Each week on Search Engine, PJ Vogt tries to answer a question he has about the world — no question too big, no question too small. This week, Queer Eye’s Antoni Porowski joins to discuss a disgusting rumor he’s heard.
LISTEN NOW: Search Engine — Wait, should I not be drinking airplane coffee?
The rumor in question involves coffee and airplanes, specifically that the coffee on airplanes is unsafe to drink because the onboard water tanks are only cleaned once a year. Together PJ and Antoni investigate to discover the truth and learn some disgusting lessons along the way.
PJ and Antoni have had a longstanding friendship of about 20 years, long before the Netflix fame and popular podcast. So after briefly discussing how their lives intersected so long ago, PJ brought up that the two recently flew together. With PJ noting, that Antoni “said something that haunted me more than I expected it to… that under no circumstances should someone drink the coffee on an airplane or the water provided on an airplane.”
“Yes” Antoni confirmed, “So it started out — you should never wash your hands in the bathroom of an airplane.” Something PJ kinda grossly revealed he hadn’t been doing anyway.
“My father told me,” Antoni continued, "my dad's an ER physician, and he told me he would get cases of people who would get like pink eye or some kind of eye infection or stye infection. And he loves to research and get down to like root cause of things. And he would learn that a lot of these people would take flights. So then I started paying attention, I noticed that when pilots use the bathroom they bring in a bottle of water with them.”
After noticing that twice, enough to get Antoni curious, “then I was on an early morning flight one day,” when a sassy flight attendant, “that seemed she didn’t give two s***s,” asked if he’d like coffee or tea. So, Antoni took the opportunity to take his hypothesis further and ask a reliable source.
Asking her to be honest with him, noting that he really wanted coffee, he asked the flight attendant, “how do you really feel about the water?” Antoni recalled that “she looked at me and said something along the lines of 'I don’t care how much I need coffee, I would never drink that.'”
After further research, Antoni found out that “the same water that’s to create the coffee and tea is the same that is used to wash your hands in the bathroom.”
For all that and more disgusting lessons, listen to entire episode above.
On Search Engine, host PJ Vogt answers the kinds of questions you might ask the internet when you can't sleep. If you find the world bewildering, but also sometimes enjoy being bewildered by it, we're here for you. New episodes every Friday.
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