Where did all the roaches go?

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Speaker 1 Where did all the roaches go? That's after some ads.

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Speaker 2 What's up?

Speaker 1 Hey, can you hear me okay?

Speaker 2 Yeah, you sound great.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 All right.

Speaker 1 So I'm going to just read the intro.

Speaker 1 So one of my favorite magazines in America is The Atlantic. It's one of the only places that consistently surprises me.
And one of my favorite reporters in America is Hannah Rosen.

Speaker 1 She always surprises me. This is true, Hannah.
She told some of my favorite stories on Invisibilia. She's now hosting The Atlantic's flagship show, Radio Atlantic.
It's a great podcast.

Speaker 1 However, recently Radio Atlantic did a story that infuriated the team at Search Engine, infuriated us because they did it. We wanted to have done it.

Speaker 1 And also, it felt search engine-y, not that we have like a copyright on surprise or delight, but we were surprised and delighted by the story in the way that we try to surprise and delight the people who hear our stories.

Speaker 1 We were very mad. And then we realized, oh, we just asked Hannah if she could do the story on Search Engine.

Speaker 3 We don't have to be furious.

Speaker 1 It's a story about cockroaches.

Speaker 2 oh

Speaker 2 i mean just because the words surprise and delight do they feel like words you're tired of hearing

Speaker 2 am i that kind of person yeah everybody i just walk around and everyone says you're so surprising and delightful no it's just that they're not words that you believe will be followed by the word cockroach oh i see it's like uh not the third ingredient in the game exactly people are expecting unicorn or starlight but not cockroach no this is a surprising delightful story about cockroaches.

Speaker 2 Exactly, exactly, exactly.

Speaker 1 Can you just tell me like literally for you, what was the origin of this story?

Speaker 2 I called up the slack because I, because I thought you might ask me that question. Yes.
So I get the slack message from one of our science editors and a friend of mine, Dan Engber.

Speaker 1 I'm a fan of Dan's.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he's great. He was on Radio Lab.
He writes great long magazine stories. He and I used to work together at Slate.
Do you want to hear the message?

Speaker 1 So this was just a slack that you guys were having one day in the office?

Speaker 2 Yes. Yes.
Okay. I'm just going to read you one sentence.
Dan writes, this is a piece of poetry. When I was a kid, we collected cockroaches and played with them.

Speaker 2 And I think he expected me to be just completely horrified, but instead I wrote back something like, me too,

Speaker 2 exclamation. So that's how it started.

Speaker 1 You guys were genuinely musing to each other. It wasn't like, hey, let me show you this article I already wrote.

Speaker 1 You guys were just making conversation over Slack, but he had a question that he wanted to investigate. And he wanted you to, he wanted the question to be contagious for you as well.

Speaker 2 Well, it's a little deeper than that.

Speaker 2 What's underneath his question is this feeling he had that he was deluded, which is a feeling that a lot of people who grew up like we did have. Like it couldn't possibly be true.

Speaker 2 Like we have these memories, but did it happen that way? You know? Yeah. So after I got this message from Dan, he wrote, I wonder if it might work for audio.
I was like, yes. The answer is yes.

Speaker 2 Please come to the studio. So he did.

Speaker 2 All right.

Speaker 2 So what are we even talking about?

Speaker 3 We're talking about cockroaches.

Speaker 2 Cool. Cool.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 a forgotten moment in the history of cockroaches or the history of American innovation, I guess. We're talking about the fact that cockroaches were everywhere and then they vanished.

Speaker 3 I actually lived through this myself. Like I was a child of the cockroach 80s.
I had cockroaches in my house all over the place too. And it's almost like hard to remember how pervasive they were.

Speaker 3 So I grew up in New York City.

Speaker 2 Where?

Speaker 3 In Morningside Heights.

Speaker 2 In an apartment. In an apartment.
Okay.

Speaker 3 So middle-class families in the 1980s in New York City had a lot of cockroaches, as I can say from personal experience. Just a number of cockroaches that I think is unimaginable to

Speaker 3 younger people, to my younger colleagues here at the Atlantic.

