 Hello everybody and welcome to the weekly broadcast of the TWIS podcast. We're here to talk about science. We have a guest tonight, Dr. Brynn Nelson, and we will introduce him some more as we get into the show. Before we get started, just a reminder that this is a live broadcast, live taping of the podcast, so mistakes will be made as I've decided that the new TWIS motto we're going to make stickers. TWIS, mistakes were made and that's just the way it goes. So the podcast is edited. This is all live and full of all the pieces of corn and we're going to start the show. I'm not going to get tired of that at all during the entire evening. I just want you all to know. All right, we are starting the show in three, two, this is TWIS. This week in science episode number 892 recorded on Wednesday, September 14, 2022. It's time for science potty talk. Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki and tonight on the show we are going to fill your heads with vomit, poo, and general relativity, but first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Burns do it, bees do it, educated folks with PhDs do it, anthropologists, microbiologists, and animal vets do it. In Hollywood, the celebrities sat do it, beetles who navigate by the stars do it, billionaires and last nickel drunks and bars do it, the Danes and Commonhound do it, any city, any town, they do it, old sailors who tell tales do it, death, tardigrades and killer whales do it, polar bears and kangaroos do it, at some point even me and you do it. Everybody, everywhere, poops. And while most don't give two thoughts about what happens next, it's just sort of thing that we might fill your head with here on this week in science, coming up next. That happened every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I want to... Thanks to you Kiki and oh, there's no Blair today. No Blair today. Hopefully she will return again next week. We will miss her animal filled fun presence. But in the meantime, we have our guest for the show today, Brynn Nelson, who is joining us to talk about his book that is out, Flush. Put it right here. And anyway, hello everybody, welcome to this episode of Twists. Thank you so much for joining us. All right, we are here. We're here to talk about science. We do that, right? Every week we talk about science and this week we have a very special show ahead. We're just going to push it right through. Okay, I brought stories all about. No, I actually did not bring any poop stories. How to make a cell? We're working on artificial cells, everybody. Can we do it? General relativity confirmed again. That's pretty much the story, but I might give you a few more details. And there's some historical vomit out there, along with virtual reality replacing psychedelics. Justin, what did you bring? That's can't happen. Where do I got? Oh, one that's very present to me right now. How to get a crying baby to go to sleep? A scientific, not an anecdotal there. They did some experiments on babies to get them to sleep and found the best way. Extremely adaptive fungi story. And Justin's animal corner. I must have known Blair wasn't going to be here. I brought an animal story too. So yeah, we kind of planned ahead just a little bit. And Bryn, what have you brought for our show? Well, I have a book we can talk about. You're in luck. Fantastic. I am looking forward to getting to your interview in just a little bit, but we're excited also that you are going to join us for commentary on some of these stories that we start the show with. As we get jumping into everything, everyone remember that you can subscribe to twists, all places that podcasts are found. Look for this week in science. We are also on YouTube, Facebook and Twitch streaming live every Wednesday night, 8 p.m. Pacific time ish right about there. And you can find us on the Twitter's and the Instagram. We are at twist science. If all this is a bunch of stuff that you don't really want to deal with remembering, just remember our website twist.org. Oh, and give us a like and whatever there is wherever you're watching us or listening to us right now. That would be a great help. Okay. Let's start with artificial cells. I have to start with this one because to me, this is scientists working at Frankenstein stuff at a cellular level. It's very interesting work. Researchers trying to develop synthetic cells that bridge the gap between not life and life. And in this particular example, which was published this week in Nature, researchers at the University of Bristol are using viscous micro droplets. So little tiny droplets of goo that are sticky viscous-ish. And then they are engulfing bacteria with their goo. And they're also, it's like, I guess, putting glitter on the outside of a Christmas ornament, like those Christmas balls getting glitter on the outside. They're putting bacteria all over the outside of those viscous droplets. And then they basically kill the bacteria, break them up into their components, and then see if the components keep working. And, lo and behold, according to their experiments, yes, they do. So all the components of the bacteria get working together on the outside and the inside of these synthetic proto cells. They start making architecture for the micro skeletons that are inside of the cells. They start working together to create little organelles and little bits and pieces creating a lot of the proteins and enzymes that need to be there to start developing bacterial cell culture inside of cell, make a metabolism work. They didn't stop there, though. They worked, it was very successful. And at that point, what they did is inserted E. coli into these bacterial-innerred goo balls. And E. coli acted as an engine producing the ATP that's necessary to power the cells. It didn't go exactly as planned. It didn't continue looking just like a nice, how you kind of imagine, roundish cell. These cells, once the E. coli came into play, began looking amoeboid in nature, and they started having little projections and started acting in a different manner. But what they did show is that they were able to bring little bits and pieces of bacteria to life in a different way. And so the idea moving forward is that they can fine-tune the components that are involved, that they can synthetically create these proto-cells to address particular needs, cleaning up environmental problems, addressing different problems that we may have. Yeah, so that's a further leap there. But so it almost sounds, though, that they've created a biofilm that they then damaged and are showing the disparate effects of these, the bacteria that they used, attempts to repair and had to add in something else for the ADP. I don't know if I'm really feeling synthetic life so much there, but it is surprising that they did begin to build architecture in that repair response to try to keep everything going, even if they're disparate bacteria, which does tell you that life, when stressed, can survive. But the tough part there is, in any application that they think of, most bacteria, the hard part is maybe not life itself, but is in billions of years of getting to a niche where you can function out in an environment and do something in your surroundings without getting eaten or exposed to something that's hot. We're trying to just sidestep that evolutionary process. Yeah, it's billions of years of work that go into fine-tuning. Make life or a particular function, no fine-tuning. But there is that Jeff Goldblum, life finds a wayline that's just jumping out of this because here's this life that's being intentionally obliterated in this capsule and still going, I'll find a way. I will find a way to keep this going. That's really, that's really intense. But maybe not in a way that we would ever anticipate. I guess that's the twist, right? Is what else might it do? Yeah, and that is the question, I guess we start with, okay, we broke up the bacteria into all the pieces. What pieces do we need? What pieces can we get rid of? What happens when we take pieces of different bacteria and put them together? And so now there is a bit, and like I mentioned, a Frankensteinian aspect to this because you're taking a little bit of this and a little bit of that and putting it together and going, live, do something for me, right? That technology they're using, doing that micro droplet, it creates its own biome environment and everything else. I know it's been used quite a bit in artificial evolution, lots of stuff because your lab then isn't one dot that everybody's focused on. You can have thousands of these dots, running experiments all at the same time. So the throughput of doing things at this scale too is really, really incredible. So you can run many, many, many, many more experiments than just one lab experiment, one op, and you see that result. All right, let's start all over again, do it again. You can, the throughput on these types of experiments is also really exciting. It is, I want to say something. No, all I can say is it's way more complicated than the E. coli research I was doing in grad school. I mean, I was obliterating like one protein in the membrane to see what it did. And so I mean, the expansion here is kind of mind blowing. Yeah. Yeah. What we're doing now, sometimes, I mean, we are living in the future, right? There's a lot of science now that I look at and I say, wow, it's amazing that we have gotten to the point that we're at right now with what we're capable of. We're solving more problems than ever before, answering more questions. It's really exciting. But some people might want to take a look at this stuff and go, what are you doing there? What are we going to do with that? It certainly does raise some ethical issues. And I think that was the same thing where they had with recombinant DNA, right? Is that there was a kind of an ethical framework, like let's kind of wrap our heads around that. So I hope that that's also front and center moving forward with this. Yeah, maybe, maybe. But the thing that always occurs to me in these like, oh, gosh, the large Hadron collider, oh, they're gonna bombard particles at these intense energies. And what happens if we create a black hole in the middle of it? The thing is, this is happening in space constantly. These are interactions that what they've created here, you have to imagine on some level is taking place constantly throughout nature. It's just because we isolated this incident that we're able to observe it. But there's nothing that seems like that couldn't be taking place all the time in the micro world. So I'm less afraid. I'm less afraid of the Frankenstein monster leaving the castle and going to town. No, I mean, it's just the concept of taking all the disparate pieces and putting them together and in new ways. They're already there. They're already out there doing it. They're out there. They're all out there. I know. Then they're doing their thing and they've all, yeah, then they're evolving still. I'm crying now. Can you tell me how to put it? Oh, okay. Yeah. So if you're crying, so here's what happened. Here we are, your midthought. Maybe you're thinking about, oh, what have I got to, what chores do I have ahead? What's going on next week? I need to send that letter or invite that person. Maybe it's an important thought. Maybe it's not. It doesn't matter because it's gone. It's like you never had it. Zap! Thought is history. Your brain has been short-circuited by an urgent rush of adrenaline and your mind is now blank, ready to react to any form of danger in a split second. What caused this? Is the house on fire? No. Did you accidentally stick a fork in an electric eel? Not likely. Did a hungry lion leap out from behind the couch? Still not very likely. It's much worse than any of those scenarios. In fact, your baby is crying. I have experienced this. Yes. Yeah, baby cries are intended to get our attention and put us on high alert. If it's somebody else's baby, it's just an annoyance. But if it's your child, your brain immediately focuses on that baby emergency. And often babies do cry before falling asleep. It's partly a way for them to process the day and get rid of some excess energy, but also because babies might just not like the way it feels to go to sleep. It's kind of a weird thing if you don't have a whole lot of perspective on it, I guess. So there's nothing worse than a baby who's crying and tired and can't seem to fall asleep, especially since also new humans tend to sleep a lot several times a day, getting lots of naps throughout the day. Getting too sleep is then just as important as staying asleep because if you get a baby, crying baby to sleep and you set them down and then 10 minutes later, they're crying again, you have to start over, which is also sort of soul wrenching. So it's an important part of baby's health because they need all of this sleep. And it's also an important part of parental mental health to be able to have those moments of peace while the baby is sleeping. So science is coming to the rescue here to find out what is the best way to put a baby to sleep. According to this paper published by Current Biology, holding and walking them for five minutes, followed by five to eight minutes of sitting with them after they fall asleep. Now I can tell you from very current experience, walking around with a baby for five minutes is good introduction to this tale. It's