SciShow Tangents - Bonus Backlog Bonanza - Ep. 5

Episode Date: April 25, 2025

This bonus episode was originally posted on Patreon on July 28, 2021 titled "Poopoopeepeepedia - Episode 5."Original Patreon description: Hank faces the consequences of his bathroom humor titling by diving into the poopy waters of urine and feces!SciShow Tangents is on YouTube! Go to www.youtube.com/scishowtangents to check out this episode with the added bonus of seeing our faces! And go to https://complexly.store/collections/scishow-tangents to buy some great Tangents merch!While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on socials:Ceri: @ceriley.bsky.social@rhinoceri on InstagramSam: @im-sam-schultz.bsky.social@im_sam_schultz on InstagramHank: @hankgreen on X

INTRO Ba ba ba ba! Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents Patreon bonus episode. I'm Hank Green and joining me as always is science expert, Sari Riley and our resident everyman, Sam Schultz. Notes about this episode. Sari has a house that is completely devoid of anything. And you're going to get my MPR voice of what is pee and what is poo. That's the best way to do it, I think. You're real close to the mic.

I know. And quiet and not calm. I also, we've been kicking up so much dust that I've been sneezing constantly, so I sound like this is the worst audio experience that I'm trying to make it sound gentle. Anyhow, every week on SciShow Tangents, I call our bonus episode Terrible Things Like Q and Bidet or Poopy Peepypedia. And I'm also going to be talking about the other two episodes, which are going to be it sound gentle. Anyhow, every week on SciShow Tangents, I call our bonus episode Terrible Things Like Q and Bidet or Poopy Peepypedia, but this month I am being forced to live with the consequences of my actions. This is Poopy Peepypedia.

This is Q and Bidet. Will it be good? It doesn't matter. It was inevitable and it has arrived. We asked for questions about peeing and pooping, and it turned out that you had plenty of questions about peeing and pooping. So before we dive into the poopy waters, Sari, what is pee-pee and poo-poo?

I don't like that. So poo-poo and pee-pee together, urine or feces and urine, respectively. Thank you for getting it right. I better get it right. I'm the science expert. Are called excretia and in mammals, they're separate, but in a lot of other vertebrates, they're not. They just come out in one big like mush.

And what comes out of most animals is just the feces. So that's the solid or semi-solid food stuffs that has been digested through the small intestine. And then there's like leftovers and that leftovers is waste. And it just gets like plopped out of your body. And that's feces. So like it can be liquidy like bird poop, or it can be solid like an elephant poop. And then in certain animals like mammals specifically, there are stronger perineal muscles. So there's like this structure near the genital area called the perineum. And around 360 million years ago, during the origin of tetrapods, which were the first vertebrates to like crawl out of the water, they evolved a strengthened perineum to split up the pee in the poop and develop a urinary tract separate from the digestive tract.

from the digestive tract. So they have, we, they have kidneys that like process liquid waste separate from the solid waste that's being processed by the digestive system. Is that better? It gives us more control over- A number of things. Lots of things, yeah. So like when we pee and poop can be separate

as opposed to like coming out in one burst and, you know, a lot of mammals like mark territory with their pee or use pee in various other social capacities. It allowed us to use it as a tool. Yeah. And it like helps with sex and like separating those organs that do. So instead of just having a hole that's like your sex hole and your waste hole, then you can have different specialized tissues.

And so like erectile tissue of penises is like traces back to separating pee and poop. So a lot of things happen because we can pee and poop separately. Awesome, hooray. I've always sort of imagined that a bird like peas, it has pee and poop. they just come out together. And the pee is the stuff that comes from the renal system

and the poop is the stuff that comes from the digestive system. Yeah, I think that's true. Cause it contains uric acid, it contains like the same liquidy waste products as our pee. Right, and so like there's the thing that's like controlling the water content of your body. And that's the pee is part of this.

