How sad are the monkeys in the zoo?

I'm PJ Vote, and this is a sneak preview of our new show, which is now called Search Engine.

That's right, we renamed the show.

Weekly is No More.

Why?

Well, we found out as we made the show that this is the right title for the thing that we ended up making.

Search Engine is a show where a human being tries to answer the questions you'd ask a search engine late at night.

The questions that are too personal, too potentially dumb-sounding, or maybe just too strange to ask anyone but a close friend.

Questions that require too much context or feeling to send to some AI chatbot.

I'm working with a very talented team to make episodes right now.

We'll launch properly in July, and then we will release basically weekly for our first year.

July is later than we planned.

If you're curious why we chose it, you can find more details at my newsletter at pjvote.com.

I'll also post our full schedule there.

In the meantime, this is one of our episodes.

We were too impatient to wait till summer, and we wanted to share something with you now.

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Before I went on a journey to answer every question I could find about the world, I was a cryptocurrency reporter.

This is a brief period of my life, lasted about 12 months, but it took me to some strange places.

In Miami, I saw the billionaire Peter Thiel tell a room full of people they should buy Bitcoin because its price could still go up 100x

just a few weeks before his fund sold all of his Bitcoin.

I met Coolio months before his death on my way to see a melting glacier in Greenland.

Bro, you're dumb.

Coolio.

I mean, not dumb, but bro, you need to edge catch yourself.

Do some research.

Do some research.

That's from the final episode of Crypto Island, which was imaginatively titled The End.

Anyway, one upshot of my time covering crypto is that I made a few friends in the crypto world.

I was having dinner with one of them a month ago.

I'd asked him, the way I ask everybody these these days, if he had any questions I could answer for him for this new podcast.

He shot off a few.

None of them grabbed me.

He's an engineer-minded person, and I'm not.

And they felt like questions that would plague an engineer, not whatever I am.

Why is it so hard to store electricity?

How can we have gotten worse at forecasting the future supplies of various consumer goods?

He asked these questions.

Maybe he sensed they weren't moving me.

Because then, after a short, quiet pause, he asked what I would consider to be possibly a a perfect question.

How sad are the monkeys in the zoo?

How sad are the monkeys in the zoo?

Has any feeling, compassionate person not been at least briefly troubled by this thought?

When you're little, the answer is, stop asking that question, just enjoy the zoo.

And then one day you become an adult and the answer becomes, stop asking that question, just avoid the zoo.

But I realized I'd never gotten an answer and I wanted one.

So I found someone to ask.

Will you just introduce yourself for me?

Sure.

My name is Dr.

Laurel Sarah Britman and I am a professor at the Stanford School of Medicine and a writer.

And why am I talking to you about this question?

Because I spent a very, very long time wondering about how sad the monkeys were in the zoo and not just the monkeys, but everybody, sometimes even us.

You wrote a book that I really found fascinating called Animal Madness, which is sort of about the feelings animals have as well as the concept of mental illness in animals, which seems to be very rampant.

Can you just tell me like how you, why you decided to write that book?

Like what happened?

Absolutely.

I had a dog, I would say, that was kind of a gateway drug to animal mental illness.

I loved him desperately and I couldn't help him.

And my dog was a rescue

and he was deeply, deeply anxious.

And the most extreme behavior he exhibited was that he jumped out of our third floor apartment about 55 feet, landed on cement, and miraculously didn't die.

But now I had a dog that was about 130 pounds that was uncontainable, that would do things like push open a window, shove out an air conditioning unit, and then jump.

You know, how do you do that with a 130-pound creature?

It's like trying to contain a person.

So we took him to veterinary behaviorists, which are kind of like the psychiatrists of the non-human world.

And And he was prescribed an anti-anxiety medication and also an antidepressant.

He was prescribed Prozac, which I had to fill at our local CVS and Walgreens.

And I went in and they called out his name, like Oliver Britman, and I got his prescription.

And I was just astounded.

I truly had no idea that so many animals were on the same drugs that we were on.

And I wanted to understand it.

And I was starting my PhD at the same time in history and anthropology of science.