Speaker 2 Against my

Speaker 2 really like every fiber of my being, I'm going to say, paint me a picture.

Speaker 3 They'd be all over the place all the time, like in full view in day, in night. Certainly if you went into the kitchen at night and turned on the light, they would scatter.

Speaker 3 It wouldn't be like you'd see individual insects. You'd see like a wave pattern.
You and your brother, let's say, might be taking the Cheerios out of the cabinet.

Speaker 3 and open it up and pour into the bowl and cockroaches would come out with the Cheerios,

Speaker 4 which

Speaker 3 I think sounds really terrifying to today's New Yorker, but at the time it was just like time to get a new box of Cheerios.

Speaker 3 There's really this feeling that it was like

Speaker 3 a natural phenomenon, like an endless sense of being enveloped in roaches, like it was an atmosphere of roaches

Speaker 3 or an ocean.

Speaker 3 You're speechless.

Speaker 2 Actually, just to weigh in, I do 100% relate.

Speaker 2 I grew up in an apartment building in Queens and exactly your memory. Like the only difference is it was cornflakes and not Cheerias, but they were everywhere.
Although, you know, it's weird.

Speaker 2 I can't seem to remember if they freaked me out or not. Like, what, did they freak you out? Like, did you scream when you saw cockroaches or call for your mommy or like, what did you do?

Speaker 3 So I don't think we were that squeamish about them. In fact, I know we weren't squeamish because because the other thing I remember vividly was my brother and I would play with the cockroaches.

Speaker 3 We would use our wooden blocks and build like obstacle courses sort of and try to do cockroach Olympics.

Speaker 2 Did you actually touch them with your fingers?

Speaker 3 I mean, it's kind of hard to imagine that I didn't. There's sort of a dreamy quality to all this where I almost doubt my own memories.
And so.

Speaker 3 Just to do kind of a gut check, I wanted to call my brother. Okay.
First of all, did we have cockroaches in our apartment growing up?

Speaker 4 We had a lot of cockroaches in our apartment growing up. And I, being a little bit older than you, remember it extremely clearly.
But it still seems somewhat fantastical,

Speaker 4 the prevalence of cockroaches in our life.

Speaker 3 Okay, so first I asked him about the cereal.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 4 I loved rice krispies.

Speaker 4 And they used to have like a slightly over-toasted rice krispie that like a darker brown.

Speaker 3 Yeah, the occasional brown one.

Speaker 4 The brown one.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 4 I definitely remember a lot of arguments about whether something was a

Speaker 4 over-toasted rice krispie, a small over-toasted rice krispie, or a roach duty. And we would frequently have these arguments.

Speaker 2 He's like completely chill about the Roach Duty for breakfast situation.

Speaker 3 If only it was just the rice krispies, Hannah.

Speaker 4 We had these special medicine cups. They were sort of like plastic hollow spoons.

Speaker 4 And I remember one time mom poured the whatever it was, probably

Speaker 4 dim a tap or something like that, in and I saw something swimming in it.

Speaker 4 And I'm like, there's a roach in there. I swear there's a roach in there.
And then she held it up to the light and there was nothing in there.

Speaker 4 I didn't want to take it.

Speaker 4 Finally, she convinced me. I drank the whole thing.
I felt the roach crawling around all over my mouth.

Speaker 4 I fit it all into the sink.

Speaker 4 And she said, oh,

Speaker 3 there was a roach in it.

Speaker 4 Roaches were just everywhere in our lives. So if we were constantly like throwing out something just because a few roaches walked over it, we wouldn't have anything.

Speaker 3 So I just want to establish the context here.

Speaker 3 In the 1980s, it wasn't just that there were a lot of cockroaches in my apartment or yours or my brother's apartment or even in New York City.

Speaker 3 There were a lot of cockroaches everywhere.

Speaker 2 Everywhere in cities or everywhere, everywhere?

