Search Engine - Am I the victim of an international sushi scam? (Part 2)

Episode Date: December 15, 2023

We bring you the shattering conclusion to our investigation into whether a New York City sushi restaurant is swapping their tuna rolls for “the ex-lax fish.” The DNA test is in. Can we trust anyone? Are our fish safe to eat? What’s the email address where you submit for the Pulitzers? We have answers. Plus a bonus this week — the 5-second rule is put to a laboratory test. If you'd like to support the show, head to our newsletter at pjvogt.com. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This is search engine. I'm PJ Vote. This is part two of our prestigious investigative series, Am I the victim of an international sushi scam? In part one, I had a literally gut-wrenching question. A New York City sushi restaurant had been making me sick almost every time I ate there. For reasons having to do with my own broken psychology,

I kept ordering anyway. I've gotten some emails and comments about how many times I did this. I don't want to say on air how many times I did this. but I will tell you it's a number greater than 20 and less than 91. That's not the point. The point is, eventually I got curious about what might be happening, and I learned that there's something called fish fraud or fish substitution, in which fish sellers swap one fish for another without telling the customer. I began to suspect that the spicy tuna rolls I've been ordering contained not tuna, but a fish called Escalar, a fish that could provoke intense GI distress,

so much so that has been nicknamed the X-laxfish. The X-laxifix. Laxative of the sea. That was my suspicion. But Dr. Peter Marco, an esteemed academic I'd been talking to, had offered to DNA test the actual fish in the role. We mailed a piece of sushi to his lab in Hawaii, and sometime later, Dr. Marco got in touch.

Check, check, check. Okay, we're recording. Okay, so first of all, thank you for doing free lab for search engine. I know, I'm happy to do it. It's kind of fun, just all a little mystery. Dr. Peter Marco, who I have to say, it's pretty dashing. He's got a cool surfer vibe. He sports a Hawaiian shirt sometimes.

We were talking from what looked to be his home office. He had a bunch of handwritten notes from his work that week. Do you want to actually see sort of what I did? It might be kind of nice to actually. Yes, I'm so curious. Because it's more than just a reveal out of a black box, I think. Yeah, please. Okay, so I'm a co-host here, so I think I can show you.

All right, so what we do... Peter broke down the process for DNA testing Suspicious Sushi. He did this using what's called a chyogen, D&EZ blood and tissue kit. Once he'd extracted some DNA, the next thing he did was run the sample through a PCR, not so different from the kind of PCR you might use to test for COVID. The goal is to make a bunch of copies of a section of the genetic material that will help figure out what organism it belongs to. At this point, if everything is gone according to plan, you're ready for the final step.

Sequencing the DNA. Peter sent the PCR product off to another lab on campus that ran it through a fancy machine. There, the machine read the DNA region he'd copied from, one base pair at a time, and gave him something like a genetic signature from the sample. And once he had that genetic signature, he was able to figure out what fish it really belonged to. I can then identify it. All right, so now I'm, what you're looking at is the, portal for a tool called Blast, which is a portal that allows us to access databases at the

National Center for Biotechnology Information or NCBI, commonly referred to as GenBank. And I can send a sequence that I paste into this box, which is your sequence or the sequence from your sample, and blast it and wait a few seconds, maybe a minute, and this will come back and tell us what matches that sequence in this massive database. So this is like the fingerprint database of DNA? Yeah, it's not what we would actually call a fingerprint in the field, but every time somebody publishes a paper involving DNA sequences, they submit the sequences to this site.

And so it's this ginormous repository of sequences that originate from all kinds of studies, anything that involves DNA sequencing, saying it's mandatory for most scientific journals to submit those sequences to this database so anybody can take your data and have a look at it for themselves. Wait, so is this going to give us our answer? It'll tell us what the very best match is in this database and how well it matches. Oh, okay, yeah. So this is the moment of truth. Yeah, we need a really long drum roll.

Peter hits the button, the website very slowly churns, and then we get a result. Uh-oh, it doesn't look good if I'm reading the Latin on this right. So can you read that? Thunis. Albuqueras. And they're all Thunis Albuqueras, which I'm assuming is a fancy Latin for albuquer tuna. No, Albuqueras, oddly, is Yelphin tuna.

