Welcome to Search Engine, I'm PJ vote. No question too big, no question too small. So this summer as the Search Engine production team rests and recharges, we are playing you some of our favorite segments from our fault, our premium feed which we call incognito mode. These are just some of the extra interviews that we share with our paid subscribers for mere five bucks a month. What a steal. This week we are sharing two segments. The first was extended reporting into illicit markets and 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 Engine's first year, I 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? 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 a 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 cocaine cut with fentanyl. So Ben said essentially that the quality of illicit drugs in America is so bad. Most of the time users don't even know what they're supposed to be getting. Like cocaine users in America might not even know what actual cocaine feels like. I found that idea very interesting. So I take 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's been in the illicit drug market for a very long time. It felt like the kind of interview that deserved to stand on its own and also potentially as a PSA for people who use drugs like cocaine or ketamine. Nate told me stories about his professional life, scenes from the complicated world of trying to figure out which drugs are safe to sell and which aren't. And he had some advice about how people could try to stay safe in a completely unregulated drug market. To protect his identity, we've changed his voice with AI. Here's Nate. Hello. Hey. Hey. How's it going? Siri takes your last name as pronounced "vaught." Honestly, that means Siri is doing at least as well as most human beings. Everybody is vaude or void. How's it pronounced? Vote. Vote. Like what you do in an election. Oh, that's great. That's a great last thing. 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. Can you tell me, like, do you remember the first time you heard a fentanyl? Like, what is the story of fentanyl as it hit you from your perspective? Well, I mean, I have always tested everything that I sell. I just have to personally test it because it's like an ethical responsibility. And so I got his fentanyl strips. I didn't know exactly what it was. Before it was so widespread and people were dying left and right. What year do you think this was? 2019 maybe. Okay. Not that long ago. And the primary method of testing for fentanyl is highly flawed. It gives almost half the time of false positives. Oh, wow. Nate says that now there are new fentanyl test strips which work much better. The yield fewer false positives and are easier to use. You can find them at dancesafe.org. But in the early days when the test strips didn't work as well and people were very scared, Nate was feeling a lot of angry phone calls. I would get like two or three phone calls a week. I just tested your shit and it has been so long. He's trying to kill me. And it would be for like everything. Like MDMA. No one is putting fentanyl in MDMA. It's just not a kind of market that intersects. And if you go to dancesafe.org where they do mass spectrometer testing of all samples, you can just send them a sample to these guys and they're going to tell you exactly proportionately what chemicals are in there. Yeah. And there is not a single sample of MDMA and the thousands and thousands of sayfans that come in from all over the world that has fenced on. We checked this with dance safe. The executive director there confirmed that dance 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 dance safes. It's always coke or heroin. And a couple times ketamine but almost never ketamine. And so that's how I started being aware of it. These strips that we're telling you there's fentanyl and shit. Nate says even the fact that he is fielding calls from his customers and testing his drugs himself, that makes him unusual. He describes himself as a professional. He has a client list, he has regulars, he has reputation to maintain. He says he'll even cut people off if he suspects they have a drug problem. But the problem he says with being an honest drug dealer is that you're the last step on a distribution chain filled with people who might be much less honest. I bought a key of what was supposed to be ketamine through a friend. Because the middle of COVID, I was like, dude, it is so dry. And this girl was like, I do know this guy, this Chinatown guy, and he can he'll get us something. So I buy a key. I give her like 30 grand and she comes back with a key low of looks like ketamine. And I go to cook it down and it turns into this rock hard stinking mass. Quick primer on what it means to cook ketamine down. When drug dealers buy ketamine wholesale, they often buy it as a crystal. But when users consume it, it's usually bought as a powder. Nate, and people like Nate, turn ketamine crystals into ketamine powder by either crushing them or cooking them down normally. Except this one time that ketamine crystals once they were cooked down appeared to be something else. A rock hard stinking mass of God knows what. Nate had been ripped off. In a normal business, that would be a reason to ask for a refund from the supplier. Nate's not in a normal business. So here's what happened on the day he fed himself staring down at his very expensive, very bad product. It's just complete adulterant. I don't even know where 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 hadn't absolutely no recourse to that guy who sold me that kilo. Right. There's no better business bureau you can go to either. No, no, no, no. And I'm not even going to like, I'm not even going to ask those guys. Yeah. 