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

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00PJ Vogt?

  Welcome to Search Engine. I'm PJ Vogt. No question too big, no question too small. So this summer, as the Search Engine production team rests and recharges, we are playing you some of our favorite segments from our Vault, our premium feed, which we call incognito mode. These are just some of the extra interviews that we share with our paid subscribers for a mere $5 a month. What a steal. This week, we are sharing two segments. The first was extended reporting into illicit markets, an interview with a cocaine salesman. The second was a kind of game show we built to highlight the depths of my ignorance. Please enjoy.

• 0:46PJ Vogt?

  So in Search Engine's first year, I'd had this question that'd come up while I was doing some reporting about fentanyl. I was talking to a journalist named Ben Westhoff, and I'd wondered about something that had not made sense to me. Drug dealers were putting fentanyl into drugs like cocaine, but I didn't understand why the users of those drugs weren't noticing, because presumably, a stimulant like cocaine and an opiate like fentanyl offer very different highs. So I asked Ben about it. One of the things I find confusing about that is that like, my assumption is that a stimulant user, like a cocaine user, would notice, hey, this is like a different high. Like, why is it possible to cut it into drugs that are supposed to have very different reactions?

• 1:27Speaker 01

  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 cure that it's basically like, it's more like ecstasy, actually. It gives you this euphoric feeling, rather than this sort of like manic high, and that it lasts a long time. So that's the first thing. And the second thing is, I think that just users aren't really in a position to complain. And as long as they're getting high at all, I think most people probably are satisfied with their coke being cut with fentanyl.

• 2:09PJ Vogt?

  So Ben said essentially that the quality of illicit drugs in America is so bad, most of the time, users don't even know what they're supposed to be getting. Like, cocaine users in America might not even know what actual cocaine feels like. I found that idea very interesting, so I took it to another person, a drug dealer we're gonna call Nate. We ended up having a very frank conversation, me and this person who has been in the illicit drug market for a very long time. It felt like the kind of interview that deserved to stand on its own, and also potentially as a PSA for people who use drugs like cocaine or ketamine. Nate told me stories about his professional life, scenes from the complicated world of trying to figure out which drugs are safe to sell and which aren't.

• 2:54PJ Vogt?

  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?

• 3:07Speaker 02

  Hey.

• 3:08PJ Vogt?

  Hey, how's it going?

• 3:09Speaker 02

  Siri thinks your last name is pronounced Vaat.

• 3:12PJ Vogt?

  Honestly, that means Siri is doing at least as well as most human beings. Everybody's Vaat or Void.

• 3:18Speaker 02

  How's it pronounced?

• 3:20PJ Vogt?

  Vote. Vote. Like what you do in an election.

• 3:22Speaker 02

  Oh, that's great. That's a great last name.

• 3:25PJ Vogt?

  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 of fentanyl? Like, what is the story of fentanyl as it hit you from your perspective?

• 3:46Speaker 02

  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 these fentanyl strips. I didn't know exactly what it was. That was before it was so widespread and people were dying left and right.

• 4:08PJ Vogt?

  What year do you think this was?

• 4:09Speaker 02

  2019, maybe?

• 4:11PJ Vogt?

  Okay.

• 4:11Speaker 02

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

• 4:23PJ Vogt?

  Oh, wow. Nate says that now there are new fentanyl test strips, which work much better. They yield fewer false positives and are easier to use. You can find them at dance safe.org. But in the early days, when the test strips didn't work as well and people were very scared, Nate was fielding a lot of angry phone calls.

• 4:41Speaker 02

  I would get like two or three phone calls a week. I just tested your shit and it has fentanyl and it'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, it's not the kind of market that intersects. And if you go to dance safe.org, where they do mass spectrometer testing of all samples, you can just send a sample to these guys, and they're gonna tell you exactly proportionately what chemicals are in there.

• 5:14PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 5:15Speaker 02

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

• 5:23PJ Vogt?

  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 Safe's.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  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 were telling me there's fentanyl in this shit.

• 5:55PJ Vogt?

  Nate says even the fact that he is fielding calls from his customers and testing his drugs himself, that makes him unusual. He describes himself as a professional. He has a client list, he has regulars, he has a reputation to maintain. He says he'll even cut people off if he suspects they have a drug problem. But the problem, he says, with being an honest drug dealer, is that you're the last step on a distribution chain filled with people who might be much less honest.

• 6:22Speaker 02

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

• 6:55PJ Vogt?

  Quick primer on what it means to cook ketamine down. When drug dealers buy ketamine wholesale, they often buy it as a crystal. But when users consume it, it's usually bought as a powder. Nate and people like Nate turn ketamine crystals into ketamine powder by either crushing them or cooking them down. Normally. Except this one time that ketamine crystals, once they were cooked down, appeared to be something else. A rock-hard, stinking mass of god knows what. Nate had been ripped off. In a normal business, that would be a reason to ask for a refund from the supplier. Nate's not in a normal business. So here's what happened on the day he found himself staring down at his very expensive, very bad product.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  It's just complete adulterant. I don't even know what it is. There's some ketamine in there because it tested positive for ketamine, but it's a rock-solid mass. It's toxic. It's stinking. I put the pot in my kitchen for like six months, waiting to see if some chemical wizard could identify what it was cut with and if they could separate it. But no one ever could figure it out, and I ended up flushing it down the drain. I had absolutely no recourse to that guy who sold me that kilo.

