Sat 12 September 2026 | -- (permalink)

During the pandemic, Jenny and I started listening to some Disney-related podcasts. We took the kids for the first time 10 years ago and had a really amazing time.

I really like the history of the attractions. The stories about how they were built are really fascinating. Disney has solved so many genuinely difficult engineering and math problems over the last 50 years. And because it's Disney, there are a lot of folks who have gathered its history (unfortunately for me, I don't think the history of the IBM PC Jr. or the Timex Sinclair has been quite as thoroughly documented, but I would listen to a podcast about that as well)

I went to Disney World in the mid-'80s as a kid, and I can't overstate how powerful the combination of experiencing your own powerful nostalgia combined with and amaizingly fun modern experince for your kids. I was super excited to take them on 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and was shocked to discover that it had been closed for 20 years.

So, of course, I wanted to be able to find every instance where Jim and Len talked about 20,000 Leagues. But there wasn't a method to search the audio podcasts for every mention. I remembered that someone had built a similar tool for ATP (a tech podcast I also listen to), so I built this simple tool to search Disney Dish episodes.

I created a couple of Python scripts to pull every episode from the RSS feed. Then I transcribed them with a Whisper model. I stored the transcriptions in a database and threw together a little API and a very simple front end.

If you'd like to try it out, it's at DisneySearch.Reing.com.