not that's not necessarily the formula for success in and of itself, but published in Current Biology. So this is this is one of the authors Kumi Koroda from the Reichen Center for Brain Science in Japan. Many parents suffer from baby's nighttime crying. Big issue, especially for inexperienced parents that can lead to parental stress and oh gosh, even infant maltreatment in a small number of cases where parents have very apparently just lost it. So the lab had been already studying what they call a transport response. And this is a reaction seen in many mammals whose young are not able to care for themselves. So you're talking mice, dogs, monkeys, and of course humans. They observed that when these animals pick up their infants and start walking, the bodies of the young become daso, their heart rate slow. So the team wanted to compare the effects of this response in humans with baby infants. They compared 21 infants responses while under four conditions. One was being held by their walking mothers, held by their sitting mothers, lying in a still crib or lying in a rocking cot. So what they found is when the mother walked carrying the baby, the crying infants calm down and their heart rate slowed within 30 seconds. Similar calming effect occurred when the infants were placed in the rocking cot, but not when the mother held the baby while sitting or placed the baby in a still crib. Suggesting that just holding your baby is insufficient, which kind of goes against some people have thought that it is the mother's touch. And it's a nice comforting thought to think the mother's embrace is what calms the baby. But according to this, nope, it's the motion. Even if that motion is a robotic self rocking crib, that motion is really what's doing it. Uh, they said the, uh, yeah, all crying babies in the studies stopped crying. Doesn't say how long it took. That's important. Also, they didn't have your end point. Yeah. Also didn't have my baby. Because this is actually what we have found works ahead of finding this study. This is this is walking around is definitely the most effective thing that we found, which is also interesting because, uh, side note, the, they tried to give us advice in this maternity post birth training thing that we went to on how to be a parent, that you should train the baby to fall asleep without motion because then they won't, they won't look for it. But according to this, there's a biological need for it. And so I don't feel so bad that we've ruined our child's sleep by constantly using the motion thing to help him sleep. But, uh, also in this, they found that more than one third of the participants, uh, the babies became alert again within 20 seconds of being put down. So they got them to fall asleep walking. They set them down where they were back up again. So that's when they found that the additional, after they've fallen asleep, sitting and holding then for another five to eight minutes allows them to get into a deeper sleep. And then the transition down into the crib was much easier. So that transition, you have to ease them into it. Or as do you end up putting the child in the stroller walking around the block a few times or sticking them in the car, driving around. There are many solutions, but I don't know, Justin, I think you should, uh, use your N of one to test this. Well, definitely I've got an N of, I've got an N of four now. So, so the thing is, but I don't think you're going to be, um, still holding and walking around with your 18 year old, right? 19. But yeah, he's, but the, but the thing that's interesting is the other three, the car was the, was that one solution that you could go, okay, nothing's working. And then when parents start talking to the teeth, you know, it's time to go to the drastic measure. Nothing's working. Put them in the car, we'll drive around the block, burning gas until they fall asleep. This one doesn't like the car. That's great. Don't burn the gas. That's good. He's even louder in the car, even more adamant that he's not going to fall asleep. So, so it, and then it points out here at the end that, you know, we need to, this is a, uh, something that we found, which is a temporary solution or a, a, uh, not, not the, not necessarily a long-term solution. This is something that we found that works in the immediate soothing of a crying baby, but more study needs to be done. And it points out that babies are more complex than we thought. And I don't know who the we is there other than people who didn't have kids. But that's fair enough. There's a, there's a lot of those people. Schnoggo in our discord is saying, when I was a kid, the answer was a crib full of puppies. At least that's what I've been told. My parents ran a kennel. I think we need to test this hypothesis as well. It sounds pretty good. Crib of puppies for all kids. This is something that needs to happen. Who wouldn't love that? Yeah. I would love that now. May I have my crib full of puppies? Yes, please. Yeah. Okay. So the, the take home messages, we hold the baby in a walk for five to eight minutes, sit down holding the baby for five to eight minutes, and then you put them down for sleeping and hopefully they will stay. That's what the study says, five minutes and then five to eight. But what, what, what, what my discovery is you walk with them until they fall asleep, be that five minutes or half an hour. Yeah. The point though is that, that, that motion does the initial soothing and the lowering of the heart rate that then makes the transition to sleep easier, as opposed to, you know, just laying them in a crib or just trying to sit and hold them. You got to get up and walk them around. Or one of those, like it's, I laughed at it. And I admit, I'm totally guilty. I laughed at, they have, we're just going to shopping for baby stuff now. They have all these baby robot, like self, you know, self rocking cribs or these little ones, like hammocks that go up and down automatically. Technology can be the, I was like, Oh, what kind of lazy parent would want one of those things and having a robot raise it. Now I realize that's, that's good. That's, that's helping people. Yeah. Let's see, helping people. This, I don't know if this is really helping people. It probably help a lot of physics students and, and physicists who are trying to understand the universe. Researchers have yet again tested the principle of general relativity to see whether an objects mass really determines how gravity affects it. So on European satellite, microscope has once again, determined with unprecedented precision, we're talking 10 to the minus 15 power. So there's a lot of zeros after that decimal point for the accuracy of the effect of gravity on the mass of matter. Researchers had little capsules suspended in this microscope satellite, and they used static electricity to keep them suspended. So in the microgravity around in Earth's orbit of this satellite, there's a constant falling, right? Anything in orbit is constantly falling towards the Earth, except it's in its perpetual state of just kind of just missing and constantly. And so you have the orbit around the planet. So this has gravity acting on the mass within these capsules. And the question is, is the static electricity required to maintain different capsules positions that are containing the exact same mass of different types of matter? Is it the same amount of electricity that's required? And their experiment to the 10 to the minus 15, they have confirmed yet again that yes, indeed, if you have a bowling ball or a feather dropping both in a vacuum at the same time, they're both going to land at the same time. It's going to happen as long as they have the same mass. So that's the quick and easy of it. And I just wanted to jump from there into fossilized vomit, because I think that then can lead us pretty nicely into our conversation with Bryn. So fossilized vomit has been discovered in Utah. There is a study in the journal Palaios. And in this particular find, they discovered vomit. It's called a boloid and this fossilized vomit from some kind of creature. They had to figure out what it was from. It's 150 million years old. And the fossil site has a lot of plant remains around that they have identified previously as a pond. So this was an area where there were amphibians and where there were fish. And they don't think this was dinosaur vomit. They think it was fish vomit. Because with an a pond, you would find predatory chains that would potentially involve what was vomited up, being eaten, a frog, and a salamander. And they're no longer existent. But these particular species of salamander and frog, they haven't completely identified them from the bone remains that were left in the vomit. But they think that a bofin fish vomited up its meal to get away from another predator that was probably chasing it. That's their hypothesis. Now, this could be what happened. Could also be that a frog or a salamander would have had toxins on their skins that could have led to the vomiting. So we don't know what exactly led to it. But these researchers believe that there was a predatory chain and this fossilized vomit has led them to understand the ecosystem of this ancient pond a little bit better. Wow. So something didn't agree with that fish. Yeah. So it's the question of, is it something didn't agree with the fish, whether it's the predator trying to eat it? And was it, was this a tactic to not be eaten? You know, I'm going to throw up my lunch on you. Don't eat me. Or I'm going to throw up my lunch, eat that instead. Don't eat me. Or I need to swim a little faster. And this is weighing me down. It's weighing me down. Yeah. I know. Fascinating. There are many questions we have about these things that our bodies get rid of. And yeah. Oh, I'm going to remove that from the screen. Yeah, these things our bodies get rid of. They're disgusting. Ew. Why do we want to talk about them? We're going to talk about them in just a minute. Oh, and she's gone. Oh, I hit the wrong button. I'm back. There she is. This, this is This Week in Science. If you are enjoying the show, please tell a friend today. Hey, everyone. This is This Week in Science. And right now we're going to come back with our special guest, Bryn Nelson, who has written a book called Flush. Now, Bryn has a PhD in microbiology, is a Seattle based freelance writer and editor with an avid interest in biology, biomedicine, ecology, green technology, and unconventional travel destinations. You may have seen his byline in publications like Newsday, New York Times, or Scientific American. And now on the cover of his book, Flush, the Remarkable Science of an Unlikely Treasure. Thanks for joining us today. Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. As pleasurable as I know where you're going. Yeah, maybe I won't finish that one. So how did you end up writing a book about a topic that people generally try not to talk about in polite company? Well, as a microbiologist, I already have an affinity with microbes. So, you know, I've just been fascinated with bacteria. And, you know, the microbiome is just so incredibly interesting to me. And the fact that we actually still know very little about what a lot of the microbes in our gut is what they're actually doing. You know, we, when I had my microbiome sequenced, a lot of the species, they would say, you know, isolated from the gut of a healthy person. And that was it. You know, so yeah, so there's there's so much that we don't know. And I did a feature story for a magazine called Mosaic a number of years back, and it was about fecal transplants. And basically, this is a therapy that was laughed at, you know, doctors and people thought it was disgusting. And no one believed that this would actually work. And it works. What happened was a lot of desperate people would have to take matters into their own hands, literally, and do these DIY fecal transplants, and they would cure each other with them. And so science started to take notice, and then they started to do the experiments that they need to do, you know, the double blind placebo controlled experiments. And we're able to show that this is not only effective, but it's more effective than a lot of the antibiotics of last resort, like vancomycin. And in fact, some of the studies were so effective that they stopped it early and gave people the fecal transplants because they thought it was unethical for them to actually continue with the, you know, the control, which was the antibiotic. And so I was just fascinated by the evolution of this therapy from something that is this kind of gross folk remedy to something that's solidly in mainstream medicine. And I think, you know, ever since then I've just been obsessed, I guess, or fascinated with the idea of, you know, this thing inside of us that we produce, that's natural, right? It's a natural product, and that it has real value. And it's something that we have not talked about and we've ignored. And what that means for some people is it literally can be deadly. Yeah. So did you get an understanding about the disgust that we feel for it? You know, the ignoring issues, people don't talk about things that affect their gut. People don't talk about things that are affecting things coming out the other end. And that can lead to really grave illness. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I have a whole chapter in the book on the psychology of disgust. And that was something that I started exploring as part of the feature. And I decided that it had to be its own chapter because it was just so interesting to me. But there is an evolutionary reason for this. You know, we have a pathogen disgust, there's sexual disgust, there's moral disgust. These are kind of the three categories that people have kind of lumped different types of disgust into. But the reason is things that are slimy, icky, you know, cockroaches, rats, vomit, poop. These are all things that can potentially make you sick. So there is a valid reason for us to have this emotional response. And disgust is a really strong emotion. In fact, a lot of researchers think it's the most potent emotion that we have, even more so than fear. But the problem is it can also work against our own best interests. And so I think, hopefully by kind of talking to people about, okay, here's how disgust works. We might be able to maybe undo some of the damage of extreme disgust, you know, because it can be used against people. You know, it has been throughout history. And that's kind of the unfortunate dark side, you know, of disgust. And so, yeah. It's also interesting, though, because, yeah, having grown up and lived on a few farms, you know, sometimes that's gold. Absolutely. Absolutely. So it is, I wonder if some of it is too, like, because of sanitation, we've also been so far like my first impression was it went down a hole or went, you know, water goes down a hole and it magically is gone. It just goes away. You never have to think about it or see it again there. And so we're not used to it even being in our environment in any way. Right. Until then you're a parent and you become something that you rate on a bi-diaper basis about the quality of diet. You know, you start thinking as a nutritionist, oh, this is a, oh, this is a good one. Oh, what's wrong with this one? That doesn't like, you know, it changes perspective again. Yeah, absolutely. Like every day, you know, we have a dog. I mean, and even with a dog, you know, it's like, okay, did she poop? What did it look like? Oh, it was gross. What did you feed her? You know, so there are these discussions that we have. What? Oh, there's my shoe. Exactly. Exactly. Or, you know, like, whatever, yeah, whatever she chewed up last night. But also, I think what's interesting about parents and Justin, you may relate to this is that, you know, when you're a new parent, you may have visceral strong disgust toward your infant's diapers. But you have to acclimate because that's part of, you know, taking care of the child. And there was actually a really fascinating study where it was, it was kind of hilarious because they basically had women smell diapers. And some of the diapers were from their baby and some were from other babies. And the diaper from their baby smelled less disgusting than those from other babies. And they did it, they repeated it multiple times. And then just to make sure that this wasn't an artifact, they would mislabel. So and they still found that they still found the same response. And what one of the one of the details was the poor unfortunate person who was charged with setting this up was apparently like so disgusted that as part of the research paper basically described sort of dry retching, you know, as part as part of this. And, you know, and kind of scientific language, yeah, all the name of science, right. But it shows, I mean, I think what's fascinating about it is that as parents, you have to, you know, you have to learn to live with it, right. And what it suggests is that there is a desensitization to disgust that can help us with with other things as well. And in fact, you know, psychologists will sometimes use that for people who have obsessive compulsive disorder. For example, there's a whole desensitization process that's very similar. Yeah. Blair is actually with us in the chat room. She's saying is that an acclimation or because of a shared microbiome, assuming that the parent is not as disgusted. Right. What leads to the left? I mean, eventually it could be a microbiome, right. But at first, there shouldn't be much of a shared microbiome. You, you generally share a portion of your microbiome with other people in your household. But it can be quite variable. And in fact, it can be quite variable within your own gut from day to day. So you know, there may be some sort of, I guess, a shared function. But I think with the level of disgust, it's such a powerful emotion. I don't know. It's an interesting question. I think that it's more of a sensitization of that. And but actually, if you if you think about it, there might be some connection because one of the things that we give off as humans are these volatile, organic compounds, VOCs, right. And poop actually is a huge contributor, you know, so your saliva, your sweat, other bodily fluids and poop. And so far, scientists have found more than 2700 different compounds that we give off. So we basically have this sort of invisible cloud around us. So part of it may be all of us are pigpen. Yeah, right. This is sort of this cloud. And it's and it's actually how dogs can tell one individual from another because they have such a keen sense of smell, they can actually distinguish one person from another on the basis of the compounds that were emitting from our poop. So if you think about it from a mother's standpoint, if you're familiar with that scent, I guess, for lack of a better phrase, that may actually contribute to a familiarity and then a desensitization over time. So that might be one way in which you know, maybe it's a shared microbiome or maybe it's just familiarity with the compounds released from that microbiome. And as you know, the babies, the babies' feces changes. The poop, it starts out as you describe it, it starts out as the dark like substance. And then it changes and it's like a yellowy kind of like mustard kind of color. And then it's later that the solid poops, when the solid food comes, that's when the solid poops. And the yellowy poops, they don't smell that bad. It's not really that terrible. It's later that the smell. And the other thing. With what is in the poop. What's happening? The other part, though, is just to be fair, though, is it's a decree. None of that matters. If a bird pooped on my car, I don't care. I'm not going to rush out and bare-handedly scrape it off of my car. I don't care about my car that much. I don't feel that instinctual level of caring for but if the bird pooped on my kid, I would immediately wipe it off. And if I don't use my own shirt to clean them up and spit and do all of that without hesitation, because I'm caretaking and protecting from the poop, even. That's what I'm talking about. I'm talking about human poop and how it changes. How does human poop change from birth to adulthood? What is it? Right. So, well, one of the things, and actually I can get back to the emotion and that changes over time, because I think that's another fascinating issue. But to your point, Kiki, we know that poop is about 40% microbes living or dead. Now, that changes depending on where you are. But that's a huge amount. That's the dry content. I mean, 75% of poop is water. But if you just go by the 25% or so, that's solid. 40% is poop. That's a lot. Then you have plant fibers. That's a good portion of it. You have nutrients. As you are going to start eating more solid food, that composition is going to change. And it also changes based on the level of plants in your diet versus meat. So, one sort of fun fact is most people in the US have a fiber deficit. We don't eat nearly as much fiber as we should. People in other parts of the world naturally eat much more fiber. And as a result of that, their poop often is about twice the weight of ARPs. Because not only because of the fiber, but if you think about the different types of fibers, actually food for the microbes, it encourages the growth of more microbes. So, their proportion in their poop of microbes plus the fiber is going to be larger. So, it's a fascinating idea of literally what you eat is going to determine what comes out the other end. And as we get some more solid foods and your poop is going to change, I think for parents, one of the reassuring things is that baby poop is notorious for the different colors. It can be green. It can be yellow. Basically, anything other than white or red is generally fine. Pediatricians are like, okay, you have the maconium that's almost like a black to begin with. But after that, there are all kinds of different shades of brown and green and yellow. And most of those are perfectly fine. It's some of the other colors like white that can suggest some sort of obstruction, for example. And obviously red can signify bleeding. But yes, definitely what we eat over time as we age has a very immediate effect on our poop. I'm picturing the public service announcement. You know how they're like, oh, it's going to be a heat wave. So, conserve electricity. You don't have any unnecessary lights on. Oh, it's a water shortage. So, don't water your lawn. Oh, hey, our waste management treatment plant is at capacity. We need everybody to go on a low-fiber diet the next week so they can recover. Exactly. So, that's a great segue into part of your adventures or your poo ventures. You've done travel writing, but you took travel writing in a different direction this time around. Yes, inner travels, I guess. I figured if I was going to write about it, and I'm not a doctor, obviously, so I can't dispense medical advice. But if I'm going to write about things that seem reasonable or unreasonable, I wanted to try them on myself first. Because the same thing about using recycled biosolids, I wanted to use them on my own garden, make sure that I was comfortable with that. So, that was kind of my role for researching and writing the book, is that, okay, if I'm writing about something, I should probably try it myself and see what it does. And basically, the kicker of all of that was that it didn't necessarily matter what I took as far as supplements. It was all about kind of what I ate as vegetables and yogurt. So, it basically comes back to your parents' advice of eat your veggies. And in this case, it's actually not only just eat your veggies, but eat diverse kinds of vegetables, because what that's doing is providing different kinds of fiber for you, which ends up being a really interesting thing. But the further thing is that that alone isn't necessarily enough. There have been some interesting studies that looked at, okay, what happens if we give people diets that are high in fermented foods versus diets that are high in fiber? And it turned out that the fermented foods are actually the most important. And so, the idea is, if you are just giving people fiber, but you're not giving them the microbes that can actually eat the fiber, that's not necessarily going to help you as much. And in fact, a lot of people who kind of go from zero to 60 on fiber will get very uncomfortable and get sort of bloated and gassy. And that suggests that they don't have the microbes in their gut yet that can actually eat the fiber, can actually act upon it in the right way. Yeah. Yeah, so you're going to want the yogurts and the, or the key furs and the kimchi and those sorts of foods along with your fiber supplement. Absolutely. I had a friend that's got the IBS, right, and every once in a while goes on a fermented oat drink diet for like a span of about a week or so. And that kind of clears it up for a while. And it, and I didn't really, it's interesting that you were saying that because I didn't really understand why a fermented oat drink would help because it seems like I would rather have IBS than drink it. Yeah, the good news is there's many more fermented foods now, right? So you can pick things that you actually enjoy eating. And that's the other thing, right? It's because, you know, we would tell people like, oh, you know, you have to have fermented foods, you have to have vegetables. Well, there's a huge variety of them and you're not going to like them all. So I mean, you know, pick something that you're actually going to stick to that you actually enjoy eating. But, but yeah, it's, it's, it's basically, you know, if you think of your gut, you know, it's a whole ecosystem, you know, you have predators, you have prey. I mean, it is incredibly complex. And it's also very easy for it to become unbalanced. So, you know, sometimes writing that is just a matter of, you know, stepping back and saying, okay, I'm going to eat some more veggies, you know, instead, or I'm going to make sure that I have yogurt every morning. You know, sometimes that's enough to kind of get that, get that back in sync. So you, you had your microbiome tested, had the, had the, had your gut flora confirmed. What other things did you do for this book? Um, so one of the fun things about that is I, it was like I was cramming for a test, right? Because I was like determined that I wanted to have, you know, a high number of species in my gut, you know, for whatever reason. And so, you know, I was eating yogurt every day, I was taking this probiotic, you know, that had like 10 different species in it. I was taking fiber pills in the afternoon, you know, I was, I was, I was eating pretty healthy, I think. But