Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Sewers

Episode Date: July 5, 2021

Alex Schmidt is joined by podcaster/founder Jack O’Brien (The Daily Zeitgeist) and bestselling author Jason Pargin (‘John Dies At The End’ series, ‘Zoey Ashe’ series) for a look at why sewers are secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources, handy links, and this week's bonus episode.

Sewers. Known for being dark. Famous for being dirty. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why sewers are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode. A podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I am not alone because this is episode number 50 of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating. Episode 50, the first giant round number. I am so glad you are here, and I am so grateful to every one of you who participated in the membership drive in the run-up to episode 50. This show's community grew like never before. We hit multiple membership drive goals. There are now more benefits to being a patron than ever before. Also today, the day this episode

releases, you should get a post in your Patreon feed with the special digital art commissioned for these 50 episodes. It's drawn by an amazing artist named Adam Koford. Please download. Please enjoy. It's built to be fun to look at closely. So whatever your biggest screen or largest monitor is, that's probably the most fun way to see it. No matter how you look at it, I think it's great. I think it makes this even more of a party than it already is. You know, big, big anniversary, episode 50. And I swear we'll get into the episode in a sec. I just, I said this at the start of the membership drive, and I'll say it again. The best part of this has been the joy of your comments about the show, and you're sharing it with people, and you're saying what it's meant to you this week or this year or anything in between.

Secretly Incredibly Fascinating is still a pretty new show. It's existed for less than a year. I am thrilled it already means something to people in that time. That's really quick. This is everything I was hoping for with the podcast, and I'm really, really grateful to you that it can keep being the podcast it is. Anyway, you should hear episode 50, I think, right? Because it's really amazing.

It's Jack O'Brien and Jason Pargin on this show. You've heard Jack on episode 24 of this show about potatoes. I hope you've heard him any weekday on his podcast, The Daily Zeitgeist. And you've heard Jason on several episodes of this show, most recently episode 42 about air conditioning. So I hope you know he's a New York Times bestselling novelist. His most recent novel is titled Zoe Punches the Future in the Dick, written under his past pen name David Wong, and he's got more novels coming from there. Also, I've gathered all of our zip codes and used internet resources like native-land.ca to acknowledge that I recorded this on the

traditional land of the Catawba, Eno, and Shikori peoples. Acknowledge Jack recorded this on the traditional land of the Gabrielino-Ortongva and Keech and Chumash peoples. Acknowledge Jack recorded this on the traditional land of the Gabrielino-Ortongva and Keech and Chumash peoples. Acknowledge Jason recorded this on the traditional land of the Shawnee, Eastern Cherokee, and Saat Sayaha peoples. And acknowledge that in all of our locations, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode. And as I said, this 50th episode is about sewers. Sewers are a patron chosen topic. Thank you very much to Caleb Pickering for suggesting that. It turns out sewers have amazing history, science engineering stories, and so much more behind them. And I think this is the perfect podcast to get into that. We talk

about why things are secretly incredibly fascinating. You don't need more setup than that. So please sit back or sit in a slight baseball catcher crouch, because apparently that helps some folks poop. Unkink some stuff. Either way, here's this special 50th episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating with Jack O'Brien and Jason Pargin. I'll be back after we wrap up. Talk to you then. Jack O'Brien, Jason Pargin, I'm so excited you're here. Thank you so much for doing this and for providing stuff for the prep. I've already gotten to see what you think of it, but either of you can start. What is your relationship to or opinion of sewers? How do you feel about them? put forward. Yeah, saying that Jason and I both provided research for this document is a little disingenuous. I was like, I used to hang out in sewers when I was a kid. And Jason, meanwhile, like did his amazing research thing. But I am captivated by sewers. I think they're

really fascinating for some reason. I think it was probably Goonies, uh, mostly when I was a kid, like the idea that there were these underground passages, uh, going underneath your town that you could like go down and explore with your friends always really excited me. And so, uh, when I lived in Dayton, uh, Ohio, we, my friends and I would go climb around and uh I later on we'll be talking about the similarities between streams and like sewage systems and that was true of us is that like some of them were definitely streams like a stream that went underground in through a sewer like pipe but then there were also like branching off like incoming water sources that looked very mossy and brown and i think i was playing in raw sewage is what i'm getting at so i but i've always been fascinated by them how how scary was it to get into the sewer did it feel