Speaker 3 I would say everywhere in cities, but it was like a national news story. There would be newspaper articles.
about cockroaches on a semi-regular basis.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 2 So cockroach is everywhere. cockroaches bad for your health.

Speaker 3 Cockroaches everywhere, cockroaches bad for your health, cockroaches in the nation's capital.

Speaker 5 Congress certainly has its hands full these days with the deficit, the MX, Central America, and now debugging.

Speaker 3 So this is an NBC nightly news story with Tom Brokoff from the spring of 1985, which is a very important moment in the history of cockroaches.

Speaker 5 It's very serious. The problem is, they're in our desks, they're under tables, they're everywhere.
Some members of Congress are trying trying valiantly to fight back.

Speaker 5 Congressman Al McCanlis has installed this black box. It exudes a sexy scent which attracts female roaches, which are then roasted by an electric grill.

Speaker 3 I mean, I think just in that short clip, you hear

Speaker 2 how...

Speaker 3 completely helpless we were to deal with the cockroach problem. We were trying everything.

Speaker 2 Yes, it does have a throw spaghetti at the wall. Like, this is the nation's capital, and we can't, we don't really have an answer, nor is anyone pretending to.

Speaker 2 It's just like, they tried this, they tried that.

Speaker 5 Congressman Silvio Conti, dressed to kill today, proclaimed a war on capital cockroaches.

Speaker 5 A company from his home district has donated 35,000 roach traps to the Capitol, but Conti said more help than that is needed. And I want to appeal to the President of the United States.

Speaker 5 I am certain that President Reagan wants to get rid of many troublesome cockroaches who run around the halls of Congress as possible.

Speaker 5 So please join me in this war on the capital cockroaches and squash one for the gipper.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 3 well, can I ask you, am I allowed to ask you?

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, of course, sure, yeah.

Speaker 3 So do you remember a change in the

Speaker 3 prevalence of cockroaches at some point in your life as a New Yorker?

Speaker 2 You know, it's so interesting you say that because I remember my childhood cockroaches just being part of the background and just something you had to deal with all the time.

Speaker 2 And my mom still lives in that apartment.

Speaker 2 And I remember coming back from college and I don't have an ⁇ I couldn't say an exact date, but it just wasn't in the part of the conversation anymore.

Speaker 2 We weren't constantly dealing with cockroaches. My mother wasn't talking about cockroaches.
It just wasn't a, like it just wasn't a thing anymore. Okay.

Speaker 3 So my premise here.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 3 And this, the memory that has sparked all of this, is that at a certain point, there was a new way to control cockroaches. The bombs were out.
Now we had combat roach traps. Do you remember those?

Speaker 2 Wait, you mean like that little plastic disc where the roaches go in and then they die or something? Like that's what this is about?

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 3 That is the amazing American invention that we have all forgotten.

Speaker 2 The thing that sits in aisle 13 on the top shelf. That's the amazing invention.

Speaker 3 The thing that should be sitting in a museum.

Speaker 3 The people who invented combat are American heroes. They did something.
I mean, you have to think about the fact that the cockroach was and is a symbol of indestructibility, right?

Speaker 3 This is the animal that's going to outlive. us after a nuclear war.

Speaker 3 This isn't, if you've ever seen WALL-E, it's a post-apocalyptic Earth. All that's left is a robot and a cockroach.

Speaker 3 It's the animal that cannot be killed. And then in the 1980s, we did it.

Speaker 3 I think it's fair to say we solved the problem. And I don't mean solved it completely and eliminated cockroaches forever, but really took a huge problem and made it much smaller.

Speaker 3 And that wasn't just true in my apartment, but across the country. In fact, I found evidence that that is exactly what happened.

Speaker 3 And so

Speaker 3 I just was fascinated by the question of who did that and what it means that we don't even really fully remember that it happened.

Speaker 3 Let me introduce you to a very important figure in the history of cockroaches who has a catchphrase. And his catchphrase is always bet on the roach.

