Search Engine - How much glue should you put in your pizza?

Episode Date: May 31, 2024

An internet breaking news story. As we told you last week, Google has begun offering AI-generated answers to search questions. But some answers, it turns out, are strange. Users were told, for instance, that glue was an appropriate ingredient for homemade pizza. We talk to reporter Katie Notopolous, who baked and ate her own homemade glue pizza. Support the show: search engine.show 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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Run your business smarter, the Square gets started today. Hello. We were not actually supposed to publish an episode this week, but then something happened that was so directly and frankly so absurdly related to our last episode that we wanted to make a quick one for you because the world continues to be very strange. And as it does, it's sometimes hard to resist the urge to document it. So we're here. To catch you up, last episode, we were talking to platformers Casey Newton about this huge change that had just been made to how Google search worked. Our episode, I will admit, a slightly doomy installment for a show that tries to, if not avoid the doom, at least sear away from it. Jim, I got your message. I'm sorry. But the news we were responding to was that Google was increasingly replacing search results that had human written information with AI-generated search answers. The way this new feature would work, the AI would now draw on the vast corpus of human knowledge on the internet to just answer user questions itself. According to the head of Google's parent company, the reason for this new feature is that

many Google users would prefer to just not have to sift through a bunch of search results. Instead, the company wanted to let Google do the Googling for you. This change may have also been rolled out because the quality of much of what is Googlable is not always that wonderful anyway. And in the last year, AI spam has already begun to clog up a lot of the websites that Google might want to index. So just giving people search. searching for a question, the answer, saves Google some of the work of trying to sort the wheat from the chaff online. I had reservations about this big new change.

We talked about those reservations last episode. What I could not picture just a few weeks ago was how funny the next phase of things would be. Google rolled out AI overviews widely in mid-May. Lots of people started using it for the first time. And turned out the way the AI would answer questions was sometimes chaotically insane. The problem was that the AI Google used to answer

readers' questions had ingested much of Reddit. And while Reddit can be a source of useful information, it can also be a source of lies and jokes, and the AI seemingly could not tell the difference. Google's users were told things like, quote,

eating at least one small rock per day is recommended because rocks contain minerals and vitamins that are important for digestive health. A crazy week on the internet. So, I wanted to talk about Reddit, both its history as a source of sounds good, sounds questionable information online. I wanted to talk about how it came to be a website that Google's AI consumed.

And I wanted to know what happened to the one person who did, in fact, make a glue pizza and consume it. So I invited one of the least trustworthy chefs on the internet to search engine, Katie Natopoulos. Okay. Before we get into any of this, how do you describe your job to people? I am a senior correspondent, a business insider covering tech and culture. I have been following your work forever. I don't think there's anyone who covers the Internet the exact way you cover the Internet. The way I would describe is that you're both like a sharp observer of how the Internet can either incentivize or induce strange human behavior in its users,

but then also someone who sometimes chooses to behave strangely on the Internet. Like you do a lot of kind of human guinea pig style reporting. Can you just tell me some of the things you've done either for fun or research online? Oh, gosh. I find that a very flattering assessment of my work. I'm trying to think of some of the human guinea pig things I've done. I one time was really interested in like how sort of tech bros and finance bros all wear like fleece vests or puffer vest to the office. Yeah. Sort of like a uniform.

And it was kind of like boring to just write about because literally, hey, have you noticed finance guys wear fleece vests? That's about it. Like there's not that much more to it. So I tried for a week. I wore a fleece vest to the office every day to see if it made me feel more powerful. Did it make you feel more powerful? It made me feel more comfortable, I'll be honest. It is very comfortable, especially compared to normal women's business casual attire.

But I also felt deeply ashamed and unfashionable. And, you know, when you have a bad outfit on and you feel bad about it. Yeah, like, you constantly want to explain it. Like, you're like, I know that this is not the right choice, but it's the choice that I made for specific reasons. Yeah. I once unfollowed all men on Twitter. I will say this is, I think, coming up on the 10-year anniversary of this. This was the first thing that I interviewed you about.