like you were like breaking into a thing or was it just, Hey, come on in like a guy with a sign. Yeah. There, there was actually a clown, uh, with sharp teeth and a sign that was like, Hey buddy. Uh, it was, you know, I got, I cut my teeth, uh, just going in what I thought was pretty, pretty open to us, which was a stream that went through a sewer pipe and then the only time it got scary was like when it got real narrow and you were like having to like i almost got stuck a couple times oh no um but for the most part there was nobody there's nobody down there policing it and it seemed to me like a place where there hadn't been anybody besides me in like 30 years since it was built like it just

seemed like there was like trash and leaves and me and my friends down there um so i was never really worried about getting caught uh as much as getting stuck and i should have been more worried about like flash flooding uh probably because that's you people drown all the time and waterways like that or or getting stuck is such a like willy wonka way to go i'm really glad that didn't come to pass and and like my parents would have never found me like nobody would have ever it would just would have been like that kid disappeared uh yeah i have as some of you know no tolerance whatsoever for the modern discourse around well kids these days are too coddled and the parents they they helicopter over every their every move but jack you have how many children

now two okay boys is there an age when you'd be comfortable in this modern era, letting them run off and just play in the sewer unsupervised? Just play in the sewer. It's funny. I want to I really want to force myself to be that way because it was such an important part of my childhood. But then, so my cohost on the Daily Zeitgeist, Miles Gray, had a similar upbringing, except the L.A. River is basically a giant sewer. You know, it's like a, it's the thing from Terminator 2 where it's like a concrete giant, like, sewage canal. where he and his friends hung out and they like would hang out with uh you know unhoused people who were like trying to who they witnessed smoking crack uh and uh so i i feel like la might not be the spot for for my kids to just roam free um but i want to find a way to like yeah give them that experience of just being like all right i'm i'm gone for the next 12 hours hopefully i come back by dinner time it does i guess something about the sewer being in

dayton when you were a kid it's just very like i know it's not charming charming but it's like oh this is a medium speed sewer that any child can enjoy yeah it's not where they do drag races and shoot shotguns at each other in our old movies yeah great there are like frogs down there and you know no no giant crocodiles or anything we're it's pretty pretty quaint but at the same time it's such a sharp contrast from my experience growing up because i grew up out in the country a town of like 4 000 people and the sewer was not a thing you like climbed down into it's you know we were this is rural enough that our house had a septic system just a tank in the yard where the poop goes into uh and so if someone came to fix it they didn't like open a manhole and go down there it It's just buried in the dirt. And there's like a six inch pipe that goes to it.

Yeah. But in the salt man, again, I did not grow up in extreme poverty. It was a normal house that you would like see in any eighties movie that like the, I guess in those movies, that's what the poor kids lived in,

but it was, it was considered like a Bali ring wall dump. Yeah. Yeah. We, yeah, we did not have a second floor um but the one thing that the problem was that something this the sewer main line the septic tank something had been installed improperly which meant every once in a while and you never had any idea of knowing when when you flush the toilet it would go the opposite direction. It would just dump the poop onto your feet and onto the floor of the bathroom.

Oh, man. It is possible that only one in a thousand flushes did it do this. But much like the slot machine, once it happens once, the randomness of it is stuck in your brain right so you're holding your breath every time you flush from then on so i am one of the few people who does not take sewage for granted because as soon as you see it around your feet or as on a couple of occasions the feces has backed up into the bathtub because all of those drains are connected. It's all just one system of drains. It all leads, you know, all the wastewater from your dishwasher sink, everything just connects to a single line that runs out to wherever,

you know, your sink, your whatever, and the bathtub is closest to the floor, so it would fill up first, and so you have poop in your bathtub. And it's not at all obvious how to get it out, And while you can call somebody to come help, they don't show up in 10 minutes. They may show up the next day. Uh, so this is a subject because I feel like a big part of my personality was formed by the fact that every time I flushed the toilet, I wasn't sure what was going to happen. You're playing a slot machine. Yeah. And to the point where I did not like to invite friends over to the house because that is a thing that you don't want to happen in a party or whatever

if you're trying to make a first impression on a friend or a girl is to have poop start flying into the room because that's a story that I feel like would have gotten around school. of the room uh because that's a story that i feel like would have gotten around school yeah so yeah this was this is something of an emotional subject for me for positive reasons as we're about to get into sorry this is a clean podcast isn't it i apologize for saying the s word it's also it's also the kind of thing where that's going to happen you know it's it's a topic where yeah there's literal dirt in it right and it's the way it goes so it's all good and jason that chances of like one in a thousand or whatever i feel like that's

even worse than it being consistent that's such a psychologically difficult like if it's consistent you're just like okay time to gear up for the bathroom like here's the shield or whatever i've worked out and here's how I do it. Like, the random chance. Boy, oh, boy. Yeah, that's like a big part of how they program games, right, is that there has to be a randomness built in so that your brain can then try and, like,

