99% Invisible - 444- Pipe Dreams

Episode Date: May 26, 2021

Most people probably don't spend a lot of time thinking about their toilets, but they are both a modern marvel while also being somewhat of a failure of systems design. On the one hand, it has created... a vast sanitation system that has helped add decades to human lifespan by reducing disease. But on the other hand, less than half of the world’s population can access a toilet that safely manages bodily waste, including many right here in the United States. We use about 100 trillion gallons of water for toilets every year at a time when water is becoming more scarce. While we see radical technological change in almost every other aspect of our lives, we remain stuck in a sanitation status quo—in part because the topic of toilets is taboo.Pipe Dreams

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Starting point is 00:00:00 This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Every time you go to the bathroom, you should thank Alexander Cummings. We actually featured a whole story about him because Alexander Cummings was the first person to patent a flushable toilet. He didn't invent the flush toilet, but he did connect it to an S-shaped pipe, which uses water to stop sewerrogas from coming up and stinking up your home. And before Alexander coming, that used to happen a lot.
Starting point is 00:00:31 Whatever was underneath the toilet could come back up. People didn't like bad smells, but they also thought that bad smells carried disease. That's how the flush came about. That's Chelsea Wald. I'm the author of Piped Dreams, the urgent global quest to transform the toilet. The flush toilet took a while to catch on, but once it did, it became part of a system we still use today, which Chelsea calls the gold standard. Here's how it works. Your poop once deposited into the toilet and you flesh it down goes into a sewer system that runs under the city.
Starting point is 00:01:09 And there it combines with water and with everyone else's poop and anything anyone puts into their sinks and their toilets and their showers and their washing machines and their dishwasher flows through to a treatment plant and in the treatment plant, bacteria help to clean up the sewage. The treatment plant produces cleaned up waste water, which is usually returned to our water supply and it filters out all the solids. The flush toilet, the sewer system,
Starting point is 00:01:40 and the treatment plant make up the gold standard. In a lot of ways, it's a really good system. Toilet technology, the toilet systems that people's developed in the 19th and early 20th century that we still use today fundamentally work very well at keeping our cities clean and keeping us healthy. But look, Chelsea Wall didn't write a whole book about how toilets are great. keeping our cities clean and keeping us healthy. Look, Chelsea Wall didn't write a whole book about how toilets are great.
Starting point is 00:02:09 The gold standard has some big limitations. I like to think of it as a paradox. I am very happy for the toilet that I have and that I've been able to use my whole life. But the paradox is that the systems are wasteful and they are not suited to the challenges of the 21st century. Today, the problem with toilets, which else you want.
Starting point is 00:02:50 So the flush toilet is pretty effective, but what are the problems with it? I think everybody would know by now that toilets waste water. They use fresh, drinkable water most of the time to flush our poop, which just seems silly. The reason that they do this uses waters for two purposes. One is to wash out the bowl and carry away the poop and then the other reason is to seal the toilet to prevent sewer gases from coming back up. Old toilets use something from 3.5 to seven gallons to flush, so it's like a waterfall of freshwater used to flesh down pee, which is crazy, because that's just liquid or your poop. And some households, you know,
Starting point is 00:03:34 that can be a quarter of their household water consumption is just toilet flushing. New innovations and in recent decades have brought that down. The current federal standard is 1.6 gallons. And low flow toilets are lower than that. But one thing that people may not think about is that more and more people are getting toilets every year as they hook up to piped water and not just in the US, less in the US, but around the world. This is a growing issue. Worldwide, one estimate is that people use 40 billion gallons of fresh water to flush toilets,
Starting point is 00:04:15 which is six times the daily water consumption of Africa. That's one portion of the worldwide wastewater usage, which is 100 trillion gallons of wastewater, which is a number that's only going up. That number might increase by 50 percent by 2050. We don't have that water to spare. So by that time, half the world's population is going to be living in water stress regions, which means that at least part of the year they won't have enough water.