Yeah, that's right. You unfollowed all men on Twitter. And it's funny, this was like several, the gender politics of the Internet were different. I know, several cycles ago. It doesn't quite hold up, I'll say. Before we could get into the most recent news, Google's AI shenanigans and Katie's, latest experiment involving eating gluey pizza, I wanted to ask her about the prehistory of our current moment. This year, one of the most popular listener questions for our show has just been

people wanting to know, why doesn't Google search work for me anymore? What's gone wrong? I mean, I know what people are saying, which is that the nature of SEO and the SEO industry has made it such that the stuff you are actually looking for tends to be more and more buried. There's more frequently the sort of drop-down boxes of related questions to what you're looking for that's not necessarily it. There's a lot more on the page than like, hey, how do I get to the website that has the information? Yeah. SEO is big and vast. And like connecting me to the right information about the question I'm asking is not the only thing that Google has broken in a way.

I think it's worth remembering that a lot of SEO money goes. into, like, if you're Walmart, you can pay for the keyword Target. So when someone wants to type in Target.com, but they don't want to type the whole dot com and they just put in Target, your ad for Walmart comes up top on front of them. Right. And then Target also has to pay for its own name. So there's like a lot of money of companies being held ransom and having to pay for their own names because someone else is going to run an ad against them. And that's, that's just genuinely a terrible experience. Like I think a lot of people have had the kind of thing where they search a specific company or name,

and the first three ads on top are something completely different. Like, that is genuinely very bad experience and kind of broken. So anyone who uses search a lot probably has their own sort of interior tips and tricks of like how they do it. Like I know that a lot of people put Reddit at the end because often Reddit is a source of great information if you're looking for how to change the light bulb in my refrigerator kind of thing. Everyone does have their own secret. How do I actually use Google model going on? The same reason people have been searching Reddit instead of the wider web

is why the two of us were talking about Reddit this week. Because as the rest of the internet has degraded, Reddit has remained one site that lots of people still go to for advice, for product recommendations, for their general questions about the world. Which was not always the case. Reddit has had a recent-ish evolution from under-moderated mess to what it is today. The earlier versions of it were like, in its first, I don't know, five years of existence, it was known as like the trash fire of the internet.

Like it was akin to 4chan. It was just full of terrible, awful people. And a lot of that had to do with the way it was being run from the top, which was this sort of laissez-faire, free speech. We're not going to get rid of the bad people because, hey, it's the internet and you're allowed to say whatever you want. Eventually, after a series of crises, they decided, hey, maybe if we want to run a successful business,

we should ban the Nazis or like all these really awful subreddits they had. Did you use Trashfire Reddit? I didn't post. I would look at it. It also had a very distinct character. It was this like nerdy web comics. Like when you think about the sort of early teens, late 2000s internet memes, like to say someone as a Reddeter had a very distinct.

It's a neck beard and a fedora who thinks advice animal memes are funny and loves web comics and has an anime body pillow. And that like very specific kind of early internet humor, I mean, I feel like I still sort of use Reddit in this sort of derogatory way to be like, if some restaurant has like an overly meany food, here's the hamburger with like 100 kinds of bacon or whatever. It's all that's such Reddit food or something like that. It's funny, as you say, I'm like basically like 2005 to like 2011, 2012 Reddit. I'm like that is the peak of that. It feels like everyone on the site is the comic bookstore guy from The Simpsons. Exactly. And then there's like a turn where it's like

Kandah Ness acquires them, it becomes, I think, like a pretty successful moderation story where they do start to figure out how to have both relatively free speech and relatively few Nazis. And, like, I remember reply all days covering like, oh, what are they going to do about the Donald? What are they going to do about this? There's this virulent subreddit that's targeting people. And, like, you don't really see those stories in the same way anymore. No. And I think that with any sort of large platform group, there's like a flywheel effect, right? of like the mix between moderation and users and who wants to be on it and what kind of community they're making, right?

