PJ Vogt

Hello, this week we are running one of our very favorite classic search engine episodes.

It concerns the topic that I think is always humming underneath the thoughts in our minds that we spend a lot of energy not thinking about.

Maybe we is just me, but I think it's probably you too.

It's a conversation that started with an intriguing question and then gently went a lot of places that surprised me.

After these ads,

What if the cemetery goes out of business?

Welcome to Search Engine.

I'm PJ Vogt.

No question too big, no question too small.

This week, a question one of our listeners has been wondering about for nearly 15 years.

A question about the dead.

That's like your interpretation of your own hockey hat feels like a very morbid Rorschach test.

Lucas, perhaps a fellow given to certain morbid wonderings, which was what had led him here today.

His questions stretched all the way back to 2011, back when Lucas was studying advertising in Texas.

In one of his classes, he was given an assignment.

Find an existing company that might need some help with their brand and copy.

And so in his search, he would find himself wandering the world, noticing businesses more, the ways they presented themselves, the choices they made.

So it starts out like that, an unusual piece of ad copy in that the business itself, the cemetery, is addressing you in the first person, but whatever.

It's the next paragraph that marks the truly strange pivot.

The cemetery, speaking to you on its website, begins to kind of berate you.