• 8:08PJ Vogt?

  Right. There's no better business bureau you can go to either.

• 8:11Speaker 02

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

• 8:17PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  You know, those guys are killers. I mean, they're serious people. And my friend, I was like, can you just ask him? And she's like, okay. So she asked him, and he was like, no, no, no refunds. It's ketamine. That's it. And then tried, changes the number.

• 8:32PJ Vogt?

  Right. So you're in a position where you're out 30 grand. You eat the loss. Somebody else might not.

• 8:39Speaker 02

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

• 8:47PJ Vogt?

  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 gonna pull a trick like this because they don't care about customer service very much in a high-demand illegal industry. He says he imagines the typical drug dealer and thinks, this guy might have stolen something to buy these bad drugs, or maybe he used his last bit of money.

• 9:20Speaker 02

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

• 9:29PJ Vogt?

  I have friends who have bought bad drugs in the pre-fentanyl era. In high school, I saw people lose cash on some very expensive Pennsylvania suburb oregano. I remember a writer friend buying what turned out to be significantly overpriced baking soda from a stranger in a bar. It's not that the idea that illegal drugs might not be what they're supposed to be is some shock to me. But talking to Nate, a picture emerges of a drug world where almost everything is adulterated. And most users don't notice, because as long as what they're taking has an effect, they assume it's legitimate. A state of affairs that has probably always existed, but has become consequential now in the age of fentanyl. Nate told me he'd seen a study from a few years back on cocaine in London,

• 10:14PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  I sell the raw, you know? But what that means is I'm getting a brick, straight from Mexico, straight from the cartels. It's pure cocaine. But pure cocaine, I mean, what does that mean? When I test that shit, I find all sorts of stuff in there. There's amphetamines in there, there's mixers and fillers. There's all sorts of stuff in it, because by the time it gets into a little gram bag, it's been cut five or six or seven times. Like, there's this worming deagent.

• 10:58PJ Vogt?

  A worming deagent?

• 10:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's this chemical that's made for like the veterinary industry. If an animal's got a massive parasite infection, they'll run this shit through them, and it's so toxic. It kills the eggs of the parasites. It's really, really toxic. And somehow, by some crazy freak of chemistry...

• 11:20Speaker 02

  When you cook it down, it behaves exactly as pure cocaine does.

• 11:27PJ Vogt?

  Oh.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  When people are buying like huge amounts, like kilos and kilos, they cook it down to see what the purity is. And it looks like it's a lot purer than it is. Um, so that is in a lot of cocaine.

• 11:41PJ Vogt?

  Worming the agent for large animals.

• 11:44Speaker 02

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

• 11:53PJ Vogt?

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

• 11:57Speaker 02

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

• 12:01PJ Vogt?

  Oh, oh.

• 12:03Speaker 02

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

• 12:07PJ Vogt?

  Again, Nate is a cocaine dealer.

• 12:11Speaker 02

  Like if someone offers me coke at a party, even if it's someone who's like rich and I think is probably connected, I don't do it ever now.

• 12:19PJ Vogt?

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

• 12:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's disgusting.

• 12:27PJ Vogt?

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

• 12:40Speaker 02

  Don't do it.

• 12:42PJ Vogt?

  Really?

• 12:43Speaker 02

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

• 12:54PJ Vogt?

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

• 12:56Speaker 02

  No, I'm saying you said if they don't have a repu-, like.

• 12:59PJ Vogt?

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

• 13:04Speaker 02

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

• 13:15PJ Vogt?

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

• 13:22Speaker 02

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

• 13:34PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 13:46Speaker 02

  This is an ethical conversation that like not everyone involved in this is ethics higher consideration.

• 13:53PJ Vogt?

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

• 14:08Speaker 02

  In an eye of worlds, we all hold each other accountable, of course.

• 14:12PJ Vogt?

  And what do you mean when you say that?

• 14:14Speaker 02

  I mean, if someone sells you something, they have a responsibility to tell you exactly what it is and the quality and the price should be aligned with the quality. And if they're selling something really cheap to you and you're like, oh, wow, that's a really low price, um, then there's usually an explanation why.

• 14:36PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 14:37Speaker 02

  You know, I mean, I'm just not a good example here. What I'm doing is very, very rare, you know?

• 14:43PJ Vogt?

  You mean in terms of like quality control?

• 14:47Speaker 02

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

• 14:55PJ Vogt?

  Right, right.

• 14:57Speaker 02

  And that, that's happened once to me. Okay, 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. Um, and he approached me at 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.

• 15:33PJ Vogt?

  2CB. I'd heard of this drug before and had actually wondered about it a lot. I first read about it in a book by Alexander and Anne Shulgin, the people who introduced American psychologists to MDMA. Dr. Alexander Shulgin, in his life, legally synthesized hundreds of novel drug compounds, many psychedelic. The US government, for a while, left him alone to do his work. He tested the compounds on himself and lovingly described them in two somewhat famous books. In one, Fical, or Fenethylamine, I Have Known and Loved, Shulgin wrote of 2CB that it made music sound, quote, voluptuous, almost three-dimensional, end quote. It's a rare drug and in some quarters, highly sought after.

• 16:15Speaker 02

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

• 16:23PJ Vogt?

  Oh, interesting.