So like when you have a thing that's like a garbage fire thing, you're going to scare off the normies. And if you're constantly seeing people say certain things, it's going to raise the tolerance for that, right? So then you come in, you like lay down the ban hammer. You ban a bunch of these bad subredits. you make it a little bit more palatable for like normal people who just want to discuss what kind of air filter should I buy to come on. And then you sort of create this flywheel, okay, now people know that you have to behave like a normal human on here.

And also there's more normal humans who would never even think to like say something awful or join an awful subreddit or like do these bad things. And so you actually do sort of grow a healthier community that is more usable, frankly. Yeah, I find it to be actually a place where I go now not to witness horrible human behavior, but to get like okay advice about things that I am curious about. That's the thing is I actually do use Reddit quite a lot. I'm on it, I don't know, maybe almost every day.

I often just check in to see if there's anything like amusing. I don't really post. It's like I love lurking. I love knowing what people are talking about the internet. And what's fun about Reddit is that there is this still, anonymous element to it. So people are totally willing to say embarrassing things that they normally would never reveal. I mean, I think the classic, Am I the Asshole, subreddit that people love so much that's full of like personal conflict advice.

That's just really fun. Like, I love that. And people wouldn't do that under their real names. What I struggle with with Reddit, and I use it. Like, I totally use it. But like, I have an uneasy relationship with it because I find myself distracted all the time wondering, is this true? Like, even am I the asshole, which I love. love, it's always somebody describing some conflict they're in, almost always the person is behaving

in a completely terrible way and is completely wrong. Or, like, it's never hard. Like, either the person is totally in the wrong or they're, like, the kindest little church mouse. And it's like, my roommate has started, like, taking money out of my pockets and, like, wearing all my clothes, and I asked them to stop. But I'm always like, is it true? And I start with that with Reddit in general where I'll use it, I'll use it, and then I'll see people on Reddit discussing something that I actually know about, and the level of people just being, like, completely certain, or just, like, lying. And I'm like, oh, this might be all of it.

And so I try to use it only for things like gardening tips where it's about expertise rather than about knowledge, if that's a differentiation. I agree with you. I will say one of my absolute favorite subredits is TV too high. What is TV too high? So people will post a picture. They're like, I just hung this TV in my new apartment. Is it too high?

And they're obsessed with the idea that TV should be really low. Like, they should be at exactly eye level when you're sitting on a couch. And so I think a lot of people will put a TV, like, for example, above a fireplace, or they sort of expect it to be a little bit raised up. And so a lot of people hang their TV, according to the subreddit, too high. So the Reddit, it's a viper. den. They will just descend upon this person and just mercilessly roast them over hanging their TV too high. And a lot of it you can tell is my girlfriend says this is where the TV should be,

but I think it's too low. And it's always like, break up with her. And like there's something about it that like I love. Like it's a weird, dark, horrible corner of the internet where people are behaving wildly bad, but it's over something so stupid that I find it very wholesome. And I really enjoy it. And even though I don't frequently hang TVs, I read this subreddit really frequently because it's really amusing. But then people will go and like clearly post like fake pictures. Sometimes there will be funny ones where they'll be like, I'm at an Airbnb and you always know what things are whack there. Like it's like right up in like the absolute corner of the ceiling or something, like really weird things. And they also

obsessed with the idea that you should never hang a TV over a fireplace. Why? Because they think it's too high. There's some amount of, if you're actively using the fireplace, it could damage the TV, which is somewhat questionable. And a lot of people don't actually use the fireplace. But like, this is this sort of huge obsession. And so they're like, here's a picture of my living room.

And it's very obvious the TV is meant to go above the fireplace. Like, there's only one way to arrange this living room. And everyone's like, make it so that your couch is against the window. and they will do anything to get the TV not to go over a fireplace. It's funny to watch. After a short break, how the website where people yell at you

about your TV being too high on the wall or hanging over a fireplace was fed into Google's extremely expensive artificial intelligence robot brain. That's after some ads. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Vanguard. To all the financial advisors out there

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So just a refresher on Reddit as a business, not a website in case that is helpful here, founded in 2005 by two college roommates, Steve Huffman and Alexis O'Hanian, joined by the late internet pioneer Aaron Swartz. The company was acquired a year later by Condé Nast, the magazine publisher. At the time, it seemed like a strange investment, but it turned out to be a shrewd one. Condé bought Reddit for cheap, reportedly between $10 and $20 million for what is currently one of the top 10 most popular websites in the world.