read and, like, graft some sort of, like, deservedness or, like, system on top of it. But because there is none, it can just like work itself into a, a lather, uh, just trying to find this, the sample of the, or the,

the symbol, the system that like drives the whole thing, the system that will create the maximum anxiety in your brain, anticipating will this next pole of the lever be the one that lets me win only it's the opposite yeah it's the opposite because again it's you are in your brain it's like okay you know it's i'm cooking dinner or whatever in there i'm gonna run to the bathroom and you flush the toilet and then suddenly there's poop all over the floor. Like your entire day has now changed. Your entire week has now changed.

You have to clean that up. You have to figure out what to do with it. Then everything you had planned for that day is now gone and your life now revolves around when can they come fix the toilet or whatever. Again, I do not want to spread the impression that I lived in a place that was so poor that we had poop on the floor. This can happen to anybody. The issue is because of people listening is like, well, why didn't they just get it fixed?

That tells me you have not had sewer problems at your home. It is unbelievably difficult to diagnose and fix those things because there are all these different points of failure. They spent thousands of dollars trying to fix it. And I don't think it ever fully got fixed. It's just the way it is. So it's a good lesson for life. There are some problems that just never get solved. And you can have the guy come out there and dig up the yard and lay a bunch of pipe and disrupt your whole world. And you can brush your hands and think, yes, it is finally fixed. We've done it.

And sure enough, the next 738 times you flushed the toilet, perfect. You have now put that problem out of your mind until one day on a Saturday morning when you're up thinking you've got the day off and you flushed the toilet and instead of the water going down and the poop vanishing from sight, it rebels and you realize, oh, my life is a horror movie. I'm going to grow up and write horror for a living. It's such a system that so many of us try not to think about at all. Like if there's a problem, I feel like part of the pain in the ass is I have to think about this period is the worst,

right? I don't want to think about what, like I want my toilet to be a magic portal and it just leads nowhere that I will ever encounter. Like I, in the run up to this topic, realized that my like house in the Chicago suburbs I grew up in, I don't even know whether it was a sewer or a septic tank.

Like I'm, I'm just not sure. I never thought about it. No idea. Yeah. You never crawled down there. Never, never got under there and explored with your friends.

Uh, I bet it was on a sewer. So I, I think because, uh, so I, I was just going to say our, um,

we have a little like garage apartment at our house and my parents were recently staying with us. And the exact thing you're describing happened. And because we have a septic tank like that, that is just what happens to septic tanks. There was poop in the shower. Oh, the thing Jason described where it fired. The thing Jason described. Yeah. Yeah. Fired back up into the shower. shower um oh the thing jason described where it fired the thing jason described yeah yeah it fired back up into the shower uh and i think that's just what happened i think septic tanks are a worse uh option and you would know if you had one yeah that's probably what's going on would

be my yeah i'm like learning i had a sewer this is is great. Very exciting. There you go. Somewhere again, Alex has in his inbox, an email from me saying, I want to be on the sewer episode. Can we do that? Can we do that for episode 50? This is why, because the fact that most people, hopefully God willing, most people listening to this have never even thought about where it goes or where it couldn't tell you where their sewer line is, where their sewer line clean out valve is, as I unfortunately knew very well where ours was. That is great. That is a tremendous literal privilege. And if this episode makes you thankful for it for like 30 seconds, we will have done our service.

I think from there we can go into the numbers and the stats, because on every episode, our first fascinating thing about the topic is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week, that's in a segment called... You can do it. Put your stats into it. I can do it. Put your facts into it. So much flavor.

So much stank on that. I can't tell what song that was supposed to be that's fair put your back into it yeah ice cube uh from uh turn of the millennium yeah and uh that name was submitted by emma thank you emma there's new name every week please make them as silly and wacky and bad as possible submit to sifpod on twitter or to sifpod at gmail.com well done as somebody who sings badly on his podcast every day, I just have to say that was, it's truly the highest compliment when the first question is,

what song was that supposed to be? And the first number here takes us into the distant past. It is the 6th century BC. So the 500s BC, that is when the ancient Romans built the Cloaca Maxima in the city of Rome. The Cloaca Maxima was the first sewer system for that city, at least a major one. And that was the first sewer system, basically, that we know of, right? That was the first sewer system, basically, that we know of, right?