the fun, the funny thing is that when I actually got the results back, none of the 10 species in the probiotic appeared in my gut. None of them took. That's so strange. Um, because, well, and I think part of it is because some of them are transient species, like we, as infants, have a lot more of the, the lactobacillus, you know, bacteria. As we age, we have less and less of those. We can supply our gut with that on a temporary basis through yogurt, you know, but there's a question of, okay, have, should we have that and we've lost it? Or is that something that sort of normally happens as we get older? Because we have some people, they have the genes to create the lactase enzymes so that they can continue to break it down. But other people like me, right, we're not so lucky. Right. And I'm partially lactose intolerant as well. So, so, and interestingly enough, yogurt actually supplies that enzyme. So if you're eating yogurt for that period of time, you could then also theoretically drink milk and you would be okay because the yogurt is supplying the enzyme that you, that you lack. Yeah, through the, through the bacteria. Exactly. So it's a, it's a, it's a temp, it's a temp, it's a temporary thing. I'm gonna eat the yogurt and eat it and then have the pizza. Well, I would say, yeah, go, you might want to go easy. Don't, maybe not like a giant glass of milk. But, but, but what the other interesting thing was several of the species in the yogurt actually did appear in my gut. And so it suggests we know more about the microbes in yogurt because most of the testing has been done with that. It's much easier to control, you know, in terms of the number of different species and kind of the, the amount, if you will. The problem is that a lot of supplements right now on the market are unregulated. So you really have very little idea of what's in them. And, you know, they'll say, you know, X number of live cultures. But you're, you're basically taking their word for it. So it comes, it comes down to, you know, is this a company that's trustworthy? And I'm not saying that, that supplements are, are bad, you know, I think for some people, they can work really well. They're just not regulated. I think you just have to be really careful, right, about which ones. And, and even though they didn't appear in the, the, the sequencing, and that was one snapshot in time, right, your, your, your gut microbiome changes on a regular basis. So this was one particular moment in time that they didn't happen to appear. It doesn't necessarily mean that they weren't doing anything. Because to the point about the, the synthetic biology story, even if the microbes aren't, you know, alive, if they're kind of broken apart, their products may still be doing different things than our gut, right? So, so just the fact that the living microbes didn't appear doesn't necessarily mean that there was no effect at all, which I think is a really interesting thing. Because if you think about it, what you really care about are the proteins, right? And the components of the bacteria, those are the engines, those are what are doing things. And so they may still be doing something in your gut. It's just that there's not enough of the microbes themselves to kind of register as living, you know, so, so anyway, living in there. Yeah. So, but yeah, but that was, that was an absolutely fascinating journey, travel journey through my gut, I guess. But then I also, I also had apps. And maybe can I show this on the, let me see if I can. Why are you pulling that up? There's, I'm getting a clicking in the audio, is anybody else hearing this? Yeah. Now it's gone. Is there? I don't know. Okay, fine. It's mentioned it and it went away. That's what happens. And maybe, let's see, I don't know if I can, can I share this, or do you need to share that? Here, I'll add it. Oh, there we go. Okay. Yeah, so I use three apps, the one, the one's PECAL, the other one's PLOP, the third one that's not shown is POOKEEPER. They're kind of unintentionally hilarious because the PECAL is like a calendar, you know, it kind of reminded me of a little advent calendar because I started in December. And you have these little symbols, right, that appear that are supposed to be like the representative poop of the day. But it will give you a message just like, you're doing a good job, you know, which is kind of funny that you're getting a gold star for pooping. But we all, we have to gamify everything. Exactly. So they're really useful as a, if your goal is basically just to be more observant, like, you know, what, what are you eating and what's coming out, right? Doing this basically helps establish a baseline. So you understand kind of what's normal for you. And that makes it easier than to observe if there's changes, you know, over time that are concerning. You know, some of the apps, unfortunately, will then try and say, well, maybe you have this, I think that's much less useful because, you know, there's not a doctor involved here, it's an app. So, you know, that, that particular aspect, I would be quite skeptical of. But as basically an observational aid, something where you can just quickly say, okay, you know, this is the, the, and there's the Bristol scale, I guess we should maybe talk about the Bristol scale. But it's basically a scale of the consistency of your poop. And it's all the way from kind of the constipation side of things to diarrhea. And the shapes, different gastroenterology doctors will have different shapes that they can tell patients. But, you know, it's like pump of grapes. And, you know, the sausage in the middle is sort of what you should shoot for. Yeah, I think food maybe not. Maybe a little unfortunate that you're using food references to talk about the shape of your poo. Well, I mean, it is what's left of your food. Right. But it, but it, but as a, but as a very quick visual aid, it gives you a sense of the transit time. Because that's, that's basically what you are, your measuring or it's a proxy for the transit time. And so things that are going very slowly are going to be more on the kind of the hard ball clump of grapes side of things, suggesting that you might have constipation, whereas the porridge side of things, you know, doesn't take a lot of imagination there. But, but for, but for some people, it's actually really, it's really important because we know that there are all kinds of intestinal disorders, transit related diseases. And so this can actually be a really important thing for doctors to know, you know, like, okay, what's, what, what's your experience been like over the last month or so? Right. So anyway, so these, these are things I, I did, I basically have been doing these for about a year and 10 months now, because I just got on the habit of doing it. It's pretty easy to do, but I think it can actually be surprisingly informative for people. So similar to parents looking at their babies diapers to check things, I mean, you've gotten into a daily habit of tracking your bowel movements. And so I mean, was it hard at first? Were you like, that's gross? Or, and now are you just like, Oh, that's just, that's just what I do. Or, I mean, as a scientist, were you just ready to begin the experiment? I mean, I'm not one of those sort of hardcore, quantified self people, you know, I did talk with a researcher and he and his thesis advisor did this for a year, but they actually had like hundreds of values. So I mean, it was way more intense than I did it. And at the end of the year, he just wanted to chuck his cell phone because he was so, he was so sick of it. But it was fascinating because they also then sequenced their microbiome at different steps along the way, right? So they were able to track exactly what was happening, what happens when you travel, what happens when you eat certain things, what happens when you have a bacterial infection. You know, it was only an N of two, but it was a deep dive right into what was happening. I'm not that hardcore. And, you know, I'm disgusted by certain things. It just for whatever reason, this isn't one of them. So I would, I would love to get my own microbiome sequenced. Because I consider myself to be an iron gut type super performer, because I can have the most ridiculously horribly varied diet. It can be a good diet, a bad diet or this whole thing. Like Blair was joking in the chat room that she would eat a tire to get rid of her IBS, let alone fermented drinks. But, you know, so I have even offered Dr. Justin's not a real doctor poo pills, not guaranteed to be in poo form to the audience for anybody who's got IBS. Oh, send you a sample. But there is, there is, you know, we had a guest on Josiah Zanier who, who self did one of these replacements he took antibiotics. And then he had this really fit athletic friend who he borrowed samples and pill formed them himself and took them over a course of I think 40 days. And did find like his IBS miraculously disappeared. And these rashes that he would get that he thought were totally unrelated stopped happening. And, and then he's the funniest thing I thought there was he, he, this is a guy who's a health food nut, you know, trying to get rid of that he also lost like 10, 15 pounds like all these things happen at once. He's a guy who never touches sugar never has a craving for it eats healthy all the time, went to the store threw in a big thing of cookies like I think a whole big cube of Oreo cookies into the thing not knowing why. It's like I don't know why I bought them. I got home I threw them up on a shelf. It's not something I've ever ever tasted or would care for. And then one night put them down from the shelf like eight the whole thing. And then, and then was talking to his friend, you know, I was like, hey, you know, do you ever have sugar cravings anything like that? Do you ever like eat a whole bunch of cookies at once trying to see if it was connected and his friends like I don't eat cookies and I eat healthy and all that kind of stuff blah, blah, blah. Oh, but every once in a while, yeah, I'll buy a pint of ice cream and eat the whole thing. And so it was such an interesting there was like an unconscious driver of this new microbiome that made him pull down the cookies that you would never have purchased, right? Take them home and just, yeah, you're going to need that later, buddy. Like sort of drove food urge that wasn't even like hungry while shopping wasn't even occurring in that moment, all of which I found very fascinating. But how much did and I haven't had a chance to read your book at do you talk about the replacement vehicle transplants? Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the one of the fascinating things is there are a number of different stool banks around the country. The biggest one, which is now transitioning a little bit but open biome, you know, has been one of the biggest for a number of years. And they screen donors and they have a very, very strict screening process and only 3% of the people pass. So I mean, so that's a lower acceptance rate than Harvard. So you have donors who have already passed, you know, a number of different stringent tests. But one of the reasons they do that is because as we're learning more about the microbiome, we don't want to get to the unintentional harm that may come from someone's microbiome predisposing them towards diabetes, for example, to your point, right? So that if you are then transplanting this into someone else, you are then making them, you know, more predisposed, you know, whether you transfer cravings or not, you know, I mean, you know, it's debatable. But there but there certainly is evidence to suggest that there can be some long-term effects if you're not doing this properly. The other thing that's really fascinating about this is that as you go away from C. diff infection, so the primary application for vehicle transplants is clostridioides difficile infections. That's a real tough one to knock out. It's a really tough one to knock out. Often it's hospital acquired, but not always. And if you have that infection, you tend to be susceptible to repeated infections. So it does some sort of self-protective like. It has a spore. Yeah. Capsule. Capsule. So yeah, so it can be very, very difficult to clean from hospital rooms. And in the book, I talked with one patient who had had the infection eight times and, you know, and she was dying. And this was a patient who basically recruited her husband to essentially save her life. The mechanism for that is more like you're replanting someone's inner garden to crowd out the weeds, right? So it's almost sort of like a mechanical function. If you are replacing someone's completely imbalanced microbiome with a sort of a fully intact one, you may be able to kind of crowd out C. diff. But as you move on to more complicated diseases, so colitis, Crohn's, for example, some of these autoimmune conditions, there is some evidence that fecal transplants work, but there also seems to be a donor effect. And what some of the research has shown is that some donors seem to have something that others don't. And so it really kind of depends on who the donor is. So it's not just you're crowding out. You're actually providing something. And that's been shown in a number of different studies. So that's a really active area of research, because of course, researchers want to