Why is the pool at Buckingham Palace a secret? (classic)

Hello, search engine nation and all the ships would say summer is finally actually truly here and this week We are celebrating by bringing you one of our very favorite classic episodes of search engine and enjoyable Well enjoyable for us hopefully for you quests after a very silly question It's a story about kings and queens and the places they allegedly cannonball a story which took search engine's team of crack reporters across the Atlantic I hope you like it. We'll be back next week with a new one for you or if you just need to hear something new from us right now We actually have a fresh new episode on the incognito mode feed It's a story that is about the pursuit of greatness and Spicy noodles but in order to hear that you would need to be a subscriber to our incognito mode which you can find at search engine.show You Most human beings start asking questions at about two and a half years old our first questions usually began with what the quintessential toddler query What's that the more sophisticated how and when questions those developmentally arrive room three and then between three and five The day loose the constant questions the why questions Why is Salami so hard to stop eating? Why do people lie? If you can think back you can probably remember this age when your parents were like perfect search engines capable of handling almost anything you throw at them And you also might remember the few times they'd refuse when you ask some question whose answer they weren't quite ready to share and you'd get in It's complicated or maybe a when you're older I can remember I swear decades later the frustration of that strange invisible wall In fact, I was reminded of that wall quite recently. I'll listen to had a question about something that felt honestly very basic Very answerable, but it just wasn't it was an unpatchable hole in my understanding of the world and the more we tried to answer it The less it seemed like a fun lark and the more it made me want to howl with rage made actually the entire staff here howl with rage Why couldn't we know this why was it being kept from us? Check check check It started in a stylishly appointed one bedroom apartment not far from my house Hey The listener who's home we just entered his name was Chris Chris sends me a lot of questions They tend to be especially good and the question he had this time is about the British royal family well sort of Are you normally a royals person? I am not normally a royals person. I came into this when it just felt like the entire world was Conspiring to make me care. Yes, you know, and I needed to find my own way to care about it Right, like if this is going to be the only show on the TV of the internet You're going to find like a minor like plot line that you can get into exactly I need to find a hidey hole that feels like it's my own. Yes. Yeah When Chris and I were talking it was early summer 2023 and the entire world seemed obsessed with something that was happening in England The coronation of King Charles in case you did not care or follow a recap Queen Elizabeth had died. Her son Charles was taking the throne and there was some drama attached to the occasion a feud between Charles's son Prince Harry and his relatives There was a tell-all book an Oprah interview allegations flying to and fro Many people had questions about the royals of other private lives. I did not Every royal headline hits my ear the same. It's always like Prince chatterly of the house Targaryen had a royal row at the Buckminster dog show or whatever I tuned it out the way I always tuned it out But for Chris all this din did a funny thing to his curiosity It made him wonder not about the royals interior lives, but instead about a different kind of royal interior So okay around the time of all of the coronation drama I went down this really insane rabbit hole looking up facts about Buckingham Palace I guess I was just kind of intrigued by this idea that Prince Charles was moving into a new palace And it just looks so beautiful and certainly from the outside and I was like I wonder what it looks on the inside It's probably the most famous palace in the world. We all can imagine what it looks like on the outside It's just like this story book version of a palace. I actually cannot picture Can we look at it? Of course, so okay Pulling it up on Google images. I'm gonna show you the outside So this exterior photo that Chris pulls up. It's honestly a little hard to describe, but I'm gonna give it a shot I see lots of Corinthian columns many windows most capped with these beautiful stone triangular pediments Honestly, it's a little similar to the building style you see in Washington DC's monuments It's just significantly more impressive. Yeah, it's a massive palace It's insane and the idea of living in it is just so inconceivable because it's like you're like living in like The part of Washington DC that all the fancy buildings are, but that's just your home Like yeah, I live in the Pentagon the White House the Washington monument like it's not a home But it is a home. It's like the home for the fanciest people in Britain Exactly. Yeah, I mean the White House is a really interesting thing to compare it to because the White House I just have zero curiosity about what it's like and I feel like I know it's like boring wallpaper It's for poster beds You know what I mean, and it just looks small and rinky dink compared to this Let's google the number of rooms. I feel like it's a close to a thousand. Oh Jesus 775 that's fucking insane. That's crazy. Like we're in my apartment right now. It's approximately three rooms 775 rooms is a lot of rooms. It's a lot more than three But what had specifically peaked crisis curiosity is that even though British taxpayers have funded all 775 of those rooms Very few rooms can be seen by the British public The White House you can visit you can tour if you win an election you could live there Buckingham Palace is different It belongs to dynast of one family forever and the vast majority of its many rooms are only accessible to that family And there are many servants you can go to tour, but you won't see very much As Chris tumbled down this rabbit hole he found that his curiosity was particularly drawn to one mysterious room One thing that I surfaced in my research about Buckingham Palace Was there's a pool obviously there's a pool. That's a very common place amenity But there are no pictures of the pool no one's outside of the royal family seems to have seen this pool It's a very private amenity We've no one's ever taken a photograph of the pool in Buckingham Palace It does not exist on the internet There are speculations about where it is so if you google this pool You'll see this little chunk Don't I'm also wondering Chris pulls up the google search results which spit out a bunch of screaming British tabloid headlines about the existence of this secret Buckingham Palace pool Some feature photos taken from a helicopter or maybe a drone very high up With one section of the palace exterior circled Oh my god it's like a CIA intelligence photo where someone's taken an aerial shot of Buckingham Palace And then they've just it with a white circle circled Their theory for like instead of where Ben Laden's hiding in a cave It's where they think the pool is hiding in Buckingham Palace That is exactly what it's like And I need to know what it looks like in there So look this is a closer picture of it I think this is about the closest we've ever seen This is definitely a pool house So it's like it's like a It's hard to tell the scale it's either a two or three story stone building with like giant Window frames like This would be a really nice pool because it has the thing where you kind of have like Like modern buildings have like big windows that look out onto a yard But this it's like on like our old Romany looking building And then also you would get the view from an outside pool But it's indoor and I'm sure it's heated Oh, that's nice. That's really nice. It's the Parthenon with windows It's the Parthenon with windows if it were just a swimming pool At this point it might bear repeating Chris does not care about the royals