It's like it's pulling water out. It's like taking water, like water soluble waste out. And then there's the thing that's just like the tube that is sort of outside and inside at the same time that is your digestive system. And so like, for example, a cicada or an aphid, they take in so much food because they're just like sucking sap, like really liquidy sap out of plants,

that like their poop is almost pure water. It's like sugary water, but it's still poop, even though it's liquid because it's passing through the digestive system. It's not going and getting filtered out by kidneys. And so like you can have pure liquid poop that is not pee just because it's liquid. It's almost like that. Yeah, poop is where it's been, not what it looks like.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's really beautiful. That's perfect, yeah. Yeah. That's exactly what I was like. Yeah. That's really beautiful. Perfect. Yeah, that's exactly what I was trying to say. We are all where we have been, not what we look like. Yeah, I think I'm just like poop.

We're all a piece of shit. So we got a bunch of questions. Is this correct, Sam? Am I doing these questions about pee-pee and poo-poo? Oh yes, they've been researched, but you can take a crack at them if you want to first. Here's a question from Jamie. Thank you Jamie for being a patron. Why does the urge to pee while I poop happen? Like you don't have to pee, you sit down to poop, is this what's happening? And then you're like, oh, I kind of do have to pee.

It's hard to pee without, to poop without peeing. Almost impossible, I'd say. I find that is not the case for me. Okay. Maybe there's something wrong, is there something wrong with me or something wrong with you? Uh-oh.

Or are we all just different and special in our own ways? Yeah, I think that one. And you also have more fun stuff going on, so you might be more adept at pooping, practiced at pooping than the rest of us, which plays into it. I also do it more than the average person because of colitis. So like... Maybe you run out of pee. Yeah, I just don't count any left.

Yeah. You have muscles called sphincters, which are generally tensed. And that's why you don't like poop and pee all the time. They don't just like fall out of your butt. The urethra sphincter, which is the one where that controls where pee comes out, is smaller and easier to relax than the anal sphincter, which is the one where can that controls where P comes out is smaller And easier to relax than the anal sphincter, which is where poop comes out of and so when you just sit down to P

Or stand up to P. I don't judge You do whatever you want to do and you relax your urethra sphincter When you relax your urethra sphincter, when you relax your urethra sphincter, it's easier not to relax your anal sphincter at the same time. But when you sit down and you're straining to poop and you relax your anal sphincter, then it relaxes everything in your pelvic area. So then it's likely that your urethra sphincter will relax as well, and then pee just kind of like comes out. But if you don't have pee to pee, then...

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Or maybe you just have excellent control. And like some people can do a kick flip, but I... You've been practicing not peeing while you poop. Mm-hmm. That was a great answer, and I feel good about it. This next question comes from Fitch who asks, how long do you think it will take for America

until Americans are using bidets? Like using toilet paper is a little barbaric. If you get poop on your hand, what? If you poop on your hand, you don't just use a paper towel to get that poop off your hand. Well, Fitch, first of all, I don't eat with my butt. I don't like scratch my, like take out my boogers with my butt, you know? So there is a difference there.

I don't just wipe poop off of my hand with a paper towel if I get some on it. Though, when you have a little baby, you do get a surprising amount of poop on your hands and you do sometimes just wipe it on your jeans. Yeah, sometimes you don't have time to wash your hands. That's baby poop, it's a different, right? Isn't it? Hope we're just gonna say it's different. But this is really a science question,

but I have a bidet. It's attached to my toilet though. It's not like a separate device. Yeah. Which I, it's just a lot of like home real estate or bathroom real estate specifically to take up with another device. To me, the worst part of going back to work

has been not having my bidet. Cause I can't have my own. You have a bidet too? I sure do. Stefan has one too. I'm clearly behind the times. You know what it will take to get Americans to start using bidets is really aggressive Instagram ads. That's what it took for me.

