Factually! with Adam Conover - The Power of Poop with Lina Zeldovich

Episode Date: March 30, 2022

Why do we have such a cultural aversion to human poop, when it’s so fascinating and useful? Stay with us: in this episode, science journalist Lina Zeldovich and author of the new book The Other Dark Matter educates Adam on why poop is an awesome substance, the history of sewage and how we should rethink poop’s role in our lives. Check out her book at http://factuallypod.com/books Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

You know, I got to confess, I have always been a sucker for Japanese treats. I love going down a little Tokyo, heading to a convenience store, and grabbing all those brightly colored, fun-packaged boxes off of the shelf. But you know what? I don't get the chance to go down there as often as I would like to. And that is why I am so thrilled that Bokksu, a Japanese snack subscription box, chose to sponsor this episode. What's gotten me so excited about Bokksu is that these aren't just your run-of-the-mill grocery store finds. Each box comes packed with 20 unique snacks that you can only find in Japan itself.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you for joining me once again as I talk to an amazing expert about all the amazing stuff they know that I don't know and that you probably don't know. We together are going to try to pry all that delicious knowledge meat out of their skulls and cram it into our own. That's what we're doing on this show. I want to thank everyone who makes this show possible by supporting our Patreon. If you want to join them, head to patreon.com slash adamconover, where you can get bonus podcast episodes, stand up that I don't post anywhere else. And you can join our live book club where we read a recent nonfiction book together and discuss it.

It's an awesome community. You can join us at patreon.com slash adamconover. But hey, the podcast itself is still free. You don't got to subscribe at all to listen to this episode. So let's talk about what we are talking about on the show today. Today, we're talking about shit. You know, poop, caca, fecal matter. See, when we're pondering the great accomplishments of humankind, we don't usually think about poop. And yet, poop is the stuff that comes out of all of our butts. Your butt, my butt, and a great chain of butts stretching back hundreds of thousands

of years. It's one of the most basic parts of humanity. In many ways, we are nothing but machines that turn food into poop. But this very basic part of ourselves is something that we prefer to basically never think about. Like, we literally pipe clean water into all of our houses and we use that clean water not for drinking, not for showering, but just for moving our poop out of our houses as quickly as possible. Just, we want to be able to drop that deuce, hit that flush, and have it be gone in an instant. But the problem is, that desire to not think about poop, to eliminate it from human life is impossible because poop is a part of who we are in more

ways than one or more ways than two. Does that joke even make sense? Do you get that? Whatever, we'll move on. You simply cannot manage lots of people living together without managing their poo. And so, the history of urbanization, and hence civilization, required humans to master shit, or at least master its management. The earliest sewage system, essentially septic pits, appears in one of the earliest cities, Babylon, around 4000 BCE. Then, some geniuses in Mohenjo-daro in modern-day Pakistan realized you could connect latrines directly into a sewage system. The Romans ended up monumentalizing this concept and called it, this is true, the Cloaca Maxima, which features a series of 11-foot high stone vaults.

It's literally a cathedral to crap. Our ancestors had to build enormous works of engineering just to manage our shit, because shit matters. Waste management is a huge factor in the modern era's increase in life expectancy. Before we were able to get rid of our shit effectively, a lot of people died of cholera and other diseases. And more recently, we're even beginning to learn about ways that shit can be useful to us. Wastewater epidemiology, for instance, is a recent and growing field that has been used during the pandemic to get a sense of where outbreaks are happening without needing to rely on individual test results. Now, that's just one example of the way that our waste can be used to make our lives better. But there are a lot more.

And to discuss them on the show today, we have the perfect guest. Lina Zeldovich is an incredibly smart science journalist, and she's the author of the new book, The Other Dark Matter, the science and business of turning waste into wealth and health. Please welcome Lina Zeldovich. Lina, thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you for inviting me. Great to be here. So you have a new book out that is all about shit. Let's just get out of the way and let's just say that it's about shit. Is that okay or is that derogatory for me to put it that way? No, it's completely okay. I think shit is an awesome substance and that's exactly what I'm going to talk about today.

You think it's an awesome substance. I love it. So this is right up my alley. Please tell me, why is it an awesome substance? And why did you write this book? How did you come to write it? Sure. Why is it an awesome substance? Because it is such an incredibly versatile resource and fully renewable, by the way, because there's seven people on this planet and we all produce it pretty regularly. Well, most of us anyway. Why is it so versatile because you can do almost anything with it as we're gonna talk later in this conversation for starters it's an incredible fertilizer it's best fertilizer out there it can also be converted into a form of crude oil so all kinds of energy that can be extracted from it and even medicine seven billion people shitting all the time.

But here's the thing. I know that, like, for instance, you know, manure, animal manure is used in compost. I have that sense, right? And I've always wondered, wait, hold on a second. Could my shit be used as compost or, you know, as fertilizer? But I don't know anyone who uses it for that purpose maybe

there's some reason that human shit can't be used that way it can it really and is it just that we happen not to do it most of the time not only it can be used that way but it should be used that way it is actually better than cow manure or chicken poop or any other manure and here is why of all the animals out there on earth, humans are the ones with the most diverse diets. What we produce and put out is actually full of all kinds of nutrients that, let's say, a cow wouldn't have. And that is why it actually makes best fertilizer. Why we don't use it that way? Well, there are certain reasons to it, and I think we're going to get into them a little later. But generally, it's the culture.