If anything he resents how much information about them has been dumped without his consent into his mind Photos of them in their bathing suits anecdotes about their squabbles Chris doesn't care about the royals Except now that there was one private room in the life of this internationally overexposed family One volume of water that had been perhaps arbitrarily made private Now that Chris was being told he wasn't allowed to know about the pool Conversely his curiosity roared online The reason that we haven't been able to see this swimming pool is actually what makes me feel like I need to see it I just kind of imagine that it's the coolest swimming pool ever Like that's sort of how I think of it And for you is that like a really tall diving board? Is it like a really deep deep end? Is it like a jacuzzi where it's kind of not tepid and gross? Like what is the coolest swimming pool ever in your imagination? I think it's like the rarest marble, like, yeah, I think it's like just insane materials that it's made of. For me, it would also be about like, the stair placement, like, because I think sometimes when you get to experience a big swimming pool, the problem is where the stairs are, where you like have to like swim too much to get out of it, and I just feel like the royals would have had like really thoughtful stair placement. I, yeah, I agree. I think every detail has been considered, including that one. I assume that like curious or people about the royals in me have poured through like every part of their life sometimes in like really tragic ways. I don't think that I'm intrepid enough that I will actually end up like in Buckingham Palace like hanging from the rafters with like a little camera or whatever, but I want to fulfill the curiosity at the hardest question, like, what, what can I get you that will feel like an answer to this question which might be unanswerable? I would settle for anything better than what's out there online, like any kind of imagery you could paint for me around the interior, any scenes you can paint for me, like, yeah, like, so and so, like, went to the pool and like ordered poolside and agronies and I'm like, if I can just basically pull this pool one moat more into the light of public view, we'll be happy. That's exactly right. Okay. I think I can, I think that feels achievable. All right. Thank you Chris. I believe in you. Thank you. After the break, we dive in. Welcome back to the show. Chapter one, the outer circle. When we started trying to answer this question almost two years ago, it's not that we thought to be easy, but frankly, it didn't seem that hard. We'd set the bar low enough. We just needed to talk to a person who had seen the pool with their own eyes. All we were seeking was a fact as small as, did the real pool have a real diving board? Or so, was it one of the really big ones, like, with a ladder? So we made our reporting plan. First up, the press office of the Royal Collection Trust. The organization that manages visitor access to Buckham Palace. We told them we were very interested in the architectural history of the palace and asked if they can make a historian available for an interview. Two hour delay, they responded. They asked for a list of questions in advance. We sent them over questions with our question about the pool artfully tucked towards the back, where we hoped it would not trigger alarms. We said we just wanted to know if the palace had modern amenities, like perhaps a swimming pool. And if so, could they talk about that? At those two words, swimming pool, they shut down like a pumpkin stand in November, closed for business. I'm sorry for the disappointing response. We do appreciate you getting in touch. Huh. Okay. We found out. Next, we tried six degrees of separation. We hit up every friend of ours who was British, or knew a British person, anyone remotely famous or who knew a remotely famous person. Shockingly, one person we knew had an old friend who had married into an obscure branch of the extended Royal Universe. She and her spouse, a member of the Royal Household, had been to the palace many times. But neither had ever seen this pool. Weird. One lovely British woman I met at a dinner, literally this devolved into just asking strangers at dinners about the Royals, told me, "Oh, this will be an easy question to answer." There's lots of students actually who intern at the palace, and she said she knew at least one. So she texted her friend, a former palace intern. The friend confirms over text, "Yes, there's a pool," but then immediately clamped up. They said they couldn't really talk about their time there, even though this was years ago. What were these monarchs hiding in their murky, marine depths? Our next move was to go to the archives. Prusa Garrett Graham read newspaper clips about the palace until his eyes bled. And then, we started watching the documentaries. Buckingham Palace. One of the most famous buildings on the planet, home to arguably the world's most famous family. This particular series, like very promising, quote, "six-part look at the secrets of Buckingham Palace." Today, it's the largest private house in the country, with an astonishing 775 rooms, including a swimming pool. The swimming pool. They go on. A swimming pool, a doctor's surgery, and a post office. There's even an ATM in the basement that dispenses cash only for the Royals. The Royals use cash? Question for different episodes. This is The Story of Buckingham Palace. The documentary series starts well before the existence of the swimming pool. It starts actually with the story of the palace before it was yet the modern palace. If you travel back in time, 260 years, Buckingham Palace would have looked like this. We see an exterior shot of a red brick house on a country lane, Hanson, Stately, certainly nicer than your house, but not a palace. That's because Buckingham Palace didn't start life as a royal residence. It was originally built as a private house by a man called the Duke of Buckingham. The private house that our modern Buckingham Palace would be expanded out from, that first came into the royal family in 1761. In the centuries after some of England's most notable architects would, in phases, transform this red brick townhouse into the 830,000 square foot behemoth that sits there today. The story of that transformation is unspooled across the series' many installments. But it begins to dawn on the attentive viewer as these installments roll on, that even in what has been built as a six-part exposé, the host is clearly locked outside of the palace gates. The cameras don't film the interiors. Instead, it's a lot of blueprints, a lot of recreations, a lot of people and wicks. The swimming pools, appearance in the dock, as a topic, comes after the section about Queen Elizabeth's mini-corkies. As well as a corgi, King George gave his daughters another present, something which isn't found in the average home, even today. We've arrived after three hours and 48 minutes of punishing non-pool-related content at the subject the brought us here. By the time the 1930s came around, no self-respecting grand house was complete without its own swimming pool. And so George VI planned a surprise for his daughters, Princess Elizabeth and Margaret, somewhere for them to have their weekly swimming lesson from the comfort of their own home. You'd expect, in this moment, in a sane or just world to see the damn pool, even just a still photograph of it? Instead, what we get is the palace floor plans we've already seen, except now they add a green rectangle to represent the location of the swimming pool. And then they cut to a very familiar by now, exterior shot of the pool building, the Parthenon with windows, photographed as always from a great distance away. We are no closer here than we were with Chris. They recite some facts that we'd already come across in the newspaper archives, like the infamous Nazi attack on the pool, soon after its creation. So almost immediately after the start of the blitz, I'd bomb landed, and it wrecked the swimming pool. Maybe the Nazis were also mad if they weren't allowed to see the pool. But the pool was later rebuilt. We learned that King Charles, as a little kid, would