That seems right. I will say my bidet is not heated. Is yours heated? Oh yeah. Got it hooked up to the hot and cold water. Oh wow. You have, what? How do you have a hot water over there?

Do you pull it out of the sink? Why don't you just come on over and see it sometime? Yeah, it's not plumbed into the wall. It's kind of a cheaper one that hooks to the sink, but still works great. Got a sort of a new pipe on the exterior of your bathroom? Got some new holes of a wall and stuff, but it's okay. Oh, okay.

All right. So you actually plumbed it. You put it through the walls. Well, in a manner of speaking. I have to come over, is what I'm hearing. Sam is a homeowner and did whatever the fuck you wanted with his walls. I got a drill out.

I wouldn't say I plumbed anything. You plumbed it. Yeah, so apparently, it's already happened. It's happening. And I think that, like, I know you joked about it in Instagram ads, but I think like that is the thing that will cause Americans to buy bidets is like other Americans having bidets and talking about it.

This is more of like a sociological answer than like a biological answer. But Americans are really puritanical. And so anything to do with the nether regions, people were like, Oh, no, including the days. So like when the days started becoming popularized in Europe, this article that I was reading said that Americans, the first Americans to really see like bidets, as separate entities popularized were probably GIs during World War II.

And the only time they would have seen them is when they were in brothels and like philandering. And so then they were like, oh, that's like the sex cleaner. You like wash out your bits before having more sex. Yeah. That's for people who do sex a lot. Yeah.

And then when, don't do this as birth control, but when douching was used as birth control, so like just trying to like wash out the sperm, then bidets were used as that as well to be like, it's water, just like flush it out and you won't get pregnant. Were there bidets other places than brothels or was that mainly where they were in Europe? I think there were other places too,

but I think that's where the Americans encountered them because they didn't like stay in fancy hotels. Yes, that was the only building they were going in for the most part. Yeah. They were either out on the streets or in the brothels. Well, that's my perception of what was going on. I mean, that's probably true, right?

Or in a tent. They were probably in a lot of tents. Yeah. Squatting to poop. I don't know. Maybe they got invited over for dinner at some people's houses sometimes. Yeah. I don't know where they pooped. I was going to say if you fought in World War II. Let us know where you pooped. Write it and tell us where you pooped. Oh, I hope we have a World War II air listener.

And then bidets were also associated with like, like, like right now, menstrual care is pretty good as far as like the range of options. But for a long time, it was just like you bleed and then you have to clean it up. And so bidets were like very useful for people who menstruate to like clean up down there. And so like all that combined, Americans were like, this is all the things that we don't like talking about. We don't like talking about sex. We don't like talking about pregnancy.

We don't like talking about bleeding. In 1964, that's when the, like the toilet bidet started becoming a thing. So that it like made it more palatable to Americans where it's like, look, it's not like a separate thing you squat over. It's not like a sex squat thing. It's like just part of your toilet, casual.

And I think that's been the marketing push nowadays to just be like, it's the normal thing to clean your butt with water. Yeah. I just Googled how did World War II soldiers poop for our new podcast, which may be better than our other podcast, Poopy Peepypedia.

And I did find a Vice article and the title of it is finally, a book about Nazi soldiers taking a shit. Wow. And I've just seen more Nazis pooping in 30 seconds than in the whole rest of my life. There's lots of photos of it happening. Yes. I don't know why.

Interesting. Choice by those guys. Fascism and taking pictures while they poop. I'm actually really mad about how well this episode is turning out. I wish it wasn mad about how well this episode is turning out. I wish it wasn't I'm stewing Look Sam, I know how to make content. That's the only thing I know how to do. I can't get one over on you I also just bought I did buy I did just buy a

26 pack of washcloths because I've been using sort of like Orin's old washcloths from when he was a baby as our, for bidet reasons. Interesting. You don't just use a little dab of toilet paper? No, I find it. Well, I do sometimes, but I find that that can sort of disintegrate.

