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

Summary

Search Engine – "What's in Your Cocaine and the Questions Search Engine CAN'T Answer"

Host: PJ Vogt
Date: July 24, 2026
Episode Theme: A two-part special featuring:

1. An interview with "Nate," an experienced drug dealer, about the realities of cocaine adulteration, fentanyl contamination, and harm reduction in illicit markets.
2. A playful, rapid-fire roundtable game show where the Search Engine team tackles listeners' “unanswerable questions”—ranging from grave robbing versus archaeology to the morality of eating meat.

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Part 1: What’s Really in Your Cocaine? (02:24–26:38)

Overview

PJ Vogt explores the question: Why do drug dealers cut cocaine with fentanyl, and why don't users notice? The segment draws on interviews with journalist Ben Westoff, commentary by Kelefa Sanneh, and an in-depth conversation with "Nate," an anonymous drug dealer. The discussion examines drug purity, adulteration practices, harm reduction, and ethics in the illicit marketplace.

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Key Discussion Points

1. Why Don’t Cocaine Users Notice Fentanyl?

• Kelefa Sanneh (03:36):
  "Cocaine in America is so adulterated, and it has been for so long, that Americans have no idea what real cocaine is actually like. ... Users aren't really in a position to complain. As long as they're getting high at all, I think most people probably are satisfied with their coke being cut with fentanyl."
• Users lack a reference for “pure” cocaine; cutting and adulteration have shaped expectations.

2. The Realities of Drug Testing and Adulteration

• Nate’s Experience (05:56):
  • Started testing for fentanyl around 2019, before the crisis became mainstream
  • Early test strips yielded many false positives, causing customer mistrust and confusion.
  • “The primary method of testing for fentanyl is highly flawed. It gives almost half the time a false positive.” (06:20)
  • Dancesafe.org now offers more reliable test strips and sample analysis.

3. Adulterants in the Drug Market

• Ketamine Anecdote (08:31–10:41):
  • Nate shares a $30,000 mishap: thought he bought ketamine, but ended up with a “rock hard, stinking mass” that couldn’t be identified or sold—eventually flushed down the drain.
  • “It’s just complete adultery, and I don't even know what it is. ... I ended up flushing it down the drain.” (09:47)
  • Most dealers, however, would simply “recrystallize” and sell it, passing the adulterated product onto customers.

4. Scope of Adulteration

• Even “raw,” high-volume cocaine direct from Mexico often contains fillers—amphetamines, mixers, and dangerous veterinary worming agents.
• Nate (13:08):
  “There’s this chemical that’s made for the veterinary industry…when you cook it down, it behaves exactly as pure cocaine does. ... That is in a lot of cocaine.”

5. Health and Safety Perspective

• Nate personally avoids using cocaine:
  • “If someone offers me coke at a party, even if it's someone who's rich...I don't usually do it ever enough.” (14:20)
  • Compares it to “watching someone pull a hot dog out of a trash can and start eating it.” (14:28)

6. Advice for Drug Users

• Nate (14:50):
  “Don't do it. ... If they don't have a reputation—don't do drugs unless you know to a high degree of certainty who you're buying them from.”
• Stresses accountability and harm reduction within close-knit, community-based circles—though admits such ethical standards are rare in the broader market.

7. Risks at the Street Level

• Most dangerous adulteration, such as with fentanyl, occurs at the lower levels, where sellers are desperate, lack ethics, and rarely have repeat customers:
  • “It's happening at the lowest levels by desperate people who don’t have any ethics…most drug dealers don't even have customers.” (23:52)
• Distinguishes between networked, community-focused dealers and transient street-level sellers.

8. Comparison to Mainstream Capitalism

• Lack of oversight and regulation makes the illicit drug market “so varied and diverse” it's unlike any regular capitalist industry:
  • “If you right now took all licensing and oversight away from the fast food industry, in 10 years you'd probably see some pretty sketchy shit, you know?” (25:34)
  • “A world where nobody exactly knows what a hamburger is.” (25:55)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• “Americans have no idea what real cocaine is actually like.” – Kelefa Sanneh (03:36)
• “There's not a single sample of MDMA...that has fentanyl on it.” – Nate, verified by Dancesafe (07:24)
• “Worming de agent for large animals is in a lot of cocaine, and it’s nasty, toxic shit.” – Nate (13:54)
• “Don't do drugs unless you know to a high degree of certainty who you're buying them from.” – Nate (15:08)
• Coke use compared to eating a hot dog out of a trash can. (14:28)

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[Segment ends / transition to next part at ~26:38]

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Part 2: The Questions Search Engine CAN’T Answer – “Game Show”

(29:35–63:00)

Overview

A lighter, wide-ranging game show segment where listeners submit “unanswerable” or tricky questions. PJ Vogt, Kelefa (Kay) Sanneh, Garrett Graham, and Emily Maltaire riff, debate, and joke their way through questions that span from the philosophical to the absurd.

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Key Questions Discussed

1. Grave Robbing vs. Archaeology

Question: How long before grave robbing becomes archaeology? (30:21–36:24)

• Explores cultural norms, ethics, consent (fun suggestion: add corpse donorship to driver’s licenses).
• “Maybe the answer is that these things are contingent and change with culture.” – PJ Vogt (31:12)
• “Would you just carve an expiration date for your gravestone?” – PJ, riffing on permission (32:24)

2. Name Slurs – Karen and Chad

Question: How do we stop names like Karen or Chad from becoming slurs? (39:18–44:14)

• PJ expresses discomfort with gendered insults:
  “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 scoldy and wet blankety. But…I've done that to 15 year olds.” (41:07)
• Group debates language change, personal experience with name-based teasing, and the power of social norms.