invite his schoolmates over to sail model boats in the pool, but still, nothing really about the pool itself. Does it have a diving board? A marble staircase? Is it big? Is it small? Is it an above ground number? We learn, search. It remains there to this day, but it's one of the most private parts of the palace. No images of the interior have ever been made public. So this was the totality of what the BBC documentary could offer us about the pool. Basically nothing. It felt like we needed to talk to someone who actually had royal connections, who could get inside the palace with a camera in their hand. Can you just introduce yourself, like say your name and what you do? Hello. I'm Ashley Hicks, and I'm a designer of interiors and objects for them, and also a photographer of historic interiors. And I've written a book about Buckingham Palace's interiors. Chapter two, the palace photographer. Ashley Hicks spent months roaming Buckingham Palace, taking these beautiful, naturally lit, shadow-drenched portraits of the interior rooms. He also has a personal connection to the palace. His grandfather was Lord Mountbatten, uncle of the late Queen's husband, Prince Philip. Ashley's relatives were central enough to the royal family, that as a kid, every June, he would get an invitation to the Queen's birthday parade. We would go and watch them ride back into the palace, and we'd go and give the horses sugar lumps and carrots. And then we would go up and have a Coca-Cola because we were children, and some sandwiches, and with our mothers saying, "Now make sure you eat enough, because that's all the lunch you're getting." How were the sandwiches of the palace? They were pretty good, actually. There were Marmite ones, which, you know, obviously are very good if you like Marmite. And if you don't even know what Marmite is, then you need to study a bit of English culture. Actually, a person more intimate with the palace and its residents than most, he understood why we'd become curious about the palace interiors. Unlike its closest American relative, the White House, but he and palace just feels inherently more shrouded. But I mean, the interesting thing about the White House in a way is the amount that you see it in movies and on TV. Yes. I mean, that over-office. I mean, I feel like I lived there, don't you? I do, and I feel like-- I mean, literally, I know how to get to the secretary's room. I know how to get to the west wing. Whereas Buckingham Palace, generally speaking, people got no idea. There's very little of it that gets seen. I mean, you can buy a ticket and go around and look at it. But then you don't see very many rooms. Of course, Ashley has seen many more of these interior rooms than most of us. In 2018, the Royal Collection Trust enlisted, actually, to document the formal spaces of the palace, the Grand Hall, the throne room, the royal closet. And what was it like to photograph it? Well, it was great fun, yeah, no. It was slightly, and every time I wanted to move an object or move a chair or something, there were shrieks of horror, you know, and somebody would have to come scuttling along with a pair of white gloves for me to put on. Then I was told, "Oh, don't lift a chair by itself." And all this kind of thing. How many of the 755 rooms were you allowed to photograph? Oh, I didn't know. Other 30, something like that. Are there really 775? Maybe there are. That's what I've been told. Maybe there are? You can hear me, I think, cautiously approaching the object of our interest here. I didn't want to scare off a royal relative. But I moved the conversation to one specific page in this book, the page on which our quarry had appeared. I have your book here, and I have it dog-eared on page 90. You have this beautiful exterior shot of, it's taken from the back gardens. Exactly. And so then on the left side of the photo, there's this building that sort of resembles the Parthenon with windows. Yeah. This is a beautiful house. I think that is the pool. Have you been inside? No, no. I haven't. And are you curious about it? Not especially. As far as I know, it's a fairly ordinary swimming pool. But maybe it's magnificent. Who knows? Maybe it's worthy of your president-elect. Maybe it's fully entirely gold. I don't know who knows. Even the photographer who is allowed to photograph, to move ever so slightly the most precious furniture of the palace, the photographer who is the grandson of Lord Mountbatten himself, even this man had not seen the pool. When his secret is kept for long enough and no reason is given, lesser minds become deranged. They start to believe in conspiracy theories. They talk about Adrenal Chrome, 5G, inside jobs, the Freemasons. I was not there yet. But spring of 2024, months into this question, nowhere near its answer, a strange pattern began to occur. We had, by then, reached out to so many people, several royal biographers, any royal affiliate no matter how extended, who had been quoted in a news article and who seemed promising. The childhood friend of King Charles, who'd sailed boats with him in the pool. And usually, we'd get no response. Sometimes we'd get one helpful email back, but then, immediately after, the line would go dead. This was the exact feeling you get when you're reporting on a celebrity and they're telling their network to give you the cold shoulder. Did the pool see us coming? All I knew was we kept bumping into this invisible, sturdy, royal wall. A forest field, I knew we couldn't quite understand, but which I was sure was there. And then, my editor Shruthi got this idea, which actually occurred to her while listening to a podcast. The podcast was called The Runaway Princesses. This incredible story about a royal family in Dubai, the story of alleged abuse of two of the princesses there. It was dark, it was fascinating, but the thing that struck Shruthi was a reporting. An investigative reporter had managed to crack into a much more impenetrable wall of silence. Not the British royals, but the Dubai ones, who owned several fancy, extremely private residences in the UK. This reporter was the person we needed to talk to. Yeah, the only thing I should warn you is I live by the sea, and so there may be some unavoidable sea gold noise, but we can try and avoid it. That sounds bucolic, that sounds relaxing. I feel like. It's not that so round. It's really deeply heretated, after a while. Chapter three, the investigative reporter by the sea. Heidi Blake is a writer for The New Yorker, host of the podcast Runaway Princesses. We spoke this past April. I emailed her with my predicament, and she generously agreed to talk, despite the profound triviality of her investigation. We've a history of reporting on one of the harder areas of reporting, which is extremely powerful, extremely secretive families, like oligarchs, royal families. Why is this the kind of story you find yourself drawn to? That is a great question, and something I often ask myself. I constantly try to find a story that is slightly less unwieldy, and then get drawn into these naughty morasses, and think, why do I do this to myself? I don't know. There's something that sort of activates in me, where I feel like there is a concentration of power in the hands of a person or people who are abusing it, I don't know, just I reach a certain level of outrage, and it spurs me on to really want to get to the bottom of something. Also, this is so fun, because this is kind of not an outrageous thing, this is just an intriguing like, why the hell don't we know what this pool looks like? Come on, go like, what are they hiding? What is so secret about this pool? This is crazy. Heidi was the first British person I spoke to who seemed able to see the invisible wall. Who didn't tell me that this was going to be easy before ghosting me for the rest of time? Heidi both appreciated the strange complexity of her question, and had suggestions about how to get it answered. With reporting I did on the Dubai Royal family, they've just had hundreds and hundreds of people pass through their employment, and actually that means it's not very difficult to find some people among them, especially if you make it a numbers game and you just approach a ton of people, some of them are