Search Engine - Where did all the roaches go?

Episode Date: February 23, 2024

Cockroaches were a scourge that scuttled through the cracks and crevices of homes all throughout America. And then one day, large numbers of them mysteriously disappeared. A miracle for humankind? Sure. But for cockroaches: the world's grimmest true crime story. This story is a collaboration with our friends over at Radio Atlantic. If you want to support Search Engine, you can do that over at pjvogt.com. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to Search Engine. I'm PJ Vote. Each week on the show, we answer a question we have about the world. No question too big, no question too small. This week, the thrilling conclusion to our series of stories about the animal kingdom, an accidental series we did not realize we were making, but which we are concluding this week with our friends at Radio Atlantic. They'll help us answer a question. It never occurred to me to ask. Where did all the roaches go?

That's after some ads. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Serval AI. If you ever worked with an IT team, you know how quickly their day gets eaten up by repetitive tickets, password resets, access requests, onboarding. It all adds up. And as your company grows, those requests just keep piling higher, pulling your team away from the work that actually moves the business forward. That's where Serval comes in. Serval can cut up to 80% of your help desk tickets, and it's not just another tool layering on AI as an afterthought. While legacy platforms bolt AI on, Serval was built for AI agents from the ground up. Here's with that

that looks like. Instead of a new hire onboarding taking hours or even days, a manager just drops a request in Slack and serval handles everything instantly. No back and forth, no bottlenecks, Serval even writes automations in seconds. Serval powers the latest growing companies in the world, like perplexity, Merkore, Verkata, and Clay. Get your team out of the help desk and back to the work they enjoy. Book your free pilot at servile.com slash search. That's S-E-R-V-A-L-com slash search. What's up? Hey, can you hear me okay? Yeah, you sound great.

Okay. All right. So I'm going to just read the intro. So one of my favorite magazines in America is The Atlantic. It's one of the only places that consistently surprises me. And one of my favorite reporters in America is Hannah Rosen. She always surprises me. This is true, Hannah.

She told us some of my favorite stories on Invisibilia. She's now hosting the Atlantic's flagship show Radio Atlantic. It's a great podcast. However, recently Radio Atlantic did a story that infuriated the team at search engine infuriated us because they did it. We wanted to have done it. And also it felt search engine e, not that we have like a copyright on surprise or delight, but we were surprised and delighted by the story in the way that we try to surprise and delight the people hear our stories. We were very mad.

And then we realized, oh, we just asked Hannah if you could do the story on. engine, we don't have to be furious. It's a story about cockroaches. Ugh. Ugh. I mean, just because the words surprise and delight. Do they feel like words you're tired of hearing? Am I that kind of person?

Yeah, everybody, I just walk around and everyone says, you're so surprising and delightful. No, it's just that they're not words that you believe will be followed by the word cockpatch. Oh, I see. It's like not the third ingredient in the dish. Exactly. People are respecting unicorn or starlight, but not cockroach.

No, this is a surprising, delightful story about cockroaches. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Can you just tell me, like, literally, for you, what was the origin of this story? I called up the slack because I thought you might ask me that question. Yes. So I get this slack message from one of our science editors and a friend of mine, Dan Engber.

I'm a fan of Dan's. Yeah, he's great. He was on radio lab. He writes. straight long magazine stories. He and I used to work together at Slate. Do you want to hear the message? So this was just a slack

that you guys were having one day in the office? Yes, yes. Okay. I'm just going to read you one sentence. Dan writes, this is a piece of poetry. When I was a kid, we collected cockroaches and played with them. And I think he expected me to be just completely horrified,

but instead I wrote back something like, Me too! exclamation. So that's how it started. You guys were genuinely musing to each other. It wasn't like, hey, let me show you this article I already wrote. You guys were just making conversation over Slack, but he had a question that he wanted to investigate, and he wanted you to, he wanted the question to be contagious for you as well. Well, it's a little deeper than that. What's underneath his question is this feeling he had that he was diluted, which is a feeling that a lot of people who grew up like we did have. Like, it couldn't possibly be true.