3. How Does a Bicycle Stay Upright?

(44:43–47:02)

• PJ’s tongue-in-cheek guess: “centrifugal force,” quickly corrected by Kay; both muddle through gyroscopes and centripetal force.
• “Anything that is science or math is a pretty good way to stump me...” – PJ (46:08)

4. Should You Give Money to Homeless People?

(46:20–52:39)

• PJ: “Definitely, definitely, you should give and it’s better to give.” (46:29)
  Reflects on the danger of tuning out suffering in cities and concentric circles of moral obligation (“ordo amoris”).
• Kay: Wonders whether engagement with suffering may cause some to move away or “shut out” discomfort.

5. How Many Eggs from Everest to the Moon?

(52:47–54:46)

• Trick question about how many stacked eggs reach from Earth’s highest to the moon’s lowest point.
• Kay does rapid “Fermi estimation,” calculates “about 6 billion eggs” (54:24).
• “Like I said, this is like having a bodyguard intellectually.” – PJ to Kay (54:24)

6. What if We Used Base-12 Math?

(55:20–57:32)

• Group imagines humans with extra fingers/toes.
• More notes in music, elaborate solos, problems with “middle finger” gestures.
• “I don’t think feet need to be grosser than they currently are.” – PJ (56:01)

7. Moral Reason to Eat Meat

(57:38–62:00)

• Reflects candidly on the lack of strong moral justification for eating animals; acknowledges personal meat eating as ethically unresolved.
• “It’s one of the things I do that most bothers me is like I eat meat…If you really take the idea that other beings experience suffering seriously, I can’t come up with a good justification for doing it.” – PJ (59:21)
• Kay explores the evolution from less “squeamish” times; notes that factory farming may be more cruel than pre-industrial meat supply.

Notable Digressions & Memorable Moments

• Speculation about consent for grave robbing on driver’s licenses, “turn your skull into a chalice.” (32:28)
• Running stumper jokes: science/math as “stumpers” for PJ; Kay as “intellectual bodyguard.”
• Irony around attitudes towards animal suffering vs. domestic pets:
  “Someone eating a hamburger while posting angrily about whether Hasan Piker shocks his dog.” – Kay (61:47)

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• “I think what I would be asking Garrett to look for is, like…what feels alive about [the question].” – PJ, on shaping podcast episodes (35:31)
• “I feel stumped by this question.” – PJ, sheepishly, as a refrain (36:26)
• “The suffering itself or your exposure—your intentional and conscious exposure to the suffering—is good in and of itself.” – Kay, on giving to the homeless (47:13)
• “Would that be bad if they were suffering somewhere out of sight?” – Kay, wrestling with scope of empathy (48:06)

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Closing Thoughts

Episode Tone:

• Inquisitive, direct-to-listener, lightly self-deprecating and witty.
• Switches smoothly from candid, real-world discussion of illicit drug markets to light-hearted conversational philosophy.

Utility for Non-Listeners:

• Provides real, vivid insight into the current illicit drug market, how adulteration happens, why it’s nearly impossible for users to know what they’re getting, and why safety is so elusive.
• The game show segment delivers a taste of how the Search Engine team thinks aloud, collaboratively and humorously approaching big and small questions, and modeling uncertainty, humility, and curiosity.
• Notable for its candidness—both about the world and the hosts’ limitations.

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Timestamps of Key Segments

• Illicit Drug Market/Cocaine Segment: 02:24–26:38
• “Unanswerable Questions” Game Show: 29:35–63:00
  • Grave robbing v. archaeology – 30:21–36:24
  • Karen/Chad names as insults – 39:18–44:14
  • Bicycle physics – 44:43–47:02
  • Giving money to the homeless – 46:20–52:39
  • China eggs to the moon – 52:47–54:46
  • Base-12 math world – 55:20–57:32
  • Ethics of eating meat – 57:38–62:00

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Final Word

The episode blends a rare, firsthand look at the ethics, dangers, and hidden realities of the illicit drug world with lively, speculative thinking on everyday philosophical dilemmas. Whether your interest is public health, philosophy, or just hearing smart people admit what they don’t know, this episode provides insight, candor, and plenty of reasons to keep wondering.

Transcript

[PJ Vogt]

This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Mercury Bank. When you're starting a business, you don't need a complex suite of financial tools. You just need a reliable way to get paid and keep the lights on. But then, as you scale, your needs shift and many founders get stuck because their banking setup can't keep up. Banking on Mercury is different because it's

[Garrett Graham]

built to flex with you.

[PJ Vogt]

You can start with exactly what you need today, like free same day ACH and USD wires, and grow into more advanced capabilities like automated spend management, invoicing and granular team permissions. As you hire your first 10 or even 50 employees, you don't have to deal with the pain of switching systems later because everything is integrated into one powerful platform. It's free to get started, requires zero in person visits to get your accounts running, and ensures that your financial stack is never the thing holding your growth back. Visit mercury.com to learn more and apply online in minutes. Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column NA Members FDIC. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Mint Mobile. Look, there are some things in life you definitely don't want to be transparent, like your swimsuit at a public pool or your 2am Internet search history. But when it comes to your wireless bill, transparency is everything. That's what's so great about Mint Mobile. They took everything wrong with the wireless industry and made it right by offering premium wireless for just 15 bucks a month. You get blazing fast data and unlimited talk and text on the nation's largest 5G network. Plus, you can bring your current phone and keep your exact same number. You just choose a 3, 6 or 12 month plan online. And finally, say goodbye to that dread of a monthly bill. Cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a [e-mail] search that's it. There's no catch. Upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months or 180 bucks for 12 months. Plan required $15 per month equivalent taxes and fees extra initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes. May slow when network is busy. Includes up to 20 gigabytes. Hotspot capable devices required Availability, speed and coverage varies. C mintmobile.com welcome to Search Engine. I'm PJ Vogt. No question too big.