And it matches, that 100% means that our sequence matches this sequence in GenBank, 100%. And it gives us a list of the top 100 sequences that match our. from GenBank. But it's a 100% match with Yellowfin. Right, yeah. So there's all these matches. If we scroll down, there's one that's 99%, but they're all tuna.

All tuna. It wasn't Esklar. Sure, multiple studies suggest there's some sort of fish fraud epidemic plaguing American cities, but I was not a victim of it. Not this time. Peter said he'd actually suspected as much when he'd opened the envelope we'd mailed

and pulled the fish out. He saw that the fish had stained the alcohol it was preserved in a reddish color, which for him was a clue. Well, okay, so you guys kind of threw me for a loop there with that because he didn't tell me about the color of the fish. So Eskilar is going to be really white,

and it's called white tuna because the attempt is to pass it off as albacore tuna, which is quite possibly my favorite type of tuna for sushi. If it's got that characteristic red color, it's almost certainly elephant or bluefin and probably not Escalara. I don't know about fish being died

other than aquaculture fish being fed dyes to make their flesh look more appealing like that's common with farm-raised salmon. Oh, interesting. So what was going on here? Why would yellowfin tuna, a fish I've eaten my whole life, be making me sick when I consumed it

from this one New York City sushi restaurant? Peter continued to play detective. If you go to a different sushi bar or restaurant and you order to know what happens. Totally fine. That's amazing that they consistently are serving something that's making you sick. That's pretty remarkable.

I know because in my mind, I'm like if it were unsafe or like unhygienic kitchen practices, then like some of the time it would happen. You know what I mean? It wouldn't happen so often. Yeah, I think you need a food safety expert maybe. I don't want to get, I mean, maybe it's just a problem with me.

Maybe I'm the problem. At one restaurant, I mean, there's nothing unusual about this fish. It's yellowfin tuna. I think you need to get more people to go there and eat it and see what happens. It's funny. It's sort of like when you're with your partner and they're like, oh, this is disgusting. You've got to try it. It's going to be hard for me to tell my friends, like, you have to go to this restaurant

because it makes me sick and I don't know why. Yeah, I think you need a bigger sample size of people to accuse them, which would allow you to rule out something about. you and that particular type of fish. I feel like I'm just back in the mystery. Yeah, the mystery continues. After a short break, if anyone is eating while listening to this, I salute you. But this would be your last warning to stop.

Because we are going to go deeper into our next suspect. Bacteria. That's after some months. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Vanguard. To all the financial advisors out there whose job is to help your clients keep more of what they earn, Vanguard is here to help you with that. Vanguard is slashing fees again, this time for more than 50 of its funds. That's on top of big fee cuts they gave last year to investors in 87 of their funds.

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That's vanguard.com slash impact. All investing is subject to risk, Vanguard Marketing Corporation distributor. This episode is brought to you by Indeed. Stop waiting around for the perfect candidate. Instead, use Indeed sponsored jobs to find the right people. with the right skills, fast. It's a simple way to make sure your listing is the first candidate C. According to Indeed data, sponsored jobs have four times more applicants than non-sponsored jobs.

So go build your dream team today with Indeed. Get a $75 sponsor job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Welcome back to the show. My life had entered a bleak chapter. I wanted an answer to this mystery, and I saw no avenue towards one. The fish wasn't Escalar, but it was making me. me sick. I didn't know if it would make other people sick, which now seemed important to

determine, but also ethically difficult to test. We briefly talked about having some kind of search engine holiday party where we'd serve guests, risky sushi rolls, and airline coffee. This idea was quickly vetoed. I ordered the sushi a few times just to make sure it was still making me sick. It was. Garrett Graham, who produced this story, had ordered the sushi. I did not tell him to, but he did, and he ate. it, and he said it made him feel sick, too. Not as sick as me, but a, quote, definite tightness in the stomach. So, I returned to the internet. Foodborne illness, I learned, afflicts one out of six Americans a year, and contaminated food is a serious enough issue nationally that both the FDA

and the CDC maintain public websites tracking outbreaks in contaminated food. These are plain government websites, which describe in clinical hysteria-free language, the routine horrors that sneak into American food stuffs. Hanging out on these databases, you get a different view of our country. It turns out some batches of super-premium mint chocolate chip ice cream may contain listeria. Cans of one variety of smokeless tobacco may contain foreign metal objects. Salmonella abounds in some brands of dried dog and cat food. Mistakes have been paid.