Like, we have these memories, but did it happen that way, you know? Yeah. So after I got this message from Dan, he wrote, I wonder if it might work for audio. It was like, yes. The answer is yes. Please come to the studio. So he did.

All right. So what are we even talking about? We're talking about cockroaches. Cool. And a forgotten moment in the history of cockroaches or the history of American innovation, I guess. We're talking about the fact that cockroaches were everywhere, and then they vanished.

I actually lived through this myself. Like, I was a child of the cockroach 80s. I had cockroaches in my house all over the place, too, and it's almost like hard to remember how pervasive they were. So I grew up in New York City. Where? In Morningside Heights. In an apartment.

In an apartment. Okay. So middle-class families in the 1980s in New York City had a lot of cockroaches, as I can say from personal experience, just a number of cockroaches that I think is unimaginable to younger people, to my younger colleagues here at the Atlantic. Against my, really like every fiber of my being, I'm going to say, paint me a picture. They'd be all over the place all the time, like in full view, in day, in night. Certainly if you went into the kitchen at night and turned on the light, they would scatter. It wouldn't be like you'd see individual insects. You'd see like a wave pattern.

You and your brother, let's say, might be taking the Cheerios out of the cabinet and open it up and pour into the bowl, and cockroaches would come out with the Cheerios, which I think sounds really terrifying. to today's New Yorker. But at the time, it was just like time to get a new box of Cheerios. There's really this feeling that it was like a natural phenomenon,

like an endless sense of being enveloped in roaches, like it was an atmosphere of roaches or an ocean. You're speechless. Actually, just to weigh in, I do 100% relate. I grew up in an apartment building in Queens

and exactly your memory. Like, the only difference is it was corn flakes and not chirias, but they were everywhere. Although, you know, it's weird. I can't seem to remember if they freaked me out or not. Like, what did they freak you out? Like, did you scream when you saw cockroaches or call for your mommy or, like, what did you do? So I don't think we were that squeamish about them. In fact, I know we weren't squeamish because the other thing I remember vividly was my brother

and I would play with the cockroaches. we would use our wooden blocks and build like obstacle courses sort of and try to do cockroach Olympics. Did you actually touch them with your fingers? I mean, it's kind of hard to imagine that I didn't. There's sort of a dreamy quality to all this where I almost doubt my own memories. And so just to do kind of a gut check, I wanted to call my brother.

Okay. First of all, did we have cockroaches in our apartment growing up? We had a lot of cockroaches in our apartment growing up, and I, being a little bit older than you, remember it extremely clearly, but it still seems somewhat fantastical the prevalence of cockroaches in our life. Okay, so first I asked him about the cereal. Okay. I loved Rice Krispies, and they used to have a slightly over-toasted Rice Krispy that was like a dark, Yeah, the occasional brown one. The brown one.

And I definitely remember a lot of arguments about whether something was a overt toasted rice crispy, a small, overt toasted rice crispy, or a roach duty. And we would frequently have these arguments. He's like completely chill about the roach duty for breakfast situation. If only it was just the Rice Krispies, Lana. We had these special medicine cups. They were sort of like plastic hollow spoons. And I remember one time Mom poured the whatever it was, probably Diamond Tap or something like that in.

And I saw something swimming in it. And I'm like, there's a roach in there. I swear, there's a roach in there. And then she held it up to the light and there was nothing in there that didn't want to take it. finally she convinced me I drank the whole thing I felt the roach crawling around all over my mouth

and I spit it all into the sink and she said oh there wasn't roaches. Roaches were just everywhere in our lives so if we were constantly like throwing out something just because a few roaches walked over it

we wouldn't have anything so I just want to establish the context here In the 1980s, it wasn't just that there were a lot of cockroaches in my apartment or yours or my brother's apartment or even in New York City. There were a lot of cockroaches everywhere. Everywhere in cities or everywhere everywhere. I would say everywhere in cities, but it was like a national news story. There would be newspaper articles about cockroaches on a semi-regular basis.