Over the years, Reddit has made money chiefly through ads. But these ads are display ads. Relative to some of the more invasive or targeted ads you see online, display ads are not usually incredibly lucrative. Reddit went public. It IPO just a couple months ago in March of 2024. And ahead of that IPO, you got the feeling that the company was looking for ways to become more profitable. As part of this, Reddit had just announced a licensing deal with Google.

Reddit would allow Google to use most of the content on its website as training data for Google's AI. Katie Natapola said that at the time, this seemed like a good deal for both sides. I would imagine that it behooved both parties very well, right? Reddit wanted to go public, and it needed to make more money, essentially. It had been in business for a long time, and it was still, like, not quite breaking even, I think, and it basically needed to be making more money in order to do that.

To have made this deal, I think it's $60 million per year with Google, to allow Google to train, it's AI models on Reddit data. And I think probably some users were maybe uncomfortable with the idea of their words being ingested into a training model, but also like you put those words on Reddit. What did you think was going to happen? I don't know.

Google also one way that these different companies making AI language models can differentiate themselves is like they desperately need more and more words, right? Like they need more content to ingest to train the models to become better. There's something called the Common Crawl, which is basically this sort of open-source, giant, massive chunk of the web for years and years. And everyone uses that, and they've already gobbled that up, right? That's how, like, Wikipedia and a lot of other websites have been somewhat ingested. Now you have all these other companies coming along saying, hey, if you want to use our stuff, you have to pay us or license it, essentially. A lot of media companies are doing that now.

business insiders parent company does that with OpenAI. And I don't know how good those deals are. To some degree, it may be like sort of last it. You are probably either going to do it anyways. But for Google, getting to license Reddit is great because Reddit has a lot of words. It has a lot of pictures. It has a lot of useful information. Tell me what happens to Google when Google's AI robot ingests Reddit and treats it as gold standard human knowledge.

So the way the Google AI modules work is if you ask a question that might have a kind of answer, like, what temperature should I cook a turkey at, right? Like, it could come up with that with an AI search result or something like that. And these, for the most part, are honestly probably pretty helpful for most searches for most people most of the time, right? I used it. The first time I saw it was at a bowling alley. and I was throwing the ball into the gutter over and over again, and I googled, how are you supposed to roll a bowling ball?

And it gave me a pretty good thing. You keep your arm close to your side. You aim at the arrows, not at the pins. It helped for, like, two frames. PJ, maybe you want to try. They have those bumpers for little kids that they can put up at the bowling alley. They did have the bumpers.

I refuse. You should have just used the bumpers. There was this guy at the lane next to me who was, like, super ripped and, like, killing it. And then I realized, because he was like, heathing the ball and he looked over and he had the bumper up. I was like, sir. Oh, God. It's wrong. So now

Google will give you that sort of quick answer. It'll give you the tips on how should I throw a bowling ball. It'll say, keep your arm close, bend at the knees or whatever. And it's sourcing that information through potentially multiple

different websites. I think typically what it does is it does give you links at the bottom to the websites that it found this information on and sort of averaged it out to write its own little three sentences about it. But a big place that it's getting this now from is Reddit. Right. And so what I saw happened almost immediately was that people noticed that on Reddit, sometimes people either are wrong or try to be funny. And sometimes are very funny. And if you're a human being, you might know what a joke is. And if you're an AI, you might not know

what a joke is. Like, what were some of the results you saw that people were sharing? So one that didn't necessarily come from Reddit was someone searched, how many rocks should I eat? And Google AI's answer was it is recommended to eat one rock per day. And that was sourced from an article from The Onion, which a human being knows that the onion has satirical articles that are not meant to be real. But when you see that in a Google answer, it certainly doesn't look that way. And it's also, it's very funny that Google is taking it. factual information from the onion. Just to jump in here for a second, I should say, a Google spokeswoman told the New York Times

that the vast majority of AI overview queries resulted in, quote, high-quality information. And she said of these bad results that, quote, many of the examples we've seen have been uncommon queries. Which didn't say, but what Google may have thought is most people are just not going to start eating rocks or whatever because a search engine told them to. Although, one person did choose to take these deranged search results very seriously. So there was a screenshot that was going viral where someone had searched in, how do I keep the cheese from sliding off my pizza?