Starting point is 00:04:48 People want to hook up to flush toilets that use water. They are a symbol of economic development. They're a symbol of progress and success. And because we don't have an alternative really that also represents that people, they're going to continue to hook up to flush toilets when they can. In the book, you point out some new kinds of toilets that reduce our water usage. Can you tell me about those? If we don't want to use water and our toilets, or we want to use much less water in our toilets, we have dry toilets. Those are toilets that don't use
Starting point is 00:05:26 any water and you might use a cover material over it. And you can kind of think like an outhouse can be a dry toilet or a bucket in some cases. People have adopted those. They're not terribly popular. They're so see, isn't you know, they's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see,
Starting point is 00:05:56 there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, there's so see, new coatings for toilets under development that kind of let the poop slide out of them more so that you don't need as much water to scour the toilet and get all the poop out of it. They're kind of more self-cleaning.
Starting point is 00:06:14 There's also a toilet under development that uses like a spatula to scoop around the toilet bowl and then it doesn't require water as well. So there's a lot of creative ideas under development. All of these ideas, I mean, they seem futuristic, but on the other hand, there's something so logical about them. It's almost as if if you just took the time to think about it, you might think it up yourself, you know, how are you going to get this poop out of the bowl? Okay, I'll get a spatula. So I think it is, there's a lot of clever engineering in it, but there's also just a question of thinking outside the toilet bowl or thinking outside the, with respect to how to deal with this problem.
Starting point is 00:07:07 The flush toilet is not the most efficient way to deal with our waste, but you could replace it with another kind of toilet. But then there's the sewer system. Like most cities built their sewer infrastructure a long time ago before they had a big increase in population. And it's so much bigger problem to deal with in the toilet because the sewer system is too expensive to replace. Can you talk about why our sewers are getting overwhelmed? When you add rainwater in there, the sewers have to handle just like a much bigger flow of water, and that can overwhelm the sewers, and it can also overwhelm the treatment plants at the end of the shores.
Starting point is 00:07:45 And that's why a lot of these systems are designed to release raw sewage into waterways during these events. And because of climate change, these events are becoming more and more frequent and bigger. And so cities are dealing with more and more of these wet weather events where they are Unfortunately releasing raw sewage into their local waters. It's not something they want to do But it's how the systems are designed and fixing that is really expensive You wrote about South Bend and Indiana where they were having overflows a lot pretty much every time There was like a tenth of an inch of rain and this is where I was really surprised when Pete Buttigieg showed up in your book. Oh
Starting point is 00:08:31 Yeah, I was writing that section when he was running for president and the whole time I was thinking Gosh when this book comes out. I have no idea You know what this section is going to mean to people And here he is now the Secretary of Transportation I have no idea what this section is going to mean to people. And here he is now, the Secretary of Transportation. So I guess it worked out okay. So one of the problems that Pete Buttigieg was trying to solve was this idea of stormwater overwhelming the sewage system
Starting point is 00:08:59 flowing out into the St. Joseph River. So what was the solution there? So they have been at the forefront of developing smart sewers, so putting sensors in sewers. The sewers are definitely an old tech, but they are very hard to put sensors in. So, you know, as everything in cities has gotten kind of wired up, sewers have been a little bit slower because it's very corrosive environment in there. But scientists at Notre Dame and some other universities worked out how to put sensors into the sewers there and get a better handle on what was happening in the sewers that they had.
Starting point is 00:09:42 And what it turned out was that there was extra capacity in the sewers that they didn't know about and they weren't really using during these events. And they were able to put devices in that would then better use that capacity automatically during these wet weather events. And just in that way, by better using the sewers that they had, reducing the number of overflows. It's not a perfect solution because they still do have overflows, but it just used the capacity of the shores a lot better. And this kind of sewer sensor technology is now really growing.
Starting point is 00:10:19 I mean, there's a lot of cities interested in it and installing it to eliminate these sewer overflows. So, South Bend shows us how we can take better advantage of the sewer infrastructure that we have in place in our cities. It's not just a question of better using the capacity of those sewers or investing in them in a way that makes them work better in the way that they're intended, but we can also use them in new ways. One issue is overflows, and the other problems with sewers are fat birds.