Yeah, I'll link stuff about ancient sewers, because from what I could find, basically any time humans have constructed a city of more than a few people, they figured out some kind of ancient sewer system to make it work, because it's just the immediate first problem that you have to deal with. And the date of the Cloacomaxima significant because like the 500s bc is very early in roman history it's before the empire it's before the republic it's when it was a very small city with kings and so one of the back before rome was cool that's back when i liked it yeah it was an indie city i don't know it's just this indie city i'm a fan of uh and so they one of the first like huge buildings in this huge city of huge buildings was a large sewer system

it also started as a storm drain and it's also to a limited extent still a functioning part of rome's sewer system a little bit of water still goes through it is there do you think that there's a reason that in zoology uh as a former zoo uh zoo guide that the i'm putting my hat on i'm putting my gear on one sec one second oh wow that was amazingly quick i didn't know you had it just off off camera there that the sexual it's a i'll just read the description a common cavity at the end of digestive tract for the release of both excretory and genital products in vertebrates um yeah it's probably a common derivation yeah i believe the words come from the same thing because it because a cloaca and an animal is kind of the loose description is the one hole.

Like if an animal has just one hole in the back, that's a cloaca. And it's where this Roman, it was the one hole for Rome. There you go. But it's not also where they reproduced through, which is the case for birds. Romans did not reproduce through their serpents. All right. Yeah, here's hoping. Yeah.

The next number here is a different year. It is 1867. And 1867 is the year when Paris started offering public tours of its sewers. And Smithsonian says Paris was the world's first city to do that, like official tours of the sewers, 1867. And one reason people wanted to go is that Victor Hugo's novel Les Mis came out in 1862 and had a bunch of scenes in the sewers of Paris. So people were like, oh, we got to do the Les Mis fantasy roleplay of going in the sewers. role play of going in the sewers do we think that this was possible because like this was a popular thing because everything else smelled so bad at the time that they were just like yeah no this is this is no big deal to go down and explore amongst the sewage i i would believe it like if

the streets are already full of poop you know sure, sure. Okay. Right. Yeah, yeah. Why don't I go to the basement? Exactly. Oh, a different kind of poop. Yeah. A different poop smell. It's just, it's novelty more than anything else. There's also a modern Paris sewer museum.

It's called Les Musées d'Ego. And you can go see stuff about the beginnings of the Paris sewer around the year 1200 when a king named Philippe Auguste put in the first drainage gutters of Paris. And I feel like any large major city, there's a sewer history. We won't cover all of them because there's too many cities. But it's a thing. Anytime people have built a huge city, somebody somewhere did a sewer job to figure it out. a huge city somebody somewhere did a sewer job to figure it out king philip augusta augusta and you can feel free to cut this from the podcast if it's wrong is he not the one who

according to legend was pelted with flying feces that someone flung from their upstairs apartment and then that motivated him to install oh well drainage we'll leave this in if that's accurate that's amazing well somebody check google king philip pelted with feces or i don't know what the exact phrase because there was like a whole uh etiquette in the city around when to fling your feces out of the window into the sidewalk or whatever which was just what people did until somebody installed drainage. Of all the things to go down as like, as your kingly legend, uh, it's not like pulling a sword from a stone. It's, uh, Oh, that's the guy who got pelted with a human waste as it was procession,

uh, proceeding down the street. I'm so sorry to interrupt. I've pasted in a link. Yes. That is the, if you scroll down the article I just'm so sorry to interrupt. I've pasted in a link. Yes, that is, if you scroll down the article I just gave you for his name. Amazing. Legend has it that 12th century French King Philippe Auguste was covered in the contents of a chamber pot and decreed that all upstairs residents were obliged to warn pedestrians before throwing out their wastewater

because he was walking down the street, supposedly, and as was the custom, people just chucked their feces out of the window, splashed him, and then that allegedly is what motivated him to reform the sewage in the city in general. Man, amazing. It is not a fact. That is legend. That's man. It is not.

It is not a fact that is legend because as we have found with our previous jobs, a lot of stuff that is in history like that, that's a little too like on the nose. It's because somebody just made it up. Right. Still an important point because they're ideally there should be like a disney movie about that but this this is his origin story he was the sewage the sewage hero and this is what what set him on that path this was his call to action and the enchanted poop that hit his head and then like inspired him and they like have a love-hate relationship, but he keeps it with him. Yeah. Yeah, they'd have a song together. Because of Jack bringing up the sword and the stone story earlier, I'm thinking of that style of Disney movie.