And it gave a couple tips, the Google AI answer. It was like, wait till the cheese cools before biting. And then it also had a couple bullet points. And one was add eighth of a cup of glue to the sauce to keep it from sliding off. And people pretty quickly realized that that particular bullet point had been sourced from an 11-year-old post, not by an 11-year-old, although possibly, but 11 years ago someone on R-slash pizza had asked that same question, how do I keep the cheese from sliding off? And someone who had the username, fucksmith, had suggested, just add an eighth of a cup of Elmer's glue to your sauce, makes a little. up and you'll have no problems. And all the comments under that were like, ha ha, yuck, yuck, yuck. Like, in that context, it was very obviously a joke. And Google ingested this Reddit answer and provided

it as a factual, decent answer to the question in its AI summary. And so when you saw that, what did you decide to do? So this sort of screenshot was going viral. And a lot of people were, enjoying how ridiculous it was. And I did see someone say, back in the day, there would have been a 23-year-old at BuzzFeed who would have actually had to make the pizza glue and eat it as a stunt. And I thought to myself, I'm not 23, but I'm going to make that pizza. And why? I think I just knew that I had to do it, that it probably wouldn't kill me for one. one thing. And that in terms of a piece of content that was going to illustrate how ridiculous this was,

you could write about it and say this is a ridiculous answer, but that might only explain so much. The way to really explain that this is a ridiculous thing would be to actually make the pizza. Before Katie tells us what glue does to the human intestines, we're going to take a quick break.

Before these ads, a free PSA from search engine. Do not eat glue. Do not eat pizza with glue in it. Do not eat food at Keating Nantopoulos' house. Okay, Samantha. Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get

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Black Friday savings, plus get free delivery on appliance purchases of $998 or more at the Home Depot. Offer about April 9th through April 29th, the U.S. only C store online for details. Welcome back to the show. We now return to an ordinary kitchen in an ordinary home, in an ordinary state, New Jersey, in which, nonetheless, something was about to happen that possibly had never before happened in all of human history. Have you ever made pizza before? I have.

I will say this did inspire me. to make homemade pizza more often. It's a delight. But, like, I went to the grocery store. I got a ball of dough that's uncooked pizza dough. And I got jarred sauce, pre-shredded mozzarella cheese. Came home, got my ingredients. I already had the white glue.

How do you stores? I think the Reddit post, if I recall, right, did specify non-toxic glue. How did you decide what type of glue to use? So I looked at the glue I had in my home, which was Target brand white glue, the classic school glue is white with the little orange top. Yeah. And it said on there, non-toxic. And I said, good enough for me.

To be fair, I did Google, how much non-toxic glue can you eat? I tried a couple different versions, like, how much glue is okay to eat? What happens if you eat glue? But you're asking the same AI that told you to eat glue. I feel like you're not even learning the lesson of your own joke. And it's true. The thing is, I didn't want to dig too deep into it because mainly I was getting a general response of like a little glue might make your tummy hurt. Don't eat too much.