Speaker 3 He's a member of the Pest Management Hall of Fame. Are you familiar with Pi Chi Omega? The fraternal organization dedicated to furthering the science of pest control.

Speaker 3 They have an annual scholarship called the Dr. Austin Frishman Scholarship.

Speaker 3 Hello. Hi, Dr.
Frishman. Speaking.
Hi, my name's Dan Angles. And so I'm a got him on the line, and he turns out to be sort of like

Speaker 3 a cockroach mystic, almost.

Speaker 2 What is that?

Speaker 3 Just any question you ask, you might get an answer like this.

Speaker 3 I want you to picture a landfill.

Speaker 3 It's snowing. It's about 28 degrees out.
Okay?

Speaker 3 And you're there with seven or eight men, and you're digging away at the snow because you're teaching them how to bait on a landfill.

Speaker 3 All right?

Speaker 3 And then out of the snow, in that cold, comes American roaches running up, bubbling up, five, ten, fifteen, sixty, a hundred, two hundred

Speaker 3 from the smoldering heat down below.

Speaker 2 I just love this man. He makes it seem like biblical.
So, okay, so where does this cockroach mystic, Dr. Frischman, fit into the story?

Speaker 3 So Frishman is in this story almost from the very start. In 1985 and in the lead up to 1985, Frishman had been hired by a company called American Cyanamid.

Speaker 3 And American Cyanamid researchers had had this product that they were selling for use in controlling fire ants.

Speaker 3 And the researchers were aware of the fact that this fire ant poison worked on cockroaches. And in fact, they used it in the lab to control cockroaches.

Speaker 2 Their own cockroach. Yes.

Speaker 3 Yeah. They put it in peanut butter and they put it around the lab just so they could continue to do their work on fire ants.

Speaker 3 But then the company was, you know, making this effort to try to figure out, well, can we repurpose some of our industrial products for consumer use and so forth?

Speaker 3 So you've got a hot new roach control product. Who do you call?

Speaker 3 Austin Frischman. And I said, well, this is going to be difficult and it may not work.
And the girl said to me, listen, do you want to do the project or not?

Speaker 6 I said, no, I'll do it, just so you know what we're up against.

Speaker 3 Okay, so everything we had up into that point. were these, you know, these insecticides that we've just been using for years.
And the roaches had just developed resistance to them.

Speaker 3 Even if you, you know, you killed 99% of them, the ones you didn't kill would have some mutation that protected them, or they'd have a thicker shell or something, a thicker exoskeleton, and they'd survive and reproduce.

Speaker 3 And now your insecticides weren't working anymore.

Speaker 2 Right. So they would just keep outsmarting us.

Speaker 3 Right. And so one of the things, this new product that made it different from the old ones was it wasn't just a spray that you'd put in the corners.
It was actually a bait.

Speaker 3 That little, the black disc had something in it that sort of like tasted like oatmeal cookie that roaches loved. And they would come in and get it and then take it out.

Speaker 7 We were filming the cockroaches and we found that only 25% of the cockroaches ate the bait, but 100% of the cockroaches would die.

Speaker 3 That's Philip Kaler. He's another cockroach expert.
And what he's talking about here is the fact that like this stuff would kill roaches that hadn't even eaten it.

Speaker 7 It was a slow-acting toxicant that allowed transfer to other members of the colony.

Speaker 3 They would regurgitate it or how does it get transferred?

Speaker 7 Well, there are several mechanisms of transfer. The main one would be that cockroaches will eat another cockroach's poop.

Speaker 7 It was actually after this work with combat baits that it became known that cockroaches actually feed poop to their young. And there are actually other methods of transfer of toxicant as well.

Speaker 7 There is, like you said, regurgitation, where they get sick and they regurgitate some and other cockroaches will come and feed on that vomit.

Speaker 7 There's also cannibalism, where

Speaker 7 a cockroach will attack another cockroach and eat it. And there's also

Speaker 7 necrophagy, where the cockroaches will eat the dead.

