Search Engine - What’s in your cocaine and the questions Search Engine CAN’T answer

Episode Date: July 24, 2026

An interview with a cocaine salesman about cocaine adulterants, plus – questions Search Engine can’t answer, with special guest Kelefa Sanneh. Become a premium subscriber!

Welcome to Search Engine. I'm PJ Vote. No question too big, no question too small. So this summer, as the Search Engine production team rests and recharges, we are playing you some of our favorite segments from our vault, our premium feed, which we call Incognito Mode. These are just some of the extra interviews that we share with our paid subscribers for a mere five bucks a month. What a steal. This week, we are sharing two segments. The first was extended reporting into illicit markets, an interview with a cocaine salesman. The second was a kind of game show we built to highlight the depths of my ignorance. Please enjoy. So in search engines first year, I'd had this question that come up while I was doing some reporting about fentanyl. I was talking to a journalist

named Ben Westoff, and I'd wondered about something that had not made sense to me. Drug dealers were putting fentanyl into drugs like cocaine, but I didn't understand why the users of those drugs weren't noticing, because presumably a stimulant like cocaine and an opiate like fentanyl offer very different highs. So I asked Ben about it. One of the things I find confusing about that is that, like, my assumption is that a stimulant user, like a cocaine user, would notice, hey, this is like a different high. Like, why is it possible to cut it into drugs that are supposed to have very different reactions? The first thing I think is that cocaine in America is so adulterated and it has been for so long that Americans have no idea what real cocaine is actually like. I've heard from people who've had it

pure that it's basically like it's more like ecstasy actually. It gives you this euphoric feeling rather than this sort of like manic high and that it lasts a long time. So that's the first thing. And the second thing is I think that just users aren't really in a position to complain. And as long as they're getting high at all, I think most people probably are satisfied with their Coke being cut with fentanyl. So Ben said essentially that the quality of illicit drugs in America is so bad. Most of the time, users don't even know what they're supposed to be getting. Like cocaine users in America might not even know what actual cocaine feels like.

I found that idea very interesting, so I took it to another person, a drug dealer we're going to call Nate. We ended up having a very frank conversation, me and this person who has been in the illicit drug market for a very long time. It felt like the kind of interview that deserved to stand on its own, and also potentially as a PSA for people who use drugs like cocaine or ketamine. Nate told me stories about his professional life, scenes from the complicated world of trying to figure out which drugs are safe to sell, and which aren't. And he had some advice about how people could try to stay safe in a completely unregulated drug market. To protect his identity, we've changed his voice with AI. Here's Nate. Hello? Hey. Hey, how's it going? Siri thinks your last name is pronounced Vot. Honestly, that means Siri is doing at least as well as most human beings. Everybody is Vod or Void.

How does it pronounce? Vote. Vote. Like what you do in an election. Oh, that's great. That's a great lasting. Nate sells drugs for a living. He has a successful business in a major U.S. city, selling hard drugs to all sorts of people. He doesn't sell fentanyl. He doesn't sell heroin. He's a person who sells many other drugs, including cocaine. Can you tell me, like, do you remember the first time you heard of fentanyl? Like, what is the story of fentanyl as it hit you from your perspective? Well, I mean, I have always tested everything that I saw. I just half the person tested because it's like an ethical responsibility. And so I got these fentanyl strips.

I didn't know exactly what it was. It was before it was so widespread and people were dying left and right. What year do you think this was? 2019, maybe. Okay. Not that long ago. and the primary method of testing for fentanyl is highly flawed. It gives almost half the time of false positives.

Oh, wow. Nate says that now there are new fentanyl test strips, which work much better. They yield fewer false positives and are easier to use. You can find them at dantsaf.org. But in the early days, when the test strips didn't work as well, and people were very scared, Nate was feeling a lot of angry phone calls. I would get like two or three phone calls a week. I just tested your shit and it has Benzol and it extraordinarily.

And it would be for like everything. Like MDMA, no one is putting fentanyl in MDMA. It's just not a, it's not the kind of market that intersects. And if you go to danceaf.org where they do mass spectrometer testing of all samples, you can just send a sample to these guys and they're going to tell you, proportionately of what chemicals are in there. Yeah. And there is not a single sample of MDMA

and the thousands and thousands of samples that come in from all over the world that has fentanyl on it. We checked this with Dan Save. The executive director there confirmed that Dan Save has never found an example of MDMA with fentanyl in it. Although he said there was one case

that was not lab confirmed where he suspected fentanyl had been involved. Nate's experience seems to mostly track with Dan Saifs. It's always coca heroin and a couple of times ketamine but almost never ketamine. And so that's how I started

being aware of it, these strips that were telling me there's fentanyl. What shit. Nate says even the fact that he is fielding calls from his customers and testing his drugs himself, that makes him unusual. He describes himself as a professional. He has a client list, he has regulars,

he has reputation to maintain. He says he'll even cut people off if he suspects they have a drug problem. But the problem, he says, with being an honest drug dealer, is that you're the last step on a distribution chain filled with people who might be much less honest. I bought a key of what was supposed to be ketamine through a friend. It was the middle of COVID. I was like, dude, it is so dry. And this girl was like, I do know this guy, this Chinatown guy, and he'll get us something. So, I buy a key, I give for like 30 grand,

and she comes back with a kilo of, it looks like ketamine, and I go to cook it down, and it turns into this rock, hard, stinking mass. Quick primer on what it means to cook ketamine down. When drug dealers buy ketamine wholesale, they often buy it as a crystal, but when users consume it, it's usually bought as a powder.

Nate, and people like Nate, turn ketamine crystals into ketamine powder by either crushing them or cooking them down. Normally. Except this one time that ketamine crystals, once they were cooked down, appeared to be something else. A rock-hard, stinking mass of God-knows-what.

Nate had been ripped off. In a normal business, that would be a reason to ask for a refund from the supplier. Nate's not in a normal business. So here's what happened on the day he found himself staring down at his very expensive, very bad product. It's just a complete adulterant. I don't even know what it is.