You will not learn about your local sushi restaurant here, though. The FDA and CDC are concerned with food that has entered at a higher point in the supply chain, brands which circulate down to grocery stores and food establishments. They don't tell you about solitary restaurants. I did get connected to a food safety expert in Matt Reneery. He offered a few clues. He said that sometimes restaurants can develop what's called a biofilm, which is exactly as gross as it sounds.

It's a kind of house strain of bacteria, a little colony of microorganisms that make their home on a specific kitchen surface. Once biofilms develop, they can be very resistant to routine disinfection. Did my sushi restaurant have a biofilm? I wanted to know if someone could test the sushi for specific bacteria, so we started contacting labs all over the country to find one that would test our tuna rolls. The problem we learned is that the labs that do this kind of work are all designed to test large. batches of food for big commercial clients, they wouldn't take on a random one-off, a piddling piece of sushi from a piddling podcaster.

My lucky break, when I found it, was because my diet began to shift. Not my food diet, my podcast diet. Bacteria, bacteria. Look, there's bacteria, bacteria, bacteria. You know, when people ask what podcasts I listen to, I tell them the usual stuff, hard fork, as their client. It's just too complicated to explain that these days I've mostly been listening to Risky or Not,

the podcast hosted by Dr. Don and his co-host Professor Ben to food safety experts. In this podcast, we promise to do our best not to waffle, dither, dissemble, or to criticate, and to give you straight-up answers about whether something is risky or not. Each episode, the two discussed the health risks associated with various questionable food-eating scenarios. Highlight episodes include adults eating at picnic tables with a little bit of dried bird poop, eating facacha made on a counter where eight cats have walked. A chicken taco found at the bottom of a backpack and a hot summer day that had been there for at least a day and a half. The verdict on that one, by the way, risky.

The man who goes by Dr. Don on the show is actually by day a tenured academic. So first of all, do you mind just introducing yourself, say who you are and what you do? do? Sure. My name is Don Schaffner. I'm a distinguished professor and extension specialist at Rutgers University. And what I do is I do research on microbiology and microbial food safety. And I also work with the food industry and the general public to understand more about food poisoning and how to prevent it. Dr. Don Schaffner has a different relationship to food poisoning than most of us. For most of us, sometimes we get sick, sometimes we call it food poisoning, usually we move on not actually knowing for sure. Maybe we accuse a local chilies to our friends.

Dr. Don actually tries to get answers. What is safe to eat? What is not? When we get sick, what has actually happened inside our bodies? He has even researched stuff like, how true is the five-second rule? In case you've never heard of this rule, congratulations on growing up fancy. But the rule is, if you drop something on the ground and you pick it up within five seconds, it's safe to eat. It's maybe less of a rule, more of a secular prayer. Dr. Donne actually studied this in his lab at Rutgers University. We studied four different foods. We studied watermelon. We studied like a gummy candy. We studied bread and we studied bread with butter on it. That's such a good. I just want to compliment you on the foods you

pick because watermelon, I would never eat off the floor. Gummy candy, I probably would never eat off the floor. Bread, I think, I'd be like, well, what's going to stick to bread? And bread with butter is a real edge case. They briefly dropped each food on four different services that had been slathered in bacteria to see what the bacteria would stick to. And of course, we did not drop them on the floor. We only dropped them onto stainless steel, carpet, wood, and something else that was relatively non-porous.

What they learned is that the five-second rule, not as scientific as you may have hoped. What matters more than the length of time are factors such as the wetness of the food, the porosity of the floor surface. You don't want to eat face-down watermelon from your wood kitchen floor, even if you picked it up in a quick three seconds. But surprisingly, if you drop some buttered bread on a carpet, you might be okay, bacteria-wise. The reason is that bacteria often sinks to the bottom of the carpet,

while your buttered bread may rest safely on top of the carpet fibers. Who knew? Do you have a hard time eating food in the world? Well, as my dearly departed friend who did not die from food poisoning, Dean Cliver used to say the risks of not eating still outweigh the risks of eating. So if we stop eating, we will die. So, no, I don't have trouble eating. I enjoy food.