Like that really classic, cell-animated, cute thing. That's amazing. Yeah. I am also glad we have democracy. i feel like a king only gets interested in his people's sewage when he gets hit with it in the face and democracy there's more input from everybody and last number here is another year this is 1854 and there are whole podcasts and things about the story of this but 1854 is the year of a cholera outbreak in London. And so the disease cholera breaks out and many scientists and researchers of the time study it. A doctor named John Snow, it's spelled J-O-H-N, it's not the Game of Thrones guy, but John Snow traced the disease to sewage-contaminated water. And those findings became famous and helped cities worldwide, especially London, start to build more effective sewers

because they realized that sewage laying around the city was getting everybody sick. And four years later, that would be the summer of stink when the entire city smelled like poo for an entire summer because they were just emptying their wastewater into the Thames. Yeah, a lot of world cities, and even closer to the modern day, like in Chicago, there just reaches a stage where it's like,

okay, we're all pooping in the single river too much. We now have to refigure out the city because we used it up. That was the maximum. But this is, okay, and extremely important. 1854 is not very long ago. Yeah. It's hard to overstate how much the past stank. Yeah.

In just a physical sense, when you're watching any kind of movie set back then, anything, I mean, especially talking about anything set in the medieval era or anything that's like a faux medieval era, like you mentioned Game of Thrones because of Jon Snow. Anything like that where they're in kind of primitive conditions or even something like Lost where they're on an island where they're living out in nature. This is the part of it, the one part of it nobody likes to think about or talk about which is that if you have like a sprawling if you got one person in the woods fine you can go dig a hole every time or you can go poop in a stream whatever you get that many people into what are basically like starts to be the first what we think of as modern cities the kind of population density buildings that can be built that tall, where you get that many people all on top of one another.

The amount of waste that humans produce and the difficulty of getting it away from where the people are is incredible. And you also have to remember that it's not just human waste. This is before automobiles. So when you had a city back then, you had roads that were packed with horses, were packed with pigs that people were transporting from place to place, because that's the, you know, just herd them together and whip them along the street. So you had feces just caked in the streets. And so when you see some movie set in the Victorian era or set in the streets and so when you see some movie set in the victorian era or set in the you know american revolution era or civil war era or even going back as far as you want to go in ancient

rome and they're wearing like very beautiful clothes because costume designers love the era and these beautiful long flowing dresses and robes and everything else you have to remember that element of it, that you're looking at something that is being shot on a soundstage. And they do not, that is the part of the set they do not dress, which is just the piles of feces that is caked in the gutters and on the sidewalks. And then these, you know, these apartment buildings would have like a cistern. They would dump everything into that were often overflowing onto the floor. And you'd have to wade into it to dump your poop in there from your bedpan that you hauled downstairs.

That was the whole world until very, very recently. Yeah. Yeah, it's in the margins of the background of every story from that time. And even just as a person, even a king or in a wealthy country, you were thinking about handling your own poop and getting around and through other people's poop all of the time. It was just going on for you. Just snow drifts of horse shit.

Sorry. Just snow drifts of horse poop going up to the second story of every building. It's, yeah. Yeah. And without getting off on a totally different tangent, the fact that at this time that this guy was theorizing that the poop was what was making everybody sick. This was, this is all the, this is all the further back germ theory goes in terms of being like actually nailing down. Oh, here's, here's how we all got

cholera it's because of feces because they the miasma theory that it was just like foul air of some kind that made people sick was still a thing back then it's still very much a debate not very long ago this is a question people ask is like well how were people not just like sick all the time the answer is they they they were children died constantly yeah i i'm not laughing at the child death i'm laughing thinking about yeah right like every know how you are man it's true i love it but i love it with the timing i was i'm thinking about now every scientist before 1854 is a lot less impressive to be you know we talk about these guys like oh he figured out gravity and geometry and yada but he was still like wondering if his poop was bad for him you know what i mean like they didn't like it but

they didn't understand the problem yet it's amazing yeah and you don't know if they'd have liked it or not. You can't make that judgment. Aristotle was a freak. Off of that, we are going to a short break, followed by a whole new takeaway. I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places, yes. I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty.