going to feel like talking to you. And do you like, I mean, when you're doing one of your investigations and you're like, okay, I want to show first for the Royal family in this time period, is it just like, I mean, I assume you're not going on LinkedIn. I am literally going on LinkedIn. You're going on LinkedIn. That is literally what I'm doing. Yeah, LinkedIn is amazing. And I feel that this is one of those things where like, you know, magicians should never reveal their secrets because like, it's, it's LinkedIn. That's the secret. Really? It's unbelievably good. Yeah, because what you can do is, I mean, this is obviously like a totally unintended consequence of LinkedIn, but everybody is on LinkedIn and everybody has put their whole professional history on LinkedIn. So you can go on there and you can say, show me everybody who has previously worked at Buckingham Palace and it will give you hundreds and hundreds of results and then you can filter those. So I took the liberty of like doing this as you see what we would find. Thank you. I mean, you guys could do, it's kind of amazingly easy, but so you can put in Buckingham Palace or the other way they describe it is the Royal Household. I was following along on my side on the computer and it was amazing to see Royal Household enter and then this wall of humans. It wasn't that we hadn't been trying to reach former employees, but our methods had been relatively haphazard. Now we had this well-organized database, this surveillance system that people had volunteered for. Heidi filtered her search to just show ex-employees, the people most likely to talk. And if you do that, you have like a hundreds of results. You have a summer warden, a sous chef, butlers, junior footmen, a building surveyor. There's a guy who was the Marshal of the Diplomatic Corps, but then this is when I got excited. Then if you add the search term swimming pool, there are three people who are specifically talking about having worked in and around that swimming pool. So like, these guys definitely know, so you have. Wait, so I'm working. Oh my God. So wait, you see. I'm seeing, I've got a. We're bleeping out the names here just to respect the privacy of these people. So it was a household electrician at Buckingham Palace from September 1971 to August 1992. And one of his duties is listed as maintenance of swimming pool plant. So like this dude has seen that pool and why would he not tell you? Also, these people that all have left the palace a really long time ago, so like, I just don't think they're going to be feeling that awkward about talking about it. We went through the details of these former palace employees. And then, Heidi told me she had her own theory about the pool. I hypothesis, as to why it might be hidden behind a veil of secrecy. Well, I think this is just a hunt. but I bet you, it's a really scuzzy rundown pool. - Oh, that's so funny because my assumption would be, they don't want you to see it because it's like, so in America, the wealthier constantly trying to make you believe they're upper-middle class, and so I was picturing something like opulent and golden, and maybe like, maybe there was an elephant there somehow, but you're like, oh, it might just be kind of a crappy pool. - I think so, because I guess, you know, obviously Buckingham Palace does pomp and grandeur and circumstance, and they wear that on their sleeves, but I think that one of the things particular about the queen was that actually, you know, room always had it that in her private apartment, so actually those rooms were really shabby with like, thread-beck carpet, and really, fashioned wallpaper. And there was this amazing thing. Back in 2003, a reporter from a tabloid here called the Mirror Newspaper, managed to get a job as a footman at Buckingham Palace. - He worked for two months. - And they kind of did it ostentably as a like, this is a massive security breach, I could have poisoned the queen thing, but actually the thing that everyone remembers from that story is that he got photos of the queen's private breakfast room, and it's like, I'll send you a picture, but it is like, super shabby, and she's eating her breakfast out of Tupperware. - Really? - Everyone was just like, the queen is eating breakfast out of Tupperware. Like, she's eating cornflakes out of Tupperware. And that was the thing, like, no one had ever seen that before. - Heidi's emulating to the story. And in the photos, I could see the weirdly dingy room. There's a plastic princess phone and FM transistor radio on the table. After a minute, it gives me a feeling I've never felt towards the royals. A warm feeling? They seem human. The queen here living like a retiree who just needs to make her pension last. - Which I think is basically the situation of the monarchy, like they actually, you know, their state is huge and kind of enormously expensive to maintain and they're having to constantly scrap for taxpayer funding to kind of maintain these state rooms. And so the queen was notoriously frugal, you know, with her own sort of stuff. And so that's my hunch. I reckon this ball is run down and embarrassing, and they don't want anyone to see it for that reason. But I mean, I could be completely wrong. Maybe there is an elephant. Our listener, Chris, had imagined that because the pool was hidden, it had to be fabulous. Perhaps there's an American bias that expects that anything hidden must be special. Exciting. Better than what's here. Heidi's view was that, like many backstage's, Buckingham palaces could be less glamorous than what the public got to say. In any event, we had another path to try. We're gonna take a short break. And when we return, search engine crosses an ocean. (upbeat music) Welcome back to the show. Okay, I think you're like super off mic, or else I'm on. I'm probably off mic. I also can't hear myself at all. Chapter four. Search engine's Royal Correspondent, Garrett Graham. Hey, TJ. Hey, Garrett. How's it going? You know, another day in paradise. Yeah? Yeah. I am here to tell you about some digging that I've done. I need to be honest here. I've been using the Royal Wii in this episode a lot. We researched, we investigated. The Royal Wii for most of these months was Garrett. On this journey, Garrett didn't just ingest historic newspaper archives and royal biographies. Honestly, by this point, he knew more about the palace than many of the experts we were talking to. The pool question had bit him the same way as a bit our listener, Chris. Garrett had gone from a person who didn't care about the royals to someone who deeply wanted to see their pool. And more than anything, he wanted to know why it was, the pool would be a state secret. So when reporter Heidi Blake had surfaced with these new leads, Garrett jumped on them. So walking out of that conversation with Heidi, it felt like she had mapped out this crazy wall of suspects connected to the palace by red string. And all that was left for us to do was trace that red string until we found a suspect who would talk and flip somebody. Are they convicted of a crime? They're convicted of having seen the swimming pool of Buckingham Palace and not telling us about it yet. In the world of bodybuilding, holding on to narratively interesting information as a crime. And they're found guilty. So the first person that I reached out to was the tabloid guy that Heidi told us about, like the mirror reporter who had snuck into the palace and snapped a photo of the queen's cornflakes or whatever. But it turned out that the tabloid had dealt with some legal action after this piece came out. And so they'd actually agreed not to publish any more information from their reporting, which meant that the tabloid guy was out. Yeah. But the next step that I took was just to start reaching out to the people on LinkedIn. And as reporter Heidi Blake mentioned, there's basically three people who had mentioned the swimming pool on their profile. There's a 20-something project manager. There's a retired electrician. And there is a maintenance officer turned aromatherapist. All of whom were one-time employees of Buckingham Palace, but are no maintenance officer turned aromatherapist? That is right. Life has so many chapters. It