Our culture does not consider it a valuable resource and, you know, a proper way of fertilizing crops. Many societies before us had a completely opposing view of their waste. They didn't consider it waste. They considered it fertilizer, and they used it, which is kind of rediscovering their wisdom now. Yeah. I mean, our relationship, at least here in the US where I am now with poop is like, get it away from me as fast as possible.

Like I poop in a little white bowl that I keep very clean. And then I push the button and it makes a big noise and whoosh, it goes far away. And it's, and it leaves my house almost immediately and is like taken away in pipes. You know, it's like, this is, this shit is radioactive. It's shameful. It's harmful. Get it, get it out. Right.

And that's, that's how I've grown up. That's how, what I've always been surrounded by. Is that part of what's going on? And is that a way of thinking about shit that we should try to change? That's how we think about shit for the most part. And yes, this is what we should change. It's sort of, we inherited this view. I can say that we developed this view in the 19th and 20th century because science was discovering how many different types of pathogens can be in that little pile of poo that humans produce.

I should mention it's not there immediately, but left outside in its own devices. It will immediately become very tasty dinner to all kinds of new pathogens, larvae, flies, all kinds of stuff. So of course, it's going to become radioactive. Of course, it's going to become extremely pathogenic. Of course, it's going to become really dangerous. But we're not talking about leaving it out there to its own devices. We're talking about practicing it in a different way, rather than

annihilating, putting it to good use. Well, and I'm also thinking about how you said the 19th century, and this was a time when people started really congregating in cities, like, you know, especially if you think about the image of 19th century London, you know, there's just shit everywhere. There's like horse shit people shit dog shit and people get sick as a result like because they don't have adequate sewage systems and so there's just sort of shit in people's water and they're getting like this is like the source of like cholera and stuff like that right those sorts of diseases so so it makes sense that then people would say okay there's

lots of people dying we got to figure out a way to get the shit far, far away because when it sits around, it's very bad for us. But that's a technological solution that maybe is a little bit less nurturing than what we could do with it, I suppose. Yeah, no, you're completely right. And I really like how you picked up on the fact that it really became a problem when people started aggregating in cities because for as long as we were nomadic, we could just take a dump wherever and just walk away from our shit and it never bothered us. And it was, if you think about it,

quite liberating. And then people started settling down. Oh, the freedom of- Exactly. When you go camping and you're like, you know what? Let me pee in the woods. Exactly.

Let me poop in the woods, but be good about it and bury it or whatever you do. You have good camping hygiene, as I hope you all do. But it is very liberating because you're like, oh, it's just part of nature. It's not that big a deal. All the animals shit in the woods and I'm one of them. Yeah, absolutely. Which is you're giving it back to Mother Nature as it should be.

But when people started living in cities, shit really hit the fan. That's like one of my favorite statements. Because you could no longer walk away from it. But when people started living in cities, shit really hit the fan. That's like one of my favorite statements. Because you could no longer walk away from it. I mean, if you had a little village, you could probably wander off to the left or to the right and whatever. But yeah, imagine 19th century London. Where would you go? There were houses everywhere and piles of shit everywhere. And that was a real, real problem.

everywhere and piles of shit everywhere. And that was a real, real problem. What I found really interesting is it's actually how modern sewage infrastructure kind of originated in London of that time. In fact, the first person who built a prototype of the toilet that we use today was an Englishman. His name was Sir John Harrington. He was Queen Elizabeth's cousin who got sent into exile from the court for whatever, some poem he wrote that she didn't like. And while in that exile, exactly, he had nothing to do. So he beat it with himself with building the first water closet,

the first flashing toilet. Kind of primitive, but, you know, a bunch of pipes, you know, a place to sit. And the queen came and visited him and she liked it. So she wanted one at her house. And then all the, you know, nobility of the time decided they wanted it too. Took a while to catch up. There was also a British engineer, his name was Thomas Crapper. Yes, that's where the name comes from.

The very famous anecdote about... Yeah, exactly. Tell me about him. Yeah, so he kind of got that original primitive toilet into this nice flushing apparatus that we have today. Almost, not quite what we have today, but close enough. It didn't stink anymore. It flushed nicely. The water came in and out. And then everybody wanted it because all these rich and important people could now act not as if their shit didn't stink, but as if they didn't produce it. They would disappear into their water closets and come out.

There was nothing left behind for their servants to take out. Wow. You know, we have arrived. Now, that also caused problems because all that shit had to go someplace. And where did it go? Altimetry. Into the river. Into this gorgeous, beautiful river that got so polluted that it caused the great stink of London, actually, even more than once.

And this is basically the infrastructure we inherited. We inherited the form of dealing with our excrement is by flushing it down the toilet, down the pipe, and somewhere. And in the next hundred years, we perfected what we did to it. Basically destroy it as efficiently as possible. And just dump it somewhere, just like out of sight, out of mind, pretend we don't do it. Yeah, we go to, I remember when I lived in New York, I lived in a neighborhood called Greenpoint, right by a sewage treatment plant. And they had these big digesters, these big digester eggs, and they would do tours. I never got to go on one of the tours and I still want to, uh, the Newton Creek wastewater treatment

plant. Um, they, that is where they process like a huge amount of poop in New York and they digest it down. And then I don't know what happens to it. Like once it's digested, it's, I guess it's not poop anymore. It's broken down. And then it's, I guess, flushed into the ocean? Question mark? No, it's actually not that bad at all. It's actually one of the better treatment plants. And by the way, I did go-

Oh, you know this one? Of course, I did go on a tour. There's a whole chapter about this plant in my book. It's actually mind-boggling. It's actually really, really cool. So no, it's not flushed anywhere. What they do with it, there's so much. New York produces so much shit that there's really no way.

