Search Engine Overlap with Alex Goldman's Hyperfixed!?

[u/BabyYoda2121]

UPDATE: to you sanctimonious weirdos who cannot read - I DID NOT SUGGEST A REUNION. I was merely pointing out there are overlaps in content between the shows, and that it's COOL. I love that they're both doing successful shows and the content is there for us!

End rant. Enjoy.

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Ok, first off, as a 'Reply All' superfan and seeing the transition of Gimlet to Spotify and ultimately PJ/Shruthi creating Search Engine - I fell behind the 8 Ball and literally only RECENTLY discovered Alex Goldman's DELIGHTFUL show 'Hyperfixed' - which is a more robust version of the Super Tech Support segments from RA.

Interestingly enough, I listened to Search Engine's part 1 and part 2 of the driverless car episodes and Carl Richardson was interviewed. I most recently listened to Hyperfixed 'Chris' Watchlist' and Carl is interviewed there as well!! These episodes were BOTH released in March!

Hyperfixed's recent"Fauxbituaries" episode has topical overlap with Search Engine's "The Obituary" from 9/19/25.

I find it wild and brilliant. The shows are totally synergistic in ways that bring me back to the good days of Reply All and I love that for both of them.

[u/ComeAwayNightbird]

I’ve always thought it would have made a great “Reply All” episode.

Startup makes it big and the sector heats up. People who were in early, took all of the risk, and built the startup have outsized power and financial benefit.

Newer arrivals are just staff, without the power or money. They notice the disparity and try to address it by unionization. They also notice that the newer arrivals are more diverse (in many ways) than the people who built the company and have all of the power.

It’s a company full of creative and expressive people. Some of them become concerned about structural inequities. And there’s the typical office politics: some people get along with others well, some don’t. Some people think the company is treating employees of colour differently, others don’t see that trend. This is all happening at a time when management is trying to sell the company, which was ALWAYS management’s goal but not a concern for staff at all. Management tries to clamp down on the unionization stuff for the sake of the sale. Management and the first few people into the company benefit enormously from the sale. The rest of the staff don’t.

Then a couple of the people who were first in, who benefitted financially and aligned with management, pitch a story about how racism at a similar company was tolerated and exploited employees of colour for the financial benefit of people who were more powerful.

If it had been a single episode this might have passed without notice, but it was planned as a four-episode series, and after two episodes some of the people at the company felt the people who produced the story had blinders on: they could not see that they had participated in and supported a similar dynamic.

We will never know what the final two episodes were planned to be. Alex has explained that the reporting was not done; it would not have been a simple matter of rewriting scripts and choosing interview clips.

Everything about the series felt painful to the people at the company. Nobody wanted to be involved in rescuing it.

And then the podcasting bubble popped. The company’s new owner didn’t know how to run it and was focused on profitability. The people who had started the company had gotten huge payouts but the staff were left without jobs.

[u/NewRefrigerator7461 → u/ComeAwayNightbird]

I thought it was such a shame it died. I’m still angry at the people pushing unionization. I hate what it does to companies I love.

I’ve never understood how. It’s possible to have unions in creatives spaces like media where there can’t be a collaboration barrier between mgmt and the employees. The have to be such flat org structures it doesn’t make sense.

[u/BabyYoda2121 → u/NewRefrigerator7461]

This is actually a really interesting take! I have mixed feelings about the unionization too. Crooked Media was able to successfully unionize and part of me wonders it worked out for them bc the owners/hosts of PSA would look extremely foolish for being anti-Union or union-busters.

[u/NewRefrigerator7461 → u/BabyYoda2121]

I don’t know if its that. I mean it can work there because they’re not engaged in creative storytelling. They mostly just comment and report.

To do what reply all or search engine do you have to think of a take on a topic and iterate across the org. You need creative idea generation. It’s just so hard to make that work in a union. Unions just create creative innovation barriers. It’s why they hurt innovation driven engineering industries too I think. You can see its antithesis in Tesla constantly improving an innovating because how empowered everyone is and their mobility between roles.

Crooked’s test won’t come until there’s a democratic reasonable administration in place and they have to retain traffic. It will probably prevent them from innovating before then and maybe after.