Yay. If it's wet. If it's wet down there. Oh, well You just got to get used to it Now I know if I ever get up the day I should text you both for advice about how to best Clean up the butt after the water spritz. I don't know that there's a right or wrong way to do it I think you kind of got to just feel it out yourself, right? There are no instructions really some people shake that seems ridiculous to me. You got to just feel it out yourself. Right. There are no instructions really.

Some people shake, that seems ridiculous to me. You got to do a little dabbing. Yeah, you can't, I mean, you got to put yourself in a centrifuge if you're getting excited. Well, you need it as a hairdryer down there. Yes, I thought about that often. It does need a little burst of hot air. We got a question from Beauregard Giovanni who asks,

what is comfortable? How does a body know well enough what a comfy position would be to suggest the placement of my body parts? That's not about poop or peep. I just thought this one was really interesting. I connected it back to pooping for my answer. I do love what is comfortable.

It's just like the default state of your body where none of your muscles have to do anything, right? Is that what it is? Well, no, because like you definitely like, you can't just lay one way either. You have to move around. Yeah, that's true. You gotta shift.

Okay, what is it? So comfortable is different positions at different times. Yeah, that's true. I don't know, man. Sari, do you know what comfortable is? I only looked up comfortable while pooping. To keep it on brand. I didn't know, man. Sari, do you know what comfortable is? I only looked up comfortable while pooping. To keep it on brand. I didn't really... I know they said not about poop and pee,

but I was like, I'm gonna make it about poop. This is poopy peepeepedia, damn it. And we're not gonna just talk about some random science stuff. But yeah, I think to connect it back to general comfort and to poop, it's like what our bodies have adapted to do over years and years and years and centuries of evolution. It's all going to be traced back to evolution, where like the only reason standing is comfortable is because we've done it for so long that our organs and our muscles and our bones have arranged in such a way that like we can walk upright in the

way that standing on two feet is not comfortable for a dog or a cat probably. And so I think in the same way like positions that we've assumed for a while, whether it's like laying down to sleep or sitting somewhere or in the case of pooping, squatting. The way your eyes lit up when he said that. So there's like a few small studies that say squatting when you poop, like this is the whole like, should you squat, should you use a squatty potty, etc. helps align your rectum and anal canal better than sitting does, but they've been like extremely small studies,

but other people are like, toilets are fine. To connect it back to your discussion of what even is comfortable, whatever's comfortable is what's comfortable for you. And you get to choose that. Yeah, and it's funny because there seems to be certain things that like I'm supposed to do that are uncomfortable

but like people are like you'll get comfortable if you do them enough like sitting more correctly with my chin more back or my back more straight or whatever and I don't know man is really uncomfortable to sit that way. I'm going to die someday and And that's gonna be uncomfortable. And like, I'm not uncomfortable now when I'm sitting, like leaning back in my chair. So I'm gonna do it my way. Yeah, life's too short not to slouch. And then when I see my son walking around

with his terrible posture and people are like, you know what they take and I'm like, shut up. Don't, I don't want your value. I don't want your guilt. I don't want your guilt. I don't want this in my life. And then I move on. He does slouch like a mofo though. Like he's just like,

he's like me all the way down. His like shirt rides up and his belly's out. Oh, that's nice. He's probably extremely comfortable. He looks comfortable. Yeah. Little guys get to be way more comfortable I I feel like, because everything's huge. So nice.

Yeah, you're just on this giant couch. This I maintain at four feet tall is the right height for humans. I know, but there's nothing we can do about it. Who you telling? It's the future. Hey, the historians listening to this episode of Poopy Peepypedia, was I right? And this is like whenever they see like Aristotle got all these things wrong,

but he got this one thing right. And so this will be you, Hank. Definitely. What else do we have about pee? Why does the urge to pee come so much more as I age? I have to wake up to pee every single night now. And that's from Ariel Bradford. We should probably answer this one for me as well.