I mean, hey, they're number one. New York City, number one in shit. All's really no way. Yeah. I mean, Hey, they're number one, New York city, number one in shit. All right. Number one, you go see a Broadway show.

You get some nice pizza. You take the best shit of your life. That's what you do when you go to New York, New York city. Number one. Yeah, exactly. So there's actually no good way to get rid of it.

Ideally, ideally, if it weren't so big, we actually could convert that digested product, the product that comes out of the digesters that you mentioned. It's basically, essentially compost. It's composted poo. It's just

about soil. So if there was a farm nearby, it could go straight in that farm, be mixed with the regular soil, and we could go grow food with it. It's just too much. So you have to truck it out God knows where. Like I do, you don't have enough farms to absorb all this.

So they always kind of struggle with it. For now, a lot of it is landfill, they told me, which means it just goes and joins other garbage in a landfill where it just sort of covers it. It's still better than dumping it in the ocean. It still becomes kind of soil as everything else decomposes there. But there could be better ways.

It just, you know, it takes infrastructure, planning, a lot of organizing. Wow. I had no idea that it actually ended up in a landfill. But yeah, that would be a really hard thing to figure out. Like, okay, even if you had the good shit that you could distribute and use as compost, like how would you get it? There's farms upstate and whatnot, but there's not enough for like 8 million people, each of them taking

hopefully a shit a day, which would be healthy. You know, probably some of them wait a week or so because they've got problems, but they should go talk to their doctor about that. So how did you end up writing about this? That is a great question and kind of an interesting one. So I had a very unconventional upbringing. I grew up in Russia in my grandfather's farm. And my grandfather, who had two degrees, one in agriculture and one in engineering,

And my grandfather, who had two degrees, one in agriculture and one in engineering, fertilized our farm with the contents of our septic tank that we produced. He did it regularly once a year. There were a couple of very valid reasons why he did so. Generally, the more self-sufficient you were in the former Soviet Union, the better it was, because you never knew what the government would do in general or to you specifically. My family was Jewish. The more self-reliant we could be, the better it was. He had this little plot of land that he got from a plane factory where he worked.

And he turned it into a farm. a plane factory where he worked, and he turned it into a farm. And so the way he did it was he would open the septic tank once, about once a year, like usually in the fall, when everything was sort of quieting down for winter, nothing would grow, meaning nothing could really get contaminated, like no produce. And then he would distribute it somewhere on the farm, underneath the trees, and into his compost pits. He had about three of them, and they were rotating.

He would dump a bunch of sewage into one and close it for like two years and use others. And then he would open it again two years down the road. There was no sewage left, nothing. It was just like rich black dirt and a lot of earthworms um they're chewing through it and it that that dirt was gold it was soft and fluffy like powdered sugar and plants loved it and they grew so well with it wow that's a beautiful image because i'm imagining as you're telling me this this guy shoveling human sewage, right? Probably very stinky. Maybe we would think of that as being very vile, radioactive stuff. And then, but when he

opens it two years later, I can picture, oh, that really good soil. Like the kind of like, sometimes you see soil that's so good that you're like, oh, it's making me a little bit hungry almost because there's, you can tell it's so nutritious. And that's what I'm picturing. And that transformation of something that we think of as being very disgusting to something that we think of as being very nutritious that's going to start the cycle of nutrition again, that's a very beautiful image.

Is that really what he would do? And then he would spread it out on his farm and grow food for you with it. What was interesting is, yeah, it was stinky, but it never really bothered us so much. You know, sometimes coming home from school, I could tell that that's what grandpa was doing. Because you could smell like a mile away, if not more. It was just kind of like, you know, permeating through the air. But you would get used to it so quickly because it was a normal

smell you know it was yeah the part of life and when you open the pit oh god that smell was incredible it smelled of nature of string and spring and the promise of the next harvest it was just so good like i i wanted to dig my hands into it and smell it. Wow. And you never felt like, hey, I'm eating my own shit? No. No. I never felt that way. In fact, what he used to say was you have to feed the earth the way you feed people.

And so to me, it was such a beautiful concept. It was that cycle of nature that now we all talk about, circular agriculture, circular economy. That's what it was. And it continued. I don't even remember how many years he owned that farm, but 30 at least, maybe more. And it just kept going. It never grew barren because we fed the earth with our own metabolic product. How did he learn to do this?

Was this a thing other people were doing? Or was he sort of a weird guy with some old books who like, I've learned how to turn my shit into gold? I think there was a certain truth to that. I don't know where he learned this because it never occurred for me to ask him. But I knew that other people didn't necessarily do it. I think he was, you know, to an extent an outlier. I think some people did do it and others didn't. He definitely had his own special methods when it came to agriculture.