[Garrett Graham]

No question too small.

[PJ Vogt]

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

[Garrett Graham]

we call Incognito Mode.

[PJ Vogt]

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 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?

[Kelefa Sanneh]

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.

[Garrett Graham]

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.

[PJ Vogt]

Hello.

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

Hey. Hey.

[PJ Vogt]

How's it going?

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

Siri thinks your last name is pronounced Vought.

[PJ Vogt]

Honestly, that means Siri is doing at least as well as most human beings. Everybody is vod or void.

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

How's it pronounced?

[Garrett Graham]

Vote. Vote.

[PJ Vogt]

Like what you do in an election.

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

Oh, that's great. That's a great lesson.

[Garrett Graham]

Nate sells drugs for a living. He has a successful business in a major US 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.

[PJ Vogt]

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?

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

Well, I mean, I have always tested everything that I saw. I just have to personally test it 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.

[PJ Vogt]

What year do you think this was?

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

2019, maybe.

[PJ Vogt]

Okay.

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

Not that long ago. And the primary method of testing for fentanyl is highly flawed. It gives almost half the time a false positive.

[PJ Vogt]

Oh, wow.

[Garrett Graham]

Nade 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 [e-mail] but in the early days, when the test strips didn't work as well and people were very scared, they. Nate was fielding a lot of angry phone calls.

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

I would get, like, two or three phone calls a week. I just tested your shit, and it has Benjamin trying to kill me. And it would be for, like, everything, like mdma. No one is putting fentanyl and mdma. It's just not a. It's not the kind of market that intersects. And if you go to dancesafe.org where they do mass spectrometer testing of all samples, that you can just send a sample to these guys and they're going to tell you exactly proportionately what chemicals are in there.

[PJ Vogt]

Yeah.

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

And there is not a single sample of MDMA and the thousands and thousands of samples that are coming from all over the world that has fentanyl on it.

[Garrett Graham]

We checked this with Dan Safe. The executive director there confirmed that Dan Safe 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 safes.

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

It's always cochrah, heroin, and a couple 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 in this shit.

[Garrett Graham]

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 a 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.

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

I bought a key of what was supposed to be ketamine through a friend. It was the middle of the COVID I was like, dude, it is so dry. And this girl was like, I do know this guy, this chinatown guy, and he can. He'll get us something. So I buy a key, I give her like 30 grand, and she comes back with a kilo of looks like ketamine. And I go to cook it down, and it turns into this rock hard, stinking mass.

[Garrett Graham]

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.

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

It's just complete adultery, and 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 sold me that kilo.

[PJ Vogt]

Right. There's no Better Business Bureau you can go to either.

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

No, no. And I'm not even gonna, like. I'm not even gonna ask those guys.

[PJ Vogt]

Yeah.

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

You know, 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. No refunds. It's ketamine. That's it. And then trot changes the number.

[Garrett Graham]

Right.

[PJ Vogt]

So you're in a position where you're out 30 grand, you eat the loss, somebody else might not exactly.

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

In that case, most people are going to recrystallize that and sell it.

[Garrett Graham]

Recrystallizing, 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.

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

If he just spent everything he had on this product, he's gonna sell that fucking product. You know, these are desperate people. These aren't like people like me.

[Garrett Graham]

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. 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 50, 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.

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

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, I think.

[PJ Vogt]

A worming de agent?

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

Yeah. There's this chemical that's made for, like, the veterinary industry. If an animal's 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, like 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

[PJ Vogt]

cocaine, worming de agent for large animals.

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

Yeah. And it's nasty, toxic shit. And, like, even in, like, a raw brick from Mexico, you'll find it.

[PJ Vogt]

And does that just show up in a test? Do you test specifically for that?

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

Yeah, yeah, I have a test for that because it's so prevalent. Oh.

[Garrett Graham]

Oh.

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

And I'll tell you the truth, I very rarely do cocaine.

[Garrett Graham]

Again, Nate is a cocaine dealer.

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

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 usually do it ever enough.

[PJ Vogt]

Do you feel like it's like watching someone, like, pull a hot dog out of a trash can and start eating it?

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

Yeah, it's disgusting.

[PJ Vogt]

So how do you think, just from, like, a consumer information perspective, people who in 2023 are taking drugs sold to them by people they don't know? Well, like, what do you recommend people do?

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

Don't do it.

[Kelefa Sanneh]

Really?

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

Yeah, don't do it. Of course not. I mean, a vegetarian or you try and eat salads every once in a while, and you shouldn't be doing this shit at who knows what the fuck is in there.

[PJ Vogt]

Wait, you're saying don't do drugs?

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

No, I'm saying you said if they don't have a reput like, oh, you're

[PJ Vogt]

saying, don't, don't do drugs unless you know to hide your certainty who you're buying them from.

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

Right? Or, yeah. I mean, there's gotta be someone accountable. Otherwise you're just like someone selling you snake oil. It's 1910 and you're in Nebraska and you don't know what the fuck that is.

[PJ Vogt]

And what about for people who are buying from a dealer who they have a relationship with or who has a reputation to them?

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

Well, then they should all be holding each other accountable to increase the accountabilities. Then that person selling to them will think a little harder when he buys something.

[Garrett Graham]

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.

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

This is an ethical conversation that like, not everyone involved in this is. Ethics are a consideration.

[PJ Vogt]

Yeah, this is like a question that I spend a lot of time wondering about and never. It's, it's, you know, it's fundamentally unanswerable. But like, in general, the people that you've met in the underworld of illicit chemicals, how do you. Where do people land ethically in my world?

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

We all hold each other accountable, of course.