• 16:24Speaker 02

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

• 16:40PJ Vogt?

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

• 16:44Speaker 02

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

• 17:03PJ Vogt?

  Okay.

• 17:04Speaker 02

  And I was like, okay, I'll take it. So he brings it over and I immediately said, it looks right. It looks like what it should look like. And I immediately send the sample away to this dance safety. But I'm just going on this guy's word. And it, 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 Tuzin Bean. Um, my other girlfriend had an amazing time. The third guy ended up tripping for like two and a half days.

• 17:48PJ Vogt?

  Oh, my God.

• 17:49Speaker 02

  He's just like, I want to stop and like, I'm not, this is terrible. Um, and we were like, oh, I guess you took too much. I'm not sure what happened. Um, I put it on the menu because I had done it. And I was like, this is good vibes. But I had done a very, very small amount of it. And after I sold like four or five brands to people for a lot of money, um, I started getting calls quickly. What the fuck, man? I've been tripping for three days. Uh, this is a nightmare. We wanted to stop.

• 18:26PJ Vogt?

  Jesus.

• 18:27Speaker 02

  It's really dark. I was like, huh? But by the second call, I was, I took it off the menu.

• 18:33PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 18:35Speaker 02

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

• 18:49PJ Vogt?

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

• 18:53Speaker 02

  Really potent and there's no control.

• 18:57PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 19:42PJ Vogt?

  In his K2 haze, he thought the computers were magical mushrooms he had to collect, like in a video game. Nate takes people selling each other bad drugs surprisingly personally. But he also said in his time as a dealer, it has been rare. There was the ketamine that wasn't during quarantine. There was the 2CB that was actually K2. But he says that's it. Although for me, the idea that even something I'd been told was weed could send me to a school with medieval weaponry, that story is more bracing than any DARE program I've ever participated in. It really makes you not ever want to do illegal drugs. Really, it's just like, oh my God, the downside risk is so high.

• 20:25Speaker 02

  I mean, that's, that's only two times it's happened in my entire whole, um, thing here. And I, you know, I'm doing a lot of stuff.

• 20:34PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 20:34Speaker 02

  So, and it only once was it someone in my community. Um, but that still pissed me off.

• 20:41PJ Vogt?

  Of course, these two particular horror stories, well, not enviable, pale in comparison to the idea of someone taking cocaine and dying because it's been cut with fentanyl. When it comes to fentanyl adulteration, Nate says he hears from customers who are worried about it, but he does not counter it in the drugs he gets from his suppliers. According to Nate, like so many experiences in America, whether a recreational drug user should expect to die from fentanyl poisoning or not might be a somewhat class-stratified experience. While Nate has friends in the scene who he believes have died from fentanyl poisoning, he thinks broadly what's happening is that people are getting bad drugs from bad street dealers. And just to make sure I have your zoomed out view on it,

• 21:24PJ Vogt?

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

• 21:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it's, it's happening at the lowest levels by like desperate people who don't have any ethics, but, um.

• 21:53Speaker 02

  Do you realize that most drug dealers don't even have like customers? It's like they probably sell to a different person every day. They, I don't think they have a lot of repeat customers. Yeah.

• 22:05PJ Vogt?

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

• 22:15Speaker 02

  You go to a corner and you don't know who's going to show up, but whoever has something is hanging around that corner. And then there's like battles between those guys. They're like, this is my corner, but like the people don't like, I don't think they stay on the same corner forever. And like, that sounds like a probably a bad idea if you're selling heroin and fentanyl.

• 22:37PJ Vogt?

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

• 23:03Speaker 02

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

• 23:11PJ Vogt?

  But what I hear you saying is like, a lot of the people in that economy are just operating at a level of desperation that makes it like, if you compare it to a normal American economy, that, that'll explain a lot.

• 23:24Speaker 02

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

• 23:46PJ Vogt?

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

• 23:49Speaker 02

  Right. Right. Like, is this coming from this lower house floor or what? We already know what's allowed.

• 23:55PJ Vogt?

  And where it was illegal to be caught holding a hamburger. So you couldn't ask anybody for help on like what you had actually just eaten.

• 24:01Speaker 02

  Right. Exactly. Right. Something you didn't know, there was no ingredients. You're just like, can I have that protein thing right there? Because it makes me feel good because my stomach needs it. And they're like, okay, yeah, I got this protein thing for you, but I got this really nice protein thing for you over here. You should try this one over here.

• 24:23PJ Vogt?

  Just don't test it.

• 24:25Speaker 02

  Just don't test it.

• 24:26PJ Vogt?

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

• 24:29Speaker 02

  You go, and you go.

• 24:33PJ Vogt?

  Now that we've revved up your energies with this cocaine segment, we're going somewhere new. After these ads, a kind of live game show we held on the internet this year.

• 24:51PJ Vogt?

  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, Calvi Sanai, live on air. I thought it'd be fun to take a break from our normal approach where we take one little question and research the hell out of it. And instead just get Gatling gunned with a bunch of unanswerable questions without access to research or the search engine team. For me, it was really enjoyable. I'll let you be the judge. So I'm going to play the segment. The first voices you'll hear are search engine senior producer Garrett Graham and writer Calvi Sanai. So what are we doing today?

• 25:31Speaker 03

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

• 25:38PJ Vogt?