There's some ketamine in there because it tested positive for ketamine, but it's a rock solid bath. It's toxic. It's stinking. I put the pot in my kitchen for like six months waiting to see if some chemical wizard could identify what it was cut with and if they could separate it, but no one ever could figure it out and I ended up flushing it down the drain. I had absolutely no recourse to that guy who saw it.

me that kilo. Right. There's no better business bureau you can go to either. No, no. And I'm not even going to like, like, I'm not even going to ask those guys. Yeah. You know, those guys, those guys are killers. I mean, they're serious people. And my friend, I was like, can you just ask him? And she's like, okay, so she asked him. And he was like, no, no refunds. It's kind of mean, that's it. And then try, changes the number. Right. So you're in a position where you're out 30 grand. you eat the loss somebody else might not. Exactly. In that case, most people are going to recrystallize that and sell it. Rechristolizing, which you may have done in chemistry class,

is when an impure solid compound is mixed with a hot solvent to form a saturated solution. In this case, it would be a way to disguise the fact that this drug should not be consumed by anyone. Nate says most dealers are going to pull a trick like this, because they don't care about customer service very much in a high demand illegal industry. He says he imagines the typical drug dealer and thinks, this guy might have stolen something to buy these bad drugs,

or maybe he used his last bit of money. He just spent everything he had on this product. He's going to sell that fucking product. These are desperate people. These aren't like people like me, you know? I have friends who have bought bad drugs in the pre-Fentanyl era. In high school, I saw people lose cash

on some very expensive Pennsylvania suburb oregano. I remember a writer friend buying what turned out to be significantly overpriced baking soda from a stranger in a bar. It's not that the idea that illegal drugs might not be what they're supposed to be is some shock to me. But talking to Nate,

a picture emerges of a drug world where almost everything is adulterated. And most users don't notice, because as long as what they're taking has an effect, they assume it's legitimate. A state of affairs that has probably always existed, but has become consequential now in the age of fentanyl. Nate told me he'd seen a study from a few years back on cocaine in London, which found that

the street cocaine there was only 15% actual cocaine, which didn't actually surprise him all that much. Nate said cocaine in general is just a much, much, much more adulterated product than its users seem to want to consider. I sell the raw, you know, but what that means is I'm getting a brick. straight from Mexico, straight from the cartels. It's pure cocaine, but pure cocaine, I mean, what does that mean? When I test that shit, I find all sorts of stuff in there.

There's amphetamines in there. There's mixers and fillers. There's all sorts of stuff in it because by the time it gets into a little gram baggie, it's been cut five or six or seven times. Like, there's this worming de-agent. A warming de-agent? Yeah, there's this chemical that's made for the veterinary industry. if animals got a massive parasite infection,

they'll run this shit through them, and it's so toxic. It kills the eggs of the parasites. It's really, really toxic. And somehow by some crazy freak of chemistry, when you cook it down, it behaves exactly as pure cocaine does. So when people are buying, like,

huge amounts, but kilos and kilos, they cook it down. to see what the purity is. And it looks like it's a lot purer than it is. So that is in a lot of cocaine. Worming deagent for large animals. Yeah, and it's nasty, toxic shit. And even in like a raw brick from Mexico, you'll find it.

And does that just show up in a test? Do you test specifically for that? Yeah. Yeah, I have a test for that because it's so prevalent. Oh. And I'll tell you the truth, I very rarely do cocaine. Again, Nate is a cocaine dealer. Like, if someone offers me coke at a party, even if it's someone who's, like, rich, and I think it's probably connected, I don't just do it ever enough.

Do you feel like it's like watching someone, like, pull a hot dog out of a trash can and start eating it? Yeah, it's disgusting. So how do you think, just from like a consumer information perspective, people who in 23 are taking drugs sold to them by people they don't know well. Like, what do you recommend people do? Don't do it. Really?

Yeah, don't do it. Of course not. I mean, it's just a vegetarian or you try and eat salads every once in a while. You shouldn't be doing this shit that who knows what the fuck is in there. Wait, you're saying don't do drugs? No, I'm saying you said it if they don't have a repute, like...

Oh, you're saying don't, don't do drugs unless you know to hide your certainty who you're buying them from. Right. I mean, there's got to be someone accountable. Otherwise, you're just like, someone's selling snake oil. It's 1910 and you're in Nebraska and you don't know what that is. And what about for people who are buying from a dealer who they have a relationship with or who has a reputation to them?

Well, then they should all be holding each other accountable to increase the accountability. And then that person is selling to them will, think a little harder when he buys something. If this idea of people in a drug-using community holding a drug dealer accountable seems very hard to do or unlikely to work, Nate seems to be aware of this also. This is an ethical conversation that not everyone involved

in this is ethics are of consideration. Yeah, this is like a question that I spent a lot of him wondering about and never, it's fundamentally unanswerable, but like, in general, the people that you've met in the underworld of illicit chemicals, where do people land ethically? In an eye world, we all hold each other accountable, of course. And what do you mean when you say that? I mean, if someone sells you something, they have a responsibility to tell you exactly what it is

and the quality and the price should be aligned with the quality. And if they're selling something really cheap to you and you're like, oh, wow, that's a really low price. Then there's usually an explanation why. I mean, I'm not a good example here. What I'm doing is very, very rare, you know. You mean in terms of like quality control? Yeah, and in terms of like someone actually choosing to lose $47,000 instead of selling it as something, it's not.

Right. Right. And that's happened once to me. the Chinatown thing was, I was like, whatever. Like, I took that risk. But another time, something happened in my circle with a guy that I had known for a very long time was totally, I trusted him.

And he approached him at a party and he was like, hey, I know this guy who has a tinole of two C-B. would you be interested in that? And I was like, hell, yes, it's so hard to find. 2CB. I'd heard of this drug before and had actually wondered about it a lot. I first read about it in a book by Alexander and Ann Shulgin, the people who introduced American psychologists to MDMA.