Starting point is 00:10:56 I mean, these get covered a lot in the news, but could you describe a fat bird for people who don't know about them? Oh, yeah. So fat bird is the other problem of mixing everything into the sewer. By now, I hope you've heard the flushing wet wipes is bad. A lot of people haven't heard that yet, but there's these growing trend toward having these adult-wet wipes, adult version of baby wipes, I guess, instead of toilet paper and people are fleshing them like toilet paper. Those go down into the system along with any trash in there and
Starting point is 00:11:30 they mix with the grease that people, restaurants as well, pour into the sewers. And this does some crazy chemistry down there. And forms, you know, accretes into a horrible blob and it can get really hard like a rock even or it can take all kinds of different forms and textures and it just grows and grows, you know, diapers in there and needles and everything until it can clog a sewer. And that's what, you know, has been called a fat bird. Hundreds clog up London's 150 year old sewer network. None bigger than the white chapel fat bird in East London, 130 tonne, monster. Crews worked for nine weeks above ground and down below,
Starting point is 00:12:20 breaking it up then sucking it up and trucking it away. It's really, it's just costing cities huge amounts of money, this problem. And it's also really a horrible thing for sewer workers to have to go down and clean up. And I think people don't think about that part of it. You know, that someone actually has to go down and clean up your mess, go into the sewer gases, use pickaxe at times or pressure, hose, and and get those things out of there. So that's why cities are sort of desperately telling residents to stop fleshing the wet
Starting point is 00:12:53 wipes and to stop pouring grease down their sinks. I don't know how far the message is getting because they say it's gotten quite bad during the pandemic, especially. Yeah. So the last part of the process is the treatment plant. What are the limitations of our water treatment process? All water discharges basically go into the sewers. I mean, there's some regulation on industry about what can go in there.
Starting point is 00:13:17 But pretty much anything can make its way into the sewers and flow to the wastewater treatment plant. That makes it very difficult, but the basic technology that's used to treat the sewage, which was designed more than 100 years ago, just isn't designed to eliminate a lot of these different kinds of pollution, toxic chemicals and plastic pollution in the sewage that have been developed in the last 100 years. And so wastewater treatment plants have the choice of adding on more and more treatment steps to filter out and eliminate these pollutants, which can be very expensive, and a lot of municipalities can't afford it. Or they end up discharging it into waterways.
Starting point is 00:14:04 It is monitored by the EPA in the US, but not for all of these substances, just for a limited number of heavy metals in other substances. So that creates a problem. The central tension of all this is like we have a toilet that mercifully removes us from our waste problem in our house and connects it to a sewer and it removes it. So, efficiently, we think it just goes away. It just all disappears completely. It's still there. It's just collecting it in a fat perk or being released into a river or something to that effect. I also just thought that it all just went away.
Starting point is 00:14:45 I did imagine that, I mean, to the extent that I thought about it, which I'm sure I wasn't really thinking, but I thought, you know, poop is biodegradable. It just, yeah, just disappears. In the book, you talk about the problems with our conventional toilet system, and you also visit some places trying different approaches. Like, this one you describe is a subdivision experiment in snake, which is a city in the Netherlands.
Starting point is 00:15:16 They have this new toilet technology that's kind of mind-blowing. How does that system work, and could you describe it for us? I live in the Netherlands, so it wasn't a bar trip for me, but it was a few hours north. It's in housing complex of 200 units. And each of these units has a vacuum toilet. So you might know vacuum toilets from airplanes or maybe boats, and you would not want one
Starting point is 00:15:42 of those in your home. They're really horrible and they're loud. But actually, people have developed really nice, easy to use vacuum toilets. So I used one in the headquarters of the company that has developed this project alongside a university and, you know, funding partner. Those toilets are, they look mostly like a toilet, they have these kind of glowing blue buttons and you press them in a little. There's a tiny bit of water in there, which I don't even think the water has to be in there.