Okay, so cockroaches everywhere, cockroach is bad for your health. Cockroaches everywhere, cockroaches bad for your health, cockroaches in the nation's capital. Congress certainly has its hands full these days with the deficit, the MX, Central America, and now debugging. So this is an NBC nightly news story with Tom Brokhoff from the spring of 1985, which is a very important moment in the history of cockroaches. It's very serious. The problem is they're in our desk, they're under tables, they're everywhere.

Some members of Congress are trying valiantly to fight back. Congressman Al McAnlis has installed this black box. It exudes a sexy scent which attracts female roaches, which are then roasted by an electric grill. I mean, I think just in that short clip, you hear how completely helpless we were to deal with the cockroach problem. We were trying everything. Yes, it does have a throw spaghetti at the wall.

Like, this is the nation's capital, and we don't really have an answer, nor is anyone pretending to. It's just like, they tried this, they tried that. Congressman Silvio Conti, dressed to kill today, proclaimed a war on capital cockroaches. A company from his home district has donated 35,000 roach traps to the capital, but Connie said more help than that is needed. And I want to appeal to the President of the United States.

I am certain that President Reagan wants to get rid of many troublesome cockroaches who run around the halls of Congress as possible. So please join me in this war on the capital cockroaches and squash one for the gipper. So, well, can I ask you, am I allowed to ask you a question? Yeah, of course, sure, yeah. So do you remember a change in the prevalence of cockroaches at some point in your life as a New Yorker? You know, it's so interesting you say that because I remember my childhood, cockroaches just being part of the background and just something you have to deal with all the time.

And my mom still lives in that apartment. And I remember coming back from college, and I couldn't say an exact date, but it just wasn't in the part of the conversation anymore. We weren't constantly dealing with cockroaches. My mother wasn't talking about cockroaches. It just wasn't a, like, it just wasn't a thing anymore. Okay. So my premise here, and this, the memory that has sparked all of this is that at a certain point, there was a new, way to control cockroaches. The bombs were out. Now we had combat roach traps. Do you remember those?

Wait, you mean like that little plastic disc where the roaches go in and then they die or something? Like that's what this is about? Yes. That is the amazing American invention that we have all forgotten. The thing that sits in aisle 13 on the top shelf, that's the amazing invention? The thing that should be sitting in a museum. The people who invented combat are American heroes. They did something. I mean, you have to think about the fact that the cockroach was and is a symbol of indestructibility, right? This is the animal that's going to outlive us after a nuclear war.

This is, if you've ever seen Wally, it's a post-apocalyptic earth, all that's left is a robot and a cockroach. It's the animal that cannot be killed. And then, in the 1980s, we did it. I think it's fair to say we solved the problem, and I don't mean solved it completely and eliminated cockroaches forever, but really took a huge problem and made it much smaller. And that wasn't just true in my apartment,

but across the country. In fact, I found evidence that that is exactly what happened. And so I just was fascinated by the question of who did that and what it means that we don't even really fully remember that it happened. Let me introduce you to a very important figure in the history of cockroaches, who has a catchphrase, and his catchphrase is Always Bet on the Roach. He's a member of the Pest Management Hall of Fame. Are you familiar with Pye Chi Omega?

The fraternal organization dedicated to furthering the science of pest control. Uh-huh. They have an annual scholarship called the Dr. Austin Frischman Scholarship. Hi, Dr. Fishman. Speaking. Hi, my name's Dan Engler. And so I got him on the line, and he turns out to be sort of like a cockroach mystic almost. What is that?

Just any question you ask, you might get an answer like this. I want you to pick. I love this, man. He makes it seem biblical. So, okay, so where does this cockroach mystic Dr. Frischman fit into the story? So Frischman is in the story almost from the very start. In 1985, and in the lead up to 1985, Frischman had been hired by a company called American Cyanamid. And American Cyanid researchers had had this product that they were selling for use in controlling fire ants.

And the researchers were aware of the fact that this. fire ant poison worked on cockroaches, and in fact they used it in the lab to control cockroaches. Their own cockroach problem. Yeah, they put it in peanut butter and they put it around the lab just so they could continue to do their work on fire ants. But then the company was making this effort to try to figure out, well, can we repurpose some of our industrial products for consumer use and so forth? So you've got a hot new roach control product, who do you call? Boston Frischman.