I enjoy food very much. There are certain foods I don't eat, but mostly because I don't like them, not because I'm super worried about them. I don't really like and I'm not super interested in eating. rare or even medium hamburger. If I want a piece of beef that is cooked less, I will order a steak because most of the bacteria should be on the surface and the inside should be essentially sterile, whereas with a burger, it's all chopped up and the bacteria are all the way through it. And so if you have a bacterial cell sitting in the middle of that rare or medium rare burger,

it's likely to be there and it's not going to be killed by that light cooking process. So it does inform your eating a little bit. Yeah, well, for sure, it does. For sure, it informs my eating. But I think the way, what did you say, do you have trouble eating or anything? I don't have any trouble. I don't have any trouble eating. But I think about what I eat.

I think about what, you know, how long has that cantaloupe been sitting out at room temperature? And do I really want room temperature candleope all that much or would I rather have a chocolate chip cookie? Like anything in life, you just have to decide what's worth the risk. There's a website that I do not recommend you visit called I Waspoisoned.com. If the FDA and CDC's food poisoning databases are a sober, no-nonsense list of possible dangers, Iwaspoisoned.com is something else. A crowdsourced place where anyone, anywhere, can make an unsubstantiated claim of food poisoning. The posts typically include a short paragraph, a photo of the offending food,

and then sometimes a picture of the resulting toilet. Someone in Knoxville reports Green Stool after eating special edition Green Dragon marshmallow Lucky Charms. In Citrus Heights, California, a woman eats four Taco Bell CrunchRap Supremes and says that for the next 24 hours, everything feels like it's in slow motion. There are 4,800 milligrams of sodium

in four CrunchRap Supremes. Reading I Waspoisoned.com, two thoughts occur. One, the food available to most of us in America is just not all that great. And two, saying you got food poisoning lies somewhere between speculation and slander. We often suspect we rarely know. Food poisoning is an accusation that gets hurled from toilets without most people spending, I don't know, several weeks, several months, trying to research whether or not it actually transpired. I've learned from speaking to microbiologists that they don't actually really use the term food poisoning in a professional context.

It almost us lay people. Dr. Don Schaffner says that what we call food poisoning is really an umbrella term, describing some biologically different experiences. We can broadly divide foodborne disease into two categories, right? Infectious illness and what we call intoxication. Now, intoxication, we're not talking about getting drunk. we're talking about a toxin that the body ingests. And so, for example, a Staphylococcus aureus, that's an organism that is naturally found on people's skins. If the organism gets into food and the conditions are appropriate to allow the growth of the organism,

then the organism grows. And as a byproduct of Staphylococcus aureus growing in food, it makes a toxin. And then when we ingest that food, because it is an intoxication, the response is almost always very quick within a couple of hours. And so one of the initial responses is vomiting. Food-borne intoxication is probably the condition that most of us think of as food poisoning. You eat something weird, your stomach feels funny, you vomit. But what's interesting is that with intoxication typically, the toxin only reaches as far as our stomach. When we vomit, we're expelling the toxin, and then we're usually fine. Dr. Don Schaffner says the second category of foodborne illness

is a bacterial infection. For instance, if you eat something contaminated with salmonella, the salmonella actually passes through your intestine, attaches to your intestinal wall, and starts to multiply inside your cells, spreading to other cells. A day or two later, you'll develop flu-like symptoms, a fever, typically diarrhea.

Your body senses that there is this foreign biological object, these salmonella cells that are inside your body, and it's starting to mount defenses against that. It's down to your immune system. to basically identify those foreign objects and then fight back against them and get rid of them before the diarrhea or the infection kills you. So that's interesting. I would have assumed prior to talking to you, you know, there's been times where I've been

a little bit ill and I've thought, do I have a sick cancer? I have food poisoning. During those times when I got a fever, I would have taken that as evidence of, no, no, you're just sick is how I would have explained to myself. But a fever can be a response to an infection you get from food attaching itself to your intestinal wall and then working through your intestinal wall and getting into your cells. Absolutely. Interesting. I had no idea. Returning to the sushi rolls in question, neither of those categories seemed to describe my experience. I hadn't vomited, so it wasn't intoxication. But my symptoms

appeared soon after eating the rolls, and then I was fine. So it didn't sound like a bacterial infection either. Dr. Schaffner agreed, and he also said the sheer predictability of my reaction, it actually made very suspicious that this was a case of any kind of foodborne illness at all? If you get foodborne illness every time you eat sushi, that doesn't make any sense, right? Unless it's the worst sushi place in the world. And even the worst place in the world wouldn't be giving people food poisoning every time, right? They would have to be doing something catastrophically wrong. And again, if this is a public restaurant that other people are patronizing, eventually, the word would get out to local public health, and they would go and inspect this restaurant, and they would