[PJ Vogt]

And what do you mean when you say that?

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

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 usually is an explanation why, you know, I mean, I just, I'm not a good example here. What I'm doing is very, very rare, you know.

[PJ Vogt]

You mean in terms of like, quality control?

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

Yeah, and in terms of like someone actually choosing to lose $47,000 instead of selling it as something it's not.

[PJ Vogt]

Right?

[Calvis Sanneh]

Right.

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

And that's happened once. Ok. The Chinatown thing was I'm just 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 me at a party and he was like, hey, I know this guy who has a tumulo of 2c b. Would you be interested in that? And I was like, hell yes. It's so hard to find 2C B.

[Garrett Graham]

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 US Government for a while left him alone to do his work. He tested the compounds on himself and lovingly described them in two somewhat famous books. In one, faqal, or fenethela means I have known and loved. Shulgin wrote of 2C B that it made music sound voluptuous, almost three dimensional. End quote. It's a rare drug and in some

[PJ Vogt]

quarters highly sought after.

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

It's a more antheogenic psychedelic. It's a more like good feeling, warm feeling psychedelic.

[PJ Vogt]

Oh, interesting.

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

It's a very powerful substance and it really is an amazing teacher. You take it in like, it doesn't have to be ceremonial. You don't take it and like go to a bar or something. It's kind of like an ayahuasca Nippy.

[PJ Vogt]

Got it. So this guy said he had a kilo of this and it's pretty rare.

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

He said this guy he knew had a kilo of it. Would I be interested? And it's extremely rare. I've never even heard of a kilo of it. I was like, yes, I would. How much? He said, I'll let you know. And he texted me later today. He said, 47,000 alcoholics.

[PJ Vogt]

Okay.

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

And I was like, okay, I'll take it. So he brings it over and I immediately say, it looks right, Looks like what it should look like. And I immediately send the sample away to this dance evening. 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 decent beat. My other girlfriend had an amazing time. The third guy ended up tripping for like two and a half days.

[PJ Vogt]

Oh, my gosh.

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

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 and 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 tripping for three days. This is a nightmare. We. We want it to stop. Jesus, it's really dark. I was like. But by the second call, obviously I took it off the menu.

[PJ Vogt]

Yeah.

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

And then the test comes back and it's not 2c b it's a cheap street drug that technically it's a synthetic cannabinoid. It's K2, basically.

[PJ Vogt]

Oh, wow. Which is like a really like, sort of like. It has a bad reputation just being

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

like extremely potent and there's no control.

[Garrett Graham]

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 potential, 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. He 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 2 CB 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.

[PJ Vogt]

It really makes you not ever want

[Garrett Graham]

to do illegal drugs, really.

[PJ Vogt]

It's just like, oh my God, the downside risk is so high.

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

I mean, that's only two times it's happened in my entire whole thing here. And I'm buying a lot of stuff. Yeah, and only once was it someone in my community. But that still pissed me off.

[Garrett Graham]

Of course, these two particular horror stories, while 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.

[PJ Vogt]

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 on to their customers or somebody takes something that is not adulterated or not adulterated with fentanyl and then they adulterate it to save money.

[Garrett Graham]

Basically, yeah.

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

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.

[PJ Vogt]

Yeah, right. That's like a, it's sort of a class and drug difference is, is this drug dealer have customers in a community or are they just selling on the street to strangers?

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

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 Corey. But like the people don't, like, I don't think they stay on the same corner forever. Like that sounds like a probably a bad idea after selling heroin and fentanyl.

[PJ Vogt]

And as far as like my larger question, which is like people who are sort of killing their customers with fentanyl, 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 quirkier way.

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

It's so varied and diverse and it's a huge economy. Jesus, if you're just going to say drugs, I mean that means a lot of different things.

[PJ Vogt]

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, that, that'll explain a lot.

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

There's no oversight, there's no governmental body overseeing anything. There's no licensing. So yeah, of course, I mean, anything can happen. If you right now took all licensing and oversight away from the fast food industry in 10 years, you'd probably see some pretty sketchy shit, you know?

[PJ Vogt]

Yeah, well, also a world where nobody exactly knows what a hamburger is.

[Kelefa Sanneh]

Right.

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

Like, is this coming from this floor or what. We don't really know what's allowed and where.

[Garrett Graham]

It was illegal to be caught holding

[PJ Vogt]

a hamburger, so you couldn't ask anybody for help on, like, what you had actually just eaten, right?

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

Exactly right. So, like, you, you didn't know there was no ingredients. You're just like, can I have that protein thing right there? Because it, 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.

[Garrett Graham]

Just don't test it.

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

Just don't toast it.

[PJ Vogt]

All right, man. Thank you so much. This is so helpful.

[Garrett Graham]

Thank you.

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

You go and you go.

[PJ Vogt]

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 we held on the Internet this year. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Instacart. Whenever I host a last minute summer hangout, my go to move is just

[Garrett Graham]

opening the Instacart app.

[PJ Vogt]

Suddenly needing ingredients or mixers or quality snacks can be stressful, but Instacart enables delivery in as fast as 30 minutes.

[Garrett Graham]

To save the day, you must be

[PJ Vogt]

21 plus to order alcohol where available, and please enjoy responsibly. For me, I just really love the convenience that I can actually order the things I want from the stores I want.

[Garrett Graham]

With a shopper who really cares about

[PJ Vogt]

getting the order right gives me my time back. It means that I can focus on my guests instead of running errands. Instacart is designed to make life easier, taking care of, delivering the things you need with the quality you deserve so you can focus on what matters most. It's one less thing to worry about

[Garrett Graham]

during a busy week.