And I was looking for a dissertation topic.

And from the dog, I got to everybody, really, particularly the great apes, including orangutans, gorillas, and then our close cousins, the monkeys.

Laurel had arrived at my question about zoo-based monkey sadness over a decade before it had sunk its teeth into my brain.

She'd had a lot more time to consider it.

and to consider the assumptions baked into it.

For instance, how sad are the monkeys at the zoo assumes animals have feelings at all and that those feelings are similar enough to ours that we can use the same words for them.

That something like captivity, which humans would have negative feelings toward, would also make a monkey feel something that we could call sad.

I guess I am curious if you can talk to me about just like scientifically, how have we gotten proof for that idea?

How do we know that animals have feelings and what feelings do we know they have?

First of all, I would say it's not exactly settled scientifically, even though it should be.

We have been trying to quote-unquote prove that other animals have emotions and which emotions for hundreds of years, literally centuries.

This has been a question in various scientific disciplines, which every generation answers with the tools they have at hand.

For a long time in the West, the reigning idea about animal feelings was that they didn't seem to have them.

In the 1600s, the French philosopher René Descartes argued that animals were essentially living machines.

He was so sure of this belief that at one point he started dissecting dogs while they were still alive.

It wasn't a problem, he believed, because animals did not feel pain.

But Descartes' belief stemmed from his own assumptions, which were that part of what made humans human was our unique access to feelings.

About 200 years later, a different prominent scientist starts to push back on this notion.

And he gathers his evidence by just actually going out and trying to observe animals.

Charles Darwin did a lot of sitting around and looking and a lot of drawing.

And one thing that I thought was really interesting was that he just took it for granted that chimps could be sad and depressed.

So I was reading his work, his very early work, some of his field notes before Origin came out and was shocked to find that he just wrote about angry chimps or chimps that had fallen into the depths of sadness or about anxiety in non-human creatures.

Darwin's approach to understanding animals was to watch them closely in the wild, to try to decide if, for instance, a furrowed brow in an ape meant the same thing as a furrowed brow in a human.

Laurel found that method superior to Descartes' strategy of vivisecting dogs, which, sure.

But she also thinks that Darwin's approach from the 1800s has some advantages even on scientists today.

Too often, in her opinion, they try to understand the internal lives of animals by removing them from their world and putting them in ours.

Much of the studies of what we do now are we take an animal in captivity, we challenge them with puzzles or treats, and then decide how smart they are based on how they respond.

But really, all we're ever testing is how much this creature wants to play our little game.

Right.

Like, if you think about, are you familiar with the marshmallow test of children?

Yeah, it's this test that, and I think it's like, maybe it's, I can't remember at what stage of debunked it is or undebuncted, but it's that you offer children a marshmallow and they can like sit and wait.

They They get a second marshmallow, and it's supposed to be this early test of self-discipline.

And there was a point in time where they were extrapolating all these predictions about kids' futures based off how they reacted to this test.

Is that a good synopsis?

Perfect.

So, what you're really testing, though, with that test, it's not their ability to be successful adults or the implication of delayed gratification on capacity for intelligence or what have you.

What you're really testing is whether or not someone wants to wait for a marshmallow.

Right?

That's really it.

And so that's how we have tested other animals and their intelligence and also tried to understand their emotional life.

We'll make them uncomfortable and then see if they move away from that discomfort, emotional or physical.

We'll give them a treat and then see if they move toward it.

But, you know, not all elephants care about the treat, right?

Not all parrots want to solve your damn puzzle.

They have other things they'd rather do.

So does that mean that that parrot is not intelligent?

Or does that mean that that parrot just doesn't care about the test?

Laurel, who assumes that animals do have feelings, has her own sort of private theory about why as humans we find that idea tricky to accept.

She thinks it might be related to our fear of animals or to how much society at any given moment is dependent on animal suffering.

Think about whales, for instance.

In the 1800s, when many parts of the world ran on dead whales, whale oil lamps, lamps, whale oil soap, whale corsettes, few people seemed particularly interested in the feelings or thoughts of whales.