find gross efficiencies, and they would shut the place down. So it does not make sense that it's your classical foodborne disease. So what does that leave? Like, are there avant-garde foodborne diseases? Well, you might have discovered one. We never know. We never know. And what do you suspect we're looking for here? Like, what do you suspect might be going on? What you're experiencing is probably, and this is, we're getting a little bit outside my expertise here. You're experiencing what, I think we would call a food intolerance, right? When you ingest this food, it just causes some sort of a GI distress. We believe that you're not allergic to fish, right? Yeah. We've already ruled out that it's one of these adulterant fish types. And I will say, again, not to overshare. Oh, please, no.

Well, it's not oversharing for me. It's oversharing about my wife. So we love spicy food. We will go occasionally for Indian food, and there have been times when we have gone for Indian food, and it sounds like it matches your symptoms pretty closely, within a fairly short amount of time, within an hour or two, she has an urgent need to go and find a toilet, right? Like, absolutely. And we don't know what it is. It doesn't seem to be any particular dish, but that, to me, what that's saying is it is some sort of spice or ingredient that she is sensitive to, which might also be what's in that spicy tuna sauce. Back when I was ordering sushi over and over again, getting sick from it and not changing my behavior at all,

my first theory had been that I had a food allergy. I kept Googling what was in sushi, but when I'd tallied the ingredients, fish, rice, nori, vinegar, I'd found nothing worrisome. But Dr. Dunn told me, to him, this did sound like an ingredient sensitivity. And I was missing a suspect in my list. The rolls I ordered were spicy rolls. spicy indicated the presence of more ingredients. At most sushi restaurants, a spicy roll is made by preparing usually the odds and ends of, say, a tuna filet, and mixing them in some sort of dressing of chili sauce and either oil or mayo. It's entirely possible that you could be getting sick from any of these ingredients.

And so what I thought, again, because I'm a scientist and I break things down and I think about things analytically, is we could do an experiment. You could order some of the sushi and then dissect it and only eat the raw fish one time. And then another time only eat the rice, another time only eat the seaweed, and then another time only eat the sauce. And figure out which of those four is actually causing you to become sick. That's such a good idea. I love it. I also love, I didn't think I could, like, I might, people might accuse me of paying too much attention. to this, but I didn't think anyone I would find a way that I could pay more attention to this.

Well, welcome to my world, academic. We make a living, making things more complicated than they need to be. I'm going to interrupt here just to point out how much this story made me appreciate the way scientists see the world. Every question, an opportunity for an experiment. No mystery so confounding, the scientific process can't be applied to it. So what I hear you're saying is that the next thing I'm going to do is reorder this sushi five times, and I'm going to split it with some kind of knife. I'm going to eat all the rice. I'm going to wait and see what happens. I'm going to eat all the seaweed. I'm going to wait and see what happens. I'll probably order a separate roll to just eat the plain tuna and see what happens. And then I will eat either the spicy sauce if I can isolate it or the spicy sauce and tuna,

I predict that that is what makes me sick. If that hypothesis bears out, is it like testable? Like, what do I do? Or is that sort of at that point have I gotten as far as I'm going to go? So I would say if you have figured out that it is the sauce, I would say the next step is to become good friends with, if you have not already, with the folks at this restaurant, and get them to share the ingredients in the sauce, right?

And then once you know the ingredients in the sauce, now you've got the next iteration where you go. go and you buy each of those separate ingredients, and you test each of those ingredients, right? That's how I would approach it scientifically. Do you see people who try, like, who are just like, money is no object? I simply must know what happened at this hamburger place, and they, like, spend vast amounts of money trying to get to the bottom of it? I have never found anybody like that, because a lot of people's conception of the world comes

from watching CSI or something, right? And they're like, oh, well, can you just put it into the, machine? Yes, I was assuming that the machine existed. There's no machine. There's a lot of fancy machines and there's a whole bunch of smart people and everything is a one-off, right? Like, you can test it for this pesticide or that pesticide or this contaminant or that contaminant. And each one of those tests costs, you know, $100, let's say, or $200. So this could really ruin me. Well, don't let it ruin you, PJ. I appreciated the good doctors of something. I appreciated the good doctors of that this hadn't already ruined, if not my wallet, at least my mind.