And I said, well, I said, no, I'll do it just so you know to power up against. Okay, so everything we had up into that point were these insecticides that we'd just been using for years, and the roaches had just developed resistance to them. Even if you, you know, you killed 99% of them, the ones you didn't kill would have some mutation

that protected them, or they'd have a thicker shell or something, a thicker exoskeleton, and they'd survive. and reproduce, and now your insecticides weren't working anymore. Right. So they would just keep outsmarting us. Right. And so one of the things, this new product that made it different from the old ones, was it wasn't just a spray that you'd put in the corners. It's actually a bait. That little, the black disc had something in it that sort of like tasted like oatmeal cookie

that roaches loved, and they would come in and get it and then take it out. We were filming the cockroaches, and we found that only 25% of the cockroaches ate the bait, but 100% of the cockroaches would die. That's Philip Kaler. He's another cockroach expert. And what he's talking about here is the fact that, like, this stuff would kill roaches that hadn't even eaten it. It was a slow-acting toxicant that allowed transfer to other members of the colony. Wait, they would regurgitate it, or how does it get transferred?

Well, there are several mechanisms of transfer. The main one would be that cockroaches will eat another cockroaches poop. I was actually after this work with combat baits that it became known that cockroaches actually feed poop to their young. And there are actually other methods of transfer of toxicant as well. there is, like you said, regurgitation where they get sick and they regurgitate some and other cockroaches will come and feed on that vomit. There's also cannibalism where a cockroach will attack another cockroach and eat it. And there's also necrophagy where the cockroaches will eat the dead.

Each method more charming than X. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Vomit, poop, or cannibalism. This seems exciting. No, I mean, if I were them, this would be really exciting. Like, I'm just imagining them, you know, like an Oppenheimer sort of sitting in their lab,

like figuring out every element of this and how are we not going to, you know, how are we going to make it safe? How's it going to work? It's exciting. Yeah, they were on the verge of something big. We would run to the lab or stay up half the night and watch. And we began to see in the beginning as we began to do the work. So Frischman was.

among the first to take this breakthrough product, put it in a syringe, take it out of the lab, and start using it in restaurants, diners, to see if it worked. You saw in real time them come to the bait. I was the first person in the world. I was shaken, okay?

I still have that. This is the moment. This is the brink of the relatively roach-free world that we live in today. Now we had the little black discs, I would say, you know, two inches across or something. With an entrance and an exit. With an entrance and an exit. I had written a cockroach combat manual.

So that's how it got its name. And Frischman is going to take this product on the road. So he takes this to Texas. He takes this to Georgia. They do an event at the Museum of Natural History in New York City. They go to the Capitol. Remember the Tom Brokaw report? Those are combat traps.

Yeah. And then ads start appearing on television. Combat disks. Use roaches to kill roaches. I had roaches in my cereal. Put combat discs where roaches are in places you wouldn't dare spray. Combat works. The roaches are not in my cereal.

They're gone. Control roaches where they live. Combat because where they live is where they die. So this wasn't just a marketing campaign. I mean, the product really did work. Would you mean it worked? Well, cockroach numbers were going down. You can find signs everywhere.

Actually, a guy went to high school with wrote an article for the New York Times in 2004, and he reported that there had been a survey of federal buildings and their cockroach complaints between 1988 and 1999, so this is combat rollout era, and the number of complaints fell by 93%. Wow. I also found a 1990s. one story from the New York Times, again, right in that combat zone. And a New York City housing

official is quoted as saying, there was a time when people were horrified at Roaches running rampant. And now everybody keeps saying, where did they go to? So it's a thing. It's like an actual documented thing. Yeah. And yet it's not a huge moment. Like there aren't a lot of stories saying, yay, us, we've conquered the cockroach problem? No. There are. are not. There are stories about combat success as almost like a business case study. There are stories that remark upon the fact that there are fewer cockroaches than there used to be. But nothing that's like this enormous giant urban problem has finally been solved by this rag-tech crew of amazing scientists. Nothing of that nature. There's a reason why I had to introduce

Austin Frischman to you as a member of the Pest Management Hall of Fame. And you weren't like, oh, you mean the guy in the back of the quarter? Yeah. Right. Right. But why? I mean, that is the question that has been keeping me up at night. And I have some ideas.