  Yeah, high dozens, low hundred.

• 25:39Speaker 03

  High dozens, low hundreds, in the effort to stump PJ and, okay, if I may say, in the effort to stump you as well, that they may not have known that they were going to be stumping you as well. So we're going to pull what is essentially a random assortment. There's been some light curation involved, but a random assortment of some of those questions that came in. And this is a little bit just like pulling questions out of a hat.

• 26:03Speaker 04

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

• 26:06Speaker 03

  This is, this is very much like when we did it on stage.

• 26:09Speaker 04

  And you had a, was it a literal hat? I can't remember.

• 26:11Speaker 03

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

• 26:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, sure.

• 26:15Speaker 03

  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?

• 26:28PJ Vogt?

  Oh. Oh. How long does it take for grave robbing to become archaeology? Because if I were to dig up someone buried at a local cemetery, that would be a crime. But if I were to dig up an ancient person, that would be celebrated socially. That's the question.

• 26:47Speaker 03

  I, that's the premise as I understand it.

• 26:50Speaker 04

  I mean, I would, I would want to do what I would always do, which is reject the premise.

• 26:56Speaker 04

  Like, is it ever celebrated socially to dig up a grave in this day and age? Aren't there big repatriation debates, roiling museums?

• 27:06PJ Vogt?

  Well, I would say definitely there was a brief period of time where like the guy who found, what was the ancient Greek city? It wasn't Troy, but who was that guy? We read about him in fifth grade, Mr. Worth. Like, there was a moment where we celebrated archaeologists. You had Indiana Jones, prominent fictional archaeologist. 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.

• 27:43Speaker 04

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

• 27:46PJ Vogt?

  Why driver's licenses?

• 27:48Speaker 04

  Well, there should be an option on the driver's license.

• 27:52PJ Vogt?

  Of whether or not your grave can be dug up by future historians?

• 27:55Speaker 04

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

• 28:02PJ Vogt?

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

• 28:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, maybe you do like a grace period, right? A hundred, maybe it's like copyright. It's like, oh, my last surviving relative who's alive when I am, plus 50 years or something.

• 28:16PJ Vogt?

  Wouldn't you just put it?

• 28:17Speaker 04

  And then have at it.

• 28:18PJ Vogt?

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

• 28:22Speaker 04

  I guess this depends on how much we want to incentivize people giving permission, right? If you have to carve it on your gravestone, there's going to be a very small number of skeletons available. But if it's an opt out situation, a Cass Sunstein nudge kind of a thing on your driver's license, then a lot of people will be like, oh, yeah, yeah, whatever, dig me up.

• 28:41PJ Vogt?

  I like this. I think we're imagining a future society that is very respectful of our corpses, which I like to try to imagine future societies is not worse than us. So I think that's good. I would also be very like, are you a, are you an organ donor?

• 28:54Speaker 04

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

• 28:57PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 29:07Speaker 04

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

• 29:10PJ Vogt?

  Oh, like a funny Halloween decoration on a front yard?

• 29:14Speaker 04

  Musical instrument.

• 29:16PJ Vogt?

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

• 29:22Speaker 04

  Turn your skull into a chalice?

• 29:24PJ Vogt?

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

• 29:31Speaker 04

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

• 29:43PJ Vogt?

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

• 30:28PJ Vogt?

  And now it's pushed even further in the other direction. And I would just want to sit down and try to understand like, how you could chart the social attitudes changing? Like, I don't think you would invent Indiana Jones today, but we don't feel so bad about it that you can't make many, many, many more Indiana Jones movies, maybe which should be made for other reasons.

• 30:47Speaker 04

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

• 30:53PJ Vogt?

  I didn't see the most recent, the Phoebe Waller Bridge one?

• 30:55Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 30:57PJ Vogt?

  I don't know if Indiana Jones has become more thoughtful about his relationship. I mean, usually they also kind of cheat it where the Nazis are racing for whatever he wants, which at that point, it's kind of like, it unbalances the scales morally.

• 31:10Speaker 04

  But like, what are 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?

• 31:25PJ Vogt?

  I think what I would be asking Garrett to look for is like, you do, like, what's, what is, what is kind of, what feels alive about the question is I do think they're charting a real change. And I would want to find somebody who got caught at the moment of the change happening. Like, like the ideal story you'd almost be casting for is the person who came out of like, you know, their dig where they'd found an ancient pyramid expecting garlands and applause and found, in fact, that they'd stepped into different cultural mores. Like, that's kind of what you'd want. And you just want to, you'd be looking for someone, this is the category of question that is philosophical and not, the reason this is a good unanswerable question is because there's literally no answer.

• 32:08PJ Vogt?

  And so you'd just be trying to figure out like, who is the thoughtful person that you can land this conversation with? Okay, there's a very good chance that you would have known in this episode.

• 32:18Speaker 03

  Do you consider yourself stumped by this question then, PJ?

• 32:21PJ Vogt?

  I do not think that there's going to be a single question today that I don't feel stumped by, and I consider myself stumped by this question.

• 32:27Speaker 04

  But as a, as a listener, this doesn't sound like a question that is out of the realm of possibility for being the version, the basis of a show.

• 32:34PJ Vogt?

  No, it's not outside of the realm of possibility. It's also the other thing I sometimes think about is like,

• 32:41PJ Vogt?