[PJ Vogt]

Instacart brings convenience, quality and ease right to your door. So you can focus on what matters most. Download the Instacart app and get groceries just how you like. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Rocket Money. Thinking about my finances and setting a budget used to be the last thing I wanted to deal with over a relaxing weekend. But Rocket Money has made this so much easier for me.

[Garrett Graham]

Now, instead of feeling overwhelmed, I get

[PJ Vogt]

personalized insights and regular reports that actually make sense. You can easily set customizable budgets, track your goals, and receive real time alerts for large transactions or low balances. In fact, users who create a financial goal with Rocket money save over $70 on average within the first 30 days. It takes all the guesswork out of your spending patterns by automatically categorizing your transactions across all your accounts. Rocket Money is a personal finance app that helps find and cancel unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending, and helps lower your bills so you can grow your savings. Let Rocket Money help you reach your financial goals faster. [e-mail] Search that's RocketMoney.com Search RocketMoney.com Search. 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, Calvis Sanne, 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 Kelefa Sanneh.

[Calvis Sanneh]

So what are we doing today?

[Emily Maltaire]

So over the past week, we collected. I don't. P.J. dozens, maybe. Maybe a hundred of questions.

[PJ Vogt]

Yeah, high dozens. Low hundred.

[Emily Maltaire]

High dozens. Low hundreds. In the effort to stump PJ and if I may say, in the effort to stump you as well, that 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.

[Calvis Sanneh]

This is like a throwback to when we did this on stage.

[PJ Vogt]

This is.

[Emily Maltaire]

This is very much like when we

[Calvis Sanneh]

did it on stage and you had a. Was it a literal hat? I can't remember.

[Emily Maltaire]

There was a literal hat that I just happened to be wearing that night. We should do that again sometime.

[Kelefa Sanneh]

Yeah, sure.

[Emily Maltaire]

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 archeology?

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

Oh. Oh.

[PJ Vogt]

How long does it take for grave robbing to become archeology? 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.

[Emily Maltaire]

That's the premise as I understand it.

[Calvis Sanneh]

I mean, 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?

[PJ Vogt]

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 archeologists. You had Indiana Jones, prominent fictional archeologist. Like, I think maybe the. Maybe, 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.

[Calvis Sanneh]

You know what I'm thinking about, pj? I'm thinking about driver's licenses.

[PJ Vogt]

Why driver's licenses?

[Calvis Sanneh]

Well, there should be an option on

[PJ Vogt]

the driver's license of whether or not your grave can be dug up by historians.

[Calvis Sanneh]

Yeah. Whether you want to donate your eyes, your brain, whatever, your heart, but also your bones. Right. This is in the same category.

[PJ Vogt]

Would you donate, Would you say, rob my grave?

[Calvis Sanneh]

Yeah, maybe you do like a grace period. Right. 100. 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?

[PJ Vogt]

Would you just carve it on the gravestone? Would it be like an expiration date for a gravestone?

[Calvis Sanneh]

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 of 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.

[PJ Vogt]

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 a. Are you an organ donor?

[Calvis Sanneh]

I think so. I don't know. I think so.

[PJ Vogt]

I'm an organ donor.

[Garrett Graham]

I would be pro.

[PJ Vogt]

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.

[Calvis Sanneh]

What if they want to do something frivolous with your bones?

[PJ Vogt]

Oh, like a funny Halloween decoration on a front.

[Emily Maltaire]

Sure.

[Calvis Sanneh]

Musical instrument.

[PJ Vogt]

Depends on if the joke is good, which I won't be there to evaluate. But if they want to use my body for science or art, I would say that I affirmatively consent.

[Calvis Sanneh]

Turn your skull into a chalice.

[PJ Vogt]

Yeah, My, my, my, my. Like morbid ID will say that I can be used for silly stuff, but

[Calvis Sanneh]

I like to get things back to search engine engine a little bit. If you were, if you were trying to answer this question for the show, like, what's your first call?

[PJ Vogt]

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 like 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 made for other reasons.

[Calvis Sanneh]

I can't remember. I think I did see the most recent one. Have his ethical practices evolved over the years?

[PJ Vogt]

I didn't see the most recent. The Phoebe Waller Bridge one.

[Calvis Sanneh]

Yes.

[PJ Vogt]

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.

[Calvis Sanneh]

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 what. 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.

[PJ Vogt]

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 ideal 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, that they'd stepped into different cultural mores. Like, that's kind of what you'd want, and you 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. Kay, there's a very good chance that you would end up in this episode.

[Emily Maltaire]

Do you consider yourself stumped by this question, then?

[PJ Vogt]

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.

[Calvis Sanneh]

But as a. 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.

[PJ Vogt]

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 is a burial ground. Like, it might not be a burial ground in the last 100 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

[Garrett Graham]

for a little bit.

[Calvis Sanneh]

But wait, you did a. Didn't you do a cemetery show?

[PJ Vogt]

We did a. What happens when a cemetery goes out of business? Which was like, a. In my opinion, a perfect question for Melissa, 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, a curtain over your own curiosity.

[Calvis Sanneh]

And you mentioned one of the oldest cemeteries in America.

[PJ Vogt]

Yes.

[Calvis Sanneh]

Grove Street Cemetery, which happens to be where my father is buried.

[PJ Vogt]

Have you visited. Yeah, I don't know.

[Calvis Sanneh]

I know. I know some people's lives are complicated. You're right. Yes, I have visited.

[Emily Maltaire]

My.

[Calvis Sanneh]

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?

[PJ Vogt]

And you decided the cool historic cemetery. How did you decide?

[Calvis Sanneh]

I mean, obviously it was my mom's decision, but it, like, it kind of felt like him. He was like a professor. And, you know, so the idea of him in this, like, august company in this, like, historical place kind of seemed like it was interesting.

[PJ Vogt]

It's really nice.