This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience, one you have no choice but to embrace because yes listening is mandatory the jv club with janet varney is available every thursday on maximum fun or wherever you get your podcasts thank you and remember no running in the halls when uh jason what you bring up that's that, I feel like this show could be 10 shows. Like, we're not really going to get into the illnesses that it causes if you don't have a good sewer or, or exactly how waste treatment works or anything. But we have some amazing takeaways about sewers in the past and present. And let's go into takeaway number one.

way number one. Increased sewer access might be the biggest and best news of the past 30 years. There's very good news, especially in the past 30 years. A lot more people have sewers and sanitation. And Jason, in particular, you brought this up because it's really exciting and nobody is fixated on it. It's this good this good thing yeah and the number here is so shocking that i don't think it will properly register with listeners like i think when you because there's a specific stat and you can deliver it if you want let's do it yeah this is there's a few sources you can go to, but one is UNICEF. In 2019, they said that since 1990, so 31 years ago, since 1990, more than 2.6 billion people with a B have gained access to improved sanitation. Improved sanitation is a household with its own

sanitation system, and the excrement is either safely transported away or safely managed on site. So in the past 30 years, more than 2.6 billion people have gained access to that. Revolutionary. Yes, because I have this thing that triggers me that people who know me, they do when people will talk about the good old days or people talk about how the world has gone to hell. It's like, well, how can you not be in a state of anxiety considering how the world is falling apart around us? And that is such a statement of extreme privilege. Because me and my friends, no doubt, like what's happened with the job market and all sorts of things in America and in our class of America, no doubt.

I totally understand why you think the world is worse than it was 10, 15, however many years ago. But if you were to rewind the world to just 1990, not 1890, 1990, like the year before Nirvana's Nevermind came out, Like the year before Nirvana's Nevermind came out. You would be taking away toilets and flushing toilets from 2.6 some, 2.7 billion people. Billion. Billion, with the letter B. As in, like 25% of the world, or 30% of the world, you would be taking their toilets away. And if you tried to live just one week without one, you would realize this would be like, oh, this has totally ruined my life.

That's how many people who used to have to poop out in the open, in a field, in a ditch, in a hole, in an outhouse, in somewhere, have access to what we now consider some kind of modern sanitation, either a flush toilet or something that actually transports it away and is not constantly making them sick, and their home and their neighborhood or whatever does not constantly stink of human feces. The rate at which mankind is solving problems in the background is mind-boggling, but you just don't see it because this occurred in India and Africa and in China. And there are still there's still like two point some billion people. I think you still don't have modern sanitation. And the fact that we are going to get it to them over the next few decades is a miracle.

What has occurred is already a miracle. Yeah. And it's also like even more impressive than 2.6 billion people sounds because from 1990 to 2015, according to the World Bank, from 1990 to 2015, the world population little bit more with improved sanitation. So like this, this huge leap in the amount of people who have it is even beating population growth by a little bit. Sanitation often sewers is meeting them. It's doing the job. Yeah, I think there's some part of our mind that rejects the idea that we are one of 7 billion people on the planet. I think that can be like pretty depressing, especially to Americans and like people who kind of grew up in a world of

individualism. And there's also a way to take it that that's absolutely inspiring that there's, you know, millions of people who were like the Da Vinci's of their local sewer systems who like, you know, made, made ingenious, uh, decisions and design, uh, flourishes that made it possible for people to have better lives and died, you know, without a single plaque to their name. And our modern world is just a carpet made of these millions of achievements

by millions of people that we've just forgotten about, but that, you know, it's inspirational. And they're, you know, coming up with inspiring ideas all the time that we just don't know about. Yeah, exactly. And unless you live in London, because we said the name Jon Snow earlier, like you don't, you don't know who helped put a sewer or sanitation in your city.

I have no idea. Like it's just a background helper who, especially if you live outside the U S has maybe done some like big leaps in your country. It's really cool. And it's also a situation that is tricky in a lot of countries. As Jason said, there's still a lot of people lacking improved sanitation. World Health Organization says about 2.4 billion people still lack it.

But we'll have a graph linked from our world and data where they lay out this data. And I feel like it's really compelling. You just see there's a red chunk at the bottom, which is people who don't have access to sanitation. And then just this massively increasing blue iceberg of people who do have it since 1990. Since, you know, like a lot of a lot of us were alive. Like we were around for this year, even if we were very little. And it's it's all happened. It's great. And you could get equal graphs that look just like that for access to electricity, access to clean water, access to shelter, a whole bunch of things. We have outpaced population growth in getting stuff to people. There's another couple billion people who have electricity.

We complain about broadband access in America and speeds. There's a huge chunk of the world that was still in the dark. They did not have electricity. Yeah. That have it, you know, we think of a town getting its first electricity. Something happened somewhere in the 1800s. But in this last 30 years, we've had an explosion again across the developing world of people getting their first electricity. This is something that is not reported enough because if you are an angry revolutionary, it's like, ah, it's time to just burn this whole system down and start over.