  One of the outrages that I'm capable of feeling, but I don't know how to think about more thoughtfully is the question of just burial grounds. Like, I would like someone to be able to tell me, and I would not want to be the person answering this, but like, my assumption is if you just think about how many people have died, I assume almost everything is a burial ground. Like, it might not be a burial ground in the last 100 years, but just that we are constantly walking on the dead. And I would just like to have a story that lives inside that feeling for a little bit.

• 33:09Speaker 04

  But what you did, didn't you do a cemetery show?

• 33:12PJ Vogt?

  We did a what happens when the cemetery goes out of business, which was like, in my opinion, a perfect question for most, because it's a question where you hear it and you're like, what does happen when a cemetery goes out of business? And you realize that maybe the reason the question has never occurred to you is because a part of your mind that doesn't want to think about death or what's after death has actually, like, put a curtain over your own curiosity.

• 33:33Speaker 04

  And you mentioned one of the oldest cemeteries in America.

• 33:36PJ Vogt?

  Yes.

• 33:37Speaker 04

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

• 33:41PJ Vogt?

  Have you visited?

• 33:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:43PJ Vogt?

  I don't know.

• 33:44Speaker 04

  I know, I know. Some people's lives are complicated. You're right. Yes, I have visited. My, uh, 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?

• 34:02PJ Vogt?

  And you decided the cool historic cemetery?

• 34:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:04PJ Vogt?

  How did you decide?

• 34:05Speaker 04

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

• 34:17PJ Vogt?

  It's really nice.

• 34:18Speaker 03

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

• 34:22Speaker 04

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

• 34:25Speaker 03

  I'm gonna keep us moving along here. Let's get some more questions out of the hat. So, uh, we have the next one comes from, let's see here, I think, hmm, we're gonna go with this question from Matthew. And the question is, two of my favorite people have names that society is turning into insults. Similarly to the dick to penis semantic change, Karen and to a lesser extent Chad are becoming derogatory terms for awful people. So the question is, how do we stop this? My friend and coworker Karen is one of the best and most experienced pediatric nurses in our rural county. Her experience, instinct and wisdom guides us daily in preventing so much patient suffering. After a lifetime of service, she should be spared this unfortunate name creep. How do we advocate and stop this without

• 35:06Speaker 03

  being a scolding, virtue signaling, wet blanket? What would the Karens and Chad's of America like us to do?

• 35:12PJ Vogt?

  Oh, that's a good question.

• 35:14Speaker 04

  Are you thinking what I'm thinking, PJ?

• 35:15PJ Vogt?

  Uh, I don't know. What are you thinking?

• 35:18Speaker 04

  I thought Chad's were good.

• 35:19PJ Vogt?

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

• 35:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, who's like untroubled by life's difficulties and is a person of action.

• 35:32PJ Vogt?

  I guess it depends on what room you're in. But I think we could agree that Karen has definitely taken on like a profoundly negative inflection.

• 35:38Speaker 04

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

• 35:50PJ Vogt?

  Is that, is it American coded?

• 35:52Speaker 04

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

• 35:58PJ Vogt?

  Yes. I actually kind of have views on the Karen thing and kind of do have an idea. I mean, the person threw me at the very end when they said, oh, uh, without being a scolding, virtue signaling, wet blanket, 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, um, 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

• 36:43PJ Vogt?

  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, I like, it actually troubles me. I don't think you can convince people not to use a word that they like using without creating actual social stigma around the word. But I kind of think if you point out that we mostly try to avoid gendered insults, particularly towards women, Karen gets kind of harder to defend. That is like scoldy and wet blankety, but like, I've done that to 15 year olds. It hasn't worked, but I could imagine it working with an adult.

• 37:27Speaker 04

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

• 38:12Speaker 04

  are able to control, right? So like, there is a whole, you know, the insult discourse is a complicated discourse, because it, it implies that we're doing something mean or rude by definition.

• 38:23PJ Vogt?

  Right. And it's hard to clean up.

• 38:25Speaker 04

  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.

• 38:35PJ Vogt?

  Yeah. I think that's the other thing I really dislike about Karen is the idea that it's not just that, like, I, I really like when people call other people assholes. Like, I just think it's not, when, when someone tells me that someone else is an asshole, my brain does this thing where I'm like, all this person's really saying is that they have a conflict with somebody else. The person might be behaving badly. The person using the word might be behaving badly, but it doesn't, there's, if you could judge an insult as good or bad, I really like asshole. The problem with Karen is you're both saying, this woman is bad. And I'm good for noticing it. Like, there's, there's like a virtue signaling in the insult that I don't really appreciate. So I would say you have to make, you have to make Karen into a taboo if you wanted to go away. And I would say that I

• 39:20PJ Vogt?

  don't feel stumped by this one, because I feel like we're doing our part right now.

• 39:23Speaker 04

  I was about to say like, well, there's some things you can't control and you can't control, like if your name gets attached to a thing. But then I remembered that when I went to ninth grade, I told everyone to call me Kay instead of Califa, because kids in like, middle school were inventing their own versions of Califa, and it was cauliflower, and it was collie, and it was elephant, it was all sorts of stuff. Um, and then people called me Kay 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.

• 39:56PJ Vogt?

  Yeah. And I think you should call people what they want to be called. I think that's like one of the etiquette rules that we almost all agree on most of the time, sometimes. All right. That one, I feel like was answerable, sort of. Can we call that a, an unstumped one?