[Emily Maltaire]

Okay, we're gonna. We're gonna move on to the next stump.

[Calvis Sanneh]

So, Garrett, you want us to spend this much time on each question? Is that the idea?

[Emily Maltaire]

I'm gonna 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 gonna 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 Karens and Chads of America like us to do?

[PJ Vogt]

Oh, that's a good question.

[Calvis Sanneh]

Are you thinking what I'm thinking, pj?

[PJ Vogt]

I don't know. What are you thinking?

[Calvis Sanneh]

I thought Chads were good.

[PJ Vogt]

Oh, yeah, I thought chads were good. Isn't a Chad just like a sort of, like, muscle bound, like, giga guy?

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

Yeah.

[Calvis Sanneh]

Who's, like, untroubled by life's difficulties and is a person of action?

[PJ Vogt]

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.

[Calvis Sanneh]

Yes. There's a name in. Is it Australia? I don't know. There's Others, there's Kevin, right? In France, Kevin is strongly, like, negatively coded.

[PJ Vogt]

Is that, Is it American coded?

[Calvis Sanneh]

I think so. Maybe it sounds the fact that it's not French.

[PJ Vogt]

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 school purchasing 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 using 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 scoldy 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.

[Calvis Sanneh]

Yeah, it's an insult with a kind of faux specificity in that way. It's like bro a little bit. Where like, it's. 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.

[Kelefa Sanneh]

Right.

[Calvis Sanneh]

And at some point we may find ourselves having a conversation about, 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. It implies that we're doing something mean or rude by definition. Right.

[PJ Vogt]

And it's hard to clean up. Yeah.

[Calvis Sanneh]

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. But for good reasons.

[Emily Maltaire]

Yeah.

[PJ Vogt]

I think that's the other thing I really dislike about Karen is the idea that it's not just that, like, I. I really like when people call other people assholes. Like, I just think it's not when. 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. There's. 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 a. There's like a virtue signaling in 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.

[Calvis Sanneh]

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 the. That when I went to ninth grade, I told everyone to call me K instead of Kefa because kids in, like, middle school were inventing their own versions of kefa. And it was cauliflower and it was K, 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.

[Emily Maltaire]

Yeah.

[PJ Vogt]

And I think Future called 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?

[Emily Maltaire]

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 Katrina's out in the world, some ISIS is out in the world. There's a lot of other names beside.

[PJ Vogt]

Oh, ISIS is a particularly.

[Calvis Sanneh]

But that's gone down, right? Like that had high political salience and then like now lower political salience.

[PJ Vogt]

Yeah. Maybe you just have to wait these things out.

[Emily Maltaire]

Time heals off. 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?

[PJ Vogt]

Oh, come on, guys. Is that really a fair thing to do to a person like me? How does it. Oh, you know how. Centrifugal force. I'll be taking a follow up question.

[Calvis Sanneh]

PJ annoys all the scientists by naming a force that famously doesn't exist.

[PJ Vogt]

Is that true?

[Calvis Sanneh]

Centripetal force.

[PJ Vogt]

Oh, centrifugal is just like me not knowing what centripetal is.

[Calvis Sanneh]

Centripetal is the force that keeps you from flying off into the distance. Centrifugal force, I think scientists should correct me, is 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.

[PJ Vogt]

So why is that right all over.

[Calvis Sanneh]

I think that's different. Doesn't that have more to do with like gyroscopes or something? Gyroscopes, yeah, like how when something's spinning, it has more stability.

[PJ Vogt]

God, no one's ever going to listen to Search Engine again.

[Calvis Sanneh]

You know, I had this. I had this moment of when I went to college and I wanted to be a radio deejay. 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.

[PJ Vogt]

Anything that is science or math

[Kelefa Sanneh]

is

[PJ Vogt]

a pretty good way to sum me besides like very basic arithmetic, which I can do decently.

[Calvis Sanneh]

Well, stop bragging.

[Emily Maltaire]

Okay, we're gonna 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?

[PJ Vogt]

Please discuss. Oh, definitely, definitely. You should give and it's better to give. I. 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.

[Kelefa Sanneh]

Well, this is.

[Calvis Sanneh]

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.

[PJ Vogt]

I think it is.

[Calvis Sanneh]

And in that sense, the people who are suffering are, in a weird way, doing you a service.

[PJ Vogt]

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.

[Calvis Sanneh]

Well, that's what you said. You said that, like, these. And that these encounters are valuable to you and that you're willing to pay money in order to have this experience.

[PJ Vogt]

That is not. 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.

[Calvis Sanneh]

I see. But if you could, if you were living in a city where you did not visibly see people suffering.

[PJ Vogt]

Yeah.

[Calvis Sanneh]

Would that be bad if they were suffering somewhere out of sight?

[PJ Vogt]

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 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 gonna really think about the proximate circles. Like, I'm really gonna think about suffering in, like, my family and friend groups. And then I'm gonna think about suffering in my neighborhood, and then I'm sort of gonna 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. 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 be like, 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.

[Calvis Sanneh]

Ordo amoris.

[PJ Vogt]

What's that?

[Calvis Sanneh]

It's like the concentric circles of love and compassion.

[PJ Vogt]

Ordo amoris.

[Calvis Sanneh]

It's a concept that was much in the news earlier this year when it was expounded by J.D. vance.

[PJ Vogt]

Oh, wow. How was he? He was like, I need to find everyone in my circles.

[Calvis Sanneh]

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 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.

[PJ Vogt]

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.

[Calvis Sanneh]

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?

[Kelefa Sanneh]

Yeah.

[PJ Vogt]

And I don't know, I definitely don't have the right answer to that, but I think that, 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.

[Calvis Sanneh]

Can I make a small counterpoint?