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, to see I asked him and he was like, no, no, no refunds. It's ketamine. That's it. And then try to change his number. Right. So you're in a position where you're out 30 grand, you eat the loss. Somebody else might not. Exactly. In that case, most people are going to recrystallize that and sell it. 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, a legal industry. He says he imagines the typical drug dealer and thinks this guy might have stolen something to buy these bad drugs or maybe he used his last bit of money. He just spent everything he had on this product. He's going to sell a lot of products. You know, these are desperate people. These aren't like people like me, you know. I have friends who have bought bad drugs in the pre-eventional era. In high school, I saw people lose cash on some very expensive Pennsylvania suburb oregano. I remember a writer friend buying what turned out to be significantly overpriced baking soda from a stranger in a bar. It's not that the idea that illegal drugs might not be what they're supposed to be is some shock to me. But talking to Nate, a picture emerges of a drug world where almost everything is adulterated and most users don't notice because as long as what they're taking
has an effect, they assume it's legitimate. A state of affairs that has probably always existed, but has become consequential now in the age of fentanyl. Nate told me he'd seen a study from a few years back on cocaine in London, which found that the street cocaine there was only 15% actual cocaine, which didn't actually surprise him all that much. Nate said cocaine in general is just a much, much, much more adulterated product than its users seem to want to consider. I saw the raw, 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. I mean, there's a fedamins in there. There's mixers and fillers. There's all sorts of stuff in there because by the time it gets into a little gram bag, it's been cut five or six or seven times. Like, there's this warming, the agent. I think I got a warming, the agent. Yeah, there's this chemical that's made for like the veterinarian industry. If animals got a massive parasite infection, they'll run this shit through them and it's so toxic. It kills the eggs of the parasites. It's really, really toxic. And somehow by some crazy freak of chemistry, when you cook it down, it behaves exactly as pure cocaine does. 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 of pure than it is. So that is in a lot of cocaine. Worming the agent for large animals. Yeah, and it's nasty, toxic shit. And like, even in like a raw brick from Mexico, he doesn't find it. And does that just show up in a test? Do you test specifically for that? Yeah, I have a test for that because it's so prevalent. And I'll tell you the truth, I very rarely do cocaine. Again, Nate is a cocaine dealer. Like, if someone offers me co-get a party, even if it's someone who's like rich and I think it's probably connected, I don't just do it ever enough. Do you feel like it's like watching someone like pull a hot dog out of a trash can and start eating it? Yeah, it's disgusting. So how do you think just from like a consumer information perspective, people who in 2023 are taking drugs, sold to them by people they don't know well? Like, what do you recommend people do? Don't do it. Really? Yeah, don't do it. Of course not. And it's just too adventurous. Terry, are you trying to eat salads that everyone's not allowed? Shouldn't be doing this shit that who knows what the fuck is in there. Well, you're saying don't do drugs? No, I'm saying you said if they don't have a repute, like. Oh, you're saying don't do drugs unless you know. Right, how do you understand who you're buying them from? Right, or yeah, I mean, there's gotta be someone accountable. Otherwise, you're just like someone's selling you snake oil. There's 1910 and you're in Nebraska and you don't know what the shot that is. And what about for people who are buying from a dealer who they have a relationship with or who has a reputation to them? Well, then they should all be holding each other accountable to increase the accountability. Then that person is just selling to them will think a little harder when he buys something. If this idea of people in a drug-using community holding a drug dealer accountable seems very hard to do or unlikely to work, Nate seems to be aware of this also. This is an ethical conversation that like not everyone involved in this is ethics or consideration. Yeah, I have. This is like a question that I spend a lot of them wondering about and never 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 an eye of worlds, we all hold each other accountable, of course. And what do you mean when you say that? I mean, if someone sells you something, they have a responsibility to tell you exactly what it is. And the quality and the price should be aligned with the quality. And because they're selling something really cheap to you and you're like, oh, wow, that's a really low price. Then there's usually an explanation why. Yeah. You know, I mean, I'm just not a good example here. What I'm doing is very, very rare. If you don't, even in terms of like quality control. Yeah, and in terms of like someone actually choosing to lose $47,000 instead of selling it as something, it's not. Right, right. And that that's happened once in a decade. The Chinatown thing was, I was like, whatever. Like I took that risk. But another time, something happened in my circle with a guy that I had known for a very long time was totally, I trusted him. And he approached me in a party and he was like, hey, I know this guy who has a kilo of 2CB. Would you be interested in that? And I was like, hell, yes, it's so hard to find. 2CB, I'd heard of this strike before and had actually wondered about it a