The biggest piece of whale literature about an albino sperm whale called Moby Dick is just about how hard it is to kill that whale.

It's not like there's a surprise chapter where all of a sudden you hear the story from Moby Dick's perspective.

But then a century passes, we become less reliant on the death of whales to run our world.

And by the 1970s, we realize we've actually begun to look at whales pretty differently.

In the 1970s, a lot of people suddenly want to talk about whale song.

A few different scientists came out and musicians came out with publications of whale song.

And the American public and people around the world were shocked to see the degree and the gracefulness and the art of whale communication and realized, oh my goodness, these creatures are singing to themselves.

Soon after we found out that at least dolphins have names for each other, that different groups of whales and dolphins have accents, that they communicate in very sophisticated ways.

So this is like a place where I feel like my, I might have an incorrect opinion, but like my first exposure to whale song was when I was like a young teenager.

One of my family members had started dating somebody and we got in the car and he was like, listen to this.

And he put on the tape and he was like, isn't it beautiful?

And to my ear, it was not, it didn't sound as musical to me, but I think I'm the only person who has that opinion.

Oh, no, I agree with you.

I think it sounds like a bunch of rusty doors opening and closing with someone in like maybe a bassoon.

I don't know.

What I think, though, what makes it beautiful to me is knowing what these songs are about, how they often change every year, how they're passed like the Olympic torch from whale community to whale community.

You want to cheer yourself up after a bad day, get on YouTube and look for videos of whales being freed by people from nets at sea.

I did have a bad day, and I did look the videos up.

In one, a heroic but funnily dressed man, he's wearing a small, bright red speedo and one of those hats with a neck protection flap.

This man is freeing a whale stuck in a net.

It's a little hard to see what's going on, except he's leaning over the side of his boat, cutting the net so this humpback humpback whale can get free.

Yeah!

Let's pull it all in!

You saved the humpback whale, yes!

Once the whale is freed, something kind of amazing happens.

The whale does a series of big, giant, free willy-style leaps out of the water, splashing his happy audience of liberators.

It's really hard not to see what the whale is doing as anything but an expression of pure joy.

An animal having a big feeling.

Yeah.

They're thankful.

They act in a way that to me watching as a person looks like joy, exuberance, and gratitude.

They often won't immediately leave the boat or the people that have helped them, even though they're now free.

They will return, they will tail slap, they will jump.

It gives you chills.

Laurel says that animals frequently exhibit the kinds of complex feelings that we want to think of as uniquely uniquely human.

One place you see it, which I really appreciate, and I don't think we measure enough, is sense of humor in other animals because it's so sophisticated to like plan a joke, execute a joke, and then wait to see if the person that you are teasing responds.

Yes.

Yeah.

Elephants do that.

Elephants make that.

Elephants love a good joke.

They'll do things like put something in the way of the person that they know is coming so that that person will trip on it, but not hurt themselves.

That's like a slapstick.

That's elephant slapstick.

Yes.

You know, elephants, I will also say, if they do not like you, you are in a world of trouble.

What does that look like?

Oh, my God.

So I spent a lot of time in Thailand because people have lived with Asian elephants there for thousands and thousands of years.

It's basically a treasure trove of elephant intelligence.

Because elephants have lived with people for so long, people almost take it for granted that, you know, a pissed-off elephant is going to be really, really dangerous to you.

The governmental elephant people will be deployed to get the elephant under control.

And if they can't be controlled, they are sent to an elephant prison.

They are not killed like in this country

or in many places in the West because the assumption is, well, the elephant had a reason to do those things.

I want you to consider this idea for a moment.

that an elephant might be a killer and that it might be worth considering their motives and reasons the same way you would a human's.

In the United States, around the turn of the 20th century, people did that.

Elephants who killed their trainers were sometimes put on trial and sometimes publicly executed like human criminals.

Perhaps the first known filmed death of an animal was a clip Thomas Edison's company made of Topsy the Elephant.

Topsy was an elephant accused of murdering a human.

He was executed by electricity at Coney Island.

Which sounds crazy that an elephant would be found guilty of murder.

