PJ Vogt

Hello, Search Engine Nation and all the ships at sea.

Summer is finally, actually, truly here.

And this week, we are celebrating by bringing you one of our very favorite classic episodes of Search Engine, an enjoyable, well, enjoyable for us, hopefully for you, quest after a very silly question.

It's a story about kings and queens and the places they allegedly cannonball, a story which took Search Engine's team of crack reporters across the Atlantic.

I hope you like it.

We'll be back next week with a new one for you.

Or if you just need to hear something new from us right now, we actually have a fresh new episode on the Incognito Mode feed.

It's a story that is about the pursuit of greatness and spicy noodles.

But in order to hear that, you would need to be a subscriber to our Incognito Mode, which you can find at searchengine.show.

Most human beings start asking questions at about two and a half years old.

Our first questions usually begin with, what?

The quintessential toddler query, what's that?

The more sophisticated how and when questions, those developmentally arrive around three.

And then between three and five, the deluge, the constant questions, the why questions.

Why is salami so hard to stop eating?

Why do people lie?

If you can think back, you can probably remember this age, when your parents were like perfect search engines, capable of handling almost anything you threw at them.

And you also might remember the few times they'd refuse.

When you'd ask some question whose answer they weren't quite ready to share, and you'd get an, it's complicated, or maybe a, when you're older.

I can remember, I swear, decades later, the frustration of that strange, invisible wall,