lot. I first read about it in a book by Alexander and Anne Shulgan, the people who introduced American psychologists to MDMA. Dr. Alexander Shulgan, 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, Fical, or fanathella means I have known and loved. Shulgan wrote of 2CB that it made music sound, quote, "villaps US." Almost three-dimensional, end quote. It's a rare drug and in some quarters, highly sought after. It's a more enthiogenic psychedelic. It's a more like good feeling, more than feeling psychedelic. Oh, interesting. It's a very powerful substance and it really is an amazing teacher. And you take it in like, it doesn't have to be ceremonial, but you don't take it in like, go to a bar or something. It's kind of like an Iowaska nupi. Got it. So this guy said he had a kilo of this and it's pretty rare. He said this guy, he knew had a kilo of it, would I be interested? And it's extremely rare. I'd never even heard of a kilo of it. I was like, yes, I would. How much? And he said, I'll let you know. I need texted you later. They said 47,000 italics. OK. And I was like, OK, I'll take it. So he brings it over. And I immediately said, it looks right. Looks like what it should look like. And I immediately send the sample away to this dance-afe thing. 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 like this and being. My other girlfriend had an amazing time. The third guy ended up tripping for like two and a half days. Oh my gosh. He's just like, I want it to stop. And I'm not, it is terrible. And we were like, oh, I guess you took too much. 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 grams 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 wanted to stop. Jesus. It's really dark. I was like, but by the second call, obviously, I took it off the menu. Yeah. And then the test comes back. And it's not too severe. It's a cheap street drive, but technically it's a synthetic cannibanoid. It's K2, basically. Oh, wow. Which is like a really like sort of like, it has a bad reputation just being like. Rheanly potent and there's no control K2 or spice is a synthetic version of THC. It's not a plant. It's made in a lab. But unscrupulous dealers sometimes spray it on weed looking grass to trick people into buying it as weed. Even though cannabis is a pretty mild drug for most people, K2 is not. It is very unpredictable. Nate told me a horror story of exactly how unpredictable. He said a guy he knew had thought he was smoking pot, but it was actually K2. The guy had a psychotic episode essentially. He woke up in prison a few days later facing multiple felonies. It was explained to him that he'd broken into a school with a samurai sword and a bow and arrow on a mission to steal all of the computers. In his K2 haze, he thought the computers were magical mushrooms he had to collect, like in a video game. Nate takes people selling each other bad drugs, surprisingly personally. But he also said in his time as a dealer it has been rare. There was the ketamine that wasn't during quarantine.
There was the 2CB that was actually K2, but he says that's it. Other for me, the idea that even something I've been told with a weed could send me to a school with medieval weaponry. Dad's story is more bracing than any dare program I've ever participated in. It really makes you not ever want to do a legal drugs. I mean that's only two times that's happened in my entire whole thing here, a lot of stuff. So and it only once was it someone in my community, but that still pissed me off. Of course these two particular horror stories, well not enviable, pale in comparison to the idea of someone taking cocaine and dying because it's been cut with fentanyl. When it comes to fentanyl adulteration, Nate says he hears from customers who are worried about it, but he does not counter it in the drugs he gets from his suppliers. According to Nate, like so many experiences in America, whether a recreational drug user should expect to die from fentanyl poisoning or not, might be a somewhat class stratified experience. Well, Nate has friends in the scene who he believes have died from fentanyl poisoning. He thinks broadly what's happening is that people are getting bad drugs from bad street dealers. And just to make sure I have your zoomed out view on it, you think that it's happening at the street level and that it's basically people being greedy, like somebody either gets burned and passes on to their customers or somebody takes something that is not adulterated or not adulterated fentanyl and then they adulterate it to save money basically. Yeah. And it's happening at the lowest levels by like desperate people who don't have any ethics, but do realize that most drug users 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, yeah. Right. That's like it's sort of a class and drug difference is this is regular have customers in a community or are they just selling on the street to go to a corner and you don't know who's going to show up. Whoever has something is hanging around that corner. And then there's like battles between those guys, they're like, this is my courtyard, 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 if you're selling heroin and tons and off. 