does. [LAUGHTER] That's not a chapter you expect to find in a book about Buckingham Palace, but it's one that I was pretty charmed to find. So OK, so you're poking around. So yeah, the first guy I decided to reach out to is the 20-something project manager. He worked at the palace just a few years ago and the clue on his profile that he might have the goods that we're looking for is that he was involved with realizing quote, "substantial carbon-saving opportunities for the onsite swimming pool plant operation." OK, that feels like it. It feels promising. It feels like this guy would have seen the pool. And the onsite. So I salute this guy out on the internet. I learned pretty quickly that he's ex-military and also happened to share the name of a 14th century Earl of Pimbroke, which to me, those are two details that kind of suggest this guy might have some sympathy towards the royals. And maybe he won't be willing to break the privacy for the sake of an American podcast. It's so funny how producing a podcast is kind of like online dating where you're cold approaching someone and you're looking at their little footprint. And you're just like, are they going to like bring or are they going to talk to me? It's sort of the same like drawing a painting from a couple dots type of that. Yeah, and I reach out several times, actually. No response. Totally fine. We have more suspects. I move on to the next one. OK. The next person I reach out to is the retired electrician. He worked there from the '70s to the '90s, which on the one hand, it means like it's been a while since this guy's seen the pool. But on the other hand, it means like he was definitely there before the Indie era. And so maybe he's more keen to chat with us about it. And I reach out, LinkedIn and on Facebook, again, zero response. OK. So then why? I go to the final person on LinkedIn. And honestly, this is the one that I'm kind of the most optimistic about because, again, this is the maintenance officer turned a Roma therapist. Oh, OK. Yeah. They're linked in bio just reads, quote, using a Roma's to support positive mental health, which not only is this a person who is in a totally different field of work now, but this is like a decidedly non-royal line of work. Yeah, OK. And so I'm like, we found our person. I just need to get this person to see the note that I send. And so I reach out on every single platform I could find her on. And this one actually turned out kind of interesting. She said, nothing. [LAUGHTER] So wait, what was it? It's not a single word of reply. There was nothing interesting about it. It was just a failed attempt at a joke. I see, I see. But anyway, the point of all this is just to say that LinkedIn was kind of a bust. There were other people that I reached out to who didn't want to talk to us, but I want to tell you the story of one person who would talk to us. Please. In the world of royal servants, there are a few more controversial figures than Paul Barrow. I think Paul is a fascinating character. As Diana's butler and footman to the queen, he served the royal family for over 20 years. Only one marriage history. Chapter five, the chatty butler. Paul Barrow spent 20 years working alongside the royal. He started as a footman to the queen before becoming Princess Diana's butler, regularly crossing paths with Prince Philip. So this is a person that came up in multiple conversations that we had, both on and off the record. And it's a guy who's kind of infamous in British tabloids. He was Diana's former butler. And after her death, he kind of presumably sees an opportunity and kind of caches in on his access to the royal family when the entire world is obsessed with Diana and the circumstances surrounding her death. And so he writes a book about his time working on staff for Diana, which he did without royal approval, which I think is a big no-no. And so even now like 30 years removed from Diana's death or however long it is, he's still taking like lots of media opportunities to talk about his time in the royal household. And in interviews, he speaks with this kind of like high school theater drama. I feel her presence and she's often in my dreams. I don't live in a morcelium to Diana. I live in this world and my life has changed as well. But you can never forget the people who touched your heart. All this to say, he seems like the perfect candidate to tell us what this swimming pool at Buckingham Palace looks like. It's a shot of an email. And after a couple of weeks, an agent got back to us, which is kind of unusual for a search engine like we were not used to dealing with agents, like it's a pot. podcast, but let me just read you the message that the agents have me. Please. Hi Garrett, I hope you're well. Many thanks for your inquiry, spelled with an E, and apologies for the delay and getting back to you. Can you please let me know what fee you have for the recording? Many thanks. And of course, by fee, that it means that we need to pay money to do an interview with the butler, and at Search Engine, I think most journalists in the US, we don't pay for information, meaning we don't pay sources to talk to us. It's like a generally accepted norm. There's exceptions. There's people who either just do it, I think tablets will do it, and actually in a lot of documentary film, they won't pay someone for an interview, but they'll like pay them a lot of money for their childhood photos and then ask them to also be interviewed, which is kind of work around. But like, generally speaking, there's this idea, rightly or wrongly, that you don't pay sources for interviews, because the idea is that once you're paying somebody to say something, you both have power over them, which may or may not be a problem. But also, they have an incentive to say what you want to hear. Right. But I should also say, there does seem to be a real, non-malicious cultural difference here, which is just like, there are different boundaries in different countries around journalism, and one of those differences in the UK is that reporters are a bit more comfortable offering sources, some compensation for information. I found some poll data saying that 53% of reporters in the UK believe paying people for confidential information is justified on occasion compared to 5% of journalists in the US. One can't help but notice that there's very few generally agreed upon ethical rules for journalism. And one of the few that we all seem to abide by is the one that involves us getting to be cheap. So if you told me that, you know, in the more progressive and sophisticated future, we realized that this rule didn't make a lot of sense. I'd be like, yeah. Sure. And on the other, like, this is also just a guy who has sustained an entire career off of selling the information that he does have. So I think it shouldn't be totally surprising that he's asking for this. Like in some ways, it's a perfectly reasonable request, but the agent ends up offering us the butler for 1,500 pounds, which is like $2,000. We politely decline. But actually, it was okay because this is around the same time that we're about to fly to England. Chapter six. American tourists in London. So we weren't going there to report this story per se. We were going there for another commitment, like, the show shouldn't have been invited to speak at a podcast conference. But we'd said yes because we knew that Buckingham Palace was in England. And honestly, like, it's funny that you say it that way because that is kind of the extent that I thought about it. I was just like, Oh, it's over there. Yes. We'll be closer to the object of our reporting. Derek, is that what is that little tan building to the right of the palace? I don't think that's the swimming pool. Oh. Maybe. Honestly, it's a little embarrassing listening back to this that we just kind of hopped on the tube and went to Buckingham Palace without a reporting plan. I mean, we're walking towards it. I suppose we'll get more information. But that's not the pool. No. Well, the pool has glass on the outside. Oh, right. This looks a little more mausoleum-y. We show up. There is a massive crowd. There's like a royal marching band, like playing brass instruments as we walk by. But bad news was, like, the