And at one point I like saw some link to like how much glue could actually be like bad for you. Because I can't remember the name of the chemical in there. It's like some sort of polyacetate kind of thing. And it was like some study done on rats of like how much it caused to like kill them. And I was like, not reading that. Nope. The other thing as a person with very limited understanding of either chemistry or human biology, my fear would not just be that there's something in it that at a certain dose is toxic,

but I would also think, like, glue makes things stick together, and you're putting it through your intestinal tract? And, like, what if just two things stick together inside of you? Do you know what I mean? I don't even know. I can't draw his stomach for you, but I can just imagine things happening that would be bad. I do think that by the time it gets into your stomach, okay, this is, again, I'm making some big guesses here, but that the glueiness of it would have sort of already been broken down by whatever sort of digestive processes you might have. But I will say this does remind me of a problem with AI search. So I recently was having sort of like a debate with a friend about the digestive process and whether or not the sort of phrase like, oh, if you eat something that disagrees with you, like it goes right through you. You know, like, oh, I eat Chipotle and two hours later it came out. And I was like, no, it doesn't work that way.

Like, food takes 24 hours to digest. Like, you can't eat something in two hours later. That actually comes out the other end, right? It's the food you ate yesterday is what's coming out. And we were debating this about whether or not it could be true. And this is a case where sort of lived experience of Chipotle is in conflict with the science. And so I had been testing out an app or an AI search called Perplexity AI. Yeah, I've used Perplexity. Yeah, which is only AI search results, and it's really good for like questions kind of like this. So I ask perplexity AI, can you poop something out right after you eat, basically? And it gave me an answer that confirmed what I knew to be true, which is no, it takes 24 hours to digest something. And that what can happen is that if you eat something that disagrees with your stomach, it might stimulate a response where yesterday's lunch is coming out. And I was like, huh, look, see, I'm right. And my friend was like, where's that information? coming from. And perplexity makes it a little bit harder

to see your sources than Google does. And I finally, like, found a little source of where this information had come from. And when you're looking at health information online, like, you kind of know in your mind like what's reputable, like Mayo Clinic or NIH or even, like, WebMD or Wikipedia even, honestly. And this had been sourced from dudewipes.com.

I'm here trying to win an argument and it turns out it was the correct information, but it makes it a little harder when you realize that the information you're getting has been sourced from dude wipes.com. Yeah, it seems to point at the whole problem of it, which is the internet's always been a place where you have to be a smart consumer of information in a way that we all always sometimes fail at, but at least you had context clues. And it feels like what is tricky about AI, at least as it exists right now, is that you've lost a lot of your context where you have to dig harder to find it. Like, you can't actually see what ingredients are in the thing that you're

eating as clearly. Yeah, I think that, you know, by 2024, most people had become pretty good at being able to look at a set of Google search results and assess which is the thing they want to click on that's going to be the trust force of the information or whatnot based on our experience doing this. And all information is not equal, right? Yeah. But to answer your question, I wasn't so worried about my stomach gluing together. You were worried about toxic chemicals. I guess I was more worried about, is this a sort of forever chemical macroplastic that I'm about to eat? But the same internet that tells you to eat glue on pizza tells you the glue is safe to eat. How do you get the glue into the pizza? So the answer said to mix an eighth of a cup into the sauce. So all I knew

is this was going into the sauce. Eighth of a cup is two tablespoons or it's one ounce. I did have to Google that, which actually turned out to be more than I thought was going to be. I was like sort of eyeballing. I had my dough spread out on my little pizza tin thing. And I was like, okay, well, how much sauce do I mix it into? And I was just kind of like, all right, I think I would probably use about half a cup of sauce. This looks like eyeballing it out, half a cup. So I put in the eighth of a cup into the half a cup. And as I was dumbing in like, table through number one, I was like, oh, boy, this is a lot of glue. It's like, table spoon number two. I'm like, oh, God. There's really quite a bit of glue here. I was imagining like it was going to be like a light drizzle of glue, and it was not.

It's a sizable amount. Did it, like, change the color of the sauce when it went in? Yes. It went from, you know, a red. It was like cheap marinerer sauce, and it turned it like orange, kind of like a vodka sauce. Oh. So the color, because we humans eat orange pasta sauce, that in and of itself wasn't necessarily off-putting because it looked like it was just a different kind of sauce or something. But it didn't really change the viscosity or the texture, I wouldn't say.