But obviously, we signed on for a second set of sushi experiments. First, I ordered the spicy tuna rolls again. Okay, so it is Monday, November 27th. I have another order of sushi from a named sushi restaurant. The results were the same as always. The only difference was that this time I felt nauseated just looking at them. Then the next day, I ordered the plain tuna rolls. I feel like I'm poisoning myself.

I examined them before eating. They're exactly the same as the spicy, except the tuna was free from spicy sauce. Also, you're not as good with that was a spicy. I ate them, two full rolls, and felt fine. So it seemed to be the culprit, the spicy sauce. Dr. Schaffner's hypothesis that I was reacting not to the fish, but to the condiment on top of it, had proven correct.

So then we moved to the next step, making friends with the restaurant. this part did not go as smoothly. Hey, how's it going? Hey, I'm calling with a strange question. Garrett, the friendliest sounding person on our team, called the restaurant twice. Once, he claimed he was the world's biggest fan of their spicy rolls

and asked if he could have the recipe. They said, no, it's a secret. The second time, Garrett called claiming to be experiencing an allergic reaction to their spicy rolls and asking for the recipe so he could, quote, tell his doctor. I could get some ingredients so I can tell my doctor Can you tell me exactly what's in the spicy tuna roll?

This time he got a little more information. They said it was sesame oil plus a homemade syracia. We wanted to know the ingredients in that homemade saracha. So for our final step, we went to the restaurant to try to get our own sample of the spicy sauce. Is it possible to do the sauce that you guys do in the spicy tuna roll, but as a side? No go.

So then I used my cell phone to take a photo through their window into their storage area, where I could see several boxes of their ingredients. When I zoomed in on the photo later, I could see the brands for their soy sauce, vinegar, and a box of avocados, but nothing that would have gone into the secret homemade serracha recipe. The obvious last step was to go undercover, to get a job at the restaurant. I worked there for four months, ingratiating myself to the staff, mastering the finer points of hand-rolling. Eventually, I was able to...

Obviously, I'm just kidding. Our trail ended at the closed kitchen door, the unknown homemade syraccia recipe. I had a food sensitivity to something in that recipe. I'll never know exactly what. Some kind of food sensitivity, you may remember, had been more or less the suspicion I'd begun with during my initial months of repetitively and mindlessly Googling this problem. I'd taken a round trip. Although not a terrible one.

I'd learned some things. I'd met some people on the way. There's this principle, some people probably know, called Occam's Razor. It expresses the idea that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. It's totally useful in life, but almost the opposite of how I try to experience the world. I'm always looking for some crack in reality, something strange, something unusual, an international conspiracy, or failing that at least a citywide scam. Outside the sushi restaurant, watching as countless men on mopeds sped away delivering countless sushi rolls

to countless stomachs, I was split. The civic, decent, human part of me was glad all these innocent civilians were being delivered to tuna, not untold tons of the X-lax fish. But the civic, decent part of me is honestly pretty small. The part of me that would rather life be interesting

than good, the part which, let's be honest, is most of me, that part had to console myself with a bitter truth. Sometimes a tuna roll really is just a tuner roll. As we have a little bit more show for you. A hidden gem from the internet we will share with you before we take our break for the year.

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now with up to 40% off saving up to $2,500. For the first time, you can pay over nine months. Get up to six free devices and a free bar kit. Sign up to by April 27th. Visit everpass.com. Limited time offer, terms apply. Garrett Graham. PJ Vote. What have you got? I have my favorite thing from the internet this week. Which is? I'm trying to think about how to describe the category of thing that I'm recommending. And I think I've spent a lot of the social media era privately mourning the loss of something that used to be a hallmark of my internet experience, which is what I'm going to call the random generator. The random generator. Do you know what I mean when I say that? No. Like one of my favorite websites in middle school was StumbleUpon. Did you use StumbleUpon.com?

Like three times. It's like a website you can literally go on and click a button and it will just show you a random page from the internet. It had a big button that said Stumble. And when you clicked it, it would just take you to some far off remote corner of the internet. And I just found this exceedingly charming. Did you genuinely, you used it a lot? I used it with my friends on like Friday nights in middle school and we would just like travel to weird places on the internet that would have dumb middle school things. And it feels like social media, like, somewhere along the way kind of box that out to, like, the heavily curated feed as opposed to just like click the button and go to a random place on the internet. So I love the random generator. And recently, I stumbled across a new one that I have become fascinated with. Which is what?