I wonder now, years later, I wonder if he learned it, you know, from if this idea sort of came from the East, from China and Japan, because there farmers have been doing it for generation and generation. Going back, yeah, you know, 100 years. Is this sort of reuse of human feces, like, still, is this practiced regularly elsewhere around the world? I don't really think so. I haven't really found a lot. When I was researching the book, I didn't find a lot of it. I think in some places it might, but I don't think it's really like a widespread practice. I think people tend to rely on animal manure more than anything, and also on birds droppings. They are also quite, you know, make good fertilizer. I don't know why

it's not done in other places of the world. I think, again, part of it is that we are so convinced that there's just such an, it's an epitome of waste. It's like you said, it's radioactive. Yeah. But it seems very unusual, even just under capitalism, to waste something that could be a valuable resource. You know, like if you take anything and, you know, throw it in the recycling bin or whatever, someone is going to find some reuse for it. Right. Might not be a great use, but there's you know, the the market as it is tends to, you know, figure out how to reuse something. Right. Like, OK, I can buy this real cheap and I can extract the precious metals from it or whatever, that kind of thing. And so it seems very odd that, you know, you'd have, say, a wastewater treatment plant like the one we were talking about generating huge amounts of this stuff that could be useful, but not actually making use of it,

like anywhere around the world. I mean, is it that there's so much animal manure that there's no need for human manure in farming and for fertilizer? No, not at all. It's actually a lot more complex, a new tangle, much more complex dilemma. So for starters, most people don't want anything to do with shit. Theirs or anybody else's. You just pull the flush, right? We are conditioned.

The medicine of the 20th century, you know, told us to stay away from it as far as possible. The other thing that happened in the early 20th century is that people basically learned to make fertilizer from thin air, that nitrogen that all plants need to grow. Two German engineers developed this specific process called Haber-Bosch process that is extremely polluting, takes an insane amount of fossil fuels,

spits out those really bad gases that contribute to acid rains, like really, really bad industrial process. but it makes nitrogen and it makes as much nitrogen as you want. And nitrogen doesn't stink like shit does. It packages very neatly into bags and it doesn't leak. Nothing bad happens to it and root and you can just ship it anywhere you want and put it into the soil and the plants will love it they will take it up and grow they're just not gonna grow as nutritious because just nitrogen or you know just phosphorus it's another fertilizer it doesn't produce um fruit and vegetables as tasty as normal so well-balanced soil that has all kinds of other things in it,

but it's easy. So we, so the problem is that we have a very sort of high-tech shortcut to get pure nitrogen, pure fertilizer that we, we manufacture at great expense when we are literally shitting something better out of our backsides. But the problem with what's coming out of us is that it's stinky.

We have a cultural aversion to using it. And there's a distribution problem, like you said earlier, that we, you know, you've got the wastewater treatment plant. They've got this stuff sitting around in barrels or however they have it in pipes. And well, how are they going to get it to Bakersfield, California, where there's a whole lot of farming going on? Or how are they going to get it to Mexico, where there's a lot of farming going on? Like, are you going to truck shit across the world? You're going to build the shit pipeline. What are you going to do? So as a result, we end up just using the shortcut, which is more harmful. Exactly. And we over fertilizing the ocean with not without sewage per se, but with the sewage effluent because the water still has to go somewhere, right? We clean the water at the wastewater treatment plant and then out like algae, like that algae that grows that we don't want to grow, but we keep fertilizing it.

Yeah. Algal blooms are a huge problem in the ocean where there's like a source of fertilizer and then you get this huge bloom of algae that grows up and then that like chokes out sunlight and then you've got invasive species well not invasive species but you have certain opportunistic species eating all the algae and choking on other species it's like a big problem in ecosystems algal blooms so we are literally instead of use it making use of all this fertilizer that we are naturally producing out of our own butts. We are just fertilizing the ocean instead and causing problems rather than fertilizing our own farms. Yeah, you got it.

You got it. And I really like how you say fertilizers out of our own butts because the Japanese farmers about 200 years ago said exactly that. They had a special term for their poop. They call it shimagoya, which meant fertilizer from the bottom of a person. And they collected it meticulously from their cities

by way of buckets and carried their buckets to their little boats and then sailed those boats to the countryside where farmers bought it. Farmers bought shit. Okay, you see the difference? Wow, yeah. Farmers bought shit. Okay. You see the difference? Wow.

Here, we pay to take it away. There, they pay to buy it. Yeah. I mean, if, look, if you were hard up for money, it would be really great to be able to sell your shit. I think. Like you can sell your blood, right? Why not sell your shit?

Shit. Exactly. At the very least, you know, I hate, see, this is what this is triggering for me because I hate throwing anything away. You know, I, at the very least, if I find something in my house, I'm like, I want to put it on eBay

and at least get a couple bucks. But more importantly, I want to know that someone else is going to make use of it. I don't want to go to a landfill. I ideally want to help someone else reuse it. And now I feel that way about my own shit that I'm like, I'm wasting something that is, that is perhaps valuable. So let me ask this. I,

you know, I grew up in a gardening household. My parents gardened, they still do. I live in a city town home. I don't have a garden myself. I have a couple boxes on my roof that I've been thinking about putting some like peppers and stuff in. You know, maybe, maybe next year I'll start my urban gardening adventure. Is this something that's possible for me to do? Is there a way for the folks listening at home to take their own shit and turn it into fertilizer? Or is that not something you suggest that amateurs try to try to do in a city where maybe your neighbors can smell you well that that that's the great question yes if you have four acres of land you can you know

designate a compost pile where you can probably dump that as long as it doesn't put you at odds with whatever municipal rules there are we had a a compost pile in my house growing up. We did not put our own shit in it, but we put all of our vegetable leavings and like leaves and stuff like that. Just a big pile in the back. And it was so cool. It gets all hot from the reactions of the pathogen or the bacteria, like chewing up the food.