reason why it was such a madhouse outside of the palace gates, we quickly realized was that we happened to be there in a month when the palace was close to tourists, which meant for us that we weren't going to be able to get inside of the palace. Okay. We're passing around sort of. We just hit this with the back of Buckingham Palace. We're on the. Oh, gosh. Let me get my directions down. So we walk around the perimeter of the palace, literally, like, looking at my phone's Google Maps to, like, see how many feet we were away from the indoor pool. As the crow flies, we're 249 feet away from the building that supposedly has a swimming pool. Google Maps is giving me a route. You'll be very bloody by the time you're there. There's also seats. And we were trying to figure out, I think this was your idea, let's, from the exterior, be as close to the pool as we can. I just wanted to know if we could see it, like, if there were some gap in the shrubbery that would allow us, like, a glimpse of the building in real life. It was a noble idea. There wasn't. There wasn't. It sounds nice, though. There's a nice bird's chirping. Oh, yeah. On the other side of the wall, I'm sure life's great. People are swimming. (laughs) Singing out. What did he just hear? Something yellow. The birds actually can't involve. (laughs) So that was a tip number one, which was in May. And honestly, I personally left feeling not that disheartened because I knew I was going to be back in London because I had a friend getting married there in August. And so I knew I'd have another shot. And I also August happens to be a month that Buckingham Palace is open to tourists. And so I booked not one, but two palace tours while I was going to be over there. Welcome to Buckingham Palace. Please pay attention whilst we give you some useful information so you can make the most of your visit. And I show back up my second time at Buckingham Palace in just two months. And the first tour I had booked was the actual inside of the palace because much of the interiors that they'll show to visitors. And so I walk up the side entrance and I go through what's pretty much airport style security. Before you pass through our airport style security, please move anything metal or electronic from your pockets. There's metal detectors, there's back screeners, there's an announcement that no photos will be allowed inside the palace. But I put my iPhone in the front pocket of my shirt so I can talk to myself and take notes as I'm walking through the palace, like audio diary style. And so I enter the palace. I walk down what's actually kind of like a dingy hallway that's poorly lit that pretty quickly opens up into the fancy part of the palace. Okay, we are officially inside the palace. It's very quiet in here. And the first thing I see is the inner courtyard, which is the first time you get a sense of just how massive this place is. I think it's something like a football field in both length and width. Yeah. And so you get stuff out along from there into what they call the Grand Hall, which is exactly what it sounds like. The tour, more or less, precedes you would expect. I mean, you're going through the state rooms, which are the fancy rooms that have historically been open to the public. And they're all filled with like impossibly expensive looking decor. A lot of gold. A lot of gold. And maybe the coolest grandfather clock I've ever seen. Honestly, I had the feeling like I was walking inside of Ashley Hicks' book. It was funny. As you're describing it, it was like, this is exactly my mental image of it. And then I remember like, yes, you have a mental image because you've selected photos of this. Did you feel like had you walked past Hallway with like a little velvet stanchion in front of it? Had that hallway had a door with the word pool on it? You would have been tempted to just book. I definitely thought on multiple occasions, like I think I can outrun some of these guys. There were like secret looking doorways off to the side. I was curious where some of these things went. I think that they mostly just lead to servant corridors where food and other items get ferried through the palace that visitors can't see. So I'm kind of like shuffling somewhat quickly through this first tour because the second tour is in the back gardens. And the back gardens is where the building that we're interested in sits. Like the back of the palace is where this woman pool is. So then I show up to like the sign that says this is where the second tour starts. And I'm about to start the garden tour with it. You won't believe it happens to start off directly in front of the swimming pool. Seriously? So can you like see through the windows? I was standing on the steps. Obviously I'm walking directly up to it to try to look in. But it's very opaque to way glass. Like my assumption is you're inside the pool and you can look out on the beautiful back gardens of Buckingham Palace. But from the outside you can not see anything. Like the panes just look like ink stained squares of glass. Which was honestly so tantalizing. Like a quarter inch of glass is what was separating me from the answer to this question that I had been seeing you off for a month. So frustrating. It was so frustrating. And to make matters worse, we start the second tour and the tour guide who's like this kindly British woman from Essex with long gray hair in the first thing she says is, if you look to your right, there's the indoor swimming pool. I've actually swam in it. What? The new king has actually turned down the temperature a few degrees. So I'm swimming in at less, but there's the pool house right there. And so for the rest of this 90 minute tour, I'm thinking the whole time please say more about the swimming pool. Please say more about the swimming pool. But instead she's pointing out like the rare shrubbery that they have lining the gardens and she's pointing to the rose garden and the marmalade plants and the tennis courts, which are actually kind of cool, if a little dingier than I would have expected. And at the end of the tour, I'm kind of trying to play a cool, but I go up to her and I ask, like, hey, you mentioned that you had swam in the Buckingham Palace swimming pool? Yeah. Like, I'm so curious. What's it like in there? And she tells me, it's just a normal swimming pool. Four of us have to swim in it at the same time in case there were any accidents. There's a squash cord in there as well. And immediately gets drowned out by like hordes of other people on the tour asking her questions about the rose garden and marmalade plants. And that's the only information I get from her. We'd four of us have to swim in at the same time. I mean, in case there's accidents. - I don't have any like decoder ring to interpret these words. These are just the precious few words that I gleaned from this like wealth of information before she was cut off from me forever. - Okay. - So what we had here was like, I mean, as you said, the mission was to bring this swimming pool like one more mode into the light of public view. I feel like we'd done that. And so I talked to Shruti and we were like, yeah, I think we have enough to answer the question. I think we know enough to answer Chris's specific question. It's just a normal swimming pool, like not some fancy marble swimming pool. But at this point, we still didn't know why it was a secret. - Yeah, the world we understand it is fundamentally unknowable, but you want to think that like, some things could be known. - So I went back to LinkedIn. - Okay. - In this time, instead of just searching for the keywords, Buckingham Palace in swimming pool, I search for the keywords Buckingham Palace and podcast. - What? - And it turns out there's one former employee of Buckingham Palace who also has a podcast. - Of course. Oh my God, of course. - The thing that is wrong with the world, which is that there's too many podcasts, is also the thing that's right with the world, which is that if you have a question, you can find someone who likes to answer questions into a microphone. - Of course, to suspect we were looking for the whole time was another podcast. - The word is kind of criminal, there is. - So we're going to talk to you in the