Dr. Alexander Shulgin in his life legally synthesized hundreds of novel drug compounds, many psychedelic. The U.S. government, for a while, left him alone to do his work. He tested the compounds on himself and lovingly describe them in two somewhat famous books. In one, Fical, or Phinethal, means I have known and loved. Shalgan wrote of 2C.B that it made music sound, quote, voluptuous, almost three-dimensional. End quote. It's a rare drug, and in some quarters, highly sought after.

It's a more amphiogenic psychedelic. It's a more like good feeling, warm feeling psychedelic. Oh, interesting. It's a very powerful substance. and it really is an amazing teacher. And you take it in like, it doesn't have to be ceremonial, but you don't take it and, like, go to a bar or something.

It's kind of like an ayahuasca, you know, be. Got it. So this guy said he had a kilo of this, and it's pretty rare. He said this guy he knew had a kilo of it, would I be interested? And it's extremely rare. I'd never even heard of a kilo of it. I was like, yes, I would.

How much? And he said, I'll let you know. And he texted you later today. He said, 47,000 dollars. Okay. And I was like, okay, I'll take it. So he brings it over. And I immediately said, it looks right,

it looks like what it should look like, and I immediately send the sample away to this dance safely. but I'm just going on this guy's word and everything looked right. And so me and two friends did a little bit of it that night. And I had an amazing time. It felt just a Tuesdays and be. My other girlfriend had an amazing time. The third guy ended up tripping for like two and a half days.

Oh my gosh. He's just like, I wanted to stop. I'm not, this is terrible. And we were like, oh, I guess you took too much. I'm not sure what happened. I put it on the menu because I had done it. I was like, this is good vibes. But I had done a very, very small amount of it.

And after I sold like four or five brands to people for a lot of money, I started getting calls quickly. What the fuck, man? I've been trooping for three days. This is a nightmare. We wanted to stop. Jesus. It's really dark.

I was like, but by the second call, obviously, I took it off the menu. Yeah. And then the test comes back, and it's not 2CB. It's a cheap street drug,

but technically it's a synthetic cannabinoid. It's K2, basically. Oh, wow. Which is like a really, like, sort of like, it has a bad reputation just being like... Really potent, and there's no control. K2, or Spice, is a synthetic version of THC. It's not a plant, it's made in a lab.

But unscrupulous dealers sometimes spray it on weed-looking grass to trick people into buying it as weed. Even though cannabis is a pretty mild drug for most people, K2 is not. It is very unpredictable. Nate told me a horror story of exactly, how unpredictable. He said a guy he knew had thought he was smoking pot,

but it was actually K2. The guy had a psychotic episode, essentially. He woke up in prison a few days later, facing multiple felonies. It was explained to him that he'd broken into a school with a samurai sword and a bow and arrow on a mission to steal all of the computers. In his K2 haze,

he thought the computers were magical mushrooms he had to collect, like in a video game. Nate takes people selling each other bad drugs, surprisingly personally, but he also said in his time as a dealer it has been rare. There was the ketamine that wasn't during quarantine. There was the 2CB that was actually K2. But he says that's it. Although for me, the idea that even something I'd been told was a weed

could send me to a school with medieval weaponry, that story is more bracing than any dare program I've ever participated in. it really makes you not ever want to do illegal drugs. It's just like, oh, my God, the downside risk is so high. I mean, that's only two times that's happened in my entire whole thing here. And I'm doing a lot of stuff. Yeah. And it only once was it someone in my community.

But that still pissed me off. Of course, these two particular horror stories, well, not enviable, pale in comparison to the idea of someone taking cocaine and dying because it's been cut with fentanyl. When it comes to fentanyl adulteration, Nate says he hears from customers who are worried about it, but he does not counter it in the drugs he gets from his suppliers. According to Nate, like so many experiences in America,

whether a recreational drug user should expect to die from fentanyl poisoning or not might be a somewhat class stratified experience. While Nate has friends in the scene who he believes have died from fentanyl poisoning, he thinks broadly what's happening is that people are getting bad drugs from bad street dealers. And just to make sure I have your zoomed out view on it,

you think that it's happening at the street level and that it's basically people being greedy. Like somebody either gets burned and passes it onto their customers or somebody takes something that is not adulterated or not adulterated with fentanyl. And then they adulterate it to

save money, basically. Yeah. And it's happening at the lowest levels by like desperate people who don't have any ethics. But do realize that most drug dealers don't even have like customers. It's like they probably sell to a different person every day. I don't think they have a lot of repeat customers, you know? Right. That's like it's sort of a class and drug difference.

Is this drug dealer have customers in a community? are they just selling on the street to strangers? Yeah, you go to a corner and you don't know who's going to show up, but whoever has something is hanging around that corner. And then there's, like, battles between those guys. They're like, this is my choreo, right? But, like, the people don't, like, I don't think they stay on the same corner forever. And, like, that sounds like a probably a bad idea if you're selling heroin and funds and off.

And as far as, like, my larger question, which is, like, people who are sort of killing their customers with Fentner, like how someone runs a business like that. I feel like the other thing I get from what you're saying is that, I don't know, there's sort of a bit of a trend in journalism and sociology to talk about the drug industry as if it's just one more kind of capitalist endeavor that just behaves in a slightly quirky way. It's so very and diverse. I mean, it's a huge economy.

Jesus, if you're just going to say drugs, I mean, that means a lot of different things. But what I hear you saying is like a lot of the people in that economy are just operating at a level of desperation that makes it like, if you compare it to a normal American economy, that'll explain a lot. There's no oversight. There's no governmental body overseeing anything. There's no licensing. So yeah, of course, I mean, anything could happen. If you right now took all licensing and oversight away from the fast food industry, In 10 years, it probably sees them pretty sketchy shit, you know? Yeah. Well, also a world where nobody exactly knows what a hamburger is. Right, right. Like, is this coming from this floorhouse floor or what?