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 quirky way. Right. And very diverse. I mean, it's a huge economy, Jesus, if you're just gonna save drugs, I mean, that means a lot of different things. But what I hear you saying is like a lot of the people in that economy are just operating at a level of desperation that makes it like, if you compare it to a normal American economy that, that'll explain a lot. There's no oversight. There's no government's whole body overseeing anything. There's no licensing. So yeah, I'm, of course, I mean, anything could happen. If you right now took all licensing and oversight away from the fast food industry in 10 years and probably sees them pretty sketchy shit, you know, huh? Yeah. Well, also in the world where nobody exactly knows what a hamburger is. Right. Right. It's like, it's just coming from this floorhouse floor or what we already know. What's allowed. And where it was illegal to be caught holding a hamburger. So you couldn't ask anybody for help on like what you would actually just eaten. Right. It's a great. Right. You didn't know. There was no ingredients. You're just like, can I have that protein thing right there because it makes you feel good because my stomach needs it. Yeah. And like, okay, yeah, I got this protein thing free, but I got this really nice protein thing for you over a year. You should try this one over here. Just don't test it. Just don't test it. All right, man. Thank you so much. This is so helpful. Thank you. You guys. And you guys. Now that we've revved up your energies with this cocaine segment, we're going somewhere new. And for these ads, a kind of live game show we held on the internet this year. What the heck is going on with all these promotional popcorn buckets? The giant shorts that all of Gen Z is wearing now and whatever the heck high rocks is? I'm comedian and certified hater Matt Bellesai and these are the types of questions I'm demanding answers to on my podcast. What the heck with Matt Bellesai? Listen or watch every Thursday as I rant about all the internet trends, pop culture stories and personal mayhem that makes me scream what the heck? Follow what the heck with Matt Bellesai wherever you get your podcasts. 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 Calva 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 gun 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 Calva Sanne. So what are we doing today? So over the past week, we collected, I don't, PJ dozens, maybe, maybe a hundred of questions. Yeah. I dozens, I dozens, low hundreds in the effort to stomp PJ and if I may say in the effort to stomp you as well, but they may not have known that they were going to be stumping you as well. So we're going to pull what is essentially a random assortment. There's been some light curation involved, but a random assortment of some of those questions that came in and this is a little bit just like pulling questions out of a hat. This is like a throwback to when we did this on stage. This is, this is very much like when we did it on stage and you had a, was it a literal hat? I can't remember. There was a literal hat that I just happened to be wearing that night. We should do that again sometime. Yeah, sure. We're doing it today. Okay, so first question pulling it out of the randomized hat here. This question comes from Ryan and the question is, how long does it take for grave robbing to become archaeology? Oh, oh, how long does it take for grave robbing to become archaeology? Because if I were to dig up someone buried in the 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. I, that's the premise as I understand it. I mean, I would, I would want to do what I would always do, which is reject the premise. Like, is it ever celebrated socially to dig up a grave in this day and age? Aren't there big repatriation debates, roiling museums? Well, I would say definitely there was a brief period of time where like the guy who found, what was the ancient Greek city? It wasn't Troy, but who was that guy? We read about him in fifth grade, Mr. Worth. Like there was a moment where we celebrated archaeologists. You had Indiana Jones, prominent fictional archaeologists, like I think maybe the, maybe, maybe the answer is that these things are contingent and change with culture and that it's less to do with time and more to do with how moderns are feeling and also the sort of like the grave being dug, like whether there are people who have feelings about that grave. You know what I'm thinking about PG? I'm thinking about driver's licenses. Why driver's licenses? Well, there should be an option on the driver's license of whether or not your grave can be dug up by insurance. Yeah, whether you want to donate your eyes, your brain, whatever your heart, but also your bones, right? This is in the same category. Would you donate, would you say rob my grave? Yeah, maybe you do like a grace period, right? A hundred. Maybe it's like copyright. It's like, oh, my last surviving relative who's allowed when I am plus 50 years or something. Wouldn't you just put it in? Yeah, I've had it. Would you just carve it on the gravestone? Would it be like an expiration date for a gravestone? I guess this depends on how much we want to incentivize people giving permission, right? If you have to carve it on your gravestone, there's going to be a very small number of skeletons available. But if it's an opt out situation, a cast sunsteen nudge kind of a thing on your driver's license, then a lot of people will be like, oh, yeah, yeah, whatever, dig me up. I like this. I think we're imagining a future society that is very respectful of our corpses, which I like to try to imagine future societies is not worse than us. So I think that's good. I would also be very like, are you an organ donor? I think so. I don't know. I think so. I'm an organ donor. I would be pro dig me up. If people think they can learn something from my body, like what happens when someone treats their organs like a meat sack, then it's worthwhile. What if they want to do something frivolous with your bones? Oh, like a funny Halloween decoration on a frankly-- Sure. Instrument depends on if the joke is good, which I won't be there about doing. But if they want to use my body for science, or I would say that I affirmatively consent. Turn your skull into a chalice. Yeah. My, my, my, my, my like morbid ID.