know, well, what is that? And can we do it in a way? Can we replicate this so that we don't have the poo pills, you know, or the... Well, you're cutting into my business now. Okay, okay. Because I'm fascinated to find this out because I, you know, it's sort of like allergies. I didn't have allergies forever. And so what are allergies? I don't even under... I had no compassion for the poor folks that had allergies. And then I moved to a place where I had really bad allergy to something. And I was like, oh, this is terrible. Now I get why people are taking pills and upset. We can't go outside on certain days. With my gut, I don't get in irritable. I don't get in an upset. And I eat either really healthy or really terrible. There's not like a rhyme or reason to a consistent diet that I've had over years. But I've never experienced any of these troubles. I'd be fascinated to find out if I've got some little subset of microbiota in there that are fixtures. Just sort of, you know, whatever the imbalance that is taking place in others or whatever the bad actors are, because I understand that in some IBS there's actual... They've isolated some bad actors that are involved in causing inflammation and that sort of thing. Maybe that good donor thing is a counter to the bad actors. Maybe it's something that actively seeks and attacks them even. I don't know. It's so fascinating because we're just scratching the surface on these. Right. Absolutely. And one of the fascinating things is that people talk about keystone species. So you may have a bacterial species that recruits other species and then actively keeps out others. Because we know that some bacteria can change the pH, for example, and make the colon more inhospitable to other microbes. And the different proteins and other factors that they will secrete can have effects for either recruiting microbes or basically killing some of the other ones. And even the byproducts of their metabolism can then be food for other microbes. So you kind of have this whole very complicated ecosystem that has evolved. And that's what's so fascinating about it is because we haven't... We've struggled to kind of distill that down because people are trying to do... Say, well, okay, if we have these two dozen bacterial species or if we have these 50, maybe we can sort of replicate what a fecal transplant is doing. And it's worked in some cases, but not quite as well as the full deal. This is the super donor. Jason Bombardier in the chat, Winsworth, can we call it colonizing? I like it. I like it. It's the last one of the night. Yes, we can. Colonizing. No, but it's true. There's a whole line of research on kind of the sequence of microbes that will colonize a baby's gut. And we know that depending on if a baby is breastfed versus formula that that can have a big impact on the microbiota. If you have a pet in the house, if you're on a farm, all of these things have really consequential impacts. And yeah. The stages of colonizing, colonizing an infant gut is interesting because there was a study some time back that was talking about the virus load is highest in infants than it will ever be. Again, the diversity of viruses load in infants is higher than it stops around age two, but is higher than it is in the adult life ever again. And part of the idea there is that those were phases that were sort of working as doorman to the gut microbiota. So those viruses in the newborn are sort of a first stage immune system. And they're also sort of doing a selection process then for what gets to get established in the first place. So then we're even backtracking like, okay, okay, now hang on. We got an ecosystem. There's a selector for the ecosystem that's a virus that are doing that. Oh my goodness. Right. I mean, the viruses that are literally predating on some of the microbes, right? And so yeah, I mean, I think the latest estimate is that it used to be that it was 10 to one that we were outnumbered. They've since updated that. So it's basically one to one, which is the bacteria. But then if you include the viruses, then you have another at least equal number because for every bacteria, there's likely to be a virus because you have the predators, you have the prey. Right. So then you have the bacteriophages. And we know that in sort of the window of time, I think, right to your point within the first couple of years of life, there's a very strong kind of development of the immune system so that your body is learning what is friend, what is foe, right? And the microbes that you have in the viruses play a really important role in your body sort of figuring that out. If you don't have that, the evidence suggests that you're prone to certain things later in life, diabetes, obesity, asthma, allergies. So yeah. So it really is suggesting that there is this really important window of time and a lot of it is what's happening in your gut. And I'm curious too to know if there's a, if those super performers that they're sequencing that we've got microbiome, are they, are they finding, are they looking for, are they able to find a viral component there? That's different because it would be interesting if there was still that predation taking place. There was a persistent virus that was helping. I mean, that's a fascinating question. And actually, so Lena Zaldovich, who also wrote a book about poop, is working on another book about bacterial phages. And that's such a fascinating thing. So that's another level. So that would actually be a good question for her. I don't know to what extent people are looking at that, but I think that is kind of a new avenue that people are looking at because they're realizing also that phages can be a good alternative to antibiotics, right? If you pick the right one, it can attack and kill your pathogenic bacteria. But, but yeah, that's an excellent question. I think, I think they're just starting to look at sequencing of the guts. I know that there was a really interesting study out of Canada. And I was looking, I think it was in colitis, but there was a very strong donor effect. And then they did sequencing to show that the donors microbiome was quite different than the other donors. I don't think that they actually then looked at the viruses in his gut. But that would be really fascinating thing to do as a whole ecosystem. Because this is one of those things too. We've talked about a bunch on the show about all the information about the microbiome. Is the poor nutritionist book on the shelf before all of this information was coming to light, was missing such a big part of the picture. And then the microbiome with it. But like Bryn said, it still comes down to each of veggies. It's all still in there. It is amazing that it like as advanced as some of the research is, it just goes back to that. And I think, and then one of the other thing that I want to add to that is that a lot of these foods were foods that were sort of undervalued, at least by us in the Western world. So cassava, beans, these are things that Indigenous people have known and valued for centuries. And we kind of poo pooed all of that. Well, no, it turns poo pooed, sorry. But it turns out that, yeah, of course, that is a really important part of nutrition. And so now we're kind of coming back to that. So avocados, you know, cassava, beans, you know, all of these foods, and kind of rediscovering that, of course, they've been there all along. It's just that, you know, some of us in the Western world have sort of ignored them. But I think it's, you know, that's worth pointing out that, you know, a lot of cultures have known this for for centuries. And it's amazing that, you know, it's taking us going down the scientific route to kind of bring us back again to knowledge that has been held. Yes. Indigenously for years. But speaking of our modern society and, you know, our technology and everything with waste treatment plants, and we can track viruses, we know COVID, SARS-CoV-2 is being tracked in our wastewater at this point in time. What did you learn from waste treatment plants about how we're doing epidemiology these days to just, you know, the good that poo can do for our society to help us know what's going on? It's such a fascinating story. And I think what may surprise a lot of people is that it really has a long history. We were looking for polio, not we did, but people and researchers, it's far back as the 30s. And I think the date was 39 where there was a polio outbreak was the first time that they the researchers were able to definitively find evidence of polio on the sewers. I think it was Detroit was one of the cities. I want to say city in South Carolina. And then researchers in Sweden confirmed that there was another polio outbreak in Stockholm. So that was actually a really important aspect of monitoring for decades. And we kind of forgot about that. Although there were a lot of these kind of surveillance systems that were sort of trundling along in the background, you know, sort of unnoticed by most people, but, you know, Israel has had one for decades. And then it kind of got rediscovered during COVID, you know, other people were looking at it for drugs. So for opioids, for example. And then people thought, oh, wait a minute, you know, the COVID virus, you know, has an envelope. And, you know, some of the early research suggested that, you know, a pretty substantial fraction of people were shedding it and their feces. And so it was making its way to the sewer. And it turns out that you can find a very, very small amount of it with the sensitive PCR test that we have now. And so that kind of took off. When done well, that can give communities about a week headstart. Because by the time that a clinical case is diagnosed, because you have to you have to go through the testing, you have to get the test results back, right? There's a lag there. And so if you can find it in a community's wastewater, you know it's in the community. And so you can then take steps to prepare for that. You know, now the question then is, okay, well, what are you prepared to do, right? That's a public health question. But there were several examples that I talked about in the book. University of Arizona was really effective, as were some other colleges and universities as well. But basically, being able to isolate it to specific dorms on campus, then they were able to test everyone in the dorm where this where it lit up and find asymptomatic cases. And so by doing it that way, they figured that they were able to avert dozens of outbreaks. And that was so effective then that that same kind of methodology was used in Yuma, Arizona. So there's a facility it's called date date pack. It's a date packing facility. And they used it there and found a silent outbreak among some of their workers, sent them home with pay, they had no symptoms, and were able to avert outbreaks that way as well. The other, I think, advantage of doing something like that is that if you're communicating to people, this is what we're doing, this is why this is, you know, intended to protect you, you can use this actually as a way to kind of earn the trust, you know, with people. So that then when it comes to, okay, what's the public health measure that we're going to do to follow up on that, they may be more likely to trust you. So for example, on the the date pack facility, when it came time for vaccinations, almost every single person said yes immediately, because they had been very transparent of like, here's what we're doing, here's why. And they saw that it worked, you know, because I think there was skepticism before that they did the testing, like, okay, what's this about? And then they're like, oh, crap, you know, this is real. And and then they were able to see that the measures that were taken actually helped avert outbreaks. So it's really effective. It's also being used for monkeypox. It can be used for a number of other viruses. It's being used for antibiotic resistance. Researchers are actually looking at planes that will take off in one city and land in another, because if you look at the bathroom, that's basically, you know, being used by the people on the plane, right? And it's cleaned after every flight. So of course, there are some privacy issues there as well, that would need to be ironed out. But you can literally track the movement of norovirus, of antibiotic resistance of other diseases, and say, we know where the plane started, and we know where it where it ended up. So so yeah, it's it's incredibly effective. I think it's just we know, and we know it's all Greg's fault now. We know it down to one guy, apparently. They're down to everybody on the plane. Exactly. Exactly. It's that Greg. Now, I mean, I mean, there are there are privacy concerns, right? Because then it's the question is who deserves to know what you're carrying around inside of you, right? And, and, you know, and leaving it on the plane. And so there is a balance there. Certainly, there's a lot of upside for public health. But but I think they're yeah, again, I think there probably needs to be a conversation of like, okay, are there limits to, you know, to privacy? Because it's kind of interesting, you know, that we were we're fine with using it when we're trying to find out if Greg was using drugs, or somebody in that neighborhood was by looking at the waste water, right? But then when it's for public