• 40:08Speaker 03

  We can call that unstumped, or maybe semi-stumped. I will say there's some pretty, uh, 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 besides.

• 40:26PJ Vogt?

  Oh, Isis is a particularly.

• 40:28Speaker 04

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

• 40:34PJ Vogt?

  Yeah, maybe you just have to wait these things out.

• 40:35Speaker 03

  Time heals all. Okay, next question. This feels maybe a little less designed to stump and a little more designed to insult PJ's understanding of physics, but the question is, how does a bicycle stay upright?

• 40:48PJ Vogt?

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

• 41:01Speaker 04

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

• 41:07PJ Vogt?

  Is that true?

• 41:08Speaker 04

  Centripetal force.

• 41:10PJ Vogt?

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

• 41:13Speaker 04

  Centripetal is the force that keeps you from flying off into the distance. Centrifugal force, I think scientists should correct me, is it feels like you're being pushed out, but you're not actually being pushed out from the center when you're spinning around. It's that something is preventing you, is like pulling you in, because otherwise you would go straight.

• 41:30PJ Vogt?

  So why do bicycles fall over?

• 41:32Speaker 04

  I think that's different. Doesn't that have more to do with like gyroscopes or something?

• 41:35PJ Vogt?

  Gyroscopes?

• 41:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, like how when something's spinning, it has more stability?

• 41:40PJ Vogt?

  God. No one's ever gonna listen to the search engine again.

• 41:44Speaker 04

  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.

• 42:01PJ Vogt?

  Anything that is science or math, uh, is a pretty good way to stump me. Besides like, uh, very basic arithmetic, which I can do decently well.

• 42:11Speaker 04

  Stop bragging.

• 42:12Speaker 03

  Okay, we're gonna move on to a question from Jim here, which is, uh, should you give money to homeless people? Or maybe phrased differently, is it better to give or not to give? Why? Please discuss.

• 42:24PJ Vogt?

  Oh, definitely, definitely you should give. And it's better to give. Um, I, I've been persuaded by my partner, just like, will keep large amounts of money in her pocket to give to homeless people whenever they ask. And I just think like, setting aside all the kind of like consequentialist questions or like blah, blah, blah, blah. If you don't, I feel like you end up in a world, living in a city like New York, where you just have to turn your mind off to lots and lots of suffering. And I just think that that is a bad way to engage with the world. I don't know that I'm like solving that suffering by handing over like, okay, bills when I see somebody, but like, the moral experience I have of living in the city is way better since I just started copying her.

• 43:05Speaker 04

  Well, this is, I mean, this is interesting, right? Because it suggests that, it suggests that the suffering itself, or your exposure, your intentional and conscious exposure to the suffering is good in and of itself.

• 43:19PJ Vogt?

  I think it is.

• 43:21Speaker 04

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

• 43:27PJ Vogt?

  I don't know that they're doing me a service. Why? Because they're reminding me that there's misery in the world and that is helping with my moral instructions.

• 43:34Speaker 04

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

• 43:41PJ Vogt?

  That is not.

• 43:45PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 43:54Speaker 04

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

• 44:00PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 44:01Speaker 04

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

• 44:06PJ Vogt?

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

• 44:48PJ Vogt?

  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'd be like, I don't think it would then mean I needed to think about people in another place necessarily. But for me, if I'm around it, I want to think about it, even though it's not like I'm volunteering or anything like that.

• 45:13Speaker 04

  Ordo amoris.

• 45:15PJ Vogt?

  What's that?

• 45:16Speaker 04

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

• 45:20PJ Vogt?

  Ordo amoris.

• 45:21Speaker 04

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

• 45:28PJ Vogt?

  Oh, wow. How was he?

• 45:32PJ Vogt?

  He was like, I need to find everyone in my circles.

• 45:35Speaker 04

  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.

• 46:01PJ Vogt?

  It's so funny because he's so, when I listen to him talk, I'm always like, I think he is very smart. And he applies his skill at making arguments to things that are so hard to defend. And so it's like, that's a really beautiful concept. I don't know what it has to do with like, anything that he's been supporting for this term.

• 46:23Speaker 04

  But I think this question that you were talking about, I think this is a central question that all of us wrestle with in different ways is like, what do we owe to people who are close to us, either in familial terms or like just geographically versus what we owe to people who are further from us?

• 46:39PJ Vogt?

  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 often decide what we're going to let in from far away. And I think we struggle with that. And it can mean like, people feeling vast amounts of pain about situations that they actually can't really control. I think it can mean people feeling vast amounts of rage about people that they don't need direct rage to. But I think not ignoring what's actually here seems like a pretty good start to a confusing moral problem.

• 47:04Speaker 04

  Can, can I make a small counterpoint?

• 47:06PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 47:06Speaker 04

  Which is that I think that one thing that happens that people that are the most, um, 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.

• 47:27PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 47:27Speaker 04

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

• 47:37PJ Vogt?

  Like what?

• 47:37Speaker 04

  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.

• 48:21PJ Vogt?

  Yeah, I think that's true. I think it's also like, I have had that impulse and I wonder if it's some unexamined part of me that's just like, it's hard to live in a city.

• 48:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:29PJ Vogt?

  Like it's hard to morally live in a city. Okay, what's the next one?