Starting point is 00:16:12 It's just, it's described as a kind of security blanket. It just makes people feel comfortable. And, you know, it's closed, it opens and it just goes, whoosh! And whatever you've put in there comes out the bottom and it's very concentrated. And from there it flows to a treatment facility that's on the premises of this housing development. It's a little house just in the center. You would not know what it was. You would think it was like the headquarters of this housing development or the erect center or something. And in there is an anaerobic digester in which
Starting point is 00:16:47 microbes turn this toilet waste into biogas for the housing complex. So they use it to heat the housing complex. So it's just like your poop is powering your home or heating your home. And they also add to that food from their sink. So they have food grinders in their sinks, and they send that in there too, and that can be digested as well by the microbes. Conventional wastewater treatment plants use aerobic digestion, and aerobic bacteria require a lot of oxygen and so that requires a lot of energy to pump the oxygen through the sewage but an anaerobic digester does not require oxygen pump and so it
Starting point is 00:17:36 uses much less energy in addition to creating energy. Yeah, I mean it's really remarkable and when you hear about it you think, well this is the greatest thing in the world. Why does everybody do this? And people from all over the world tour this facility. And with the mindset that maybe they'll change their, you know, their sewage and toilet systems. And then what happens? I asked that question. People I was talking to who work on this system just told me in a very disappointed way that you know it's been very difficult. Everyone just goes home and we think what they do is they install conventional infrastructure. They just don't really trust that the system is going to work. They don't want to take the risk to find out. If people will like the vacuum toilets.
Starting point is 00:18:28 If the plumbers will be able to fix them, if they can get all the regulatory stuff in line, you know, there's just a lot of barriers. When you have a system that's so widespread and so standard as the conventional system, adopting something so novel. I mean, it's disappointing that people don't want to try better toilet system, but also, you know, using poop for energy sounds really radical and maybe gross to a lot of people. Do you think that our own taboos and discomfort with our, you know, excreta makes it so that design innovation is more difficult? It's funny because after spending years working on this topic and writing a book, it's a
Starting point is 00:19:14 little hard for me to connect to my own sense of disgust around the topic. So it takes talking to other people for me to recall what it feels like to talk about, to be uncomfortable about talking about poop and spreading it on my garden or whatever. Of course, I think poop smells bad, but I don't have that same kind of disgust around it. But yes, I mean research shows that disgust is a very strong motion. It is a problem that, you know, as I was doing this research came up again and again, could people overcome the Yuck Factor? And could the Yuck Factor rear its head at a very inconvenient time? So say you're halfway through a project or you have, you know, a fertilizer project going and you've invested all of this time and effort into it. And then suddenly
Starting point is 00:20:10 the public gets a hold of it and they're disgusted and you get shut down. Something like that could happen. So there's a real fear of that. I think it's changing as people start to care more and more about the problems that innovators are trying to solve, I think that can counterbalance the disgust, but there are still hundreds of millions of people who don't even have that. What is it like in areas of the world without a modern flush toilet system? There's usually something there, but it's informal or it's not organized. So you might have pit latrines.
Starting point is 00:21:08 And the problem is that when those pit latrines fill up, people have to call somebody to empty them. There's often not a professional service or the professional service that does exist is too expensive. And so they call an informal worker, someone who's highly stigmatized, who calms and digs it out and then leaves the contents from the pitiletry somewhere other than a treatment plant for sure, maybe even just digging a hole next to the house and putting it there
Starting point is 00:21:36 or dumping them in a waterway. So you have a really disorganized system. These are places where it's not easy to imagine building the kinds of sewer systems that we see in American cities, nor as I've described, I mean our sewer systems necessarily big sewer systems, necessarily the best option. People are working now as an kind of incremental improvement on making these pit latrines into a more organized system, so creating services that can safely empty them and then take them to treatment plants.
Starting point is 00:22:17 That's a step that would go really far in the right direction. And it requires a little bit of innovation, but really a lot of organization and political will, mainly, to serve these informal areas that have very little infrastructure. But another piece where people don't have sewers currently, there's a lot of opportunity there to do something new in places that have not yet been able to afford these kinds of comprehensive sewer systems.
Starting point is 00:22:46 It is interesting that it's kind of just like a transport problem. It's just like we have one transport system, which is a great deal of water moving things to a system. Or you have people taking buckets of things out and moving them to other places essentially. It really is like a systems and transport issue when you get down to it, right? Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, yeah, how can you get this stuff someplace safe? There is the idea of these hyper-local decentralized systems where centralized systems, where everything can be kind of treated on the spot. The Gates Foundation had the reinvent the toilet challenge, which encouraged research teams to come up with ideas for these kinds of toilets that could neutralize the waste and create
Starting point is 00:23:41 resources on the spot in places where there is no infrastructure. I mean, so far, those are still in development, let's say. It's a big dream, it's a big dream, but a worthy one. I think that the idea that the Gates Foundation had, Bill Gates had, that people could kind of leapfrog the conventional system and get to something better. Don't go down that path. Find a new one, make a new one. I think that, you know, communities need to decide for themselves, you know, how they
Starting point is 00:24:18 want to organize their own waste. And in part, or they need to be consulted in that as well. But it is a problem that's still unsolved. I mean, obviously, if it were solved, we wouldn't be talking about it. But I think we're seeing increasing attention to it and a lot of different kinds of solutions appearing, enough that there's reason to be hopeful. I want to talk about another equity issue around toilets, which is access to public toilets. The number of public toilets around the world has gone way down, especially in the United States. Why is that? So, public toilets are a big cost to a city.