Speaker 2 Each method more charming than the next.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 3 Vomit, poop, or cannibalism.

Speaker 2 This seems exciting. No, I mean, if I were them, this would be really exciting.

Speaker 2 Like, I'm just imagining them, you know, like an Oppenheimer, sort of sitting in their lab, like figuring out every element of this.

Speaker 2 And how are we not going to, you know, how are we going to make it safe? How's it going to work? It's exciting. Yeah.

Speaker 3 They were on the verge of something big.

Speaker 6 We would run to the lab early in the morning to see the results from the night before or stay up after night and watch and we began to see you know what was happening in the beginning i was hesitant in the whole thing but as he began to do the work and i saw the results first in the lab

Speaker 6 it was a breakthrough okay

Speaker 3 so Frischman was among the first to take this breakthrough product, put it in a syringe, take it out of the lab and start using it in restaurants, diners, see if it worked. And I went into a small

Speaker 3 diner, a little luncheonette place,

Speaker 3 and a bunch of guys were sitting and eating sandwiches. And I was behind the counter, so I was down low.
And I

Speaker 3 had the bait, and I saw the roaches in a crack, and I just put a little tab.

Speaker 3 As I went to go do it, the roses started coming out, and they were

Speaker 3 gobbling. it up.

Speaker 3 You saw in real time them come to the bait.

Speaker 3 I was the first person in the world.

Speaker 6 I was shaking. Okay.

Speaker 6 I'm telling you, I was shaking. I still have that syringe, that original one.

Speaker 3 This is the moment.

Speaker 3 This is the brink of the relatively roach-free world that we live in today. Now we had the little black discs.
I would say

Speaker 3 two inches across or something.

Speaker 2 With an entrance?

Speaker 3 With an entrance. With an entrance and an exit.

Speaker 2 I had written a book called the Cockroach Combat Manual. So that's how it got its name.

Speaker 3 And Frischman is going to take this product on the road. People would write in

Speaker 3 horror stories and they won a prize, the product and me.

Speaker 3 And we would go into those places and knock out the population. So he takes this to Texas.
He takes this to Georgia. They do an event at the Museum of Natural History in New York City.

Speaker 3 They go to the Capitol. Remember the Tom Broca report? Those are combat traps.
Yeah. And then ads start appearing on television.

Speaker 8 Combat discs. Use roaches to kill roaches.

Speaker 9 I had roaches in my cereal.

Speaker 10 Put combat discs where roaches are, in places you wouldn't dare spray.

Speaker 3 Combat works.

Speaker 9 The roaches are not in my cereal. They're gone.

Speaker 8 Control roaches where they live. live.

Speaker 2 Combat.

Speaker 8 Because where they live is where they die.

Speaker 3 So this wasn't just a marketing campaign. I mean, the product really did work.

Speaker 2 What do you mean it worked?

Speaker 3 Well, cockroach numbers were going down.

Speaker 3 You can find signs everywhere.

Speaker 3 Actually, a guy I went to high school with wrote an article for the New York Times in 2004, and he reported that there had been a survey of federal buildings and their cockroach complaints between 1988 and 1999.

Speaker 3 So this is combat rollout era. And the number of complaints fell by 93%.

Speaker 3 Wow. I also found a 1991 story from the New York Times, again, right in that combat zone.

Speaker 3 And a New York City housing official is quoted as saying, there was a time when people were horrified at roaches running rampant. And now everybody keeps saying, where did they go to?

Speaker 2 So it's a thing. It's like an actual documented thing.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And yet it's not a huge moment. Like there aren't a lot of stories saying, yay us, we've conquered the cockroach problem.

Speaker 3 No, there are not.

Speaker 3 There are stories about combat success as a almost like a business case study.

Speaker 3 There are stories that remark upon the fact that there are fewer cockroaches than there used to be.

Speaker 2 But nothing that's like, this enormous giant urban problem has finally been solved by this ragtag crew of amazing scientists.

Speaker 3 Nothing of that nature. There's a reason why I had to introduce Austin Frishman to you as a member of the Pest Management Hall of Fame.