Those ideas after the break. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Vanguard. To all the financial advisors out there whose job is to help your clients, keep more of what they earn? Vanguard is here to help you with that. Vanguard is slashing fees again, this time for more than 50 of its funds. That's on top of big fee cuts they gave last year to investors in 87 of their funds. In an increasingly high-priced world, Vanguard is staying true to excellence without expense. With Vanguard, your clients get access to sophisticated, active, and index bond funds at industry-leading low costs, backed by a fixed-income team that's truly obsessed with consistent

outperformance. Lower fees don't just mean savings. They give Vanguard's skilled bond managers more freedom to maneuver as they pursue strong results. And they give you more flexibility to deliver measurable value to your clients because top performance shouldn't come at higher cost. Go see the record for yourself at vanguard.com slash impact. That's vanguard.com slash impact. All investing is subject to risk, Vanguard Marketing Corporation distributor. This episode is brought to you by Indeed. Stop waiting around for the perfect candidate. Instead, use Indeed-sponsored jobs to find the right people with the right skills fast. It's a simple way to make sure your listing is the first candidate C.

According to Indeed data, sponsor jobs have four times more applicants than non-sponsored jobs. So go build your dream team today with Indeed. Get a $75 sponsor job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Dan, you said you had some ideas about why this, discovery didn't get the credit and hoopla that it deserved. So my brother had a good theory about this. I said, well, how come we just, our family, why didn't we celebrate and go out to dinner

or something? The roaches are gone. And he said, well, it's because we just assumed they would come back. So I think it was, that must be part of it, right? That there was, like, oh, this new thing works, but, like, yeah, everything works the first time you do it. Right. So there was never one moment where you realized that the world had changed.

Or it could be that, you know, when things change for the better, we just have a tendency to just accept, you know, the new, better reality and pretend the old thing didn't happen. Like, hey, that's done. I'd rather not discuss it. Like, what's an example of that? Like the Spanish flu, for example. There's a famous gap in art and literature about the Spanish flu. There is not a great literature of this cataclysmic event in the 19-teens. You'd think there would be, but there isn't. Why not?

Probably because it was traumatic. And actually, you know, I think that's similar to the experience with cockroaches, because when, at least in my memory, when I was living with them, it wasn't just like kind of gross or annoying or an inconvenience. It's really unsettling. Like, it lives as this constant undercurrent of anxiety and a sense that you just don't have control over things. It's like a terrible feeling.

Like a free-floating, pervasive anxiety hanging over you at all times? Yes, yes. Can we talk about the Cold War for a second? Yeah. Yeah. So we were talking about how the cockroach was this symbol of indestructibility

that would outlast us in the event of nuclear war. Yeah. This was, I mean, the cockroach was, in a way, a symbol of the Cold War. Like the nuclear disarmament groups would put ads in the newspaper with just a picture of a cockroach to try to be like, wake up America, we have to disarm now, or this is the future. So it all just got blended in our heads, like nuclear war anxiety, cockroach anxiety. Yes. And then those two anxieties were being unwound at almost exactly the same time. I mean, just to be frank, this is a highly tenuous theory, but I do want to line these things up.

So, you know, 1985, the Tom Brocah report, the combat is coming out. You know, spring of 1985, that's also when Mikhail Gorbachev comes to power. In fact, Sylvia O'Canti, the congressman who on the steps of the Capitol is saying squash, one for the Gipper, touting combat traps, which are manufactured in his district. Five days later, he's in Moscow for a historic meeting with Gorbachev at the Kremlin that is considered a watershed moment in the wind-down of the Cold War. Gorbachev says at the present time, relationship are in a nice age. However, he said, spring is a time of renewal. I'm just saying the guy wearing the exterminator outfit on the steps of the Capitol touting combat gave Ronald Reagan the advice to meet with Mikhail Gorbachev.