We already know what's allowed? And where it was illegal to be caught holding a hamburger. So you couldn't ask anybody for help on, like, what you had actually just eaten. Right. Exactly. Right. So you didn't know, there was no ingredients. He.

You're just like, can I have that protein thing right there? because it makes me feel good because my stomach needs it. And they're like, okay, yeah, I got this protein thing for you, but I got this really nice protein thing for you over here. You should try this one over here. Just don't test it.

Just don't test it. All right, man. Thank you, so. This is so helpful. Thank you. You go, man, you go. Thanks. Now that we've revved up your energies

with this cocaine segment, we're going somewhere new. After these ads, a kind of live game show. show we held on the internet this year. Welcome back to the show. So at some point, I had the idea, which is that I wanted listeners to send in questions they thought would just be unanswerable. And then I wanted to try to answer them with one of my favorite writers and friend Calvesanay, live on air. I thought it'd be fun to take a break from our normal approach, where we take one

little question and research the hell out of it and instead just get gatling gunned with a bunch of unanswerable questions without access to research or the search engine team. For me, it was really enjoyable. I'll let you be the judge. So I'm going to play the segment. The first voices you'll hear are search engine senior producer Garrett Graham and writer Caliphassanae. So what are we doing today? So over the past week, we collected, I don't, PJ, dozens, maybe, maybe a hundred of questions. Yeah, high dozens, low hundred. High dozens, low hundreds, uh, in the effort to stump PJ and, okay, if I may say, in the effort to stump you as well, but they may not have known that they were going to be stumping you as well. So we're going to pull what is essentially a random assortment.

There's been some light curation involved, but a random assortment of some of those questions that came in. And this is a little bit just like pulling questions out of a hat. This is like a throwback to when we did this on stage. This is very much like when we did it on stage. And you had a was it a literal hat? I can't remember. There was a literal hat that I just happened to be wearing that night. We should do that again sometime. Yeah, sure. We're doing it today. Okay. So first question, pulling it out of the randomized hat here.

This question comes from Ryan, and the question is, how long does it take for grave robbing to become archaeology? Oh. Oh. How long does it take for grave robbing to become archaeology?

Because if I were to dig up someone buried at a local cemetery, that would be a crime, but if I were to dig up an ancient person, that would be celebrated socially. That's the question? That's the premise, as I understand. I mean, I would, I would want to do what I would always do, which is reject the premise.

Like, is it ever celebrated socially to dig up a grave in this day and age? Aren't there big repatriation debates, roiling museums? Well, I would say definitely there was a brief period of time where, like, the guy who found, what was the ancient Greek city? It wasn't Troy, but who was that guy? We read about him in fifth grade, Mr. Worth. Like, there was a moment where we celebrated archaeologists. You had Indiana Jones, prominent fictional archaeologists.

Like, I think maybe the, maybe the answer is that these things are contingent and change with culture and that it's less to do with time and more to do with how moderns are feeling and also the sort of, like, the grave being dug, like whether there are people who have feelings about that grave. You know what I'm thinking about PJ? I'm thinking about driver's licenses. Why driver's licenses? this. Well, there should be an option on the driver's license. Of whether or not your grave can be dug up by future historians. Yeah. Whether you want to donate your eyes, your brain, whatever, your heart,

but also your bones, right? This is in the same category. Would you donate, would you say rob my grave? Yeah, maybe you do like a grace period, right? A hundred. Maybe it's like copyright. It's like, oh, my last surviving relative who's alive when I am plus 50 years or something. Wouldn't you just put it? And then have at it. Would you just carve it on the gravestone? Would it be like an expiration date for a gravestone? I guess this depends on how much we want to incentivize people giving permission, right? If you have to carve it on your gravestone, there's going to be a very small number of skeletons available. But if it's an opt-out situation, a Cass Sunstein, nudge kind of a thing on your driver's license,

then a lot of people will be like, oh, yeah, yeah, whatever, dig me up. I like this. I think we're imagining a future society that is very respectful of our corpses, which I like to try to imagine future societies is not worse than us. So I think that's good. I would also be very like, are you an organ donor? I think so. I don't know. I think so.

I'm an organ donor. I would be pro dig me up. If people think they can learn something from my body, like what happens when someone treats their organs like a meat sack, then it's worthwhile. What if they want to do something frivolous with your bones? Oh, like a funny Halloween decoration on a front yard. Sure.

Musical instrument. depends on if the joke is good, which I won't be there to evaluate it. But if they want to use my body for science or art, I would say that I affirmatively consent. Turn your skull into a chalice. Yeah, my, my, like, morbid ID will say that I can be used for silly stuff. But, like, to get things back to search engine and engine a little bit, if you were trying to answer this question for the show, like, what's your first call?

It's funny, you know, one of the things that we sometimes struggle with with stuff like this is, like, who's like I feel like we're in a moment of strange views towards experts. So like I think 10 years ago I would have gone to just like a professor who thinks about this stuff. And now I kind of wouldn't go to a professor who thinks about this stuff. I think my first call wouldn't be a call. I think I'd just be trying to research. Like I'd be trying to figure out like I do actually think that there was a there was like a there. my loose pop cultural imagination is that there was a moment where things that we actually would

reasonably consider basically grave robbing were wildly celebrated. There was kind of a clawback and now it's pushed even further in the other direction. And I would just want to sit down and try to understand how you could chart the social attitudes changing. Like I don't think you would invent Indiana Jones today, but we don't feel so bad about it that you can't make many, many, many more Indiana Jones movies, maybe which should be for other reasons. I can't remember. I think I did see the most recent one. Have his ethical practices evolved over the years?