And then it like, yeah, it was just a very cool thing to see as a kid. But if you just put human shit in that kind of compost pile, would it work or no? It would have to mix it really well. Okay. And cover with something like hay or whatever, because it will stink. Yeah.

I would not recommend it in any city. I live in New York City. I have like a regular compost pile in my backyard where all the leaves go, but no, I'm not going to mess with anything else because it will cause a problem. However. Might come up at the neighborhood board meeting or whatever. Yeah, board meeting.

Exactly. Lena is composting shit, everyone. Okay, I'm sorry. Go on. No, no, no. That's completely fine. However, there is a way for gardeners like you to use other people's composted shit to grow your peppers. Because some wastewater treatment plants actually managed to make it work. converts the metabolic output of about 2.2 million people

into a fertilizer, grade A, meaning completely safe, fertilizer called Bloom. It comes in this neat squared back with big letters, Bloom. And it is the same composted sewage that is then squeezed to get all the water out and dried. And basically, when you open that bag and you smell it, it's your classic garden dirt. Wow. And that is made of the poop of people who live in D.C. Our politicians, our elected officials, their staff members, they're all pooping.

And you can buy their poop and fertilize your, your garden with it. Yes. You got it. You got it. Can you imagine that? I mean, that's very beautiful because so much shit comes out of DC. So I finally made my way to the joke. That is so cool though. Yeah. I'm looking at the website and you can, you can just order it. Is there, is there a reason I there's,

and they're really stopping me from doing that from just purchasing. I'm just purchasing. Yeah. Completely. Completely. Incredible. Well, look,

I want to ask you more about our own relationship with shit and, and how we got here. I have some very specific questions for you, but, but we had to take a really quick break. We right back with more Lena Zeldovich. So we're back with Lena Zeldovich. You know, something that always stuck with me

was in our very first year in our writer's room in Adam Ruins Everything. We talked about, you know, we did an episode that was about the sewer system of London and its creation and what a great public health, you know, achievement that was. But one thing, one of our writers, Melinda Taub, wonderful writer, she said in our writer's room, this didn't make it into the episode, but she was like, isn't it weird that we transport shit from place to place using clean water? Isn't that strange? Like literally clean water, very precious resource.

in Los Angeles, we are constantly having a drought, right? And yet I am literally taking clean drinkable water and dropping my, not only am I wasting my poop, right? And sending it far away rather than, you know, having it be used for fertilizer. I'm also transporting it using a precious clean substance. Like that's just thinking about it that way. Like we could have gray water systems, right? Things like that, that, that flush it using other forms of water. But just that weird discontinuity makes me think, okay, our relationship, our psychic relationship with this substance is really weird and really messed up and is clearly stopping us from building something better. Do you agree with that? Yeah. Yeah.

And it's another kind of historically very complicated tangle of how we got there yeah how so well um water is perhaps the only media that is so convenient it exists in abundance right it rains you get water you get water, you can store it, you can direct it down through any type of pipes and it will wash away and carry through whatever is in those pipes. So even ancient societies build sort of more primitive set of pipes and toilets and sewage systems that operated on water because it was just so convenient. In some places, people build toilets over water.

Kind of like imagine an outhouse that doesn't have a pit, but instead it all falls into the water and floats away. Yeah, like literally an outhouse over a river or something like that. Exactly. You can actually Google and find some hilarious pictures of toilets like that. It's pretty wild. Yeah. And so this is what we stuck with.

And then the Romans perfected it with their cla ca massima. They built this huge sewers. You know, you could go, you know, a horse-drawn carriage could go through them. Today, I think a car can drive through some of them. But, you know, that horse-drawn carriage could go through them. Today, I think a car can drive through some of them. Yeah. But, you know, that's what the Romans did. And that's basically how we started to look at, you know, our shit. Just like, get rid of it.

Like, who wants it? But the mixture of it with the clean water system, right, also led to, like, when you're using water to transport your shit and you are using, you know, pre-modern sewage systems, pre-modern infrastructure, you're going to end up in situations where people are going to end up drinking like, you know, contaminated water because you have now in so doing, if you put your outhouse over your river and someone downstream is drinking from the same river, they're going to get sick.

And so, so you are turning something clean that you need into something like kind of polluted. And you are also, as you say, polluting the ecosystem and things like that. It just seems like a very strange mixture, you know? Yeah. In a lot of ways, that's, like I said, that's what we kind of inherited in a lot of ways from Victorian London. When they had this, you know, the Great Stink of London, which happened more than once, there were a lot of conversations about how to do this better. For example, you know, I call them sewage separatists.

There was a group of people that suggested that there should be two separate systems. One for stormwater, basically clean water that would flow into the river and people could draw from that water to cook food and whatnot. And a separate system specifically for sewage. to cook food on whatnot, and a separate system specifically for sewage. And that would be pumped out of the city and onto the farms that at the time weren't as far as they're now here in New York or London. So maybe this would be doable. The questions that they couldn't solve were, first, cost.