we'll say that I can be used for silly stuff. - But to get things back to search engine engine a little bit, if you were trying to answer this question for the show, what's your first call? - It's funny, 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 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 recently consider basically grave robbing were wildly celebrated. There was kind of a claw back 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 for other reasons. - I can't remember, I think I did see the most recent one. Have his ethical practices evolved over the years? I didn't see the most recent, the Phoebe Warrer Bridge one. - Yes. - I don't know if Indiana Jones has become more thoughtful about his relationship. I mean, usually they also kind of cheat it where the Nazis are racing for whatever he wants, which at that point it's kind of like unbalanced as the scale is morally. - But like what do you, if you were, if this came up in a pitch meeting, what are you looking for in your initial research or googling or whatever magic Garrett does to know like oh this could make a good show or like no this isn't going any further than these five minutes of riffing? - I think what I would be asking Garrett to look for is like 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 the ideal story you'd almost be casting for is the person who came out of like their dig where they found an ancient pyramid expecting garlands and applause and found in fact that they stepped into different cultural morais. 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 just be trying to figure out like who is the thoughtful person that you can land this conversation with. Okay, there's a very good chance that you wouldn't know in this episode. Can you consider yourself stumped by this question then, TJ? - I do not think that there's going to be a single question to say that I don't feel stumped by and I consider myself stumped by this question. - But as a listener, this doesn't sound like a question that is out of the realm of possibility for being the basis of a show. - No, it's not outside of the realm of possibility. It's also the other thing I sometimes think about is like one of the outrages that I am 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 hundred years but just that we are constantly walking on the dead and I would just like to have a story that lives inside that feeling for a little bit. - But what you did at, didn't you do a cemetery show? - We did at what happens when the cemetery goes out of business which was like a, in my opinion, a perfect question. Because it's a question where you hear it and you're like, what does happen when the cemetery goes out of business and you realize that maybe the reason that the question has never occurred to you is because a part of your mind that doesn't want to think about death or what's after death has actually like put a carton over your own curiosity. - And you mentioned one of the oldest cemeteries in America. - Yes. - Grove Street Cemetery, which happens to be where my father is buried. - Have you visited? - Yeah, I don't know. I know, some people's lives are complicated, you're right. Yes, I have visited my good friend Mark made a beautiful tombstone but like there was a decision after my father died of like, do we want to go for the cheap cemetery down the street or do we want the like cool historic cemetery? - And you decided to cool historic cemetery. How did you decide? - I mean, obviously it was my mom's decision but it like it kind of felt like him. He was like a professor and the, you know, so the idea of him in this like August company in this like historical place kind of seemed like it was interesting. - It's really nice. - Okay, we're gonna move on to the next dump. - So Gary, you want to suspend this much time on each question? Is that the idea? - Yeah, 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 in wisdom guides us daily and 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 or two signaling wet blanket? What would the Karen's and Chad's of America like us to do? - Oh, that's a good question. - Are you thinking what I'm thinking, PJ? - I don't know, what are you thinking? - I thought Chad's were good. - Oh yeah, I thought Chad's were good. Isn't a Chad just like a sort of like muscle bound like a king of guy? - Yeah, there's like untroubled by life's difficulties and is a person of action. - I guess it depends on what room you're in. But I think we can agree that Karen has definitely taken on like a profoundly negative inflection. - Yes, so there's a name in, is it Australia? I don't know, there's other, there's Kevin, right? In France, Kevin is strongly like negatively coded. - Is it American coded? - Ah, I think so, maybe it's the fact that it's not French. - Yes. I actually kind of have views on the Karen thing and kind of do have an idea. I mean, the person threw me at the very end when they said, "Oh, without being a school member "using like my kids 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 scolty and wet blankety, but like I've done that to 15 rules. It hasn't worked, but I could imagine it working with an adult. - 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 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. I think the thing about slurs in general and insults is that like they have to be insulting and the ones that we consider the most generic are the ones that insult people's intelligence, right? And at some point we may find ourselves having a conversation about why it makes sense to insult people on the basis of intelligence, which is not something that mainly people are able to control, right? So like there is a whole, you know, the insult discourse is a complicated discourse because it implies that we're doing something mean or rude by definition. And it's hard to clean up. Yeah, and most of us try to avoid being mean or rude. And yes, like you, I'm skeptical of times when people say they're being mean or rude, but for good reasons. Yeah, I think that's the other thing I really just like about Karen is the idea that it's not just that, like I really like when people call other people assholes. Like I just think it's not, when someone tells me that someone else is an asshole, my brain does this thing where I'm like, all this person's really saying is that they have a conflict with somebody else. The person might be behaving badly, the person using the word might be behaving badly but it doesn't, 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 like a virtue signaling in the insult that I don't really appreciate. So I would say you have to make Karen into a taboo if you wanted to go away. And I would say that I don't feel stumped by this one because I feel like we're doing our part right now. I was about to say like, Well, there's some things you can't control and you can't control like if your name gets attached.