health, we're like, Oh, hey, it's everybody's right to have a pipe pathogen, go undetected in society. Somebody's medical issues are but I think when you're talking about public health, you're talking about something that I don't know. I get the privacy issues, especially when because people want to get away with crime, and they should be able to with the, you know, forth and on the right to privacy. You should be able to get away with some personal crime. That's just you should be that should be allowed. That's part of privacy rights. That just does. That's a privacy right. But when it comes to public health and infecting people, yeah, that's not going to make that argument for me. Because yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I think, yeah, to your point. I mean, I think it depends on how serious is the public health threat, right? And yes, absolutely. I mean, if there is a serious threat, you know, above a particular threshold, then yes, you have to weigh the public good against the right to privacy. Absolutely. You investigated so many things and like the singularly worded titles on the bookshelf behind you. You also have a nice single word flush. And each of your chapters is has single words for the chapter title titles very thematic. But you spent a lot of time breaking everything down into some wonderful different categories. But at the beginning of our conversation here, you did really make a point of focusing on the good that our poop knowing more about what we're releasing into the wild. You know, what good that can do for us as humans. So I don't know if that's your message. But if you did have one thing that you want people to gather from this from reading your book, what do you hope that it is? I think the overwriting message is that learning more about the natural product that we make can help us live more in balance with our own bodies and the rest of nature. You know, we've kind of divorced ourselves from the rest of nature and forgotten that this is how nature works, you know, animals poop that those nutrients are reused. You know, we have these nutrient cycles, phosphorus, nitrogen, water, the water cycle, and they're reused again and again and again. And we were kind of the odd ones out by saying, oh, no, we have to burn it, we have to bury it, we have to be rid of it. And we're really harming ourselves in the process. And I don't want to minimize the danger. I mean, obviously, poop is mishandled can be incredibly dangerous. And in fact, you know, a lot of sanitation crises around the world are because the poop is going where it shouldn't go. And it's an incredible problem. And it's astonishing to me just the level of it. And we haven't yet gone to the point where, you know, sanitation is human right for everyone, you know, it should be. And I think, you know, by teaching people that if used in the right way, we can not only solve some of these problems like sanitation problems and environmental harm, we can flip that on its head and use it for environmental remediation. We can bring value back to some of these communities. And so container-based sanitation as an example, where you're basically safely removing the waste, and then you're transforming it into something, whether that's fertilizer, whether that's biogas for electricity, you're then basically bringing value back to those same communities. And I think that's just such a wonderful kind of circular economy message. So that's what I hope people take away from it. Poop, it's part of the circle of life. Absolutely. It definitely is. So your book, how can people find it and connect with you about it? Ah, well, it is available in most bookstores. But if people have questions for me, I would be more than happy to. People can find me on Twitter. I'm Seattle Bryn. Let's see here. I can put that up. No, I can't. Let's see here. Maybe you can share that. I can share it. Sure. Yeah, if anyone has any questions, yeah, feel free to ding me on Twitter, DM me. But yeah, it's been quite an adventure. And I obviously can talk about this for a long time. I love it. We can go deep. Go deep in the poo. Absolutely. And there will be puns in the book. But hopefully it's a way for people to have, to get more comfortable with it, you know, so that we can have more serious conversations. And we really need to. Absolutely. I've enjoyed reading it very much. Not only because you do reference me in one of the early parts of the book, not only because of that. It's quite memorable. And it's for a punny reason, too. But the book itself, I've really enjoyed reading it. I think that you touch on so many wonderful topics. And I really do hope that people don't let their disgust and their distaste for the topic lead them away from this book and that they actually do, you know, check it out and enjoy the puns and your humor. I mean, you had to have a sense of humor in addressing this topic and you did and you handled all the topics from humorous to serious in a very great manner. So yeah, thanks for writing a good book. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for for having me on. It's been great. Yeah, it's been fun time. We do have some more science stories to discuss. We do. This is This Week in Science. And if you are enjoying the show, I implore you, well, I'm asking you very gently to head over to twist.org and click on the Patreon link. Our Patreon community is how we support the show and your support is greatly appreciated. $10 and more a month and we will thank you by name at the end of the show. I look forward to reading your name. Can't do this without you. Thank you for your support. All right, this is This Week in Science. And we're going to come back, but we don't have the animal corner, but oh, Justin. Oh, we do. Did you bring an animal story? It's Blair's Animal Corner with Justin. Hey, everybody. Hey. So this week in Justin's Blair's Animal Corner, lots of creatures use camouflage to avoid getting eaten by predators. Some use a strategy of blending in or background matching as a way to avoid being seen. This is what chameleons, maybe an Arctic fox are doing. The Vietnamese mossy frogs that kind of have skin that looks a little bit like moss itself and even have green eyes kind of blend in well. Many insects match their environment that they're doing this. Basically, the idea behind military camouflage as well. Blending into the environment. Others attempt a more complicated form of mimicry. Masquerading is something they're not, an insect that looks like a leaf or a stick. And maybe I put into that category a hoverfly that's a fly that looks like a wasp. It's got the yellow and black bands on it. It looks just like a wasp. He would not guess that it was a fly, but it's actually just a fly, totally not a wasp. Which strategy though is the most effective? The the backgrounding or the mimicking? Researchers looked at 84 previous studies. Each had run experiments to rate how well a given camouflage strategy worked. How long it took for a predator to find a camouflage prey in a controlled environment. And whether or not they were at what percentage rate they got attacked. They boiled this down to a predator search time and a predator attack rate of the camouflaged prey. Camouflage was found to be generally an effective survival strategy as it took 62% longer for predators to find them than uncamouflaged prey. And they were attacked 27% less often. So you hid better and and you were less often attacked if you had some form of camouflage. Masquerading camouflage. That's the one like if you're the insect that looks like a stick or you mimicked something in the environment. You look like something else. Was the most effective as it increased predator search times by almost 300%. So if you can't be seen, you also can't be eaten. So they were also attacked and eaten much much less often. Research suggests that the reason more creatures do not use masquerading as camouflage strategy. First of all, that's got to be a difficult thing for nature to arrange for you to look like a leaf or a stick or have a fly that looks just like a wasp. That's got to just be hard I guess to get there. But you also have to be roughly the same size as the thing you're trying to match. So a zebra masquerading is a wasp. Doesn't work would not be effective. Having eye spots, you know how you sometimes you got animals and they have like a thing that looks like an eye but that's not really where their eye is. Didn't affect anything at all. Oh no. There's so many eye spots in nature. There's so many eye spot creatures which might suggest it isn't actually a camouflage component after all or it simply works best on a specific predator that somehow eluded the study. So these are also studies that looked at several different types of prey and generalized the results together. But it also had several different kinds of predators that got generalized together in this. So keep that in mind. But overall the having of eye spots, a sort of eye camouflage, no effect. It didn't make things worse. Didn't improve either the search times or the attack rates. They also point out that most of the studies they used were conducted in the Northern Hemisphere which I mean right there that leaves out the rainforest of South America which must be absolutely rich in these strategies. So definitely as we often say at the end of every story, more research is needed. Speaking of more research, another animal story Blair brought a story last year related to cockatoos opening up garbage cans in Australia and people being upset because the cockatoos were spreading garbage all around but the garbage is a great source of food resources for these cockatoos. So it's been very important for the cockatoos to learn how to get into the garbage bins. Well in the latest update to this saga of cockatoos versus garbage cans it's turned into cockatoos versus humans and the latest study that has been published in current biology is really looking into the interaction between the humans and the cockatoos and looking at what has happened in this evolution. Human residents are trying to keep cockatoos out and so while they're keeping them out of the bins they have started putting bricks and stones on the bin lids strapping water bottles to the top rigging ropes to prevent the lid from flipping using sticks to block the hinges and then they switch tactics once the cockatoos figure it out but then so the humans are also learning from their neighbors as to what their neighbors are doing so the tactics that neighboring humans are using so there's human spread learning of information and knowledge that's happening on a house by house neighborhood by neighborhood kind of basis the cockatoos as well are learning new tactics and cockatoos are learning from each other and spreading successful tactics around and so this is definitely it's predator prey but it's a competition that's going on it's it's not predator prey but it's it's a competition of motivation but it might be more motivated the cockatoos are the or the humans it might turn into that the cockatoos might just get fed up with all the things that happen to jump through to get to the trash and they just might start taking people's groceries when they get home you know we were totally happy going through the stuff you didn't want but if you're forcing our hand we'll just take the stuff that you just bought right out here the cockatoos are going to escalate yeah and and that's and that's exactly what this researcher is looking into you know but it's not just the cockatoos who are escalating so what will happen next with the humans and this is just part of the interesting interactions that occur between animals and humans as we you know as we spread out more and more and you know as humans are putting ourselves into historic ecosystems that have been you know the homes of the homes of the cockatoos right here where I am I see coyotes up on the hill because we're putting our homes where coyotes lives we are moving into their habitats and ecosystems so but these interactions are very interesting Justin do you have more stories I got one more story tonight adaptation to environment something required for all living things we've been talking about a little bit on the show today we humans often pride ourselves on our ability to live across many varied environments across the planet sometimes interacting with coyotes and cockatoos early on we found we would seek out and find caves that we could just move into later we learned how to make our own caves and put them anywhere on the world pretty much wherever you go on land you find humans fungi exist everywhere humans do and many many places we don't like oceans of course inside of most animals they are living there as well adapting to environment is the strategy that fungi understand better than most any other life form on earth yeah one interesting example of fungal superiority in this regard is cryptococcus neoformants the fungus responsible for cryptococcus which can infect human lungs as a pneumonia and can make it to the brain as a meningitis a swelling of the brain so cryptococcus neoformants starts out living in an environment it'll be in rotting wood it's found often in pigeon poop or in the soil pretty much anywhere in the world where you have rotting wood soil and pigeons which is everywhere that's right that's already in