I didn't see the most recent. The Phoebe Waller Bridge one? Yes. I don't know if Indiana Jones has become more thoughtful about his relationship. I mean, usually they also kind of cheat it where the Nazis are racing for whatever he wants, which at that point, it's kind of like it unbalances the scales morally. But like, what do you, if you were, if this came up in a pitch meeting, what are you looking for in your initial research or Googling or whatever magic Garrett does to know like,

oh, this could make a good show or like, no, this isn't going any further than these five minutes of riffing. I think what I would be asking Garrett to look for is like you do like what's what is what is kind of what feels alive about the question is I do think they're charting a real change. And I would want to find somebody who got caught at the moment of the change happening. Like like the idea. The deal story you'd almost be casting for is the person who came out of like, you know, their dig where they'd found an ancient pyramid expecting garlands and applause and found, in fact, they'd stepped into different cultural mores. Like, that's kind of what you'd want. And you'd just want to, you'd be looking for someone. This is the category of question that is philosophical and not,

the reason this is a good, unanswerable question is because there's literally no answer. And so you'd just be trying to figure out, like, who is the thoughtful person that you can land this conversation with. Okay, there's a very good chance that you would end up in this episode. Do you consider yourself stumped by this question then, PJ? I do not think that there's going to be a single question today that I don't feel stumped by, and I consider myself stumped by this question. But as a listener, this doesn't sound like a question that is out of the realm of possibility for being the basis of a show. No, it's not outside of the realm of possibility. It's also the other thing I sometimes think about is like one of the

outrages that I'm capable of feeling, but I don't know how to think about more thoughtfully, is the question of just burial grounds? Like, I would like someone to be able to tell me, and I would not want to be the person answering this. But, like, my assumption is if you just think about how many people have died, I assume almost everything that's a burial ground. Like, it might not be a burial ground in the last hundred years, but just that we are constantly walking on the dead.

And I would just like to have a story that lives inside that feeling for a little bit. But wait, you did a, didn't you do a cemetery show? We did a what happens when the cemetery goes out of business, which was like a, in my opinion, a perfect question. Because it's a question where you hear it and you're like, what does happen when a cemetery goes out of business? And you realize that maybe the reason the question has never occurred to you is because a part of your mind that doesn't want to think about death or what's after death has actually like put a curtain over your own curiosity. And you mentioned one of the oldest cemeteries in America. Yes. Grove Street Cemetery, which happens to be where my father is buried.

Have you visited? Yeah. I don't know. I know. Some people's lives are complicated. You're right. Yes, I have visited. My good friend Mark made a beautiful tombstone.

But like there was a decision after my father died of like, do we want to go for the cheap cemetery down the street? Or do we want the like cool historic cemetery? And you decided the cool historic cemetery? How did you decide? I mean, it was my mom's decision, but it kind of felt like him. He was like a professor. of, you know, so the idea of him in this like august company in this like historical place kind of seemed like it was interesting.

It's really nice. Okay, we're going to move on to the next dump. So, Garrett, you want to suspend this much time on each question? Is that the idea? I'm going to keep us moving along here. Let's get some more questions out of the hat. So we have the next one comes from, let's see here. I think we're going to go with this question from Matthew.

And the question is, two of my favorite people have names that society is turning into insults. Similarly to the dick to penis semantic change, Karen and to a lesser extent, Chad, are becoming derogatory terms for awful people. So the question is, how do we stop this? My friend and coworker Karen is one of the best and most experienced pediatric nurses in our rural county. Her experience, instinct and wisdom guides us daily in preventing so much patient suffering. After a lifetime of service, she should be spared this unfortunate name creep.

How do we advocate and stop this without being a scolding, virtue signaling, wet blanket? what would the Karen's and Chads of America like us to do? Oh, that's a good question. Are you thinking what I'm thinking, PJ? I don't know. What are you thinking? I thought Chads were good. Oh, yeah, I thought Chads were good.

Isn't it Chad just like a sort of like muscle-bound, like, gig a guy? Yeah, who's like untroubled by life's difficulties and is a person of action. I guess it depends on what room you're in. But I think we could agree that Karen has definitely taken on like a profoundly negative inflection. Yes. There's a name in, is it Australia? I don't know, there's Kevin, right? In France, Kevin is strongly, like, negatively coded.

Is it American coded? I think so. Maybe it's the fact that it's not French. Yes. I actually kind of have views on the Karen thing and kind of do have an idea. I mean, the person threw me at the very end when they said, oh, without being a scolding,

purchasing like wet blankets since that's how I would solve this. But I kind of, I understand why Karen as a term came to popularity that people were trying to find a way to describe people who kind of like abused calls to the police or like kind of like using the rules in a way that felt nasty or amoral. But I also have watched it evolve in a way that sometimes gives me a little bit of nausea where I think if you have a bad word for something that only applies to women, you end up in a place where it's just like another slur that people just apply to women that they don't like. And like slur is maybe a little harsh, but I don't like it. Like it's something that the teenagers in my life, when their mom does anything that embarrasses

them, they'll jump to Karen. And I get, like, it actually troubles me. I don't think you can convince people not to use a word that they like use. without creating actual social stigma around the word. But I kind of think if you point out that we mostly try to avoid gendered insults, particularly towards women, Karen gets kind of harder to defend. That is like scaldy and wet blankety. But like I've done that to 15-year-olds.

It hasn't worked, but I could imagine it working with an adult. Yeah, it's an insult with a kind of faux specificity. And that way it's like bro a little bit where like it's like, it's like, kind of gender-specific, but like what it means to be a tech bro versus like a tech asshole. Like bro, like it suggests something, but because it's not quite defined, you can't really like defend yourself against an accusation of being a bro or in this case, a Karen. You know, I think the thing about slurs in general and insults is that, like, they have to be insulting.

And the ones that we consider the most generic are the ones that insult people's intelligence, right? And at some point, we may find ourselves having a conversation about why it makes sense to insult people on the basis of intelligence, which is not something that mainly people are able to control. Right. So, like, there is a whole, you know, the insult discourse is a complicated discourse because it implies that we're doing something mean or rude by definition. Right. And it's hard to clean up. Yeah. And most of us try to avoid being mean or rude.