Starting point is 00:25:10 My understanding is there used to be quite a lot of public toilets in the US, but they were paid toilets. Problem was the women paid, but the men didn't have to. And so in the 1970s, people started pointing that out as being sexist, which it was, and demanded free toilets for everybody, which they got, except for the fact that that meant that cities didn't really want to keep up those free toilets. Yeah, they just turned into big burdens for cities and cities started taking them out.
Starting point is 00:25:47 And the public toilets that did exist were kind of gross and nobody wanted to really use them as a result. Our cities are really depleted of public toilets. And it's a really big problem. Really for everybody who wants to go out into public life, although people who, you know, the privilege of doing so can often walk into a cafe and use it, but there really are a lot of people who don't have that privilege who won't be invited into a cafe and allowed to use the toilet there. Yeah, we were relying on a private system, like of public toilets, are basically in private cafes and
Starting point is 00:26:27 Starbucks and hotel lobbies and things like that. When I travel, I often wear a suit when I travel. And one of the things that I'm going to do is you can walk into any place and use the bathroom as soon as you can. Yeah, I believe that. You've noticed that. I am. Yeah. Yeah. I was sort of like, as I was reading this part, I was imagining a've noticed that. I am. Yeah. I was sort of like, as I was reading this part, I was imagining a string of law in which good public toilets that are well maintained are just part of the city infrastructure and
Starting point is 00:26:56 maybe coupled with public transit or something to that effect. It just seems like that would make the world just a tremendously better place, like every city of better place. City planners have forgotten, you know, like the people have basic bodily functions, even when they're outside. I don't know, you can't always run home, and some people don't have homes. One option is to actually pay private establishments to open their toilets up to the public that has worked in some places. Although with the pandemic, with all these establishments closed, you can see the limitations
Starting point is 00:27:33 of that, what happens after hours. There's also the possibility of combining toilets, as you said, maybe with public transit, but maybe with a private business, but that the toilet leads. So you have the public toilet, but it's also a cafe or a like a stand for coffee or something like that. You know, they sell things alongside of it and that helps fund the toilets. People want to bring back, some people want to bring back pay toilets, you know, think that people would be willing to pay a little bit for a toilet.
Starting point is 00:28:02 And I think with apps, you know, that's easier. You don't have to carry around a quarter. You don't have exact change or something for the toilet. But you can just tap your phone and use the toilet. And then you could provide something like toilet stamps for people who couldn't afford it. That sounds promising to me. In the book, you lay out an idealized vision for toilets and you call it Lutopia, which is pretty good. So what does Lutopia look like? Yeah, so I came up for the book with the concept of Lutopia which is a place where our toilets allow us to live in more harmony with each other and with nature and one of the points that's really important to me in this book
Starting point is 00:28:48 is that there is no one type of toilet in Lutopia, but it's in fact a kaleidoscope of toilets. We have this notion that has come down to us from the past of what the toilet or what the ideal toilet system is, which is what we've been talking about, the flush toilet connected to the sewer system connected to the centralized treatment plan. But what we really need for the future is a range of different kinds of toilet systems that are appropriate for different places with different resources, with different needs. And that is really, I think, how we're going to get to something like Lutopia, where yeah, where toilets are healthier, more sustainable, and more equitable.
Starting point is 00:29:35 You may not realize it, but there's a good chance you've been drinking recycled wastewater, and it's been totally fine. More with Chelsea Wald after the break. So, we just published a book last year called The 99% Invisible City and the first chapter of the book is about utility markings and how underground utilities are color coded. Like the color oranges used indicate telecommunications infrastructure and red is for electrical, and you write about lavender. There are lavender utility markings and also lavender pipes. What are those for?