Two systems instead of one. Two, how would shit move down through the pipes? You needed, at the time, all they had was steam. So you had to use water anyway. And that system could also clock, so you needed more water. So you couldn't, they couldn't get out of that water equation. So we still have that water. There are better technologies these days that manage to sort of, you know, squeeze the water out of the sewage that comes out of a building, that gray water.

It can be reused again, not for drinking, but for watering gardens, washing clothes, I am told, in other means. And there's certain systems that could recover up to 98% of that water, from what I read. Yeah, I mean, there are, I looked into it once. If you want to replumb your house, you could get a gray water system installed in your house where it takes some of the excess water from maybe your laundry or something like that, your dishwasher, whatever, and then uses that to flush your toilet or to water your plants.

There's also you can also get rainwater capture and things like that. But it's expensive. And a lot of plumbers don't like it because it violates rule that like water comes in one way and goes out the other way. And you shouldn't mix the two because they're worried about you getting shit in your drinking water. But it's like just it's just sort of astonishingly rare. And so it just makes me think, again, what you're describing here is like a fundamental inefficiency in the way that we have plumbed our entire civilization. That that, you know, we talk about our civilization as being very efficient. Capitalism is being very efficient.

But here is something where we are wasting a valuable resource. And we're not only wasting a valuable resource, we're using a precious resource, water, to waste the valuable resource. It's like very strange. Yeah, you got it. You got it. I think in the past, you know, maybe 10 years or so, I've started noticing a change in that. It began around the time in 2011 when the Gates Foundation issued this, you know, reinvent the toilet challenge. It was originally issued to create, my understanding is, it was issued to create better sanitation solutions in the developing world where it's really ugly.

People still head out into the bush. But out of that evolved different technologies that are quite applicable to our own world to stop using precious resource to wash down the valuable resource. And some of them might still sort of be in the early stages, but I know there is a company called Epic Clean Tech on the West Coast that developed sort of like a plugin. I don't think it works for houses per se, but it does work for buildings. They basically plug in this cartridge, for the lack of a better word, into the building's sewage pipes, and they stop it right there.

They extract the water, and whatever's left of the poo eventually becomes fertilized through their own proprietary method. That's cool. I like to say I see the sewage tide turning. It sounds very ominous when you put it that way. But I do want to ask because you mentioned

places where, you know, they don't have access to adequate sewage to safe sewage, where, you know, the the human waste still gets people sick. And that's, in fact, something else we talked about in that very early episode of Adam Ruins Everything that, you know, a lot of places don't have access to safe toilets. And, you know, also the sort of like habitual ways that excrement are dealt with there are not only inefficient, but very unsafe. And so I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit, like how much of the world is affected by those issues. And if we're thinking about how we can redesign our sewage system so that we're not wasting this wonderful resource, right? In places like that, that need more

infrastructure, is there a better sort of infrastructure that could be built than what we have here in Los Angeles or New York City? Yeah, that's a great question. So the numbers of people who still don't have a safe and working toilets kind of fluctuate depending on exactly what statistic you look at. But it's still kind of in billions. It could be like 1.2 or near 2 billion, whatever, depending on exactly how they count. And a lot of people still head out into the bush,

which is dangerous on its own. You know, heading out into the bush in some of these places in the middle of the night to take a leak, you don't know what's going to bite you or eat you. Yeah. So the other issue is that in a lot of these places, our Western flushing toilets can't be built, just can't be built because the water is too unreliable. There's either too little water or there's too much. When it's too much, everything's going to spill. Like we have sewage spills here all the time.

There it's just not going to work day one because some of these places flood. One place where I went to when I was reporting on the book was Madagascar. And in its capital, people grow rice in their front yards. It's rice patches because it floods all the time. Like this water just standing there. What are you going to do with it? How are you going to handle that? So most people just have latrines.

But when it rains for five days, latrines overflow and all this stuff just floats out into people's yards and homes. Yeah. And into their water. And into their water. Yeah. Yeah. Completely. So it doesn't work.

It needs a completely different solution. And there are startups in those parts of the world that are trying something completely different. They call it container-based sanitation. In short, what happens is, you know, they build toilets that are comfortable to sit on, but they're not connected to any pipes. There is either a hygienic bucket or a biodegradable bag underneath. And once it's full, a service comes and swipes it for an empty one or a clean one. So it is basically manual waste collection, just like that manual waste collection that I described earlier in Japan.

just like that manual waste collection that I described earlier in Japan. That output is taken then to a local waste treatment plant where it's loaded up into digesters and out comes fertilizer. And in that particular case, biogas, it's also a product of fermenting shit that you can use as energy. People cook with it. People boil water with it and whatnot. So it's based on containers, hence the container-based sanitation. And it's a different way of doing it, but in a lot of ways, it's also more ecologically savvy. It dies in wastewater and it returns poo to Mother Nature, to soil. Yeah. And I can imagine a very mature, you know, high-tech version of this, right? I can imagine in L.A. if I had some sort of toilet that had a container that I pooed in, right? And that sealed

up nicely. And then, you know, I mean, look, I'm used to having a garbage man come take my garbage away, right? I take it out to the curb and they pick it up and they go do whatever with it. And I do, I have my yard waste that is turned into, you know, mulch for the city parks department. And I've got, you know, that I put my, you know, dried leaves in whatever, you know, yard trimmings and I've got recycling. And so like, why not have a like shit pickup, right? I could imagine a version of that where, oh yeah, that's very much like my normal life, not any grosser, but I'm not using water to move the poo around and it is being used for something more productive. And I can imagine how, yeah, in a lot of places where maybe plumbing with water to move people's shit around is not the