Like in the in the span of a week? In less than a week. In less than a week he was in Moscow. And you start to see combat traps are, you know, spreading through the country as Glasnost is spreading through the USSR. are. And in the years that follow, we have the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, those are exactly the years when the cockroach populations are finally diminishing when we're winning the war on cockroaches and we're winning the Cold War. It's happening concurrently. So what you're saying is our nuclear fears dissipate, our cockroach fears dissipate. And what?

What I'm saying is it was the cockroach that took over the imagination as this thing. So they made sense to stand in for nuclear fears going the other way. Once we were free of that nuclear anxiety, we just sort of glided into a roach-free world. Okay, so Hana. Yes. I guess what I hear Dan theorizing there is that part of the reason we don't remember cockroaches is because they happened to disappear at the same time the thing they were a related metaphor for disappeared. And so it was just like the way the brain works and language

works and metaphor works, they just kind of got tossed out with the trash. That's the theory, right? Yeah, it's almost like that cockroach became the mascot. You know, it was like a thing that sort of came into fashion. And then when nuclear war fell out of fashion, so the cockroach fell out of fashion. It's something like that. Are you convinced? I mean, he was clearly, trying to convince me. I got almost there. I find it to be a hard theory to evaluate, which I guess is a way of saying I'm not convinced, but only because I wasn't there or I wasn't cognizant of history and its sweep at that point. So I'm like, yeah, maybe, maybe. I don't know. Like, I don't know. Yeah. You guys published this episode about your personal relationship with

Roaches and how Roaches have mostly been eradicated. What was the, have you gotten any interesting feedback since that came out because I can imagine both of those things inducing emails. Well, both Dan's mother and my mother were like, we didn't have any cockroaches. I was like, what?

They both thought that we were exaggerating. Did they demand corrections? They were just like, we didn't have any. I didn't make you drink that medicine with the cockroach in it. We didn't have any cockroaches. There were no cockroaches in our cereal. I was like,

mom, here's a, here's a new word for you, gaslight. Go look it up in the dictionary. Do you think that they've just deleted it from their memory, or do you think that they were embarrassed or what? I think they were embarrassed. Like, it just, ugh, it filled them with ick on their skin to think, like, somebody out there is attaching me

to a domestic scene with lots of roaches running around. I mean, my mom is a clean freak, which just goes to show how ubiquitous the cockroaches were. Yeah. The other thing I wanted to ask you that I wondered about listening to your story is sometimes I get in a debate with people in the real world that I don't think is a good debate. Like, I mean, I think it's like an unproductive debate, but like I have friends on both sides

of this where like I have friends who either, it's very important for them to prove that the world is getting worse, that like this would be the worst time in history of been born. And I have friends who feel like it's very important to establish that actually, despite all the things that are happening that are bad, this is the best. time to be alive. But listening to your story, I'm like, oh, part of the reason it is hard to notice if the world is getting better is there is just a part of human nature where once something gets solved, we stop thinking about it. And cockroaches feel like almost a perfect example of that. Totally. I also like to collect evidence, like tiny bits of evidence like cockroaches, that the world

is getting better, not because I'm an optimist, which I'm not, but just because the human bias is so strongly towards everything went downhill the day I was born. Yes. Yeah. And I just find that annoying. Like it's just an argument I have with my brother over and over and over again about how there's more crime in New York now. And there isn't.

There isn't. No, there definitely isn't. No, I'm the same way. I'm not an optimist. I do tend to want to take the side of the world is getting better only because saying the world is getting worse strikes me somehow as a kind of self-centeredness. masquerading as empathy? Amen.

So true. I was going to say narcissism, solipsism. I didn't know what the word was, but this guy, Adam Mostriani, he did the best series of studies about, you know,

why do we all think that everything's going downhill when it's not? The most shocking thing that he discovered is that people date the decline basically to the day they were born.

Interesting. Yes, it's like we all conceive of ourselves as the center of history and it all went downhill from there. It's crazy. Hannah Rosen, host of Radio Atlantic.