• 48:33Speaker 03

  That was nice. Uh, we're going to take a turn from somewhat serious to somewhat silly. This is a question from Adrian. Uh, the, the question reads PJ, you're going to hate this, my question. Assuming it was directly overhead, how many average sized, extra large chicken eggs would it take stacking one on top of the other to reach from the highest point on earth to the lowest point in the sea of tranquility on the moon? That's it. That's my question. This is like a consulting interview.

• 49:01Speaker 04

  It's a trick, it's a trick question.

• 49:03PJ Vogt?

  Why is it a trick question? Save me, Kay.

• 49:06Speaker 04

  Well, because everyone says Everest, but the highest point, you know, what you want to be talking about is Chimborazo in Ecuador, which is not the highest point above sea level, but it's the furthest from the center of the earth because of the equatorial bulge, right? Which adds like 27 miles. Um, and so it's actually a mile and change, maybe further from the earth's center than the top of Everest. But we're only talking about a mile or two, right? And then if you think about the sea of tranquility, mare tranquilitatis, I call it. It's like 500 miles in diameter, right? But like this podcast, it is not that deep. So I think, I think you'd want to ignore, I think the, the earth's highest point in the sea of tranquility, you'd want to ignore all of that, right?

• 49:47Speaker 04

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

• 50:18PJ Vogt?

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

• 50:25Speaker 04

  Just, just spitballing with no advanced knowledge whatsoever.

• 50:30PJ Vogt?

  Did you peek at the questions?

• 50:33Speaker 04

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

• 50:38PJ Vogt?

  Nice try, listener. Okay.

• 50:40Speaker 03

  That was truly terrifying. Uh, okay. Also, if folks have stumpers they want to throw in the chat, we might have time for a couple of live stumpers at the end. So throw them in the chat. Maybe I will call your name. You can come off mute and ask your stumper live. But let's move on to our hat full of questions here. Let's see. Um, let's see here. This is another kind of mathy one. And I feel like Kay is in a mathy mood right now.

• 51:07Speaker 04

  Oh, no.

• 51:07Speaker 03

  But out there, if we had a base 12 numbering system, how would the world be different?

• 51:14PJ Vogt?

  Like, so we would count in 12s instead of 10s?

• 51:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:19Speaker 04

  Well,

• 51:21Speaker 04

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

• 51:25PJ Vogt?

  That sounds great, honestly.

• 51:27Speaker 04

  And an extra toe, which would maybe affect us less.

• 51:32Speaker 04

  And so then I'm imagining, because I don't think the base would matter that much in terms of like our everyday math. We'd figure it out, right? We'd have two more numbers after, you know, between 10 and a, uh, between nine and 10, I guess, right?

• 51:46PJ Vogt?

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

• 51:49Speaker 04

  No, we still write 100, but it just is equivalent to 144 of something.

• 51:56PJ Vogt?

  I guess I can live in that world. I think that, I think the toes thing would bother me a little bit, but I could live in that world. I don't think feet need to be grosser than they currently are.

• 52:02Speaker 04

  But my question is, in that world, like, our hands are a little better, right? Like, so we're a little better at like manipulating objects, right? So music probably sounds different.

• 52:12PJ Vogt?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. You have more ying we malm steams.

• 52:14Speaker 04

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

• 52:20PJ Vogt?

  Solos get more elaborate.

• 52:23Speaker 04

  Yeah. And I wonder, I, I wonder if there are some downsides, right? Like evolutionary, like sometimes these evolutionary advances are kind of zero sum. So if more energy is going to growing that 11th and 12th finger, does something else evolve more slowly? Is there less, are there less calories available for something else?

• 52:41PJ Vogt?

  So maybe it's like where maybe IQ takes a hit and the human race is a little bit more slow processing, but we have more fingers to count on. Our music gets better. We're typing more. The internet would get worse.

• 52:56Speaker 04

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

• 53:03PJ Vogt?

  You can't give people the middle finger anymore.

• 53:05Speaker 04

  Exactly right. There's no middle finger.

• 53:08PJ Vogt?

  But you kind of like, it would be this. You'd like hold up your two middle finger.

• 53:13Speaker 04

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

• 53:16PJ Vogt?

  Yeah, it feels, it doesn't feel good.

• 53:18Speaker 04

  If you had two middle fingers. So yes, I think that, I think, I think hands would be the biggest difference in a base 12 world.

• 53:24PJ Vogt?

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

• 53:27Speaker 03

  That is a beautiful answer.

• 53:29PJ Vogt?

  Do we have time for one more, a couple more?

• 53:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, let's hit one more. I'm going to pull one more out of the hat here. Let's see, I think our final question is a somewhat, uh, yeah, this is, this is a good one. This is a chewy one. Humans don't need to eat meat to survive. What moral reason do we have to continue eating animals?

• 53:51PJ Vogt?

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

• 53:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 53:56PJ Vogt?

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

• 54:03Speaker 04

  I don't want to get too complicated in terms of philosophical concepts, PJ.

• 54:09Speaker 04

  Peer pressure.

• 54:11PJ Vogt?

  Peer pressure in both directions?

• 54:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think so. Like for, for me, it was like more of a cultural thing. It was about being part of a, like a punk rock community where everyone was vegan and also straight edge, right? In the hardcore punk world, vegan and straight edge often go together. You stop indulging, right? You stop eating meat, you stop or never start drinking alcohol.