[Kelefa Sanneh]

Yeah.

[Calvis Sanneh]

Which is that I think that one thing that happens, 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 touch with the suffering around them. I think they sometimes feel like that ends up. Can be exhausting or unpleasant.

[PJ Vogt]

Yeah.

[Calvis Sanneh]

And I think so. Sometimes what happens is that those people and end up making choices sometimes subconsciously that take them a little further away.

[PJ Vogt]

Like what?

[Calvis Sanneh]

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.

[PJ Vogt]

Yeah, I think that's true. I think it's also like I have had that impulse and I wonder if it's some unexamined part of me that's just like, it's hard to live in a city. Yeah. Like it's hard to morally live in a city. Okay, what's the next one?

[Emily Maltaire]

That was nice. We're going to take a turn from somewhat serious to somewhat silly. This is a question from Adrian.

[Kelefa Sanneh]

The.

[Emily Maltaire]

The question reads, P.J. 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.

[PJ Vogt]

It's a trick.

[Calvis Sanneh]

It's a trick question.

[PJ Vogt]

Why is it a trick question saving cake?

[Calvis Sanneh]

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 change maybe further from the Earth's center than the top of Everest. But we're only talking about a mile or two.

[Kelefa Sanneh]

Right.

[Calvis Sanneh]

And Then if you think about the Sea of Tranquility, Mari Tranquilitatis, I call it. It's like 500 miles in diameter.

[Garrett Graham]

Right.

[Calvis Sanneh]

But like this podcast, it is not that deep. So I think. I think you'd want to ignore. I think the Earth's highest point in the Sea of Tranquility. You'd want to ignore all of that.

[Kelefa Sanneh]

Right.

[Calvis Sanneh]

And you'd want to just look at the distance, because it'll. 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 thousand thousand. So 6 billion, give or take.

[PJ Vogt]

Like I said, this is like having a bodyguard intellectually,

[Nate (Drug Dealer, Interviewee)]

just.

[Calvis Sanneh]

Just spitballing with no advanced knowledge whatsoever.

[PJ Vogt]

Did you peek at the questions?

[Emily Maltaire]

As the.

[Calvis Sanneh]

As the host of this show, pj, I have certain privileges.

[PJ Vogt]

Nice try, listener. Okay.

[Emily Maltaire]

That was truly terrifying. Okay. 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 K is in a mathy mood right now. Oh, no, not there. If we had a base 12 numbering system, how would the world be different?

[PJ Vogt]

Like, so we would count in twelves instead of tens.

[Emily Maltaire]

Yeah.

[Kelefa Sanneh]

Well,

[Calvis Sanneh]

we would obviously have an extra finger on each hand. Right. Because that's how we got to 10.

[PJ Vogt]

That sounds great, honestly.

[Calvis Sanneh]

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.

[PJ Vogt]

But then does 100 lose all its power? Like, I feel like 100 has a lot of significant.

[Calvis Sanneh]

No, we still write one. Oh. But it just is equivalent to 144 of something.

[PJ Vogt]

I guess I can live in that world. I think that. 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.

[Calvis Sanneh]

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.

[Kelefa Sanneh]

Sounds better. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[PJ Vogt]

You have more Yingwee Malmsteins.

[Calvis Sanneh]

Well, I was gonna say it depends on what you enjoy. But yes, music probably has more notes.

[PJ Vogt]

Solos get more elaborate.

[Calvis Sanneh]

Yeah. And I wonder. 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? Is there less. Are there less calories available for something else?

[PJ Vogt]

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.

[Calvis Sanneh]

But there's a big problem in terms of communication. Have you already identified the big communication problem?

[PJ Vogt]

You can't get people in the middle finger anymore.

[Calvis Sanneh]

Exactly.

[Kelefa Sanneh]

Right.

[Calvis Sanneh]

There's no middle finger, but you kind of like.

[PJ Vogt]

It would be this. You, like, hold up your two middle fingers.

[Calvis Sanneh]

I guess that feels ruder, right? That's closer to, like, the British. Up yours.

[Emily Maltaire]

Right?

[PJ Vogt]

Yeah, it feels.

[Calvis Sanneh]

It doesn't feel good if you had two middle fingers. So, yes, I think that. I think. I think hands would be the biggest difference in a base 12 world.

[PJ Vogt]

I feel like we totally. I don't feel stumped by that at all.

[Emily Maltaire]

That is a beautiful answer.

[PJ Vogt]

Do we have time for one more? A couple more?

[Emily Maltaire]

Yeah, let's hit one more. I'm gonna pull one more out of the hat here. Let's see. I think our final question is a somewhat. Yeah, this is. 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?

[PJ Vogt]

Oh, I think about this a lot. Kay. You were vegan for a while.

[Calvis Sanneh]

Yeah.

[PJ Vogt]

How did you decide to become vegan? As a person who thinks hard about moral questions, how did you decide to not be vegan?

[Calvis Sanneh]

I don't want to get too complicated in terms of philosophical concepts, pj, but peer pressure.

[PJ Vogt]

Peer pressure in both directions.

[Calvis Sanneh]

Yeah, I think so. Like, for me, it was like more of a cultural thing. It was about being part of 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

[PJ Vogt]

only listen to power chords.

[Calvis Sanneh]

Yeah, sure. And so yes, for me it was like that I liked being part of that community. And yes.

[PJ Vogt]

And so when my community pressure was binding you, did peer pressure push you out or is just the community dissolved

[Garrett Graham]

or you left it?

[Calvis Sanneh]

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.

[PJ Vogt]

But do you now, when you eat meat, are you aware of like a cognitive, moral, dissonant feeling in your mind?

[Calvis Sanneh]

Yeah, I probably feel a lot of moral dissonance in my day to day life.