to a thing, but then I remembered that when I went to 9th grade, I told everyone to call me "K" instead of "kelefa," because kids in like middle school were inventing their own versions of "kelefa," and it was cauliflower, and it was collied, it was elephant, it was all sorts of stuff, and then people called me "K" from now on. So I would be hypocritical, not to at least acknowledge that one thing that people do when they don't love the resonance of their name sometimes is change it. Yeah, and I think for you to call people what they want to be called. I think that's like one of the etiquette rules that we almost all agree on most of the times sometimes. All right. That one I feel like goes the answer of all sort of. Can we call that an unstumped one? We can call that unstumped or maybe semi-stumped. I will say there's some pretty gold going on in the chat right now with some listeners pointing out that there are some soras out in the world, some kindles out in the world, some Katrina's out in the world, some ISIS's out in the world, there's a lot of other names. Oh, ISIS is a particularly-- But that's gone down, right, like that had high political salience and then like, now lower political salience. Yeah, maybe you just have to wait these things out. 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? Oh, come on, guys. Is that really a fair thing to do to a person like me? How does it-- Oh, you know how? A centrifugal force. I'll be taking a pile of questions. PJ, annoys all the scientists by naming a force that famously doesn't exist. Is that true? Centripetal force. Oh, centripetal is just like me not knowing what centripetal is. Centripetal is the force that keeps you from flying off into the distance. Centripetal force, I think, scientists should correct me, is it feels like you're being pushed out, but you're not actually being pushed out from the center when you're spinning around. It's that something is preventing you--it's like pulling you in because otherwise you would go straight. Is that-- Is that right? Is that right? 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? God. No one's ever going to listen to such engine again. You know, I had this--I had this moment of when I went to college and I wanted to be a radio DJ and they gave me a test to test my knowledge of punk rock, like a written 90-minute test and I was like, "I've never been so qualified and prepared for anything in my life." Well, this question is the opposite of that. Anything that is science or math is a pretty good way to stuff me. Besides, like, God, very basic arithmetic, which I can do decently well. Stop bragging. Okay, we're going to move on to a question from Jim here, which is, "Should you give money to homeless people or maybe phrase differently? Is it better to give or not to give why? Please discuss." Oh, definitely. Definitely you should give and it's better to give. I've been persuaded by my partner just, like, will keep large amounts of money in her pocket to give to homeless people whenever they ask and I just think, like, setting aside all the kind of, like, consequentialist questions or, like, blah, blah, blah, blah. If you don't, I feel like you end up in a world living in a city like New York where you just have to turn your mind off to lots and lots of suffering and I just think that that is a bad way to engage with the world. I don't know that I'm, like, solving that suffering by handing over, like, "Okay, bills when I see somebody." But, like, the moral experience I have of living in the city is way better since I just started copying her. Well, this is, I mean, this is interesting, right? Because it suggests that the suffering itself or your exposure, your intentional and conscious exposure to the suffering is good in and of itself. I think it is. And in that sense, the people who are suffering are in a weird way doing you a service. I don't know that they're doing me a service. Because if they're reminding me that there's misery in the world and that is helping with my moral instruction. Well, that's what you said. You said that, like, these encounters are valuable to you and that you're willing to pay money in order to have this experience. That is not right. I just think that it's bad to tune. I think the more things you're tuning out, the worse. Even though you have to tune a lot out. I see. But if you were living in a city where you did not visibly see people suffering, would that be bad? If they were suffering somewhere out of sight? I don't know where you're supposed to set the bounds of your empathy, sympathy, like moral consideration. And I think one of the obvious modern problems is that we're aware of so much suffering. And for the most part, the only thing we seem to be able to do is angrily post about it. I think that I don't know. I think for me, as someone who really struggles with this, I just try to think like, I'm actually going to really think about the proximate circles. Like, I'm really going to think about suffering in my family and friend groups. And then I'm going to think about suffering in my neighborhood. And then I'm sort of going to think about suffering in the communities I'm in. And everything past that, I kind of don't know what to do about. But if I lived in a city where there was just like great social services and nobody was homeless and everybody was doing really well, I don't think that that would, I think that would be good. I don't think it would be, like, I don't think it would then mean I need to think about people in another place necessarily. But for me, if I'm around it, I want to think about it. Even though it's not like I'm volunteering or anything like that. Ordo Amores. What's that? It's like the concentric circles of love and compassion, Ordo Amores. It's a concept that was much in the news earlier this year when it was expounded by J.D. Vance. Oh, wow. How was he? He was like, I need to find everyone in my circles. He said, as an American leader, but also just as an American citizen, your compassion belongs first to your fellow citizens. That doesn't mean you hate people from outside of your own borders. But there's this old school concept. I think it's a very Christian concept, by the way, that you love your family and then you love your neighbor and then you love your community and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country. And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world. It's so funny because he's so, when I listen to him talk, I'm always like, I think he is very smart. And he applies his skill at making arguments to things that are so hard to defend. And so it's like, that's a really beautiful concept. I don't know what it has to do with anything that he's been supporting for this term. But I think this question that you were talking about, I think this is a central question that all of us wrestle with in different ways, is like, what do we owe to people who are close to us, either in familial terms or just geographically, versus what we owe to people who are further from us? Yeah. And I don't know. I definitely don't have the right answer to that. But I think that, I think that not, I think we also 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 people feeling vast amounts of rage about people that they don't need direct rage do. But I think not ignoring what's actually here seems like a pretty good start to a confusing moral problem. Can I make a small counterpoint? Yeah. Which is that I think that one thing that happens is that people that are the most, the most intent on not shutting people out, on letting people in that are close to them, of being in touch with the suffering around them, I think they sometimes feel like that ends up can be exhausting or unpleasant. Yeah. And I think so sometimes what happens is that those people end up making choices sometimes subconsciously that take them a little further away from those people. In other words, like if every time you pass someone in the street who's suffering, you might find yourself wanting to move to a neighborhood, a city, or a state that has less of that in your daily life. And you might not explain to yourself in those words that that's why you're doing it. But you might find that just like mentally psychically, you're like, oh, there's something about living out in the woods that really appeals to me. There's something about living in some rural place that appeals to you, but maybe subconsciously part of what will appeal to you is being a little further from that suffering, right? If we create a universe where you have these obligations to people you see who are suffering right close to you, then one way to resolve that tension is to get further geographically away from people who are suffering. Yeah. I think that's true. I think it's also like, I have had better balls than I wonder if it's some unexamined part of me that's just like, it's hard to live in a city. Yeah. It's hard to morally live in a city. Okay. What's the next one? That was nice. We're going to take a turn from somewhat serious to somewhat silly. This is a question from Adrian. If the question reads PJ, you're going to hate this, my question, assuming it was directly overhead, how many average sized extra large chicken eggs would it take stacking one on top of the other to reach from the highest point on earth to the lowest point in the sea of tranquility on the moon? That's it. That's a question. This is like a consulting interview. It's a trick question. Yeah. Why is it a trick question? Save me, Kate. Well, because everyone says Everest, but the highest point, you know, we want to be talking about this chimborazo in Ecuador, which is not the highest point above sea level, but it's the furthest from the center of the earth because of the equatorial bulge, right? Which adds like 27 miles. And so it's actually a mile and changed, maybe further from the earth center than the top of Everest, but we're only talking about a mile or two, right? And then.