most effective for the reasons that you're saying, like that would be a good solution. Is that a model that you think is going to take off or is it just getting started? So I think it's getting started in the developing world because it's a lot easier and a lot cheaper than laying down pipes that may or may not work. Here in the Western world, I don't know. I could totally see it. The way I sometimes envision it is that you have this cartridge that pops underneath your toilet and then there's a little flushing thing say i'm full and then you swipe it and yes it goes out just with the rest of your garbage yeah it could be i mean it's 21st century we can make them so that they don't stink that they you know flush it you you know it's almost full. It doesn't have to smell. It can be easy. I think all in all,

it's doable. The issue is, I think, you're breaking through the human aversion of their metabolic output and creating these new infrastructures. That's money. But if you're, it costs money, but if you're doing that in a place where the infrastructure is needed anyway, there's perhaps a lower barrier to that. Yeah. And, hey, you know, in the U.S., we are getting more open-minded about our shit. I mean, bidets are now taking America by storm. And everybody thought that we would never be into bidets and that we couldn't handle it because we're too prudish.

And now everyone's getting, you know, of these but you know a toto or whatever it is installed it's like people's pride and joy i want to make sure we talk about this and actually wish we had gotten into it a little bit earlier because i'm really fascinated by it what about the medical potential of shit um this is like people are using each other's poop for therapy to cure diseases now aren't they yeah yeah that's Yeah. I would say it's a budding therapy, but in a lot of ways it's proven, definitely proven. It's a budding therapy. Budding therapy, exactly. So I'd say in the past decade, or maybe two, medics fully recognize that human intestines is not just a place where your foot sits and gets absorbed.

It is actually a very thriving, rich ecosystem full of all kinds of microbes, mostly good that we need, but occasionally pathogens. And so sometimes some particularly bad antibiotic-resistant pathogens manage to settle there. People tend to get them after like a surgery in the hospital. One of these really bad bugs is Clostridium difficile. And I first wrote about it, I think, like in 2013 or 2014, before I started working on the book. And in that story, which then also made it into the book, a lady in her 50s got this bug and couldn't shake it off.

And about 25,000 or 35,000 people died from it because nothing works. At least back then, nothing was working. Antibiotics of last resort weren't working. It kept coming back. And she literally had, she tried everything. Somebody in her family Googled and found this procedure for fecal transplant that basically boils down to

you take the poop out of healthy individuals, mush it up, and put it into an enema and give it to the person who is suffering from this bug. Yeah. And you hope it works. And lo and behold, not only it worked, but it worked completely miraculously, better than any antibiotic she took before. Within a day, like in 24 hours, she was a completely changed person. She couldn't get up and all of a sudden she had all this energy and she was walking around and even willing to drive a car because what happened, she didn't

just get the poop. She got all the microbes her body didn't have after all this antibiotics. And suddenly she had them all and they they were working. And they were producing all the necessary nutrients. And she was back to normal. And so she started this foundation called Fecal Transplant Foundation to educate other people about the method. And not only she did that, a year or two later, she convinced the FDA to let this method live, quote unquote. The FDA was very leery of it. It didn't want doctors to do it.

It was afraid for people to do it. Think about it. It's completely against the logic that Uber taught, right? So they were going to sort of like close it down. Poop comes out of your butt. It doesn't go back up your butt. It can't be good for you to put poop up your butt. It violates the sort of root notion we have.

And this is some of the deepest down prejudices and ideas that we have. We learned this stuff very early. There's a lot of like weird religion in it about like it's sinful to poop. And so just this very idea of taking someone else's poop and putting it up your butt strikes some people as like deeply wrong

in a way that maybe they can't even articulate yeah yeah heresy yeah exactly so she convinced them to let their idea live and right now we have um there is this um uh you know it's not even a startup anymore in Boston called Open Biome that screens healthy donors for their poop and, you know, gathers that poop and stores that poop in freezers specifically for people who need it to battle that infection. Wait, so can I, like, is this one of those things where I can send them a poop sample and they'll, like, keep it on file or something like that in case someone needs my poop? No, not quite. You'd have to go there and get screened. Man, they take your blood samples and poop samples and all kinds of things to make sure you qualify to donate. And what they told me is that it's easier to get into Harvard and MIT than pass

their test. But see, now I want to do it because I love, I love signing up to donate body parts. I'm signed up as a body donor at the, at UCLA. If I die, you know, the medical students will get to dissect me. I signed up for bone marrow transplants via an organization called, I think, Be The Match, where you just send them a little cheek swab. And then if someone, if, you know, it's a very small chance, but if someone, if you're a match for someone's bone marrow, you might be asked to give a bone marrow transplant. And so I just like, I like, you know, having my body parts be useful to other people. I like being in the database. So maybe it's in Massachusetts, maybe I'll stop by and take the poop test. It's near Boston. But so this is my understanding is that, you know, we're still learning a lot about the gut, the gut biome, all the different microbes and what they do.