Obviously, an elephant might kill a person, but do we really believe that it's accurate to call that killing murder?

I didn't feel like it was.

But then Laurel told me this other story, one that had really blown her mind.

This was about an elephant in Thailand.

He'd killed members of the family who owned him across three generations.

For the first two deaths, the family had kept the elephant, but after the third, they'd given him up.

Now he was in the care of the Thai government's trained elephant handlers, who were keeping an eye on him.

And the way this works in this part of Thailand is the elephants, they always have a chain attached to like one of their back legs and it's a long chain.

And this is what allows them to be free during the day.

And then, you know, their human can go pick them up at night or call them in to work and they just pick up the back edge of the chain.

They never have to get within trunk reach of the elephant.

So that's how elephant handlers typically stay safe.

But then one day, Laurel said, this elephant handler is trailing his elephant on his his walk using the chain method when he gets a peek at exactly how cunning this elephant really is.

So they're walking through the forest.

And as you can imagine, the elephant is walking ahead.

So the chain moves like drag, drag, drag with every footstep, right?

And all the footsteps are the same length.

It makes the same sound.

The government agent is following the elephant, turns a corner.

The elephant is standing behind a tree.

The chain has been piled piled at the foot of the elephant, and the elephant goes to attack the agent.

He knew exactly how he was being followed.

He knew the exact distance he needed to pull the chain

so that the person following would keep walking forward.

He mimicked his own steps.

He made a pile of the chain.

He hid himself so that he could hit the person when they turned the corner.

And the guy was like, Okay, well, mystery solved.

This is how he killed all those people.

That elephant's a serial killer.

That elephant should get like a four-part Netflix series, like Dahmer.

Yes.

And that elephant had not been abused.

That elephant was a bad egg, just like every group of animals has them sometimes.

100%.

There's probably a serial killer dolphin out there.

I am someone who believes that non-human animals, populations, are full of jerks.

Some of them are assholes and some of them are incredible and they exist on a continuum just like we do.

Okay,

I want to go to Zoos, although I want to ask one more question before we do segue, which is just, is there any feeling that does feel completely unique to humans like that you've just never seen in any of the literature, in any experiments in an animal?

Oh my God, I love this question.

I'm not sure.

how many other creatures worry about things in advance.

I think to worry, so many different things have to come into that, right?

Like you have to know that something is possible to happen.

There has to be a time period in which you're worried about that thing happening.

You are imagining a future self suffering in some way and you don't want that to happen.

I think like Laurel Brayton worry.

It's so extreme.

Like it might not even be like PJ worry.

You're not

coyote worry.

I would say it's my main feeling.

But yeah, I know what you mean.

It's like, like I think about my dog doesn't like car trips and like when the car turns on, he'll start to run.

But I don't think the night before he's like, I wonder if they're going to start the car.

And it's impossible to know.

All of this is impossible to know.

Like whatever animals really feel, there's always going to be this strange, lonely gap between what's inside them and what we can actually understand.

They have their feelings and we have our assumptions.

But if there can be nothing more human than the capacity to make jokes and occasionally be a vengeful asshole, it stands to reason that animals are also, like us, unenthused about the prospect of living their life in captivity, existing solely for the entertainment of another species.

At least, that's what you might assume.

But is it true?

After the break, we finally tackle our question: How sad are the monkeys in the zoo?

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Welcome back to the show.

Before this week, it never occurred to me to ask who invented the zoo.

I think I just assumed that maybe there was something intrinsic to people about this drive to capture animals, put them in cages, and then at them.

Ideally within close proximity to some gift shop that charges larcenous prices for elephant merchandise.

History suggests my assumption may be largely correct.

Throughout time, where there have been people, those people have collected animals to gawk at.

Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, the ancient Egyptians, all kept animals in captivity.

But those zoos were relatively private.

Zoos like the ones we're used to, where the public gets to come in and see the monkeys, those really begin in England, in the age of the empire.

The zoo then existed so that the empire could brag about itself.

A place to show off the animals, sometimes even the people from faraway lands conquered.