• 54:29PJ Vogt?

  You only listen to power chords.

• 54:30Speaker 04

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

• 54:39PJ Vogt?

  Was like peer pressure was binding you? Did peer pressure push you out or is just the community dissolved or you left it?

• 54:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, I found myself like hanging out with different people and I found myself not wanting, not feeling as strong about wanting to be a kind of like an outlier. But also feeling like if I was living in like a vegetarian world or a more vegetarian world, I certainly would not be the one dude eating meat.

• 55:02PJ Vogt?

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

• 55:08Speaker 04

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

• 55:14PJ Vogt?

  It's the thing I, it's one of the things I do that most bothers me is like, I eat meat, I eat lots of meat. I can't, I, it's just like, if you really take the idea that other beings experience suffering seriously, like I can't come up with a good justification for doing it. I don't like that I do it and I do it. Like I don't judge other people doing it, but I really, it like, it's sort of like, if this is true, what else is true?

• 55:35Speaker 04

  Right, yeah.

• 55:36PJ Vogt?

  Question about myself that I don't like.

• 55:37Speaker 04

  Although some, if you, 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, you know, dairy products might give them more pause than meat, depending on how the animal lived and how it was killed.

• 55:54PJ Vogt?

  Yeah. And when you read about the ways those animals live, it's very, very unpleasant.

• 55:59Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 56:00PJ Vogt?

  I feel unsettled by it, but also weirdly, the way that I've handled it is I've decided if I'm going to eat meat, I'm like, really going to eat meat? And so I've started gravitating towards like meatier meat. Like I, 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.

• 56:25Speaker 04

  I feel like maybe, I feel like we used to live in a world where we were on closer terms with suffering and with blood and guts and all sorts of things. And I think that we have gotten, I'm going to use a word that sounds pejorative, but I don't mean it to be pejorative. I think we've gotten a little more squeamish and I think in a lot of ways, that's kind of a good thing. And that might be a place where eating habits haven't caught up with other parts of our lives, right? The, 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.

• 57:10Speaker 04

  So I, I think that, that there is some, like maybe some real dissonance there.

• 57:14PJ Vogt?

  Although it's actually surprising, when you think about how the internet has become much less moderated and so much more sort of disturbing and sensational images proliferate, you would almost think that the thing that organizations like PETA used to do, where they would just like show really terrible photos of real animals suffering, like you would almost expect to encounter that more on social media internet now. And I'm, I wonder if that will actually happen.

• 57:41Speaker 04

  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 Hasan Piker shocks his dog.

• 57:53PJ Vogt?

  Yes.

• 57:54Speaker 04

  Right?

• 57:55PJ Vogt?

  No, it's completely, yeah. But that video of like Hasan Piker, uh, the like streamer has this dog in the corner of his house where he's constantly streaming and like may or may not have been using a shock collar. He says it was a vibration collar, but the amount of either real or performed moral outrage I've seen around the possibility he's doing that, yeah, among, if somebody said, you're reincarnated tomorrow, do you want to live in a nice house where sometimes someone shocks you with a shock collar, but you're alive? Or do you want to grow up in like a slaughterhouse where you're quickly murdered? Most people would choose, so it's confusing. Our moral reasoning around animals is confusing.

• 58:34Speaker 04

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

• 58:41PJ Vogt?

  I honestly was thinking about, there are these like shock bracelets you can get that are supposed to, it's like, it's called like the Pavlok. And I was trying to figure out if it would help me focus and I was like, this is an insane way for a person to live, don't do this.

• 58:54Speaker 03

  Okay, that I think is all we have time for today. PJ, do you want to sign us off? Also, just before I hand it back over to-

• 59:01Speaker 04

  Wait, wait, wait, wait. PJ is going to sign off.

• 59:04Speaker 03

  The host of Search Engine-

• 59:05Speaker 04

  Oh my god.

• 59:08Speaker 03

  If you want to see more stumpers, throw an email to [email protected]. Or if you want to see other segments on, on incognito mode, let us know. But Kay, host of this show, over to you.

• 59:20Speaker 04

  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.

• 59:32PJ Vogt?

  Thank you.

• 59:33Speaker 03

  Thanks, guys.

• 59:35PJ Vogt?

  Thank you for listening to our episode. If you enjoyed anything you heard, please consider signing up for incognito mode. It is how we fund the show. It is the money we will use to make the next season for you, which begins very soon.

• 59:48PJ Vogt?

  You can find incognito mode at the link in our show notes or by heading to searchengine.show.

• 1:00:01PJ Vogt?

  Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. This is created by me, PJ Vote, and Shruti Pinnamaneni. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. Emily Multer is our associate producer. Our production intern is Piper Dumont. Theme, original composition and mixing by Armin Basarian. Additional production support on this episode from Noah John and Kim Kupel. Our executive producer is Leah Reese Dennis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Moira Curran, Josephina 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, [email protected]. Subject line, advertising. You can also send us questions there if you have a question for the show. As I said before, if you would like to delete every advertisement from every episode of

• 1:00:45PJ Vogt?

  Search Engine just for you and you alone, sign up for incognito mode, our paid feed, five bucks a month, 50 bucks a year if you sign up for the annual subscription. You can find it at searchengine.show. Thank you as always for listening.