And yes, like you, I'm skeptical of times when people say they're being mean or rude. but for good reasons. Yeah, I think that's the other thing I really dislike about Karen is the idea that it's not just that... Like, I really like when people call other people assholes. Like, I just think it's not... When someone tells me that someone else is an asshole,

my brain does this thing where I'm like, all this person's really saying is that they have a conflict with somebody else. The person might be behaving badly. The person using the word might be behaving badly, but it doesn't... If you could judge an insult as good or bad, I really like asshole.

The problem with Karen is you're both saying this woman is bad and I'm good for noticing it. Like there's like a virtue signaling and the insult that I don't really appreciate. So I would say you have to make, you have to make Karen into a taboo if you wanted to go away. And I would say that I don't feel stumped by this one because I feel like we're doing our part right now. I was about to say like, well, there's some things you can't control and you can't control like if your name gets attached to a thing. But then I remembered that when I went to ninth grade, I told everyone to call me. K instead of Kela, because kids in like middle school were inventing their own versions of

Kelaifa, and it was cauliflower, and it was collied, it was elephant, it was all sorts of stuff. And then people called me K from now on. So I would be hypocritical not to at least acknowledge that one thing that people do when they don't love the resonance of their name sometimes is change it. Yeah, and I think future call people what they want to be called. I think that's like one of the etiquette rules that we almost all agree on most of the time sometimes. All right, that one I feel like it was answerable, sort of. Can we call that an unstumped one? We can call that unstumped or maybe semi-stumped.

I will say there's some pretty gold going on in the chat right now with some listeners pointing out that there are some soras out in the world, some Kindles out in the world, some Ketrina's out in the world, some Isis out in the world. There's a lot of other names besides. Oh, ISIS is a particularly... But that's gone down, right? Like, that had high political salience and then like now low-levels.

lower political salience. Yeah, maybe you just have to wait these things out. Time heals all. Okay, next question. This feels maybe a little less designed to stump and a little more designed to insult PJ's understanding of physics. But the question is, how does a bicycle stay upright? Oh, come on, guys.

Is that really a fair thing to do to a person like me? How does it? Oh, you know how? Centrifical force. I'll be taking up all of questions. PJ annoys all the scientists by naming a force that famously doesn't exist. Is that true? Centripetal force.

Oh, centrifugal is just like me not knowing what centripetal is? Centripetal is the force that keeps you from flying off into the distance. Centrifical force, I think, scientists should correct me, is it feels like you're being pushed out, but you're not actually being pushed out from the center when you're spinning around. It's that something is preventing you, is like pulling you in because otherwise you would go straight. So why do a bicycle fall over? I think that's different. Doesn't that have more to do with like gyroscopes or something?

Gyroscopes. Yeah, like when something's spinning, it has more stability. God. No one's ever going to listen to search engine again. You know, I had this moment of when I went to college and I wanted to be a radio DJ and they gave me a test to test my knowledge of punk rock, like a written 90-minute test.

And I was like, I've never been so qualified and prepared for anything in my life. Well, this question is the opposite of that. Anything that is science or math is a pretty good way to step me. Besides like very basic arithmetic, which I can do decently well. Stop bragging. Okay, we're going to move on to a question from Jim here, which is should you give money to homeless people or maybe phrase differently?

Is it better to give or not to give? Why? Please discuss. Oh, definitely. Definitely you should give. And it's better to give. I've been persuaded by my partner just like will keep large amounts of money in her pocket to give to homeless people whenever they ask. And I just think like setting aside all the kind of like consequentialist questions or like blah, blah, blah, blah.

If you don't, I feel like you end up in a world living in a city like New York where you just have to turn your mind off to lots and lots of suffering. And I just think that that is a bad way to engage with the world. I don't know that I'm like solving that suffering by handing over like okay bills when I see somebody. But like the moral experience I have of living in the city is way better since I just started copying her. Well, this is, I mean, this is interesting, right? Because it suggests that it suggests that the suffering itself or your exposure, your intentional and conscious exposure to the suffering is good in and of itself. I think it is. And in that sense, the people who are suffering are.

are in a weird way doing you a service. I don't know that they're doing me a service. Why? Because they're reminding me that there's misery in the world and that is helping with my moral instruction. Well, that's what you said. You said that like these encounters are valuable to you and that you're willing to pay money in order to have this experience.

That is not what I said. I just think that it's bad to tune. I think the more things you're tuning out the worse, even though you have to tune a lot out. I see. But if you could, if you were living in a city where you did not visibly see people suffering. Yeah. Would that be bad?

If they were suffering somewhere out of sight. I don't know where you're supposed to set the bounds of your empathy, sympathy, like moral consideration. And I think one of the obvious modern problems is that we're aware of so much suffering. And for the most part, the only thing, like we seem to be able to be able to be able to be able to be. to do is like angrily post about it. I think that, I don't know, I think for me, as someone who really struggles with this, I just try to think like, I'm actually going to really think about the proximate circles. Like, I'm really going to think about suffering in like my family and friend groups, and then I'm going to think about suffering in my neighborhood. And then I'm sort of going to think

about suffering in the communities I'm in. And everything past that, I kind of don't know what to do about. But if I lived in a city where there was just like great social services and nobody was homeless and everybody was doing really well, I don't think that that would, I think that would be good. I don't think it would then mean I needed to think about people in another place necessarily. But for me, if I'm around it, I want to think about it, even though it's not like I'm volunteering or anything like that. Ordo Amoris. What's that? It's like the concentric circles of love and compassion.

Ordo and Morris. It's a concept that was much in the news earlier this year when it was expounded by J.D. Vance. Oh, wow. How was he? He was like, I need to find everyone in my circles. He said, as an American leader, but also just as an American citizen, your compassion belongs first to your fellow citizens. That doesn't mean you hate people from outside of your own borders, but there's this old school concept.