Starting point is 00:30:18 The purple is for non-potable water. It's possible to take the water that comes out of a wastewater treatment plant and clean it up to a level where it can be reused very often. You know, it is very clean. It's possibly even cleaner than the water body that it gets charged into at times. More and more, we're going to see water scarcity in our cities and so utilities are reusing this water in some way. Non-potable means you don't drink it, but it's still very useful for things like irrigation, industrial uses, even fleshing toilets. This color purple, it's sort of a really nice lavender color, is the color that arose as the best color in Irvine, California. I think a manager at the wastewater treatment plant who was colorblind found that it stood out. And the really the reason
Starting point is 00:31:17 you want to have different color pipes is because you know, you don't want a plumber to accidentally because you don't want to plumber to accidentally plumb the non-potable water into a drinking fountain say. So that's why you color-coded. People have a hard time with the idea of drinking recycled water. Lots of people would probably feel uncomfortable drinking a glass of water if they were told that it used to be wastewater from someone's toilet. But you write in the book, we're indirectly drinking recycled water all the time. How does that work? So what has been done to now is often instead of feeding it directly into the drinking water system, they will use the water to say recharge groundwater. And then it gets pulled back up into the drinking water system. And so it sort of goes for this inter intermediary step,
Starting point is 00:32:05 which is, you know, sort of unnecessary, but useful for sort of cleansing the mind at least. Other people are thinking about sort of clever ways of bringing this concept to people's attention, like using this water to make beer. So beer uses a lot of water. It's not water efficient. And so utilities have been working with these brewers to deliver them this very clean water. Actually, in some cases, it's sort of like very tasteless water because they've cleaned it
Starting point is 00:32:41 so much of all of minerals and stuff. You know, stuff. They have this sort of clean palette on which to make this beer. I don't know if this is apocryphal or not, but I've heard many times that, for example, the medieval period, people drank beer instead of water because it was safer. So maybe there's also a kind of long history of thinking that the brewing process is a kind of cleansing process for liquid And also, you know, when you drink beer, you pee more. So it's sort of got a circular logic to it as well Because we've lived in a period of time of abundance, I think, and that might be shifting Do you think it's possible to change our thinking about this stuff globally considering the climate change and are you hopeful?
Starting point is 00:33:31 Yeah, I think I'm hopeful about it. I mean, it depends on the day how hopeful I am about the global situation that we find ourselves in. In general, it's not such a hard topic for me to cover as an environmental journalist because plastic pollution kind of depresses me because every time I use a piece of plastic I feel guilty and bad about it. But I don't really have to feel bad about pooping. I mean, it's just something every animal does. And so it's all opportunity. There's room for a lot of different solutions. It is a problem that we have to confront as a species. It's also hyper-local. So it's like the scales go from extremely
Starting point is 00:34:19 local, like your own private toilet and what you can do there to the global and every scale in between. I found in my reporting, people at all those scales doing all that kind of work, maybe not everyone's paying attention to that, but it is going on. And I think the more that people tie what they're doing into larger global issues that are really concerning all of us, the more that those innovations can take hold. Thank you so much for the book
Starting point is 00:34:53 and for talking with me, Chelsea. Oh, thanks so much for having me. This was really fun. Chelsea Wald is the author of the book, Pipe Dreams, the urgent global quest to transform the toilet, get it, wherever fine books are sold. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Chris Baroube, music by our director of Sound John Rial, sound mixed by Andy Christen's daughter. Our senior producer is Delaney Hall, Kurt Colstad is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Vivian Le, Joe Rosenberg, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson,
Starting point is 00:35:26 Lasha Madonna, Katie Mingle, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. We are a part of this stature and serious XM podcast family now headquartered six blocks north, in beautiful, uptown, Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me at Roman Mars in the show at 99pi org, or on Instagram and read it too.
Starting point is 00:35:49 You can find other shows I love from Stitcher on our website at 99pi.org, including Freakonomics, uncovering the hidden stories of the world through the lens of economics. Find a link to it in every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org. Hey, Sue, don't have an audio logo. I haven't set up my email yet. I think that might be the problem. So, um, okay. Duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, your head, Stitcher. Stitcher in your head, da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da

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