And if you think about the Sea of Tranquility, Maurey Tranquilitatis, I call it. It's like 500 miles in diameter, right? But like this podcast, it is not that deep. So I think you'd want to ignore, I think that at the Earth's highest point and the Sea of Tranquility, you'd want to ignore all of that, right? And you'd want to just look at the distance, 'cause it'll come out. And you want to just look at the distance between Earth and the Moon, right? Call it, what, 239,000 miles, maybe? 230, right? So an egg, call it, what? 2.4 inches, so 63,000 inches in a mile, 26,000 eggs in a mile if you divide it down. So 26,000 times 239,000, call it 6,000,000,000. So 6 billion, give or take. - Like I said, this is like having a bodyguard, and it'll actually. (laughing) - Just spit-balling with no advanced knowledge whatsoever. (laughing) - Did you pick up the questions? - As the host of this show, PJ, I have certain privileges. (laughing) - Nice try, listener. - Okay. - That was truly terrifying. (laughing) Okay, also, if folks have stumpers, they want to throw in the chat. We might have time for a couple of lives, 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. - It's been out there. If we had a base 12 numbering system, how would the world be different? - Like, so we would count in 12s instead of 10s? - Yeah. - Well, we would obviously have an extra finger on each hand, right? 'Cause that's how we got to 10. - That sounds great, honestly. - And an extra toe, which would maybe affect us less. - And so then, I'm imagining, 'cause I don't think the base would matter that much. In terms of our everyday math, we'd figure it out, right? We'd have two more numbers after, you know, between 10 and a, between nine and 10, I guess, right? - But then does 100 lose all its power? Like, I feel like 100 has a lot of significance. - No, we still write 100, but it just is equivalent to 144 of something. - I guess I can live in that world. I think the toes thing would bother me a little bit, but I can live in that world. I don't think feet need to be grosser than they currently are. - But my question is, in that world, like, our hands are a little better, right? Like, so we're a little better at like, manipulating objects, right? So music probably sounds better. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You're more yin-wi-mound teams. - Well, I was gonna say, depends on what you enjoy. (laughing) - But yes, music probably has more notes. - Solos get more elaborate. - Yeah. - And I wonder if there are some downsides, right? 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 calories available for something else? - So maybe it's like where maybe IQ takes a hit and the human race is a little bit more slow processing, but we have more fingers to count on. Our music gets better. We're typing more. The internet would get worse. - But there's a big problem in terms of communication. Have you already identified the big communication problem? - You can't get people in middle finger anymore. - Exactly right. There's no middle finger. - This would be this, you hold up your two middle finger. (laughing) I guess that feels rudder, right? That's closer to like the British up yours. - Yeah, it doesn't feel good. If you had two middle fingers. So yes, I think that I think hands would be the biggest difference in a base 12 world. I feel like we totally, I don't feel stumped by that at all. - That is a beautiful answer. - Do we have time for one more, a couple more? - Yeah, let's hit one more. I'm gonna pull one more out of the hat here. Let's see, I think our final question. Is this somewhat, yeah, this is a good one. This is a chewy one. Humans don't need to eat meat to survive. What moral reason do we have to continue eating animals? - Oh, I think about this a lot. Okay, you were vegan for a while. - Yeah. - How did you decide to become vegan as a person who thinks hard about moral questions? How did you decide to not be vegan? - I don't wanna get too complicated in terms of philosophical concepts, PJ. (laughing) - Peer pressure. - Peer pressure in both directions? - Yeah, I think so. For me, it was 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 beating me, you stop. Or never start drinking alcohol. - You only listen to power chords. - Yeah, sure. And so, yes, for me, it was like that I liked being part of that community. And, yeah, and so when my community-- - Peer pressure was binding you. Did Peer pressure push you? Outer is just the community's all over you left it. - Yeah, I find myself hanging out with different people and I find 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 a vegetarian world or a more vegetarian world, I certainly would not be the one dude eating meat. But do you now, when you eat meat, are you aware of a cognitive moral dissonant feeling in your mind? - Yes, I probably feel a lot of moral dissonance in my day-to-day life. (laughing) - It's the thing, it's one of the things I do that most bothers me. It's like I eat meat, I eat lots of meat, I can't. It's just like if you really take the idea that other beings experience and suffering seriously, like I can't come up with a good justification for doing it, I don't like that I do it and I do it. Like I don't judge other people doing it, but I really, it's sort of like if this is true, what