It's like, well, ask the people who just got electricity first if they are okay with that. Ask the people who are just now, like in so much of China where people are getting their first paved roads to their village, because in China you have very different parts of the country. You have mega sprawling mega cities and you've got these very isolated countryside places that basically have no connection to them. It's like these people are seeing paved roads for the first time, the internet for the first time. It's, you know, it's look, look outside. If you pretend to care about like people who aren't white, then look at the whole world and realize how many of them are actually advancing really, really well right now. And because they're, you know, technology has finally reached them and given them these

things that we just take for granted. reached them and given them these things that we just take for granted because again who who who takes who gets up and is like thankful for their electricity who's thankful for the fact that their toilet flushes every time aside from me when i was a kid you don't think about it it's on you're on this treadmill if you get a thing and then you take it for granted but man there's still there's still so many that don't have it even now like that's and it is it's also a thing where there are people in countries like the u.s who lack these things and it's just not talked about very much like well link uh i'm thinking of texas because they've had power grid trouble lately and a few months ago and and i like now they're very aware of what

ercot is and and it's it's such a chore to have to know about your power company. I feel like that means something went wrong. But there's a great piece in The Atlantic by Alana Samuels where she writes about Colonia neighborhoods, which are low-income housing. And they were specifically built by developers on land outside city limits where there weren't regulations. And so they didn't have to provide basic stuff. And as of now, around 500,000 people live in over 2,000 colonial neighborhoods, and most of them lack stuff like running water and sewer systems.

Because there are, I feel like we've kind of solved the technology and the process of sewers. We also just need to solve the political and organizational thing where some people just get left out of that system in a way that is totally avoidable. We figured it out. You know, we did it. Yeah. And in America, if you don't pay your water bill, they will turn off water to your home. And then you now don't have a toilet anymore because it depends on flushing water. So this is with everything that we just like. There's a reason we followed this up with what we just said about access around the world.

The fact that this still goes on in America is inexcusable. But you could go back to where the town I grew up in and absolutely find like I could walk you to a house where people are living without sanitation because they've had their water cut off or they're just squatting in a property that no one, no one knows they're there, but because they don't, they're not supposed to live there, there's no utilities hooked up. So, you know, they may be running using a generator run power, but they have no way of, you know, they can get drinking water, they can buy bottles of it from the store, but that doesn't get them a working toilet. So this is the part, again, because we don't like to talk about toilet stuff as part of our everyday conversation, the fact that this is part of what extreme poverty means in America. It's something that should be on everyone's mind because it's one thing that I feel like it's very visceral because you can see an extremely poor person or even a homeless person like oh well that guy's smoking cigarettes and drinking an energy drink you know like i wish

i could just hang out and do that all day it's like okay where is that person using the bathroom stop stop and think right yeah and drinking an energy drink you need to use the toilet immediately like he's he's gonna have to solve this soon. Yeah. Right. But they'll even do, like, this very dehumanizing thing. Because I know in L.A., you guys are probably aware of this. There was the big controversy over the homeless encampment, I guess, in Echo Park, where they came and, like, forced everyone out and bulldozed it. But then there's these news stories that come out. And it's, like, very dehumanizing because, like, well, they had to clean up hundreds of pounds of human waste and human feces from this whole like look how disgusting these people are yeah it's like okay you're missing the point you're anyone who tries to romanticize like

ah you know we're just hanging out under the bridge here you know we got our tents and we're just it's like okay if you don't truly understand poverty until you understand what's left behind when they get cleaned up and why they were forced to live there and why they were forced to live like that. That's a key part of it that you can't you can't put out of your mind just because no one ever likes to think about it. The people who measure this stuff, as far as who has improved sanitation, they also say the worst system is what's called open defecation, which is like what those homeless folks had to do where you just poop in fields, forests, open water instead of a toilet. And there's a joint UNICEF World Health Organization program that monitors world water supply and sanitation. They say that as of 2015,

about 15% of the world still practices open defecation. But that's great news because it means we've cut that number in half since 1990. Since 1990, we've reduced it by half all the way down to 15%. And that's life-changing for all of those people. If you're in a community with open defecation, there's a lot more diseases, worse outcomes in pregnancy. We'll also link a book called Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez, where she talks about rural places in South Asia where women traveling groups to open defecate because they know that predatory men will target women who are defecating for assault. So if you have a toilet and under sewer system, that's salt there that's it's, or at least that risky situation is no longer a situation. Yeah. And there's a YouTube video I posted about like the problem with people openly defecating on beaches and in India. Um, because again, they do it because

the tide comes in and washes it away so it's like at least it's it's like a field that flushes itself but i feel like people watch that video or hear stories like you just told and you it's very dehumanizing because you want to see these people as animals if you are lucky enough to not have lived in that okay so there's this thing where it's like oh my gosh it's just this man he's just sitting there pooping on a beach and can you imagine being that type of person it's not a personality type there's this thing among certain people and not even necessarily conservatives but certain people who are afraid of foreigners their whole thing is that they're dirty.