everywhere but then it can enter the human's body when it enters human lungs for instance the cells can grow to 10 times their normal size and they think that's a strategy or a way for it to become more difficult to make it more difficult for the immune system to to attack and destroy them they can also remain in their smaller sizes travel throughout the blood system reaching other organs and according to scientists at University of Utah Health in a recent report they can shrink to a much smaller than usual size to get past the blood brain barrier and infect the brain causing meningitis this is sort of interesting because there is already a stochastic size difference within this fungus where some and even in the lungs would get very big and some would be medium and some would be small and when they looked at uh somebody studying lungs and used to this stochastic varied uh size differentials looked at slides of the fungi in a brain of a patient with meningitis they found them all to be uniform and of this much smaller size so they infected mice with various sizes of cryptococcus neoformans they found that indeed the smallest cells preferentially affect infected the brain although you'd also say that's they were screened in a sense too that's that you had to be small to get there this these cells were not only diminutive though they weren't just small like immature or small compared with the larger cells they had unique features on their surface that were similarly important for accessing the brain they also turned on different sets of genes so this is a stochastic uh adaptation where you try different strategies at the same time to sort of uh what you call it shotgun effect your environment yeah see what we see what size difference see if we turn these genes on over here and some of us some of us keep those genes off and turn on different ones that gives you a broader uh reach uh for biome niche researchers also found that phosphate seems to play a central role in the forming of these microversion cells the microcells had an enhanced expression of phosphate acquisition genes so these and mutants that were unable to acquire phosphate were not able to have the same morphotypes as the really really small ones so that becomes interesting because of one of the places that we're used to finding uh this well for one when there's an injury around tissue tissues release phosphates so this can be a thing that on site of an injury could accelerate infection of of a mammal yep but also we find this in pigeon droppings which is high in phosphate so that also might be a clue to how it got small enough to be easily transmittable into into humans in the first place so uh the size variation represents inducible morphotypes that change host interactions to facilitate the micro spread and links to the that study where it's published are on our website that's fascinating so yeah it's specifically adapted to make infection easier get it gets in the lungs it's small enough to be transported inhaled uh get into the bloodstream through the blood brain barrier and then it can seed the infection so that then from that particular morphotype it can grow into it's more usual fungal state but it can grow into a larger cell in the lungs where it really makes it easier to survive and it can also get smaller so you can go yeah it could go all over that's a strategy thing beyond people hey okay let's make one of us two feet tall and another one of us 30 feet tall and we'll be able to chase after gophers in in the gopher hole and pick those coconuts right off the pier whatever we're doing we don't have options like that yeah but in the in this particular case it's you know it's interesting to understand how these morphotypes work because the future is fungal and when we're looking at health public health issues of the future funguses are at the top of the list especially with a lot of the climate change that we're seeing there have been a lot of stories recently from the central valley california of uh cacosteridium i believe which causes valley fever and there have been a lot of stories of more valley fever cases kind of popping up than usual um and it's a it's a fungus and uh we don't know enough about fungi we need to learn about the infectious funguses that are going to be affecting us and this is huge research that can help us potentially discover the different pathways are there specific targets we can look for how can you know can we look for uh ph or not ph phosphate um some kind of metabolism uh you know what proteins are involved can we target um i don't know like like you worked on in your phd work uh brinn with e coli you know maybe a sugar channel but not a sugar channel or or yeah absolutely yeah no i mean nature nature is just fascinating and i mean in your right there's there's there's so much that we have let yet yet to learn about some of these just ingenious adaptations um you know of these pathogens and and you're right i mean uh you know not to take this back to poop specifically but but there's but i can't um but but i mean there's a long list of pathogens and sort of like the wish list for environmental surveillance and we're just not doing it you know and and wastewater epidemiology is one form of it it's certainly not the only one uh but but it can be incredibly important um you know and and and i think people are realizing that we need to have the infrastructure to do way more you know whether it's whether it's uh fungi whether it's viruses whether it's bacteria um yeah we're we're we have a long way to go such a long way but we are close to uh replacing psychedelics with virtual reality what prove it well i can't do that right now and uh prove it is a really hard statement in science i'll know it when i see it first hand i need a side by side comparison now darn it now right now oh no i got a busy day but anyway publishing in scientific reports this week researchers are talking about their work in a vr platform uh which they have created called is niss and is niss d is niss distributed so is niss in uh this lab um that works on using virtual reality for uh for potential therapies it's the head of the intangible realities laboratory um which is irl which ha ha which i find kind of funny anyway this project is has been looking at whether or not participants can have a transcendent state in which they leave their or lose their sense of self release the sense of ego and are able to perceive a sense of oneness with others and in this uh this platform of vr you are represented as a ball of light within a human type form it's all very fuzzy and uh not as defined as our physical forms and they started with is niss which is co localized together niss and uh people will uh wear vr headsets and enter the vr situation together in the same room so holding hands but uh in the vr space so they're connected but also in a physical location and also within this virtual location the balls of light then move around and get rid of within the vr space the sense of your physical body and so the idea is that with the representation within the vr space participants lose a sense of really where their bodies stop and someone else's body begins and participants in the co localized experiments said that very out that they did have these experiment these experiences and they actually had these feelings of connected connectedness and oneness with others so then the researchers said can we do this remotely can we make it distributed and so that's when they moved on to the is niss d and were able to bring together people from all around the world in a crowd sourced experiment where they had users all over the world use the platform and um they said and they they say that they they they analyze the results using four key scales applied in previous studies with psychedelics to assess the subjective phenomenon phenomenology of is niss d in fact and to the best of our knowledge this work represents the first attempt to analyze a virtual reality experience experience using these measurement scales um and the complexities that they found the is niss d scores on all four scales were statistically indistinguishable from those of recently published psychedelic drug studies yeah so can virtual reality taking yourself it maybe it's kind of like an isolation tank experience where you isolate yourself um i i don't know i i haven't tried this i am skeptical but at the same time i am curious can we use these virtual reality technologies to simulate some aspects not all the aspects but some aspects of psychedelics that have led to beneficial psychological experiences in people's lives that have uh treated depression anxiety and a host of other issues related also to the fear of dying so there's a lot there's a lot maybe i don't think i think i you know i think this is uh first of all unless the drugs have really changed since i was a since you were a kid yeah uh back in the sixties you know like there's brain chemistry uh temporary brain chemistry some of it maybe a little more permanent uh changes that take place uh perception filters i mean if you read something like uh all this Huxley's doors of perception i think it is where he does he writes about being on mescaline for an example the things he's talking about are visually and time perception uh differences that i don't think you're getting from like oh whose body of his who's touching who like whatever in the virtual thing like a lot of these concepts of oneness are not i don't think as surface as you don't think i know i believe i believe there's a lot more like deep amygdala tuning that's taking place chemically that that may not be visual perception oriented that may be some byproduct affect of it but it doesn't seem to me like but so here's the question like is is it the the i mean there's always the the brain and behavior feedback loop right your body affects your brain your brain affects your body your entire nervous system with proprioception and all the things creates your sense of self and your sense of space and what what space you exist within in the universe and so that physicality of it does changing that physicality necessarily have to be chemical to have permanent or chemically started to have permanent downstream neural changes so this kind of VR experience by just experiencing whatever the situation is that they've put together someone getting through this kind of this groundbreaking experience of feeling connected to others does that itself that experience is that what rewires your brain is that what starts the process my guess is that's all that the other thing they're playing with is artifacts related to so it's like it's the difference of getting clean by taking a nice hour long hot bath and it's really soaking in the suds and then and it's like hey we've got something just like that and then somebody takes a sprayer and spritzes you in the face a bunch of times you're like okay i'm wet but i just i'm not clean at all like that didn't do i get how you've connected to there's wetness involved but that's doesn't mean i don't know i'm do i seem skeptical you do you do was there a placebo control i mean did they have people that were basically holding hands in a darkened room with the headsets on but it just it was i don't know they're playing a disney movie instead i'm curious to know because because presumably like the power of suggestion there right might have a huge impact right yeah so um yeah as far as i know there's not a placebo group that everyone was experimenting with in the platform so that is a big um that's a big hole in this study good uh good uh good format good uh protocols to be taking their virtual albeit trip in a group where they can watch out for one another that's always advisable when doing virtual things it's always good to to have that sense of community and have someone watching over you but uh it's it's interesting it's very interesting thank you for bringing up the the how the study is designed and i will look into that more specifically to be able to answer that question because it's a good question is it really science if you don't have a control group or is it just people playing in vr it's just people playing in vr i think we've come to the end of the show what do you think i think that is that it are we done playing in our virtual world here so so only a little more than our normal tight 90 uh yes ah we've done it everyone thank you for joining us for another episode i do appreciate you being here and brinn thank you so much for joining us once again for talking about your book and for everyone out there remember you can find brinn's book flush the remarkable science of an unlikely unlikely treasure all places books about pooper found exactly we didn't even get we didn't even get the touch into the agricultural aspects and all the other i know there's a lot more in there absolutely absolutely no thank you it's it's been it's been wonderful thank you so much for having me it's been great having you on the show and i just do want to say thank you to a few people who help out the show our shout outs fada thank you so much for doing the social media and our show notes for youtube it that it just really is such a wonderful help to us identity for thank you for recording the show gordon aran lore thank you for making sure our chat rooms are nice happy places for people to hang out and i also