Speaker 3 And you weren't like, oh, you mean the guy in the back of the quarter?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 Right. But

Speaker 2 why?

Speaker 3 I mean, that is the question that has been keeping me up at night. And I have some ideas.

Speaker 2 Those ideas after the break.

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Speaker 2 Dan, you said you had some ideas about why this discovery didn't get the credit and hoopla that it deserved.

Speaker 3 So my brother had a good theory about this. I said, well, how come we just are family, why didn't we celebrate and like go out to dinner or something?

Speaker 3 The roaches are gone. And he said, well, it's because we just assumed they would come back.

Speaker 3 So I think it was. That must be part of it, right? That there was like, oh, this new thing works, but like, yeah, everything works the first time you do it.
Right.

Speaker 3 So there was never one moment where you realized that the world had changed.

Speaker 3 Or it could be that, you know, when things change for the better, we just have a tendency to just accept, you know, the new, better reality and pretend the old thing didn't happen.

Speaker 3 Like, hey, that's done. I'd rather not discuss it.

Speaker 2 Like, what's an example of that?

Speaker 3 Like, the Spanish flu, for example. There's a famous gap in art and literature about the Spanish flu.
There is not a great literature of this cataclysmic event in the 19 teens.

Speaker 3 You'd think there would be, but there isn't. Why not?

Speaker 2 Probably because it was traumatic.

Speaker 2 And actually, you know, I think that's similar to the experience with cockroaches because when, at least in my memory, when I was living with them, it wasn't just like kind of gross or annoying or an inconvenience.

Speaker 2 It's really unsettling. Like it lives as this constant undercurrent of anxiety and a sense that you just don't have control over things.
It's like a terrible feeling.

Speaker 3 Like a free-floating, pervasive anxiety hanging over you at all times.

Speaker 2 Yes. Yes.

Speaker 3 Can we talk about the Cold War for a second?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 So we were talking about how the cockroach was this symbol of indestructibility that would outlast us in the event of nuclear war.

Speaker 3 This was, I mean, the cockroach was in a way a symbol of the Cold War. Like the

Speaker 3 nuclear disarmament groups would put ads in the newspaper with just a picture of a cockroach to try to be like, wake up, America, we have to disarm now, or this is the future.

Speaker 2 So it all just got blended in our heads, like nuclear war anxiety, cockroach anxiety.

Speaker 5 Yes.

Speaker 3 And then those two anxieties were being unwound at almost exactly the same time. I mean, just to be frank, this is a highly tenuous theory, but I do want to line these things up.

Speaker 3 So, you know, 1985, the Tom Brokaw report, the combat is coming out, you know, spring of 1985, that's also when Mikhail Gorbachev comes to power.

Speaker 3 In fact.

Speaker 3 Silvio Conti, the congressman who on the steps of the Capitol is saying squash one for the Gipper,

Speaker 3 touting combat traps which are manufactured in in his district.

Speaker 3 Five days later, he's in Moscow for a historic meeting with Gorbachev at the Kremlin that is considered a watershed moment in the wind down of the Cold War.

Speaker 10 Gorbachev says at the present time, relationships are in an ice age. However, he said spring is a time of renewal.

Speaker 3 I'm just saying the guy wearing the exterminator outfit on the steps of the Capitol, touting combat, gave Ronald Reagan the advice to meet with Mikhail Gorbachev.

Speaker 2 Like

Speaker 2 in the span of a week?

Speaker 3 In less than a week. In less than a week,

Speaker 3 he was in Moscow. And you start to see combat traps are

Speaker 3 spreading through the country as Glasnost is spreading through the USSR.

Speaker 3 And in the years that follow,

Speaker 3 we have the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Speaker 3 Those are exactly the years when the cockroach populations are finally diminishing, when we're winning the war on cockroaches and we're winning the Cold War. It's happening concurrently.

Speaker 2 So what you're saying is our nuclear fears dissipate. Our cockroach fears dissipate.