I think it's a very Christian concept, by the way, that you love your friends. family and then you love your neighbor and then you love your community and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world it's so funny because he's so when i listen to him talk i'm always like i think he is very smart and he applies his skill at making arguments to things that are so hard to defend and so it's like that's a really beautiful concept i don't know what it has to do with like anything that he's been supporting for this term. But I think this question that you were talking about,

I think this is a central question that all of us wrestle with in different ways, is like what do we owe to people who are close to us, either in familial terms or like just geographically versus what we owe to people who are further from us? Yeah, and I don't know, I definitely don't have the right answer to that. But I think that not, I think we all have to decide what we're going to let in from far away. And I think we struggle with that. And it can mean like people feeling vast amounts of pain about situations that they actually can't really control.

I think it can mean people feeling vast amounts of rage about people that they don't need direct rage to. But I think not ignoring what's actually here seems like a pretty good start to a confusing moral problem. Can I make a small counterpoint? Yeah. Which is that I think that one thing that happens is that people that are the most, the most intent on not shutting people out, on letting people in that are close to them, of being in with the suffering around them, I think they sometimes feel like that ends up can be exhausting or unpleasant. Yeah.

And I think so sometimes what happens is that those people end up making choices, sometimes subconsciously, that take them a little further away from those people. In other words, like, if every time you pass someone in the street who's suffering, you might find yourself wanting to move to a neighborhood, a city, or a state that has less of that in your daily life. And you might not explain to yourself in those words that that's why you're doing it. But you might find that just like mentally, psychically, you're like, oh, there's something about living out in the woods that really appeals to me. There's something about living in some rural place that appeals to you. But maybe subconsciously, part of what will appeal to you is being a

little further from that suffering, right? If we create a universe where you have these obligations to people you see who are suffering right close to you, then one way to resolve that tension is to get further geographically away from people who are suffering. Yeah, I think that's true. I think it's also like, I have happened in balls. I wonder if it's some unexamined part of me that's just like, it's hard to live in a city. Yeah. It gets hard to morally live in a city.

Okay, what's the next one? That was nice. We're going to take a turn from somewhat serious to somewhat silly. This is a question from Adrian. The question reads, PJ, you're going to hate this. My question. assuming it was directly overhead, how many average-sized extra-large chicken eggs

would it take stacking one on top of the other to reach from the highest point on Earth to the lowest point in the sea of tranquility on the moon? That's it. That's my question. This is like a consulting interview question. It's a trick question. Save me, Kade. Well, because everyone says Everest,

but the highest point, you know, what you want to be talking about is Chimborazo in Ecuador, which is not the highest point above sea level, but it's the furthest from the center of the earth because of the equatorial bulge, right? Which adds like 27 miles. And so it's actually a mile and changed maybe further from the Earth's center

than the top of Everest. But we're only talking about a mile or two, right? And then if you think about the Sea of Tranquility, Marais Tranquilitatis, I call it. It's like 500 miles in diameter, right? But like this podcast, it is not that deep. So I think you'd want to ignore, I think the Earth's highest point and the Sea of Tranquility, you'd want to ignore all that, right?

And you'd want to just look at the distance, because it'll come out. And you want to just look at the distance between Earth and the moon, right? Call it, what, 239,000 miles maybe? 230, right? So an egg, call it what, 2.4 inches. So 63,000 inches in a mile. 26,000 eggs in a mile, if you divide it down. so 26,000 times 239,000, call it 6,000,000, so 6 billion, give or take.

Like I said, this is like having a bodyguard intellectually. Just spitballing with no advanced knowledge whatsoever. Did you peek at the questions? As the host of this show, PJ, I have certain privileges. Nice try, listener. Okay. That was truly terrifying. Also, if folks have stumpers, they want to throw in the chat, we might have time for a couple of live stumpers at the end.

So throw them in the chat. Maybe I will call your name. You can come off mute and ask your stumper live. But let's move on to our hat full of questions here. Let's see. Let's see here. This is another kind of mathy one, and I feel like Kay is in a mathy mood right now. Oh, no.

It's been out there. If we had a base 12 numbering system, how would the world be different? Like, so we would count in 12s instead of tens? Yeah. Well, we would obviously have an extra finger on each hand, right? Because that's how we got to 10. That sounds great, honestly. And an extra toe, which would maybe affect us less.

And so then I'm imagining, because I don't think the base would matter that much in terms of, like, our everyday math. We'd figure it out, right? We'd have two more numbers after, you know, between 10 and between 9 and 10, I guess, right? But then does 100 lose all its power? Like, I feel like 100 has a lot of significant parts. No, we still write 1-0,000, but it just is equivalent to 144 of something. I guess I can live in that world. I think the toes thing would bother me a little bit, but I can live in that world.

I don't think feet need to be grosser than they currently are. But my question is, in that world, like, our hands are a little better, right? Like, so we're a little better at like manipulating objects, right? So music probably sounds different. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You have more Yingwi Malmsteams. Well, I was going to say, it depends on what you enjoy. But yes, music probably has more notes.

Solos get more elaborate. Yeah. And I wonder if there are some downsides, right? Like, evolutionary, like sometimes these evolutionary advances are kind of zero-sum. So if more energy is going to growing that 11th and 12th finger, Does something else evolve more slowly? Are there less calories available for something else? So maybe it's like where maybe IQ takes a hit

and the human race is a little bit more slow processing, but we have more fingers to count on. Our music gets better. We're typing more. The internet would get worse. But there's a big problem in terms of communication. Have you already identified the big communication problem? You can't get people in middle finger anymore.

Exactly right There's no middle finger But it would be this You'd like hold up your two middle fingers I guess that feels ruder Right that's closer to like the British up yours Right Yeah it doesn't feel good

If you had two middle fingers So yes I think that I think hands would be the biggest difference In a base 12 world I feel like we totally I don't feel stumped by that at all That is a beautiful answer Do we have time for one more

A couple more? Yeah let's hit one more I'm going to pull one more out of the hat here. Let's see. I think our final question is a somewhat. Yeah, this is a good one. This is a chewy one. Humans don't need to eat meat to survive.