Starting in the year 1847, the London Zoo is open to the public.

In theory, this zoo is dedicated not just to the glory of the empire, but to this idea of scientific inquiry.

The zoo still looks the same.

The animals are in the cages, the people are outside, but the idea is that now its purpose is something higher.

A similar thing happens again in the latter half of the 20th century, recently.

That's when the modern zoo's stated mission becomes about conservation.

Some zoos donate money to keeping animals in the wild alive.

The idea is that by coming to see animals in captivity, people will care more about not killing off entire species.

But again, while the reasons for keeping the zoo might change, the monkeys stay in their cages.

Of the animals in the zoo, like, are there some that are less aware of their captivity or seem happier?

Like, who are just like, yeah, it's like three hots and a cot.

It's fine.

Yeah.

I mean, I'd say animals who've been born into captivity who don't know anything else.

They have nothing to compare it to.

But I think that gets into like a whole nest of bioethical questions, which is that just because a person doesn't know how good their life could be, does it mean they're not suffering?

So for you, the distinction is between animals who became captives versus animals born into captivity.

Does it vary by species?

Yeah.

Like I love a petting zoo.

I mean, I think all of the domestic animals are like us.

Like, you know, most of us are pretty domestic.

We sleep at night in our apartment and don't think that we're being contained.

I think any animal that likes being around us, you know, pigs, sheep, all of the animals that have lived with us for thousands of years that we have bred and who have bred us back.

Those are creatures that like lives like we do.

You know, like I don't think a donkey who sleeps in a barn at night is suffering, you know.

Like

they probably like the barn, they want to see you in the morning when you bring their alfalfa.

Yeah.

So I think if our zoos could be full of animals that we knew liked us,

then I think that would be great.

Okay, so I want to go to my big question, which is the monkeys.

I think the reason that I think about them is because they seem the most like us, and because honestly, they don't seem particularly happy to me.

How sad are the monkeys in the zoo?

Well,

you know I'm going to say this, but it depends on the monkey.

Right.

And it depends on the zoo.

And it depends on their psychopharm prescription.

You know, many of them.

It depends on their meds.

Yes.

Yes.

Almost all of our great apes in captivity were taken out of the wild.

And often their parents were killed in order to trap them as youths because they were easier to transport, they were trainable.

So, not only did they have the experience of early trauma, oftentimes watching their mother be killed in front of them and then put on a ship, taken thousands of miles away, put on display somewhere else, and their family pods still exist out in the wild.

I think that is a level of suffering that is unconscionable.

Many

monkeys and apes in zoos in the West are on psychopharmaceutical drugs.

Many of them are on anti-anxiety meds, and they work about as well for monkeys and apes as they do for us, which is that it depends on the dosage, it depends on the person, it depends on, you know, all kinds of other things, your brain chemistry.

Do I think we should have to have a system in which these creatures, some of them, must be medicated into compliance with their life?

No.

But if they're going to be there and the SSRI is going to make them feel better or the valium is going to make their day a little bit easier, then I think the compassionate thing is to offer them those things.

You know, I wish that, I wish we weren't in that mess in the first place, but

right.

It's hard because it's like when you think about like a lot of the ways that we medicate ourselves, it's to adjust to a society that we're not sure we want in the first place.

Or I mean, that we is really, I guess, an I.

But with animals, it feels very strange.

It's like, I've put you in a cage and you're unhappy.

And so I'm going to give you the medications that make humans able to tolerate lives lives they don't like so that you can stay here.

Exactly.

Exactly.

And, you know, for my dog, for example, that was true in his case, too.

We were living in Washington, D.C.

at the time.

He might have been okay if he was never left alone and he lived on a farm.

Yeah.

You know, we thought about looking for another home for him.

We didn't get the chance to rehome him.

But I,

are some monkeys happy at the zoo?

Probably.

Probably.

You know, the problem is that we can't tell which ones and then decide that those ones who want zoo life who don't want to spend their days looking for food who would rather have it brought to them on a tray like some individual monkeys are probably super suited to that job yeah

but we don't know we don't know we don't know and so what i mean i this might be a question that sort of hits the unknowable abyss a little bit of like other beings but it what do you think the range is of monkey happiness in the zoo like it goes from very sad to pretty content Yeah, probably.