Speaker 2 And what?

Speaker 3 What I'm saying is it was the cockroach that took over the imagination as this thing. So they made sense to stand in for nuclear fears.

Speaker 3 Going the other way, once we were free of that nuclear anxiety, we just sort of glided into a roach-free world.

Speaker 1 Okay, so Hannah.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 1 I guess what I hear Dan theorizing there is that part of the reason we don't remember cockroaches is because they happened to disappear at the same time

Speaker 1 the thing they were a related metaphor for disappeared. And so it was just like the way the brain works and language works and metaphor works.
They just kind of got tossed out with the trash.

Speaker 1 That's the theory, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's almost like the cockroach became the mascot. You know, it was like a thing that sort of came into fashion.

Speaker 2 And then when nuclear war fell out of fashion, so the cockroach fell out of fashion. It's something like that.
Are you convinced? I mean, he was clearly trying to convince me. I got almost there.

Speaker 1 I find it to be a hard theory to evaluate, which I guess is a way of saying I'm not convinced, but only because I wasn't there or I wasn't cognizant of history and its sweep at that point.

Speaker 1 So I'm like, yeah, maybe, maybe. I don't know.
Like, I don't know.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 You guys published this episode about your personal relationship with roaches and how roaches have mostly been eradicated. What was the, have you gotten any interesting feedback since that came out?

Speaker 1 Because I can imagine both of those things inducing emails.

Speaker 2 Well, both Dan's mother and my mother were like, we didn't have any cockroaches. I was like, what?

Speaker 2 What?

Speaker 2 They both thought that we were exaggerating.

Speaker 1 Did they demand corrections?

Speaker 2 They were just like, we didn't have any, I didn't make you drink that medicine with the cockroach in it. We didn't have any cockroaches.
There were no cockroaches in our cereal. I was like, mom,

Speaker 2 here's a new word for you. Gaslight.
Go look it up in the dictionary.

Speaker 1 Do you think that they've just deleted it from their memory or do you think that they were embarrassed or what?

Speaker 2 I think they were embarrassed. Like it just, ich, it filled them with ick on their skin to think like somebody out there is attaching me to a domestic scene with lots of roaches running around.

Speaker 2 I mean, my mom is a clean freak, which just goes to show how ubiquitous the cockroaches were.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 1 The other thing I wanted to ask you that I wondered about listening to your story is

Speaker 1 sometimes I get in a debate with people in the real world that I don't think is a good debate.

Speaker 1 Like, I mean, I think it's like an unproductive debate, but like, I have friends on both sides of this where like I have friends who either it's very important for them to prove

Speaker 1 that the world is getting worse, that like this would be the worst time in history to have been born.

Speaker 1 And I have friends who feel like it's very important to establish that actually, despite all the things that are happening that are bad, this is the best time to be alive.

Speaker 1 But listening to your story, I'm like, oh, part of the reason it is hard to notice if the world is getting better is there is just a part of human nature where once something gets solved, we stop thinking about it.

Speaker 1 And cockroaches feel like almost a perfect example of that.

Speaker 2 Totally. I also like to collect evidence, like tiny bits of evidence like cockroaches, that the world is getting better.

Speaker 2 Not because I'm an optimist, which I'm not, but just because the human bias is so strongly towards everything went downhill the day I was born. Yes.
Like, yeah. And I just find that annoying.

Speaker 2 Like it's just an argument I have with my brother over and over and over again about how there's more crime in New York now. And there isn't.
There isn't. No, there definitely isn't.

Speaker 1 No, I'm the same way. I'm not an optimist.
I do tend to want to take the side of the world as getting better only because saying the world is getting worse strikes me somehow as

Speaker 1 a kind of

Speaker 1 self-centeredness masquerading as empathy.

Speaker 2 Amen. So true.
I was going to say narcissism, solitism.

Speaker 2 I didn't know what the word was, but this guy, Adam Mostriani, he did the best series of studies about, you know, why do we all think that everything's going downhill when it's not.