What moral reason do we have to continue eating animals? Oh. I think about this a lot. Kay, you were vegan for a while. Yeah. How did you decide to become vegan? As a person who thinks hard about moral questions, how do you decide to not be vegan?

I don't want to get too. complicated in terms of philosophical concepts, B.J. But peer pressure. Peer pressure in both directions. Yeah, I think so. Like, for me, it was like more of a cultural thing. It was about being part of a, like, a punk rock community where everyone was vegan and also straight edge, right? In the hardcore punk world, vegan and straight edge often go together. You stop indulging, right? You stop eating meat. You stop or never start drinking alcohol. You only listen to power chords. Yeah, sure. And so, yes, for me it was like that I liked being part of that community. And yes, and so when my community- Pure pressure was binding you, did peer pressure push you out

or is just the community dissolved or you left it? Yeah, I found myself like hanging out with different people and I found myself not wanting, not feeling as strong about wanting to be a kind of like an outlier. But also feeling like if I was living in like a vegetarian world or a more vegetarian world, I certainly would not be the one dude eating meat. But do you now, when you eat meat,

are you aware of like a cognitive moral dissonant feeling in your mind? Yeah, I probably feel a lot of moral dissonance in my day-to-day life. It's the thing I, it's one of the things I do that most bothers me. It's like, I eat meat, I eat lots of meat. I can't. It's just like if you really take the idea that other beings experience suffering seriously,

like I can't come up with a good justification for doing it. I don't like that I do it and I do it. Like I don't judge other people doing it, but I really, it's like, it's sort of like if this is true, what else is true? Right. Yeah. Yeah. Question about myself that I don't like.

Although, if you talk to some vegans, they, that to them, the suffering of animals is more objectionable than the killing of animals. And so that means in some situations, you know, dairy products might give them more pause than meat depending on how the animal lived and how it was killed. Yeah. And when you read about the ways those animals live, It's very, very unpleasant. Yes.

I feel unsettled by it, but also weirdly, the way that I've handled it is I've decided if I'm going to eat meat, I'm like really going to eat meat. And so I've started gravitating towards like meatier meat. Like I want my brain to, if it's going to, if I'm going to cause suffering for pleasure to at least experience the pleasure. So weirdly, the worrying about it has probably made me worse. I feel like maybe, I feel like we used to live in a world where we were on closer terms with suffering and with blood and guts and all sorts of things. And I think that we have gotten, I'm going to use a word that sounds pejorative, but I don't mean it to be pejorative. I think we've gotten a little more squeamish. And I think in a lot of ways that's kind of a good thing.

And that might be a place where eating habits haven't caught up with other parts of our lives, right? the kinds of things that we'll put up with, the kinds of things we'll shrug at, right, whether it's warfare or, like, how animals are treated. You know, I think in a lot of ways we've gotten more sensitive and meats a little weird because it's hidden because, like, factory farming processes might mean that in a lot of cases, it's gotten more cruel than it used to be 100 years ago or 200 years ago. So I think that there is some, like, maybe some real dissonance there. Although it's actually surprising when you think about how the Internet has become much less

moderated and so much more sort of disturbing and sensational images proliferate, you would almost think that the thing that organizations like PETA used to do where they would just like show really terrible photos of real animal suffering, like you would almost expect to encounter that more on social media internet now. And I'm, I wonder if that will actually happen. Yeah, and you see it. I mean, obviously our attitudes towards animals are like super, super strange, right? So right now, there is someone eating a hamburger while posting angrily about whether or not Hassan Piker shocks his dog. Yes. Right?

No, it's completely, yeah. But that video of like Hassan Piker, the like streamer has this dog in the corner of his house where he's constantly streaming and like may or may not have been using a shot collar. He says it was a vibration collar. But the amount of either real or performed moral outrage I've seen around the possibility he's doing that. Yeah. Among, if somebody said, you're reincarnated tomorrow, do you want to live in a nice house where sometimes someone shocks you with a shot collar,

but you're alive, or do you want to grow up in like a slaughterhouse where you were quickly murdered? Most people would choose. So it's confusing. Our moral reasoning around animals is confusing. Garrett has actually talked about putting a shock collar on you, PJs, on certain days when you're starting to stray outside of the podcast studio.

I honestly was thinking about, there are these, like, shock bracelets you can get that are supposed to, it's like, it's called like the Pavlock. And I was trying to figure out if it would help me focus. And I was like, this is an insane way for personal. Don't do this. Okay, that I think is all we have time for today. PJ, do you want to sign us off?

Also, just before I handed back over to. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, PJ. I'm not the host of the show. The host of search engineer. Oh, my God. Please. If you want to see more stumpers, throw an email to PJVote85 at gmail.com. Or if you want to see other segments on.

on Incognito mode, let us know. But Kay, host of this show. Over to you. Thank you, Garrett, as always, the secret power behind Search Engine. And PJ, thank you for coming on and being a guest for the second episode of Search Engine Engine. We'll see everyone again in 14 months. Thank you.

Thanks, guys. Thank you for listening to our episode. If you enjoyed anything you heard, please consider signing out for Incognito Mode. It is how we fund the show. It is the money we will use to make the next season for you, which begins very soon. You can find incognito mode at the link in our show notes

or by heading to search engine. show. Search engine is a presentation of Odyssey. This created by me, PJ Vote, and Shruthi Pinnaminani. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. Emily Maltaire is our associate producer. Our production intern is Piper Dumont. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armand Bizarrian. Additional production support on this episode

from Noah John and Kim Coupil. Our executive producer is Leah Reese Dennis. thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey. Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Moor, Curran, Josephina, Frances, Kurt Gortney, Finessa Tinkati, and Hillary Schuff. If you have a business

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