else is true, question about myself that I don't like. Although some, if you talk to some vegans, they, to them, the suffering of animals is more objectionable than the killing of animals. And so that means in some situations, dairy products might give them more pause than meat, depending on how the animal lived and how it was killed. - Yeah, and when you read about the ways those animals live, it's very, very unpleasant. - Yes. - I feel unsettled by it, but also weirdly the way that I've handled it is I've decided if I'm going to eat meat, I'm like really gonna eat meat. And so I've started gravitating towards like meatier meat. Like I want my brain to, if it's gonna, if I'm going to cause suffering for pleasure to at least experience the pleasure. So weirdly the worrying about it has probably made me worse. - I feel like maybe, I feel like we used to live in a world where we were on closer terms with suffering and with blood and guts and all sorts of things. And I think that we have gotten, I'm gonna use a word that sounds pejorative, but I don't mean it to be pejorative. I think we've gotten a little more squeamish. And I think in a lot of ways that's kind of a good thing and that might be a place where eating habits haven't caught up with other parts of our lives, right? The kinds of things that we'll put up with, the kinds of things we'll shrug at, right? Whether it's warfare or like how animals are treated. You know, I think in a lot of ways, we've gotten more sensitive and meat's a little weird because it's hidden, because like factory farming processes might mean that in a lot of cases it's gotten more cruel than it used to be 100 years ago or 200 years ago. So I think that there is some maybe some real dissonance there. - Although it's actually surprising when you think about how the internet has become much less moderated and so much more sort of disturbing and sensational images proliferate, you would almost think that the thing that organizations like PETA used to do where they would just like show really terrible photos of real animal suffering, like you would almost expect to encounter that more on social media internet now and I wonder if that will actually happen. - Yeah, and you see it, I mean obviously our attitudes towards animals are like super, super strange, right? So right now there is someone eating a hamburger while posting angrily about whether or not Hassan Piker shocks his dog. - Yes, yeah, right? - No, it's completely, yeah. But that video of like Hassan Piker, the streamer has this dog in the corner of his house where he's constantly streaming and like may or may not have been using a shot collar, he says it was a vibration collar, but the amount of either real or performed moral outrage I've seen around the possibilities doing that. Yeah, among if somebody said you're reincarnated tomorrow, do you want to live in a nice house where sometimes someone shocks you with a shot collar, but you're alive or do you want to grow up in like a slaughterhouse where you're quickly murdered. Most people would choose, so it's confusing. Our moral reasoning around animals is confusing. - Garrett has actually talked about putting a shot collar on UPJs on certain days when you're starting to stray outside of the podcast studio. - I honestly was thinking about, are these like shock bracelets you can get that are supposed to, it's like, it's called like the Pavlock and I was trying to figure out if it would help me focus and then was like, this is an insane way for personal life, don't do this. - Today, that I think is all we have time for today. PJ, do you want to sign us off? Also, just before I handed back over to you. - Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. PJ, I'm not supposed to search engine here. - Oh my God, please. - For instance, if you want to see more stumpers throw an email to
[email protected] or if you want to see other segments on incognitive mode, let us know. But K, host of this show over to you. - Thank you, Garrett, as always, the secret power behind search engine. And PJ, thank you for coming on and being a guest for the second episode of search engine.
engine. We'll see everyone again in 14 months. Thank you. Thanks guys. Thank you for listening to our episode. If you enjoyed anything you heard, please consider signing out for incognito mode. It is how we fund the show. It is the money we will use to make the next season for you, which begins very soon. You can find incognito mode at the link in our show notes or by heading to search engine.show. Search engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It is created by me, PJ vote, and Shruthy Pinominating. Gare Graham is our senior producer, Emily Maltaire is our associate producer. Our production intern is Piper Dumont. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bizarrian. Additional production support on this episode from Noah John and Kim Cooper. Our executive producer is Leo Reese Dennis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey. Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gainer, and more current Josephine Francis, Kirk Courtney, Vanessa Tinkati, and Hillary Schuff. If you have a business and would like to advertise here on search engine, please email us PJ vote
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