Why is the pool at Buckingham Palace a secret? (classic)

**PJ Vogt** (0:00)
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.
In fact, I was reminded of that wall quite recently. A listener had a question about something that felt, honestly, very basic, very answerable. But it just wasn't. It was an unpatchable hole in my understanding of the world. And the more we tried to answer it, the less it seemed like a fun lark, and the more it made me want to howl with rage. Made, actually, the entire staff here howl with rage. Why couldn't we know this? Why was it being kept from us?
Check, check, check.
It started in a stylishly appointed one-bedroom apartment not far from my house.

**Chris** (2:50)
Hi.

**Garrett Graham** (2:51)
Hey, how's it going?

**Chris** (2:52)
How's it going? Welcome.

**PJ Vogt** (2:54)
The listener whose home we just entered, his name was Chris. Chris sends me a lot of questions. They tend to be especially good. And the question he had this time was about the British royal family. Well, sort of.
Are you normally a royals person?

**Chris** (3:07)
I am not normally a royals person. I came into this when it just felt like the entire world was conspiring to make me care.

**PJ Vogt** (3:14)
Yes.

**Chris** (3:15)
And I needed to find my own way to care about it.

**PJ Vogt** (3:18)
Right. Like if this is gonna be the only show on the TV of the internet, you're gonna find like a minor plot line that you can get into.

**Chris** (3:25)
Exactly. I need to find a hidey hole that feels like it's my own. Yes. Yeah.

**PJ Vogt** (3:32)
When Chris and I were talking, it was early summer, 2023 And the entire world seemed obsessed with something that was happening in England, the coronation of King Charles. In case you did not care or follow, a recap. Queen Elizabeth had died. Her son Charles was taking the throne. And there was some drama attached to the occasion. A feud between Charles' son, Prince Harry, and his relatives. There was a tell-all book, an Oprah interview, allegations flying to and fro.
Many people had questions about the royals of other private lives. I did not.
Every royal headline hits my ear the same. It's always like, Prince Chatterley of the House Targaryen had a royal row at the Buckminster Dog Show or whatever. I tuned it out the way I always tune it out. But for Chris, all this din did a funny thing to his curiosity. It made him wonder not about the royals' interior lives, but instead about a different kind of royal interior.

**Chris** (4:29)
So okay, around the time of all of the coronation drama, I went down this really insane rabbit hole, looking up facts about Buckingham Palace.
I guess I was just kind of intrigued by this idea that Prince Charles was moving into a new palace, and it just looks so beautiful and straight away from the outside, and I was like, I wonder what it looks on the inside. It's probably the most famous palace in the world. We all can imagine what it looks like on the outside. It's just like the storybook version of a palace.