But there's a whole lot of conditions that can be caused by having the wrong kind of biome down there. Like things that are surprising that we might not even expect. Like, you know, weight loss, weight gain, you know, IBS certainly, you know, all kinds of different disorders. And maybe the cure for some of these things is like inside of our friends and neighbors' asses?

It could be. We just don't know yet. Let me tell you this, nobody looked. Nobody looked up close. But this is like a brand new therapy and it really is bringing like a lot of comfort to people. A lot of- Yes, at the moment it's only used

when everything else fails and for that specific infection. There's a lot of conversation and research on how to expand it, but it's not quite there yet. Because just like you said, you may inherit good bacteria, you also may inherit bad bacteria. So if the question is, are you going to live or die, then maybe you're not care so much whether you might inherit some diabetes from this transplant or not oh it it it you know it's it's it's all part of your metabolism right so it's a very hot area of research yeah and hopefully in the next decade you know some more

facts come out and we'll know more and. And this is the really interesting thing about it being such a new area, because we still don't understand what so many of those microbes do. And so a lot of times I always like to caution people when we're talking about gut flora, gut biome stuff, that there's a lot of products out there that'll say, oh, this nurtures good bacteria or bad bacteria, you know, like, like sort of quasi pharmaceutical products. And you got to be really careful with those because the truth is that like, we don't even understand enough about that yet to really be like taking supplements that are going to do X, Y, Z.

Anyone who like makes those claims is like a little bit suspect, but yeah, if your lives have been saved through the first forms of this therapy that we have through poop, poop transplants, which, by the way, is very fun to say poop transplant. I love it. Yeah. Incredible. I mean, do you have any opinion about like probiotics, things like that? Like, are these things that work or are these things to be skeptical of? Both.

I think some of them work. I think some of them don't work at all. Yeah. And how to find out those that works, that's why FDA doesn't regulate them, because it has no clue how to regulate them. Because, again, there's not enough science. Yet, yet. Yeah, exactly. I think a lot of these therapies work on some people and don't work on others.

And a lot of it is just basically trial and error. Yeah, people do it themselves. Well, wait, people do it themselves? People just do the transplant themselves? Is that what you said? Well, in the earlier days, that's what people did because doctors wouldn't do it. So the lady that I described in my book, her husband was her daughter. And on the morning

of the transplant, he pooped into a little device that he put on top of the toilet and he took it, mixed it with that enema solution, put it in the blender, pushed the button, the whole thing kind of like whipped into a

brown milkshake. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you need a really strong stomach for all this stuff. So that's what it was. Yes. They did it completely themselves. I don't know if people still do it themselves because now you actually can do it as an experimental therapy in a doctor's office. I'm sure there are people out there who are, there's a lot of people do weird things to their bodies and I'm sure there are people out there and I wouldn't advise that lot of people do weird things to their bodies, and I'm sure there are people out there, and I wouldn't advise that people do it themselves. Yeah, don't do it at all. But this is how it got started, was through this.

Yes, yeah. I mean, so to bring us in for a landing here, like, we've talked about how this is a part of our bodies that we often would rather not think about, you know? Even while I am pooping, I'm usually on my phone reading Twitter and not thinking about what I'm doing, you know, trying to be far, far away from it. I'm doing, I'm doing a crossword puzzle. I'm doing the wordle. I'm not thinking about what's coming out of my butt. You know, I, I look back, I glance at it. I'm like, all right, good job. I hit flush and that's it, you know, but you're talking about how, hey, the way that we deal with our poop causes environmental destruction in many ways. It ends up creating algal blooms, stuff like that.

And how we're wasting all this wonderful resource, the medical potential of it. After writing this book, what is your perspective holistically, what our relationship with poop could be if we were to, you know, take all this into account. And how do you suggest that folks at home, you know, think about poop differently in their day-to-day lives as a result of all these insights? It's like, it's one of my favorite topics. So what I... People, it must be great. You're at a dinner party and people are like, what do you do for a living? And you're like, oh, well, I know a lot about shit. Let me tell you. I advocate for poo.

I love it. It's not correct. We produce an extremely valuable metabolic product that our planet needs very badly to keep feeding us. Our farm fields need it very badly to bear crops. And if you think about it, it's such an incredible power that you carry within. Think about it. I call it people's own organic power, poop. I love it. We're all super poopers. We just haven't been conditioned to think about it that way. But we all produce at least a pound worth a day of an incredibly versatile resource that can generate energy, become fertilizer, can be converted to crude oil or biogas. By using it properly, you can stave off algae blooms. You can stop over fertilizing the ocean. By putting it back in the fields, it would also cut down on the synthetic fertilizer that is polluting and contributes to acid rains and whatnot.

Just think how you can fix all these problems with what you flush down the toilet. Be proud of that power within you, and you'll never flush the same way again. You're incredible. Your body is a marvelous machine and it's turning food, not just into energy for you, but into something that has value, that is not useless, that has people's own organic power. I love that so much. Lina Zeldovich, thank you so much for coming on the show. The name of the book is?

The Other Dark Matter, the Science and Business of Turning Waste into Wealth and Health. And of course, you can get it at our special bookshop, factuallypod.com slash books. That's factuallypod.com slash books. Lina Zeldovich, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been a delight. It's been a delight too. Well, thank you so much to Lina Zel Zeldovich, for coming on the show. I hope you loved that conversation as much as I did. If you did, please, again, consider supporting us on Patreon. Just head to patreon.com slash adamconover.

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