are good drivers, into a technology story about work, automation, and the early logic of self-driving cars.
A criminal caper that becomes a story about surveillance and technology reshaping the job.
It begins like a criminal caper, then opens into a larger story about surveillance, trust, and the way technology can reshape a job. The episode lets the setup unfold at a measured pace before widening to the FBI's criminal phone company and what the show calls history's most…
Political disagreement looks less like a debate than a test of whether relationships can hold disagreement.
Political disagreement is treated less like a contest to win than a strain on human relationships. PJ Vogt starts with a skeptical theory and worries it through conversation, which keeps the episode taut: how much of political disagreement is about policy, and how much is about…
A dry, lucid tour of China, America, and how countries are run.
Search Engine turns a question about America and China into a clear argument about how countries are run, and its strength is the way Dan's case unfolds in public.
Willa Paskin traces one cultural mystery per episode, from web soap operas to prune marketing.
A Radiotopia feed built around the scripted drama Red for Revolution plus curated NPR crossover episodes.
San Quentin's incarcerated and formerly incarcerated producers tell first-person stories from inside prison.
Spanish-language narrative journalism from across Latin America and Latino life.
PJ Vogt asks why the United States is at war with Iran and turns to Linda Bilmes, a Harvard Kennedy School public-finance professor who studies war costs.
PJ Vogt opens by saying Search Engine had avoided GLP-1s even while he privately wondered about them, and Rachel Bedard frames the drugs against the 2022-2023 culture-war noise around Ozempic.
A robot driver meets a human one.
A knocker-upper taps the window.
This episode features a crossover with the Odd Lots podcast, introducing listeners to their financial reporting style and sharing an episode about the Chinese real estate bubble.
This episode explores the unsettling advancements in AI chatbots, particularly Anthropic's Claude, and how its capabilities like Claude Code are causing 'future nausea' and disrupting industries.
This episode explores the cultural and ethical reasons why cannibalism is taboo through an interview with a young child questioning food norms.
The episode explores the trend of Americans self-experimenting with gray market Chinese peptides and injectable compounds that promise to change the body.
Host PJ Vogt announces an exclusive salon event for top-tier listeners, promising cheese, wine, and a definitive answer to 'what is a salon?'
This episode continues a historical exploration of Venezuela, focusing on Hugo Chavez's consolidation of power in 2005, while also briefly mentioning a documentary about Greenland.
PJ Vogt updates listeners on the Forkiverse experiment, a small social media site built with Hard Fork Podcast, covering micro-scandals and disinformation, then transitions to discussing the challenge of deciding what to pay attention to in a world full of competing stories.
PJ Vogt explores potential solutions to the internet's problems, revisiting a 2024 interview about building the Fediverse.
This episode features a story from the podcast Heavyweight, where Jonathan Goldstein helps Gregor address his aging parents' refusal to move out of their family home.
PJ Vogt introduces a listener's inappropriate question that became a favorite, teasing a story about a niche topic.
PJ Vogt discusses the business side of running an independent podcast, including listener-funded board meetings and the show's financial health.
A new technology shows up.
Can a family argument survive inside a relationship?
PJ Vogt explores the AI investment bubble through the lens of teenagers buying NVIDIA stock and a reporter visiting data centers.
This episode explores Elon Musk's ambitious AI data center project Colossus in Memphis and its implications for the AI arms race.
This episode explores the online subculture of gooners through an interview with writer Daniel Kolitz, who spent a year investigating this niche within the porn world.
Review culture opens the back door to geopolitics.
This episode previews a live Q&A event with host and guest Pablo Torre discussing unanswerable questions and sports journalism.
PJ Vogt asks listeners to submit questions he is unqualified to answer for a live event.
The host introduces the show's mission to make sense of the world through questions, followed by sponsor ads for Square and Son of a Tailor.
PJ Vogt introduces a question about when it's okay to copy creative work, exploring the line between inspiration and rip-off.
PJ Vogt introduces a new season and takes a listener's call about a homemade memorial in a closet.
Host PJ Vogt interviews sex worker and writer Ayla about her work, surveys, and search for meaning.
This episode explores practical strategies to overcome phone addiction without relying on traditional methods like self-discipline or meditation.
PJ Vogt examines Mark Zuckerberg's recent persona shift and what it signals about the political landscape as a second Trump term begins.
The host announces a board meeting episode and a live event, then transitions to advertisements.
PJ Vogt introduces the show's premise of answering questions about the world, then reads advertisements for Square and Liquid IV.
PJ Vogt introduces a rebroadcast episode exploring the question of when to stop drinking, framed around New Year's resolutions and self-improvement.
PJ Vogt introduces a podcast episode about a person whose strange experience changed her mind, featuring a clip from another show.
PJ Vogt explores the mystery of why airport luggage stores exist, using listener questions to examine the absurdities of airport culture.
PJ Vogt asks listeners for questions for chef Allison Roman about post-Thanksgiving malaise, then introduces an episode on the internet trend 'jaw maxing' with reporter Ryan Broderick.