So I'm going to send you a link and I'm going to get you to look at it. Okay. Oh, no. Oh, no. I don't want this at all. The website says cry once a week. dot com and the main image is uh puffy clouds and a blue sky and in the middle in yellow it says click to feel something and at the bottom and i don't agree with any of this it says science shows

crying can relieve stress for a week click above to watch a tear-inducing video and take a moment to let yourself feel something why don't we go ahead and click something and see what you get click to feel something okay it's like a pixar style video of a little girl drawing, and I think scenes of her growing up. She's ice skating. Oh, this is the Pixar movie about all the embodied feelings. Oh, there's a caption to it, I should say. A scene from the movie Inside Out 2015, Riley's childhood imaginary friend sacrifices himself

for joy. We were best friends. Well, the other thing I find interesting about the idea of this website, and while I would not be a customer for this website, I support the premise of it, is that. that most social media, I believe, and I'm not the only person to believe this, sort of offers an addictive loop of a feeling, and the feeling is usually a negative one, you know, whether it's envy or outrage. But, like, crying is a sort of negative feeling. You're in pain, but for some people, it's cathartic. You know, I like sad music. That's the closest I get to crying is just sitting

with sad music. Oh, definitely. Any day of the week. Any day of the week. Like, I will listen to sad music and feel like the good bad instead of the bad bad bad. And it is cathartic. The most emotional that I think I felt clicking through videos. What I think is the end of Marley and me got spoiled for me, which was a movie I was saving for a rainy day for like 15 years. I know the end of the movie of Marley. And I felt feelings for multiple reasons. So Marley me is a tearjerker movie about a person and their older dog. I have a dog who's not that old, honestly. Like he's like seven, but like he started to snore a little bit more. And I think about his mortality much more than I think about anything on earth. Like, I think about the idea

that I will have to mourn him. And, like, the most you're allowed to mourn a dog without people thinking there's something more deeply wrong with you is, like, three days to a week, I think. Like, I think that's the most that I could be publicly grieving my dog, and I have a suspicion that I'm going to need a lot longer than that. I'm definitely not watching the end of Marley and me on Cry Oncea Week.com. And what's the saddest thing you've seen? Was it Marley and me? Marley and me. I'm just clicking one more time. Click to feel something.

See, this is a scene for me, too. I've never seen any TV. The problem is I don't watch sad movies. Like, I do kind of avoid sad movies. I think part of what they're relying on is nostalgia here, too. Oh. Darks mourn their best friends. Oh, this is hard.

There's kind of a glisten in your eye right now. I don't want this at all. At first, it was like a dog at a grave of a person. But now it's a dog, like, pawing at a dog who is. died. I don't think that feels better at all. Oh, no. No, no, no close website. Bad recommendation. Maybe a little emotionally manipulative. I'm laughing and crying at the same time. Cry and laugh once a week.com. Yeah, that's my website. Garrett, I don't know if thank you is the word that I want to use, but thank you. You welcome.

That is our last episode of Search Engine in 2023. We are now halfway through our first season. We will be back on January 12th. If you're looking for a presence to give us during the holidays, tell a friend about the show. Pass on your favorite episodes to someone you think may enjoy them. Spread the word. It has been such a pleasure for us to make these first 21 episodes for you. We'll see you in the new year with lots of new questions and some new adventures. Surge Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It is created by me, PJ Vote, and Shruti Pinnam and Mennam and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Backchecking by Sean Merchant.

Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armand Bizarrian. Also, in case you found the intro music for the risky or not podcast as catchy as we did, it is findable on the internet. They used a Jonathan Colton song called Bacteria. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reese Dennis. Thanks to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Porello, and John Schmidt, and to the team at Odyssey, J.D. Crowley, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Matt Casey, Mara Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hillary Schuff.

Our agent is Orrin Rosenbaum at UTA. Our social media is by the team at Public Opinion, NYC. Follow and listen to Search Engine with PJ Vote. Now for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, that's it for us this week. Thank you for listening. As I said, we are taking a short publishing break over the holidays, but we will be back here on January 12th.

See you then. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Not loving your AT&T or T Mobile Bill? Yeah, we've been hearing that a lot. Good news. Bring your AT&T or T Mobile Bill to Verizon and we'll give you a better deal.

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