Speaker 2 The most shocking thing that he discovered is that people date the decline basically to the day they were born.

Speaker 2 Interesting. Yes.
It's like we all conceive of ourselves as the center of history and it all went downhill from there. It's crazy.

Speaker 1 Hannah Rosen, host of Radio Atlantic. Dan Engeber is a senior editor at The Atlantic and the mind behind the cockroach story.
You should check out the show.

Speaker 1 Some of our favorite episodes, there's one about people falling in love with their AI companions and then being heartbroken when the code is changed.

Speaker 1 There's another about an engineer in Gaza whose sole job is just to keep the water flowing. We'll have links links to both in our newsletter.

Speaker 1 I am going to keep Hannah though for one more minute because she has a recommendation for us. This recommendation is a book that made her feel uncomfortable to read.

Speaker 1 Honestly, it felt kind of uncomfortable to even hear about. That recommendation after some ads.

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Speaker 1 Okay, Hannah, what is your recommendation?

Speaker 2 Oof, I just finished this book and I, PJ, I don't know what you're going to think about this. Oh.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 3 I feel excited at your wonder and discomfort.

Speaker 2 Okay. I really want people to read this and then email me and talk to me about it.
It's the book Molly by Blake Butler. Blake was the husband of Molly, who's no longer with us.

Speaker 2 And it's a very intense and revealing portrait of a marriage. But I think what I'm thinking about is like, was it okay to write this book?

Speaker 2 It feels like a stealing of someone's life and not in a good way, not in a way that's flattering. And I'm just like wondering about it.

Speaker 2 I've never quite read what feels like a memoir of someone else's life.

Speaker 1 Oh, that's so interesting.

Speaker 2 Was she a writer? She was a writer and she was a poet.

Speaker 2 She was on the great British Bake Off, the American edition. She was also a great baker, but she's a pretty well-known poet and he's a novelist.
And he wrote this book.

Speaker 2 And there's just just some edge in it, which I can't quite decide if you can do this to a person.

Speaker 1 She died. She died by suicide?

Speaker 2 Yes. She died by suicide and supposedly said, write our story.

Speaker 2 Wow. But he reveals like so many of her secrets and things he didn't even know that he learns along the way.
And it's also constructed because he's a novelist. So that kind of weirds me out too.

Speaker 2 Like there's a reveal. It's structured kind of like a novel in which things unfold at a certain kind of rate to keep you reading very successfully so.
And yet like she is, you know,

Speaker 2 the portrait of her is

Speaker 2 not lovable.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 1 Which is also like the rule is supposed to be that when someone dies, you make them lovable.

Speaker 2 Yeah, which is an American rule, which I never loved. Like I admire the honesty and I kind of admire him telling us everything,

Speaker 2 but I also feel protective of this person, Molly, who I don't know. I don't know, it's so complicated whether this is okay or not.
Anyway, read it.

Speaker 1 That's a great recommendation. Thank you.
I'm excited to get to have an opinion about it.

Speaker 2 Good. Excellent.

Speaker 1 Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by P.J.
Vogt and Trithi Pinamaneni and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John.

Speaker 1 Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bazarian.

Speaker 1 The original Radio Atlantic episode called The Cockroach Cure was hosted by Hannah Rosen.

Speaker 1 It was produced by Ethan Brooks, edited by Jocelyn Frank, back-checked by Michelle Soraka, and engineered by Rob Smersiak.

Speaker 1 Special thanks to Sam Schechner for his roach reporting in the New York Times. Claudine Abade is the executive producer for Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is the managing editor.

Speaker 1 Search Engine's executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reese Dennis. Thanks to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Perello, and John Schmidt, and to the team at Odyssey: J.D.

Speaker 1 Crowley, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Matt Casey, Kate Hutchison, Laura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Scheff.

Speaker 1 Our agent is Oren Rosenbaum at UTA. Follow and listen to Search Engine with PJ Vote now for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts.
That's it for us this week.

Speaker 1 Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week.

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