Episode #1047 of Thinking With Mitch Joel is now live.

This conversation with Simon Rogers gets into a strange and revealing idea: maybe the most honest version of humanity is not what we post, publish or present to the world. Maybe it is what we ask when we think nobody is watching. Simon has spent his career turning data into stories that help us better understand the world (and ourselves). He is a former news editor at The Guardian, where he founded and edited the influential Datablog, and is now the Data Editor at Google, where he works with Google Trends, one of the largest publicly accessible datasets of human curiosity and behaviour ever created. He is also the co-host of The Data Journalism Podcast and a longtime advocate for open data, visualization and making complex information meaningful.

His new book, What We Ask Google – A Surprisingly Hopeful History Of Humankind, explores what billions of searches reveal about our private fears, shared vulnerabilities, and desire to help one another.

It is a book about data, but not in the cold, spreadsheet sense. It is about grief, parenting, friendship, health, loneliness, crisis, generosity and all of the questions people ask when they are trying to make sense of being alive. What makes Simon’s work so compelling is that search is different from most public signals. Social media often captures performance. Search captures need. We ask Google the questions we may be too embarrassed, confused or overwhelmed to ask another person. We ask about our bodies… our children… our relationships… our fears… our hopes. In aggregate, those questions become a kind of collective stream of consciousness… chaotic, intimate, vulnerable and often more compassionate than we might expect. In this conversation, we talk about Google Trends as a cultural signal, the power and limits of data visualization, how search behaviour shifted during Covid, what search can reveal about loneliness and connection, and why being surrounded by data does not automatically make us more insightful. We also get into AI and how it may be changing the language, complexity and shape of search without changing the deeper human impulse underneath it. Mostly, this is a conversation about what people reveal when they genuinely need answers. The data may be massive, but the questions are deeply human.

The episode is now live. Listen to my conversation with Simon Rogers here: Life Lessons From Google Search With Simon Rogers – TWMJ #1047.

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