And honestly, just like with us, one monkey might have all those feelings in the span of a single day.

Right.

There might be monkeys who are like, I really want to get out of the zoo and they constantly talk about it.

And if you open the door for them, they'd be like, yeah.

Yeah.

And again, like the problem is that we can't know.

I think what we can do is give them the benefit of the doubt and work a little harder to make their lives interesting.

And lots of zoos do this.

There's this thing called behavioral enrichment that is often TV.

So

monkeys and a zoo watching TV?

Oh, yeah.

The equivalent of TV.

No, no, watching actual TV.

Many zoos will have like a TV on a rolling cart.

They wouldn't do this while the monkeys are out.

Yeah.

Because I think visitors would think this is too weird.

It would feel like a comment on people.

There is a gorilla, I think she's since passed away

in Boston at the Franklin Park Zoo.

And she was amazing.

And she really loved watching like the American movie channel.

She really loved black and white films.

And one of her longtime keepers would tape her favorite movies and would bring them in and show them to her.

And what are they, like,

what are they watching?

Like,

do you know what I mean?

Like, what are they watching?

What are they seeing when they're watching?

Surely they understand us speaking.

So I'm sure they understand what's going on in the movie.

They're watching, what are we watching when we watch a movie?

But I speak human language.

Like, you know what I mean?

Like, I feel like they're not.

not i speak human language like a gorilla will understand your dog speaks human language at least in a limited way a great ape right who lives around humans is going to speak english they're not going to be able to speak but they can certainly understand

there's something about it that makes me feel sad just like the gap um

how close it is and how far away it is do you know what i mean Yeah, I would say, you know, the best thing we can do is agitate to let the populations in zoos slowly stop replacing themselves.

You know, the creatures who are there, they deserve to live out their lives in peace and comfort.

They deserve to be entertained.

They should be able to get to watch the TV they want to watch, right?

They should get their favorite snacks.

But I am a fan of birth control for some of these creatures.

And the reason that, like, a lot of the bonobos and gorillas are on birth control is so that they can have recreational sex just like us.

Wait, what?

Yeah.

They can't deal with baby apes all the time, but you don't want to take sexual pleasure off the table.

I mean, I think that's like bonobo's core reason for being.

That's so funny.

I'd heard that about bonobos, that they're just like a very horny animal, but I never, I didn't know if that was true or like middle school true.

No, I think it's really true.

And so, when you walk around a zoo, like what is your, I mean, do you go to zoos?

Um,

I go to zoos,

this is like embarrassing to admit, in one very particular way.

That particular way, which I found very, very surprising, after the break.

Welcome back to the show.

Laurel was about to reveal something very unusual about her zoo-going life.

I go to zoos,

this is like embarrassing to admit, in one very particular way.

Which is what?

Which

I go as kind of a clown.

So one thing I learned at the Bronx Zoo from some wonderful folks who work there is that the

apes' favorite day of the year is Halloween.

Because

people come into the exhibits and they're dressed in a costume.

Well, it turned out that a lot of the animals, particularly the apes,

totally acted completely different on those days.

Really?

Because, yeah, because all of a sudden the people were interesting.

Like, they look at us as much as we look at them.

Imagine how boring it is to be sitting inside your living room and have 5,000 people come through and everyone does the exact same thing.

They come in, they may or may not knock on the glass, they lift their hand, they wave, expecting the creature to wave back for some banana's reason.

Then they pull out their iPhone and they film you for a few minutes.

Maybe they point at you and then they walk away.

You're having the exact same interaction all day.

Imagine how boring that is.

So you go and you're like, I'm going to entertain.

There's a suffering here, which is boredom.

And I'm going to try to alleviate it by like being a clown.

Yes.

And you have to be brave.

Okay.

Wear something crazy.

Wear like a bright color.

Wear wear a hat.

I don't know,

bring a musical instrument.

That's always really interesting.

You've played music for them?