bar. (upbeat music) - Chapter seven, secrets of the palace. - Hello. - Hi PJ, how are you? - I'm good, how are you? - Doing very well. - I've never done anything like this before, but it's so exciting. - I am excited to be talking to you. It's been a long journey to get here. - I hear there's a lot that goes into these episodes, but sounds like you go really deep on really niche topics, I had to look at some and listen to a few, since Garrett messaged me, so yeah. - Yeah, I mean, you are the person at the bottom of our rabbit hole, that's right. (laughing) - That's easy if you provide me to be honest. - This is Rithik Karia, host of the podcast, Football for Sale, which is actually a remote sore car, and also a former employee of the Royal household. - What did you think about the palace before you worked there? - I think you have a really weird relationship with it, growing up in the UK, you sort of see it as this place, it's shrouded in a lot of mystery, and most of the time you see it, it's just on the TV when the royals are coming in and out of it. I don't think a lot of British people actually do go inside of it, 'cause you sort of just walk by it and you're like, "Oh, that's just there." And when I got the job, I was actually, that was the first time I'd ever been inside, and then as soon as you go inside, you're like, "This place is insane." - And how did you end up working there? - It was during my first year of university, and my dad said you need to get a job over the summer, because university holidays are much longer than school holidays, so he was like, "You need to get a job. You're 19 years old, do something with your life." So I was like, "Okay." Well, literally went on Google search, summer jobs in London, and it was the first thing that came up, and it was the last day of applications. And so I just-- - Really? - Yeah, literally just said, "Retail assistant, Buckingham Palace." And I was like, "Okay, sure." And so I just put it in an application, actually went to the palace for my interview, and then got a call a couple of days later saying, "Yeah, we want you to come and work here." - So in July of 2019, Rithik showed up for the first day of his royal summer gig. - And so what was your official title once you began? - It's not glamorous. It was just retail assistant, when Buckingham Palace opens in the summer for guests, they have a shop, like a temporary pop-up shop. I say temporary, it's a massive structure that they put in the garden, but only for those three months. And you go and work in this shop in the garden for three months, sort of just like as a retail assistant, but like quasi-tool guide as well, because people still obviously see you do get a bit of background and people still want to talk to you about it when they're in the shop. - And did it feel like, you know, you just tried the title as "Unglamerous." I've worked in retail jobs before it, and I didn't find it too exciting. Did you feel more like, I'm working a retail job at Buckingham Palace, which is like, I'm working a retail job at Buckingham Palace. Like did the specialness at the palace permeate your days? - I think you don't see it until you do something else. So that was the first job I'd ever had. And then I went and worked the year later at my local Tesco's, which is like your super market. - Yeah, super market. And I was doing like fruit and veg, so I was doing food stuff. And at that point, I was thinking, I was like, a year ago I was working in Buckingham Palace and then it hits you and you're like, wow, I got 11 of access to this place that most people in their lifetime will never get. It's also the thing I can hold over my family members a lot, which is quite fun. (laughing) - And when you started working there like, did anyone ever give you like a talk about secrecy and privacy? Like what you were allowed to say about what you saw and what you weren't or like what questions you should answer and what you shouldn't? - Yeah, so there was a lot of about that, right? 'Cause obviously you're working for this institution that a lot of people wouldn't know about. So obviously I'm not gonna sit here and give you like a walk through of exactly how many steps it takes to get from one place to one place. And exactly what doors that you have to go through to go from one place to another place. Obviously I can't do that. I think also a lot of it was about like journalism and the media 'cause the entrance we going in out of was obviously known as being the entrance that people who work there will go out of and they said, like people will see, people will know that you worked there and they don't care what you do or the fact that you just work in the shop. But don't answer questions. Like if people wanna come and ask you about stuff, go and talk to us. As you may know with the royal family, there's always a story about them in the papers. So for example, when I was working there, there was one particular scandal that was going on at the time which I will let you figure out which one it was because it was quite a big one that I think people still talk about today, involved a man from your homeland. - And what time period was this? - This was 2019. - Okay. - And you're talking to the most royals dumb person, perhaps in North America. But there was an ongoing scandal that everybody but me knows about. - Yeah, there was an ongoing scandal about a man in America who owned an island and one of the particular British royals. - Oh, a man who owned an island, okay, I do know that way. - Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. - In case you were as slow as I am, this was a scandal that involved a man whose name rhymes with F.R.E. Jeppstein. So we got a big talking to you about if anyone, even if they are just seemingly a customer in the shop, says anything about that, you do not say a word. - You're like one of the guards with their fuzzy hats. - Yeah, you could do that but you just be like nothing and you just move on. Because what people will do is they will say a royal spokesperson said this. - So if you, 19 years old, working in something out of Google, if you were being discreet and I were buying a royal tea set and I asked you and you were like, "I don't know, it sounds pretty messed up though." Then if I worked for a British tabulate, the next day I would say royal spokesperson says, "Scandal, pretty messed up." - Yeah, that's the risk that you're playing with. - It made the sense that even an employee as junior, as Rhythmic had been media-trained because after all, there was treasure hidden in the palace. Information, valuable information that could be pillaged by traitorous butlers, raiders who left the palace with novel facts about the royal's private lives, an easy way to make a living, hence these roles. But Rhythmic was willing to talk to us, not for money, not for gossip, but because, frankly, he'd sussed us out and he could tell we legitimately had zero interest in the royals or in their private lives. That we had only ever really wanted to know about one thing. - What can you tell me about the swimming pool about getting out of the palace? - The actual guy's shit. - Yes. - And so, yeah, it's weird. Like, there is one. (all laughing) Like, I think that's the main thing. You wouldn't have thought about it. Oh, I've thought about it. Have you seen it? I have seen it. You've seen it with your own eyes. - Yeah, well, yeah. 