Yeah, I'm starting to have to pee more often also. Boo. Especially at night. If I go to bed and I have even a molecule of pee inside me, my body will say, hey buddy, you're gonna go pee this out, right? Yes, I think. If I drink a molecule of H2O,

just to take a pill, within a half an hour my body's like, I got that ready, that gulp you had, it's ready to go. Is that all the time or just at night? Just at night. Okay, yeah, me too, because I don't have to pee more often during the day,

but is your body more afraid you're gonna pee your pants or something as you get older? Well, I think we should let Sari take it, because I think Sari did some research. I did do some research, but sadly I don't think I'm gonna give you a very satisfactory answer, because there are some biological reasons.

So as you age, as you grow older, your body produces less of a hormone called aldosterone, which regulates salt and water balance. And basically, this means it's harder for your body to retain fluid naturally. So like, as your body decays, you're producing less of a hormone that lets you hold water. I think decay is the wrong word. Can we move, can we steer clear of decay? As you become decrepit. Senesce, as I senesce. And then also, your organs become less efficient at what they do. They've been doing it for a long time.

And so, your kidneys may become less good at concentrating urine and may draw in more water from elsewhere in the body to like process your urine, which is maybe why your bladder feels fuller faster because your kidneys are just like, okay, let's let's work on this. Let's just like, get water from wherever whether it was the gulp or not. Your bladder is also senescing and maybe losing some storage capacity. Your urethra might be shrinking a little bit or the lining may be thinning. So there are all these possible biological components to it. And as far as brain stuff, this is the biggest we don't know, but doctors have talked about this is an observable phenomenon. People tend to wake up more and go to go to the bathroom more and like specifically pee more. This one doctor just

recommended mindfulness exercises where you like retrain your brain to say like, no, I don't need to pee right now. So there's something where like you you think that you need to pee in your brain is what's generating that urge to pee. And you can convince yourself or through mindfulness practices say like, I can go back to sleep and I don't need to pee right now because I know my body. And like I have this constitution with me. That is not the advice I would have expected to get from a doctor. Uh-uh.

I would expect a doctor to say you need to go pee when you have to pee so that you don't have your bladder be all full and causing strain and et cetera. Yeah, I don't know. I've read three articles, so only one of them said this one. So take it with a grain of salt. Do not come to SciShow Tangents, poo poo pee pee pedia for medical advice. Pee when you gotta pee.

So it's probably a mixture of biological and brain. And you get to decide what to do with that. Whether you want to be like, I'm going to try to sleep. And I think that's probably it too. It's like we don't want to take the risk. It's like, ah, I have the urge to pee. Bathroom's right there. Might as well go.

And I think my body at least, like when I'm camping, I don't need to pee as much because my body's like, oh, lock it down. You don't wanna use that pit toilet a lot. But if you're like sleep right next to the bathroom, then it probably becomes habitual in some way. Yeah, you're probably right. Whatever doctor said that.

Okay, we gotta do one more question before we go. And Sam has specially requested this question from Emily M. who asks, why does being suddenly anxious make me have to go poo? I've always assumed that it's just because my body is like, well, currently, I'm not in dire peril, but I suspect at some point in the near future I will be, so I should probably poop now, before I am in the dire peril that your stress response is telling me that I'm about to be in.

Whereas actually I will not be in dire peril, I will be on a stage giving a PowerPoint presentation. Is that correct, Sari? That has always been my assumption, why I always have to poop right before giving a PowerPoint presentation. I think you're giving your body more credit to have like a logical process for this.

