Podcast research rarely travels in a straight line. You begin with a game designer, find an old magazine interview, discover a forgotten project, and emerge three hours later holding an extremely specific fact about Nintendo. This is not failure. This is the expedition.
The nuisance is having to organise every page while the interesting part is happening.
In June 2024, Eleanor spoke with podcaster Max Roberts about using Horse Browser while preparing The Max Frequency Podcast and Chapter Select. Max had been making podcasts in one form or another for sixteen years. He knew his way around a rabbit hole.
Sixteen years of pressing Record
Max began podcasting because he wanted to make something like Show Me Your News, a programme about Super Smash Bros. Brawl. In 2021, after writing and podcasting for larger companies, he returned to his own site and started two shows on his own terms.
The Max Frequency Podcast brings in a new guest for conversations about games, technology, podcasting, and whichever peculiar question has acquired sufficient gravitational pull. Chapter Select, made with Logan Moore, takes one series at a time and moves between its entries to study how it evolved. Paper Mario, Resident Evil, and Pokémon have all gone through the apparatus.
From one question to the weeds
Eleanor: What does a typical research session look like?
When using Horse to research for a show, it usually starts with going somewhere or looking for something specific, like a person’s body of work. Then, before I know it I am down the proverbial trail in the weeds on a project I didn’t know the person did or finding an old magazine interview that offers cool insight to a game’s development. I’ll clean up some unnecessary pages and then have this clear lineage of how I got to where I ended up.
That “clear lineage” is what Trails preserve. Click a link and the new page branches from the page that opened it. Follow another and the branch continues. The browser draws the route while Max follows the material, so he does not have to stop mid-discovery and perform administrative taxidermy on a row of tabs.
The organisation happens by itself
Eleanor: How did your process change after Horse?
It’s changed from tab groups and windows slammed with tabs that I would try to manually organize into that flow of “how did I get here?” Now I just look to the left and quickly and clearly see the answer to that question. It’s lifted this mental load of organizing my research while I am researching.
The tabs were not merely untidy. They had lost the relationship that made them useful. Max knew that one interview had led to another project, but the browser displayed both as equal rectangles and politely invited him to remember the plot himself.
Trails make that relationship visible. Max still decides what matters and what can be deleted. Horse carries the lineage. Human: story. Computer: lineage. THE SPECIES HAVE FINALLY BEEN ASSIGNED THEIR CORRECT DEPARTMENTS.
A small shift with a large consequence
Eleanor: What is your favourite part of Horse?
My favorite feature is the innovation of trails. At first glance, you might think it is just folders or groups by a different name, but when using them you realize how the slight shift in approach makes a world of difference.
That difference is automatic branching. A folder waits for you to decide where something belongs. A Trail records where it came from. You can organise later if the work earns it; until then, the act of browsing produces enough structure to return.
At the time of the interview, Max also wanted better hierarchy above Trails and support for the 1Password vault he already used. Both requests tell the same story: software has to join a person’s existing working life, not demand they rebuild that life as an entrance fee.
Horse has moved since then. Folders now sit above Trails, and tested 1Password and Bitwarden extensions are available alongside Horse’s local Saddlepack password manager. Max asked for those things because a browser has to meet the life already in progress. Horse can now fit more of that life without asking him to rebuild it.
The rest of the workshop
Horse is one piece of Max’s production setup. He writes and publishes with Obsidian, records with Audio Hijack, edits in Logic, transcribes with MacWhisper, follows feeds in NetNewsWire, and prepares images in Pixelmator Pro. His maintained colophon carries the current list.
Horse does not make the podcast, conduct the interview, or identify the excellent fake Miyamoto quotation. It keeps the route through the source material visible, so Max can spend more of the session on the part only Max can do.
I hope to keep making the shows and share impactful stories. They give me an avenue to explore and find answers to the questions that excite me.
That is the destination: more room for the questions, less labour spent rebuilding the path to them. Sixteen years into making podcasts, Max has not run out of things worth asking. The browser should be helping that appetite, not charging a filing fee every time it wanders into the weeds.
See how Trails work, visit Max Frequency, or read Beth McClelland’s quiet-internet story.
Catch you on the Trail,
Pascal & Eleanor