So I went ahead. I put it on the pizza. I put on my shredded cheese like I normally would. And I hadn't made pizza in like a while. So in hindsight, I've gotten some tips that, like you should pre-bake the crust a little bit. I didn't do that. I was reading the instructions on the like bag of pizza dough. And it said to like cook at like 550 degrees.

And I was like, my heaven doesn't go up that high. So I just turned the oven up all the way or whatever. Does glue have a smell when it cooks? I think so. So I let it cook for about 12 minutes. And when I opened up the oven door, I was hit with just like a wallop of steam. And that's when I immediately was like, oh, no. Like I remembered all of a sudden that there was this fake TikTok scare trend a couple years ago called NyQuil chicken or Sleepy Time Chicken.

And it was based on someone had done. done this viral stunt originally on 4-Champ where they essentially poached chicken, like raw chicken in NyQuil, and then called it Sleepy Time Chicken and ate it or whatever. And obviously this is a prank. Someone recreated it on TikTok. And then there was a like a little bit of a moral panic that like this has gone viral. And the kids are doing it. And the FDA came out and issued like a warning of like, do not do NyQuil Chicken Challenge on TikTok.

And it was like, no one's really doing this. This was like one person who did it for fun. I don't think I really like ate it. The FDA kind of got like snookered by this. But part of what they said was like, it's not just like drinking extra NyQuil that will hurt you. It's the fumes from cooking NyQuil. It can create toxic fumes that can cause lung damage. And so all of a sudden, in this moment, I'm hit by this blast of pizza glue steam.

I'm like, oh no, I've created toxic fumes from the glue plastics. And that's what's going to kill me. It's going to be the fumes that get me. So I turned on the oven fan and stepped away a little bit. I had to let it cool. But it was like the pizza did seem bubblier than I would normally expect a pizza to be. I don't know if it was the glue or the sauce or the cheese or what, but it was really like bubbling and sizzling and making a lot of noise for kind of a few minutes.

Had you not known that the glue wasn't a thing, would you have thought, oh, this is an unusually successful pizza cook? Because normally you kind of want bubbles and you want sizzle. Yeah. I think had I not known the glue was a thing. in there. And I will say the pizza like looked really good. Like I was kind of like, wow, I did, I did a good job here. This is a good looking pizza. It might be my best yet. So I love the pizza cool. Yeah. This is when I started getting really nervous that I had changed the chemical property that, you know, sure this was non-toxic when it's room temperature in the bottle of glue, but they're not expecting anyone to cook it and that you may have significantly changed the chemical properties of the glue. And now it's like, you.

incredibly toxic and that I'm going to die. So I started getting nervous about that. So I let it cool, like, extra cool. I eventually took a couple bites and, like, it was not good. Did it taste like glue? No, I mean, it wasn't not good because it was still pizza. Isn't it still pizza? Here's the thing. It's like, there's a lot you can do to pizza before it crosses the threshold of, like, actually tastes bad. Yeah. And I think had I not known there was glue. in there that was maybe going to kill me, I probably would have been like, this is just kind of mediocre pizza. This is like some chunky cheese pizza. But I feel like it did have a weird taste. It's really

hard for me to assess how much of that was like me knowing there was glue in there versus it actually tasting bad. And you can't ethically blind taste test anybody else. It's not like you can like just tell a friend, like have a bite of this. Surprise. You're eating glue. Yeah. And I didn't want to eat too much again because I started getting really worried about the toxic properties of the cooked glue. So I probably had a few bites. I would say it was like fine, but I was a little bit in my head of like, oh my God, is this what's going to kill me? This is what's the big one. And did it stop the cheese from sliding, which is the whole thing that was fish to do? I will say, that cheese was not going anywhere. That cheese was locked down. Fuck Smith had it

right. So what, what have we learned from this? That's a good question. What have we learned? I think we've learned that you shouldn't put glue on your pizza. No matter what Google tells you to do. No matter what Google tells you to do. This was certainly an embarrassing incident for Google. They really want to compete against these other AI companies like OpenAI or even things like Proplexity, which, it's not like Proplexity is overtaking the Google search market.