have to thank rachel for your wonderful editing thank you for doing that job and many many thanks to our patreon sponsors who 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And if you've learned anything from the show remember it's all in your head. warming with a wave of my hand and all it'll cost you is a couple of crumbs coming your way so everybody listen to what I say I use the science this week in science science science this week in science this week in science this week in science science science science I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news that what I say may not represent your views but I've done the counting we are now officially in the after show yay brand thank you so much yeah absolutely oops I was gonna remove that that's fine Justin you're back I was just gonna go your video you gotta go because I said uh crying not sleeping baby is now uh awoken awakened demanding things but if he says I want this I want that they're constantly your baby has it said its first word yet oh he said yeah he talks constantly uh really yeah and he's got more work uh a little of both uh he'll repeat a word right after you say it doesn't keep it okay are you are you hey are you tired tired oh you know how to say that but you just oh it's great a little mimic and then but uh the other thing amazing he's he's got he's got more teeth than he is months old and is already crawling and getting I think he's going to be an engineer because he's already trying to take everything in the house apart see how it's put together he's a very careful guy meant to uh oh it stayed awake through a nap time at the zoo where he was in a pram where they can lie down and you know it's not like a stroller but he was sitting up like a little prairie dog the whole time he's like and was battle talking I think more to the animals than he does to us so I think I think my my theory is that he's uh uh oh here's a whole bunch of other creatures that that walk around on all fours like I do this is my people this is where I belong and then he's uh according to this sign too it looks like uh oh you and you and mama are some form of ostrich because that's the only other thing that walks on two legs but I gotta go I gotta get breakfast going here and I'm sure yeah and I'm sure Bryn would love to get to bed because you've had a long day of talking and interviews it has yeah I mean unless anyone has a has a is anyone still on do we I mean unless someone has there are people still watching if other people if people have more questions about if someone has another question but um I got a question about toilets thank you Justin hi uh see if anybody ah Paul says thanks for hanging out with us Dr. Nelson thank you Paul that's been fun yeah yeah I think we got I don't I think I answered everything that that we asked okay I don't know when I was when I was thinking about uh I was looking through your book and I was remembering an experience that um my husband Marshall had come to me laughing one evening and like speaking about disgust and poop and kids and and parents causing trauma to their children um there are all these videos and you can find compilations of them on YouTube of course but there are videos of parents pranking their kids by putting like I think it's peanut butter on or it's might be chocolate but I think it's peanut butter putting peanut butter like on the toilet or on on themselves and then making the kids like clean it up or touch it like somehow getting it on the kids and then saying poop right and then and the kids breaking down hysterically like these kids and this is little kids so when we talk about like the the psychological aspects of our aversion our disgust reaction to our waste products like these kids freak out right well there's crying there is I mean there's a famous experiment about that um on disgust uh Paul Rosen did this and I mean it's it's it's such a it's such a funny experiment but he basically had kids eat what they describe as dog poo and it was basically Limburger cheese and Pete and Peter I think it was um but basically looking at their response at different ages and below a certain age the kids were like oh this is great this is great this is great a certain age I think it was maybe four three or four some and then they were like no this is disgusting this is this is gross but there was a very specific difference you know the the kids who were like yeah dog poo yes and then you know then the just intense disgust but you see that you know sometimes I think I wrote in the book there was a very story of one of my relatives you know it was basically like playing you know with mud pies of course they were you know cow pies and everyone is horrified right except for the kid you know this is great so you know I think there is uh some sense that um you know part of disgust may be hardwired but our experience helps fill in the blanks and some of cues will come from parents you know like the grimace the uh what was it there was the mystery yuck stickers uh when I was when I was young growing up in Ohio um they would put these little stickers on products to warn kids like this is yucky don't know so parents so they would you know as a precaution of course you want to you know lock up your your cleaning supplies but but on certain things you would put a mystery yuck sticker and that would help train the kids with the you know the disgust face no don't don't please don't drink this this is icky what have you just put a happy smiling poop emoji on it well then they would be like yes happy poops okay I mean poop emoji is like the most is the most popular emoji right now you know so um yeah anyway I would have thought it would be the oh the face palm I mean yeah maybe we maybe we need that more but uh or the head the head on the desk yeah exactly exactly but um anyway now this has been great thank you it's been really wonderful yeah and I mean the we talked about the part that I missed when my wi-fi decided that the whole house was gonna just everything broke so when I went away I apologize for that but no worries no I'm relieved that uh my wi-fi uh hung in there yeah I said mine might be the one but yeah the environmental stuff and like your garden and using compost and we just like Blair brought a story like a couple of weeks ago about um about using human excrement for fertilizing plants you and you know so that the stuff you've got in your in your book about that is yeah I mean it's it's I mean it's great I mean I think I think that that aspect might be more controversial uh for people because of the safety you know risks and you know I've gotten some questions about that and I think they're legitimate uh but I think it goes back to um what's the source of the contaminants right if poop is sort of a fingerprint of how we live then you know it's sort of reflecting what's going into us and so some of these contaminants like the forever chemicals you know those are kind of the chemicals that people are talking about now but they're still being put in in products I mean you can still get paper packaging that has that on that so that's it's kind of insane to me you know and and people are sort of looking and saying well you know there's these levels in these biosolids we shouldn't use them well there's you know orders of magnitude more in the products that you're using every day you know lipstick and yeah non-stick pans and so it's it's a time so so it's so it's so I mean it's an interesting you know dilemma and I think you know certainly wastewater treatment plants are taking that seriously but I think it's also it's it's apparent where we're testing it but we're not testing most of the things and when we do it turns up that it's everywhere it's in our blood it's in drinking water you know so that's that's gonna that's gonna be a huge issue we're gonna need to solve that but I think you know it's it's it's certainly a valid concern but I think it needs to be we need to weigh the the benefits and the risks and I think right now the benefits of biosolids you know still far outweigh the risk but but we need but we need to be careful I mean that's why we have to be careful it needs to be done with regulation it needs to be done yeah safely absolutely that's why we have testing that's why we have regulations yep yep yeah yeah I years back and it was not 2008 or something I did an energy podcast and we weren't talking I wasn't talking about poop so much then but the the water energy nexus came up quite a lot which is this water scarcity issues are going to lead to energy scarcity issues because these are all these are all tied in together and when we start talking also about water purification so that we can have more water that also needs power and energy and you know so if we're cleaning our waterways you know and our through our waste treatment that's going to require energy and to get this whole cycle of the waste water energy nexus no absolutely and I mean and what's what's amazing is if you do it right you can create a loop and some of these waste water treatment plants I mean they're rebranding themselves as resource recovery plants which is fascinating but you can actually use some of the power that you're getting from biogas to help power some of the other things whether it's water recovery you know whether it's processing the the biosolids into you know safe compostable material but yeah but that's the other I mean there's a lot of the utilities that are pairing with water reclamation plants where you know in Orange County you have the wastewater treatment plant that's literally next door to the groundwater replenishment system so you have the treatment to a specific point and then it goes through a whole other series of steps and so you know what comes out is is is water it's it's it's pure distilled water so it was kind of amazing yeah but but we're gonna yeah I mean yeah some people are still disgusted by that but I think at a certain point when you have no water you're gonna drink it yeah we're gonna have to get past it yeah I mean I can't I can't find you I'm sitting here I've been talking to my husband about putting you know the because the the inflation recovery act is going to extend a whole bunch of sustainable energy rebates and tax credits and stuff we've been talking about putting solar on the roof and I can't help but sit here and go how much like does my family produce enough poop could I put a little biogas oh yeah production you know take the get to collect my own get my own gas could I use that gas to power my house there are I mean China has millions of these now basically home-sized biodigesters so yeah it's a it's a real thing I mean you know between food waste and poop and right I mean whether whether you can power your home your your home who knows but but but yeah it works with all organic waste right so you can combine your food waste your yard waste your you know I mean if you do it right yeah you know not just not just composting it not just right right there's so many things you can do with it and I think you know it's for different communities you're going to need different things so one community might decide oh we need biogas and another one will be like well no we're going to use it more for composting but that's kind of the beauty of it is because we're not really doing any of that right now or very little of it and there's so much so you know it's it's kind of an embarrassment of riches so yeah anyway yeah an embarrassment of rich riches and that it's a perfect phrase yeah yeah actually it encompasses so let's see fada from our discord just said just pooping back in to say if the children showing discussed at a greater than age four that's just after Freud's anal stage and potty training oh interesting yeah so that does it could be I mean they're they're definitely quite nicely yeah they're definitely is a lot of social reinforcement right and then attracts with sort of development because then you start socializing more with like other kids you know there's you probably are starting to see things on the television but yeah I mean it's it's it's yeah I mean the the psychology of disgust is just absolutely fascinating but I think it's but it's what's I think hopeful is that it's you're more than just your emotion right and you can get past it if you need to so and we will we'll need to I hope we are I hope we are more than just our emotions sometimes I wonder but we can leave it at that it has been so wonderful talking with you I mean it's been ages I mean yeah seeing you in person at triple as right before the pandemic and right you know February of 2020 yeah yeah it does hit the end of before and the before times before times yeah all right well but it's what I'm glad that you've been well and that you are you know your book is out your your book birthday has passed and my birthday has passed yes yes yeah no it's been a fun ride and and it's and I'm glad that people want to talk about it which is fun ride and a lot of work and it's great so yeah yeah good job that's a lot of work congratulations thank you yeah and thanks thanks again for the show it was it was it was awesome I I loved it so great have a lovely night all right everyone out there wherever you are we'll be back next week and I hope that in the meantime you stay safe you stay healthy and you stay curious about your poop there we go