I think the real answer is that your gut and your brain are more interconnected than a lot of people think. I don't know, we've talked, I think on this podcast, or I've absorbed it from other vlogbrothers' media about how the brain and body are often thought of as separate entities, but they're really so interconnected. And that's the same with like your gut and your brain. So the the autonomic nervous system has like the parasympathetic, the sympathetic, and the enteric nervous system, which is like the gut nervous system. And the gut uses a lot of

neurotransmitters to control like contractions. when you digest and various things like that like the You have a really high concentration of the neurotransmitter serotonin in your gut and like it helps regulate how you contract your intestines And serotonin you usually think of as a neurotransmitter in the brain to like help you with mood regulation and things like that. And so when you when you get the and anxiety, it increases hormones like cortisol, adrenaline, and serotonin. And when those hormones flood through your body, it does things like increase your heart rate, but also it produces physical symptoms like contracting your gut and contracting your intestines and causing peristalsis to like shove the poop out. And like there's all these connections between neurotransmitters

and like IBS or other bowel conditions and like mental health and bowel conditions. And so that's basically it is like when you're in a panic, when you're in a tizzy, cells in your gut, specifically, enterochromophin cells, which line the digestive tract, release serotonin, and then your digestive tract is like, I'm gonna poop, uh-oh. But why? Why, yeah.

That's what happens, why did evolution select for this? That's mean. No, I don't know. I think it's what Hank said about being scared about PowerPoint presentations. You don't wanna poop on stage when your PowerPoint's mean. I don't know. I think it's what Hank said about being scared about PowerPoint presentations. You don't want to poop on stage when your PowerPoint's gone. It's true, you want to have your bowels entirely evacuated because otherwise it's a power poop presentation.

Yeah, in my head, it's just like accidental. It's just incidental because we have a set number of neurotransmitters and so it just like happens to do multiple things in your body, but maybe there's like a logic to it. It might just be that our bodies are not particularly well designed. You shouldn't need serotonin down here. And then humans were like, but wait, we're anxious beings. And then it's like, oh shit, now we got to poop more.

Yeah, there was, there's a, there's a stat that goes around in the wellness world that like 90% of the serotonin in your body is produced by your gut, and it's like, I mean, yes, but what that makes that sound like is the health of your gut affects your mental health greatly, but like that serotonin in your gut is not being detected by your brain. There's not like a tube that connects the two.

It's pretty specifically, there's a lot of walls between the brain and the gut, pretty thick ones biochemically speaking. But yes, our guts produce a lot of serotonin because we use that neurotransmitter in different places for different things. And also it doesn't even really do the thing that we imagine that it does.

Well, I'm glad that we answered that one, Sam. Thank you for asking. And I hope that it was satisfactory. Sam and I are going to go offline now and talk a little bit about our different bidet strategies just so that we can be sure that we're both doing it right. Sam seems to have it down. I also feel like I got a good system.

So we'll see. Sari, on the other hand, is gonna have to go back to her terrible bidet-less life. But for how long, who knows? I can't believe Sam drilled a hole in his wall. Well, okay, it's not on my wall, it's in one of my cabinets. You're just gonna have to come see it.

Yeah, if anyone wants to sponsor me getting a bidet, I'll use one. I just am currently in the middle of a move and don't have very much money to go to not the move. So Sam, get a bidet sponsorship for Saisha Tangents and then give it to me. Okay, I love it. Nice, nice. If 10 people increase their pledges,

Sari will get a... No, I don't promise that. Unless you can make it happen for real. If ten people increase their pledges, then Hank will personally buy me a bidet. Correct. And I'll install it. I can compliment for you. I would love that.

I'll bring my drill. Well, thank you everybody for being a Patreon patron and for coming and hanging out for this really delightful episode of Poopy Peepypedia. I can't believe that only a select few people get to experience this joy and this insight and knowledge. Just the depth of knowledge that has been presented here today on Poopy Peepypedia is really astounding. So did I feel like I was being forced into something I didn't want to do? A little bit. Did it turn out to be something I't want to do? A little bit.

Did it turn out to be something I absolutely wanted to do? Yes, I should have known that about myself. You rascal. You got me again. Bye! And remember, the toilet is not a vessel to be filled. Except it is. It absolutely is. It's not spilled. Except it is.