[PJ Vogt]

It's the thing I. It's one of the things I do that most bothers me is 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 like it. It's sort of like if this is true, what else is true?

[Calvis Sanneh]

Right.

[PJ Vogt]

Question about myself that I don't like.

[Calvis Sanneh]

Although some, if you, 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.

[PJ Vogt]

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, 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.

[Calvis Sanneh]

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 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. 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 meat's a little weird because it's hidden, because, like, factory farming process 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. That there is some, like, maybe some real dissonance there.

[PJ Vogt]

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 wonder if that will actually happen.

[Emily Maltaire]

Yeah.

[Calvis Sanneh]

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 Hasan Piker shocks his dog.

[PJ Vogt]

Yes. Yes.

[Calvis Sanneh]

Right.

[PJ Vogt]

No, it's completely. Yeah, but that video of, like, Hasan 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 shock collar. He says it was a vibration collar. But the amount of either real or performed moral outrage I've seen around the possibility that 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 shock collar but you're alive, or do you want to grow up in, like, a slaughterhouse where you're quickly murdered? Most people would choose. So it's confusing. Our moral reasoning around animals is confusing.

[Calvis Sanneh]

Garrett has actually talked about putting a shock collar on you, pj on certain days when you're starting to stray. Outside of the podcast studio, I honestly

[PJ Vogt]

was thinking about there are these, like, shock bracelets you can get that are supposed to. It's like, it's called, like, the Pavlok. And I was trying to figure out if it would help me focus then was like, this is an insane way for personal life. Don't do this.

[Kelefa Sanneh]

Okay?

[Emily Maltaire]

That, I think is all we have time for today. Pj, do you want to sign us off? Also, just before I hand it back

[Calvis Sanneh]

over to Wait, wait, wait wait wait.

[Emily Maltaire]

Pj, the host of Search Engineer Engineer Me. If you want to see more stumpers, throw an email to pjvo.85gmail.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.

[Calvis Sanneh]

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.

[PJ Vogt]

Thank you.

[Emily Maltaire]

Thanks guys.

[PJ Vogt]

Thank you for listening to our episode. If you enjoyed anything you heard, please consider signing up 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. This episode of Search Engine is brought

[Garrett Graham]

to you in part by Webroot.

[PJ Vogt]

As we head into the busy back to school season, our home routines get a major reset. Between managing chaotic family schedules, shopping for school supplies, and researching homework, everyone is

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[Garrett Graham]

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[PJ Vogt]

This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by NPR's Planet Money.

[Garrett Graham]

I've always found the economy a bit

[PJ Vogt]

intimidating, but then I started listening to NPR's Planet Money. I still think about their episode on the global supply chain where the hosts

[Garrett Graham]

actually created and tracked their own book

[PJ Vogt]

just to show how products move across the world.

[Garrett Graham]

It totally changed how I think about everyday items.

[PJ Vogt]

That's the magic of Planet Money. They take massive complex economic forces and turn them into stories that actually make sense, making you laugh along the way. Every episode kicks off with a fascinating question, whether they're looking into why Pokemon cards are outperforming retirement accounts, how Russia's economy is surviving years of heavy sanctions, or What a 750 pound wok robot

[Garrett Graham]

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[PJ Vogt]

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[Garrett Graham]

for real human stories.

[PJ Vogt]

It is truly econ down to Earth. Follow NPR's Planet Money podcast and understand

[Garrett Graham]

how money shapes the world.

[PJ Vogt]

This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by protonvpn. Have you ever googled something once and sudden your entire feed is haunted by ads for it? Or worse, you travel somewhere, try to stream your favorite show and get hit with that annoying content not available in your region wall. It is infuriating, but there is a solution. ProtonVPN ProtonVPN instantly protects your data and opens up the Internet the way it's supposed to be. Unlike other services, Proton is based in Switzerland, backed by strong European privacy laws and has an independently verified no logs policy, meaning they never track or sell your browsing history. It runs seamlessly in the background with lightning fast speeds and an integrated ad blocker across over 145 countries, it's easy to get started. Right now, ProtonVPN is offering our listeners 70% off a two year plan. When you go to protonvpn.com search that's P-R-O-T O N V P N.com search for 70% off your two year plan. That's protonvpn.com search. Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ Vogt and Shruti Pinamaneni. Garrett Graham is our Senior producer. Emily Maltaire is our Associate producer. Our production intern is Piper Dumont. Theme Original composition and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Additional production support on this episode from Noah John and Kim Kuple. Our Executive producer is Leah Rees Dennis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey, Rob Mirandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Maura Curran, Josefina Francis, Kirk Courtney, Vanessa Tincati and Hilary Sheff. If you have a business and would like to advertise here on Search Engine, Please email us pjvote85mail.com Subjectline advertising. You can also send us questions there if you have a question for the show. As I said before, if you would like to delete every advertisement from every episode of Search Engine just for you and you alone, sign up for Incognito Mode, our paid feed. Five bucks a month, 50 bucks a year. If you sign up for the annual subscription, you can find it at Search Engine Show. Thank you as always for listening. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Atari Hotels. Quick stat for you. Phoenix tourism is up 23%, hotel occupancy is at 89%, and a developer called Intersection Development, who already has 15 properties live and operating on Roosevelt Row in downtown Phoenix, has purchased the land for what might be the most interesting hotel project in the country. It's the first ever Atari hotel, and before you write that off as a novelty concept, consider that the gaming industry just crossed $450 billion. Bigger than film and music combined. This project sits at the crossover of that culture with one of the strongest hospitality markets in the US Even more interesting is that they filed a Reg A with the sec, which means you can pull up the actual financials, projections, full deal structure, and become an investor. Check it [e-mail] that's Atari Hotels.com.