'Cause generally when people work in government or in those kind of positions is, 'cause you work in such secure sites, a lot of the facilities you need are on-site. So, it makes sense that the people who work they get access to the swimming pool in a gym. So, you don't have to leave the site to go and do it. And it's, I think whoever put this question in may not like the site, 'cause it's just a swimming pool. Like, it's a tiled surface with the swimming pool in the middle of it, with changing rooms and a gym attached to it in a building. (upbeat music) It took a moment to sink in that the Parthenon with Windows building where we'd imagined a spacious swimming pool, surrounded by space and light and generously poured poolside negronies, we'd imagine that as a royal pool, that sometimes the family allowed their staff to swim in. Rhythmic was saying, no, this is the staff pool and the attached staff gym with amenities like what you'd find at your local YMCA. That is what was hidden behind the impenetrable dark of us. - Would you say just a swimming pool? Like, I open the door. - Yeah. - I walk in. - Yeah. - Just like, what do I see? - You are at your local gym with the swimming pool. - And are people swimming like on a day where you walk in or they're just like, there's, so you're saying, yeah, people work about campus. They're just swimming in the pool. - Yeah, if you wanted to see, yeah. - Did you swim in the pool? No, I didn't join the gym because I wasn't living close enough to the palace to make it make sense. But you could have. I could have. Yeah, yeah. That was why we went in there because they were like, oh, you can join this gym if you want to. But yeah, I could have done. And is there a diving board? No. Diving boards are very American. There isn't like diving boards are American. We fought a war for diving board. You know, there's like little like springy dot, you don't want to let this springy diving board. Yeah, yeah. Like, yeah, we don't have them. I'd heard the rumor. There's a squash court in the house with the pool, which would make sense because of the gym. Is that true? Yeah. Yeah. And what? Tell me about the gym. It's just, again, it's just pretty, it's a government funded gym. It's just the basics that you need in the gym. It's got your machines. It's got your free weights. It's got your treadmills and other cardio sort of machines and like, it's not like this is the leg machine from like King, whatever the fourth. And it was liberated in this war. It's like that part of the palace breaks the rules of everything is Buckingham Palace in Buckingham Palace. Yes. Our research found that apparently in 1970, Buckingham Palace was registered as a grade one building. A designation meant to preserve buildings of quote, exceptional architectural historical or national significance. The provision would, among other things, prevent some future mad king from tearing out Buckingham's printing columns to make room for a jacuzzi or a nice flat screen. Everything had to be kept more or less as it was, including the swimming pool, which was not very old or beautiful. After the Nazis bombed it, it'd been rebuilt sometime in the 1950s. And in 1970, when the grade one listing was issued, it froze in time, an unremarkable municipal swimming pool with an attached gym. But if you wanted a fancy gym, I'd go down to the equinox or something. Yeah, we have equinox here. Yeah. If you wanted a fancy gym, go there. So many of my friend who's so curious of this pool, he has a pool in his apartment building which I've seen. His pool is probably better than the Buckingham Palace pool. Is it New York, right? Yeah. New York. Like a nice New York apartment building. Yeah. New York. He's probably got a nicer pool than the Buckingham Palace pool. Yeah. The invisible wall had fallen. We could finally see what was on the other side. Most human beings began asking questions at around two years old. But as adults, we learned to be more judicious in our question asking. We learned, for instance, that if we ask a question and get silence in return, we may have crossed the line and that we should consider retreat. Our ginger had spent months asking a simple question and it had to fight and weedle to get this simple answer. And I still wanted to know the five year old's lament. Why? Why was it like that? But wait, okay, here's my last question for you. I still feel like one thing I do not entirely understand, but for many parts of Buckingham Palace are, you know, have been photographed, have been shared with the public in some way or another. I still don't get why if the pool at this point in its life is just like a staff pool that would look like the pool I would see at the YMCA, why do you think it's shrouded in as much secrecy as it is? Like there are no pictures of it online. So there's very strict rules about pictures and people taking pictures. Like when I was inside the palace, you're not allowed to take a picture, you're not allowed to send a snapshot to your mate, you're not allowed to record something funny that happens at lunch with your colleagues, you're not allowed to, like, pick up a FaceTime call. So that's probably the reason why I'd say, like I think part of it is like if there's no reason for there to be a picture of it, there isn't going to be one. And I don't think that there is a reason for there to be a picture of it. There was another thing, a less neutral, less polite reason we'd been blocked. And it had less to do with the question and more to do with who it was asking at. Okay, there's not really a nice answer here. And I will go back to my time in the palace. And it's like whenever the other Americans in the shop, I was sort of just like, no, not this again. Like it's just, it's just so much like talking, it's like sharp, like I don't care. Like, I think this is where it gets a bit like funny where you guys may not take this one. There is a level of like, you assume that they have a level of like superiority. I say mine's a confusing situation because I'm obviously, you know, ethnically not British. And you think you can probably tell, but like going up here, you still get that of like, oh, we left you. And do you know how many times I heard that on a daily basis, really, at the palace of America? Yeah. Oh, we left you and like, haha, like, oh, look at this tea. We threw it in the harbour and I'm like, I don't care. I honestly don't care. I was like, if I hadn't opened my mouth, you would have thought I was just an Indian guy. So now that you found out I'm British suddenly, you're going to talk to me about throwing tea in a harbour, mate. I don't honestly don't care. So I think that's probably where that comes from, especially around the royals, because I think the British are very protective of, even if you don't like them, a lot of British people are very protective about conversations of the royals should only occur between British people. So, this was the answer. Why had the pool been kept a secret from me? Perhaps because I was allowed American, and the legions of British people who we'd emailed, likely held in their hearts a prejudice about my ilk. They thought that we only asked questions about the royals, because we thought their royals were kind of dumb. Our national identity, after all, began with the idea that monarchy was stupid, that a taxpayer-funded palace might represent a civilization uninvolved. We might ask questions, but the Brits suspected we did not seek to understand. We were here to tease, maybe as a way of feeling better about the faults in our own system, with its nepotism, its corruption, its occasional January riot. America had broken up with England two and a half centuries ago. We had a country ever on, why were we still bothering them with our childish questions? I think your question was, it was a really interesting question, but I think you guys were maybe expecting this really extravagant answer, and it was going to be probably the most boring answer that you could have got to a question about what's the pool like? It's just a pool, mate. That's it for this week's show. If you enjoyed what you heard, if you enjoyed anything you've heard recent on our show, if we kept you company, if we gave you something to talk about at a dinner party, please consider signing up to be a paid member to support our work. You get a subscription at searchengine.show for our incognito mode here. You get ad free episodes, bonus episodes, and discounts on our upcoming new merchandise. Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ vote, and truthy, pinimany. This episode was produced by Garrett Graham, fact checking by Holly Patton, theme original composition and mixing by Armin Bizarreon, additional production support by Noah John and Sean Merchant. Our executive producer is Leo Reese Dennis, and thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gainer, Mark Currin, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hillary Schuff. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week with a brand new episode. [BLANK_AUDIO]