Dan Engber is a senior editor at the Atlantic and the mind behind the cockroach story. You should check out the show. Some of our favorite episodes, there's one about people falling in love with their AI companions and then being heartbroken when the code is changed. There's another about an engineer in Gaza whose sole job is just to keep the water flowing.

We'll have links to both in our newsletter. I am going to keep Hannah, though, for one more minute because she has a recommendation for us. This recommendation is a book that made her feel uncomfortable to read, honestly felt kind of uncomfortable to even hear about. That recommendation after some ads. This episode is brought to you by Nordstrom. Spring calls for a wardrobe refresh, and Nordstrom has the best styles of the season.

From dresses and denim to standout tops and accessories, find the trends and essentials that feel right for you. Discover new arrivals from brands you love, like Waif, Princess Polly, Mango, Adidas, and free people. Plus, free shipping and returns and freestyling appointments make everything so easy. Shop in stores at Nordstrom.com or download the Nordstrom app. No one goes to Hank's for his spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza.

Lately, though, the shop's been quiet. So Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice. He asks co-pilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs. Help him see if he can afford it. Co-pilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice work. Now, Hank has a line out the door. Hank makes the pizza, co-pilot.

Handles the Spreadsheets. Learn more at M365 copilot.com slash work. Okay. Hannah, what is your recommendation? Oof. I just finished this book and I, PJ, I don't know what you're going to think about this. Oh. Okay. I feel excited at your wonder and discomfort. Okay. I really want people to read this and then email me and talk to me about it. It's the book Molly by Blake Butler. Blake was the husband of Molly, who's no longer with us. And it's a very intense and revealing portrait of a marriage. But I think what I'm thinking about is, like, was it okay to write this book?

It feels like a stealing of someone's life, and not in a good way, not in a way that's flattering. And I'm just, like, wondering about it. I've never quite read what feels like a memoir of someone else's life. Oh, that's so interesting. Was she a writer? She was a writer, and she was a poet. She was on the Great British Bake Off, the American edition. She was also a great baker.

But she's a pretty well-known poet, and he's a novelist, and he wrote this book, and there's just some edge in it, which I can't quite decide if you can do this to a person. She died. Is she died by suicide? Yes. She died by suicide, and supposedly said, write our story. Wow. But he reveals, like, so many of her secrets and things he didn't even know that he learns along the way.

And it's also constructed because he's a novelist. So that kind of weirds me out, too. Like, there's a reveal. It's structured kind of like a novel in which things unfold at a certain kind of rate to keep you reading. Very successfully so. And yet, like, she is, you know, the portrait of her... is not lovable. Wow.

Which is also like the rule is supposed to be that when someone dies, you make them lovable. Yeah, which is an American rule, which I never loved. Like, I admire the honesty, and I kind of admire him telling us everything. But I also feel protective

of this person, Molly, who I don't know. I don't know. It's so complicated whether this is okay or not. Anyway, read it. That's a great recommendation. Thank you. I'm excited to get to have an opinion about it.

Good. Excellent. Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsawb productions. It was created by PJ Vote and Trithy Pinnaminani and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John.

Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armand Bizarrian. The original Radio Atlantic episode called The Cockroach Cure was hosted by Hannah Rosen. It was produced by Ethan Brooks, edited by Jocelyn Frank, fact-checked by Michelle Serraca,

and engineered by Rob Smerciak. Special thanks to Sam Shack for his Roach reporting in the New York Times. Claudine Abade is the executive producer for Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Baldez is the managing editor. Surge Engines' 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, Matt Casey, Kate Hutchison, Laura Curran, Josephina-Fran, Kurt Courtney, and Hillary Schuff.

Our agent is Orrin Rosenbaum at UTA, follow and listen to Search Engine with PJ Vote now for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. That's it for us this week. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week. Hey, business owners. The NFL season is a big revenue driver. Now there's a smarter way to get ready. Everpass is the only authorized commercial platform for NFL Sunday ticket, delivering every live out-of-market-market-market-offer-off, Lock in the best offer now with up to 40% off saving up to $2,500. For the first time, you can pay over nine months. Get up to six free devices and a free bar kit.

Sign up by April 27th. Visit everpass.com. Limited time offer, terms apply. 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.