I had a project for a number of years called Music for Animals, where I would bring bands to play for animals in captivity.

And in a couple of cases in the wild, like you can stand on a soapbox and be like, animals have feelings.

We shouldn't eat them, you know?

But I think it's much more interesting to like put on a rock show for a group of gorillas and show people that like some of the gorillas are super into it, especially the drums.

Someone else is going to be interested in the guitarist.

And then some of the other ones are going to be like, meh, whatever.

I like classical better.

Do they really have genre preference?

Yeah, absolutely.

And it depends on the creature.

Like, I went with Janet Weiss,

you know, from the band Slater Kinney to a chimp sanctuary in Washington.

And what we found, this was amazing.

Okay, like, I don't think Slater Kinney had had anything thrown at them since like the early 90s.

But A's weren't in his later guinea?

Oh my God.

No, they almost broke my friend's camera who was there shooting and doing the project with me.

And what we found out afterwards that it was Jamie, who's the sort of like ringleader chimp, she only likes country music.

And I was like, I would have been nice to know this, you know?

So I was like, okay, well, I guess, like, I don't know.

I'll come back with Chris Stapleton.

Dr.

Laurel Brightman.

Her book about animals is called Animal Madness.

If you enjoyed this conversation, you should check it out.

It is a 90,000-word answer to our question.

Dr.

Brightman is also the author of the new book, What Looks Like Bravery, an Epic Journey from Loss to Love.

The only last question I have for you is,

when I've been interviewing people who are helping me answer the questions I have, I've been asking them if they have any questions about anything, small or big, that I can track down.

If you don't have anything top of mind, totally okay, but is there anything that you were curious about that you'd like me to look into?

I think it's about

like that worry that I think might be uniquely human, which is like when a bad thing has happened to you and you know that it can happen, how do you get out from underneath the worry?

How, when you know that things can turn out poorly,

how do you get out from underneath that worry?

That is probably the question I think about more than any question.

I mean, I feel like some people tell you, like, meditate or whatever, but it's like I intellectually know it's true,

like, everything else just sort of feels like a passing band-aid.

You know, I want that question answered.

Okay, that's that's that's a question that I also want an answer to.

I'll see if I can find out.

Okay, please report back.

That's our show, but stick around after these ads for a recommendation from Search Engine.

My recommendation this week is the Your Welcome podcast from Zoe Nightingale.

I'm really not supposed to admit this in public, but federal regulations stipulate that there's only four kinds of podcasts you're actually allowed to make.

True crime, celebrity podcasts, histories, mysteries, or middlebrow show about curiosity.

I think you know which one you're listening to now.

Anyway, your welcome is actually something different.

It's very weird.

It's not for everyone.

It might not be for you.

Zoe's a very strange person who's interested in understanding other strange people.

It's like watching an alien try to understand other aliens.

She spent six months working on a piece documenting the people she met at the Insane Clown Posse Festival Gathering of the Juggalos.

She took her mom to Burning Man in another episode.

There's a glowing profile of a guy who got a lot lot of plastic surgery to try to become a real-life Ken doll.

I don't know.

I'm glad it exists.

I wish more people listened to it.

The podcast, again, is called You're Welcome with Zoe Nightingale.

Go check it out if you're curious.

Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions.

This episode was put together by Shruthi Pinamanani, Noah John, and Garrett Graham.

Theme and sound design by Armin Bazarian, fact-checking by Elizabeth Moss, show art by Ollie Moss.

No relation.

Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Rhys-Dennis.

Special thanks this week to Rayhan Harmanchi, and thank you to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Richard Pirello, and John Schmidt.

And to the team at Odyssey, J.D.

Crowley, Rob Morandi, Eric Donnelly, Lizzie Roberti, Casey Klausner, Moira Curran, Josephina Francis, and Hilary Schuff.

Our agent is Oren Rosenbaum at UTA.

Follow and listen to Search Engine with me, PJ Vote, now for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts.

And if you have a question for me, you can either leave a comment on my newsletter at pjvote.com or email me directly at pjvote85 at gmail.com.

Thanks for listening.