for now. But they really want to be making sure that they're continuing to own search, essentially, that these other models are not going to get away with being what people go to when they have questions. They don't want someone asking chat GPT, what air filter should I buy? They want people using Google. Yeah, I find it confusing as someone who I'm excited that we're living through a moment where things are changing, even if I don't know whether those changes won't end out positive or negative. I'm just like, oh, something new, and I'd like something new. I find AI so vexing as a thing to try to understand because it's like one minute I can feel fully convinced

oh my God this is going to be so destructive because it's so effective and because it's so powerful and the next minute it's like telling people to put glue in their pizza it's just really confusing. Like it's really confusing to figure out like, oh, is this like a funny bug that then they'll just train the AI and nothing like this will ever happen again or if there's a lesson in it, which is that

the tradeoff of AI might be that as we have less transparency around the sources of information, maybe we'll need different skills for finding good information online three years from now than we did five years ago. Yeah. I think about a lot of what librarians do, right? They don't know all the information in the world, but they know where it exists and where to go look for it, right?

They sort of know what the indexes are to go search out the things. And you can say, I have a question, I don't know where to look, and they'll say, I don't know the answer to your question, but I can tell you where to look. And I think that's what's missing from the equation right now. This current version of it is not good at telling you where to look for the answer. And I think that the SEO stuff had borked search results so much.

That was also getting frustrating for the regular people. And that's why they were putting Reddit on the end. Yeah. How about for you, how are you searching the Internet now? Like right now in this moment where everything's up and down and the ocean's a little choppy. Like, who's your librarian? I mean, I still use Google for most. stuff. But like, I do think that everyone in their mind, if you've been on the internet for a while,

you have your own repository of librarian knowledge of like where to go to look for the thing, right? If I want to know about something that's happening right now this second, like, I know that probably Twitter or X is the place I want to go for that information. Or if I want to like learn about a makeup technique or something, I will probably watch a TikTok video. I wouldn't necessarily search Google because I know I'm going to get a bad Google result. And I think that you just know all that stuff just because you've been on the internet and you look for stuff and that's what we do on our phones all day is acquiring this knowledge. What's tricky is when Google comes along and says, don't worry about all that stuff that you think you already know, we're going to change it for you. Because then it turns out, like it's not necessarily a great result.

And I do worry that if we sort of lose the sense of knowing where to look for what's going to give me a good result, and we just rely on this, or maybe younger people who are becoming online, this is just the only way they are used to searching is relying on AI answers for things. You don't know when you're getting information that's been sourced from a really stupid, like Reddit joke or the purveyor of personal wipes is telling you about medical. information. So I think there is a little bit of a worry of what happens if we lose this sort of innate knowledge of how to search. Okay, last question. We are talking at the end of May.

The 2025 Pulitzer Prize set light opens in December. Have you submitted the video of yourself eating pizza with gluten already? Do you wait until the entry is officially open? I have heard from the committee and they're ready to create

a new category for me and award it right away. And so I think things are looking up for me. That makes you so happy to hear. Katie, thank you. Thank you for having me. Katie Nantopoulos. She reports and blogs at business insider.com. Business Insider is where Katie first wrote about this pizza glue adventure. This was the article that finally made me subscribe because I wanted to see the video. We'll have a link to that in our newsletter. 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.

Surge Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by me, PJ Vote, and Shruti Pinnemanani, and has produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Fact-checking this week by Holly Patton. Theme and sound design by Armand Bizarrian. Our show was mixed this week by Matt Bull. Matt actually helped create a brand new show called Reflector. Their debut episode is about a medication that is said,

to cure alcoholism. And it asks the question, why aren't more people using it? Go check it out. It's called Reflector. That's the show, not the medication. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Burman

and Leah Reese Dennis. Thanks to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Perrello, and John Schmidt, and to the team at Odyssey, J.D. Crowley, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly,

Kate Hutchison, Matt Casey, Morric Curran, Josephina-F, Kirk Courtney, and Hilary Chef. Our agent is Orrin Rosenbaum at UTA.

Follow and listen to Search Engine for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening. We'll see you in two weeks.