It's like they're bringing in diseases. Like this is a Trump line. That guy, they're bringing in these weird diseases. This is what a lot of us were nervous about when the COVID outbreak and it came from China, like this turning into this whole, ah, see, see, the Chinese are filthy. This is, when you talk about improving sanitation,

you have to overcome people's like these prejudices. It's like, well, these, these people just, they just poop anywhere. And it's like, well,

if you didn't, if you don't have any specific place to go, if you don't have that infrastructure, yeah, that's kind of, that's kind of how it happens. It's no one's doing it as a preference. You moron.

They're doing it. They're doing it. They're doing it. Cause you get into a situation where you're trying to find the least bad solution. Yeah. It's a type of xenophobia that doesn't get talked about as much where it's like, Oh my gosh,

I visited there and the whole place just the stink. It just stinks so bad. And they mean it as like, well, these jerks, they don't even, they don't even freshen the air in their city. What savages they are. It's like, okay, These jerks, they don't even freshen the air in their city.

What savages they are. It's like, okay. It's definitely not because several million people all had to move there because that was the only place where they could get work, and then they just moved into an apartment that doesn't have a flushing toilet, and so they just went. They did the only thing they could do. Anyway. Speaking of modern sewers i think

we can get into takeaway number two for the show takeaway number two we are filling modern sewers with fatbergs and i'd never heard of fatbergs before researching this but we'll we'll talk pretty quickly about a thing that is building up and growing inside the modern sewers of the world. Yeah. And this comes from grease, like putting grease in the like down the drain, which is definitely something I have done or almost done multiple times with. Like, I did not realize that this was such a just, I don't know, it doesn't feel like it is warned against enough. And like when you're growing up, do not pour grease down the sink or you will be creating fatbergs. Yeah, yeah, I've never been there should be like big labels on meat or something like, hey, when you're done cooking this, you got to do something

here because fat and grease and flushable wipes in particular will form just a mountain of those things in a sewer now. They can break pipes and block toilets. They require entire teams of sewer workers to haul them out. The stories describe candy bar wrappers and other trash like agglomerating onto it but the core is just used fat and grease uh national geographic says for example somebody might pour molten turkey fat down a drain which you're never warned not to do that i can think of in my life right you just do it i remember my grandma like putting it in a can and putting that out in the trash and like giving me some words that I totally forgot. Uh, but yeah, I feel like it's one of those old school piece of wisdom that we were just

like, yeah, whatever. Um, and now we are ruining our sewers and ruining the good name of the fast food restaurant, fat burger. Um, I will never think about that restaurant the same way again i i actually want to rewind because we're using the term fatberg without seeing it on print i don't know if you the listeners realize it's an iceberg yeah made of made of fat and sewage and flushable wipes and used condoms and when when I say iceberg, I don't know if you're picturing how big these are, but Alex, you have the measurements for one of them, right?

Yeah, it's B-E-R-G, like an iceberg. And 2017, real landmark day for London. In September of 2017, workers discovered one of the biggest fatbergs ever seen in the East End neighborhood of Whitechapel in London. It measured more than 800 feet long, weighed an estimated 130 metric tons, and the story describes it as the size of 11 double-decker buses. So that just one thing of fat, grease, flushable wipes, used condoms, other stuff that people throw into their pipes just filled up a sewer and when they found it uh there's a london utility provider in 2013

had found a fatberg that they said was the biggest they'd ever found and then this one in 2017 was 10 times the size of that i mean 800 feet is like three blocks like it's massive it's so yeah i like i know that london likes to use double-decker buses for everything uh for all their converging units but it's pretty it's uh it's not just the size of like a handful of cars it is like the size of uh yeah blocks and blocks of buildings it's massive yeah it's a kaiju more or less very slow and inactive kaiju uh under the source and and i know we're talking about britain a lot but also the new yorker says that this is a huge u.s thing as well the term fatbergs was coined by london sewer workers who found these things. In the US,

people first used the term FOG, which is an acronym for fat, oil, and grease, and occasionally they call it FROGS if it's fat, roots, oil, and grease. National Geographic says that New York City did a 2016 State of the Sewers report and said they had spent $18 million in the past five years just clearing out fatbergs. So multiple millions of dollars every year. They also say grease causes 71% of sewer backups. I think we have more meat than ever. We have more grease than ever. And it's just really jamming up our sewers in a way that is unprecedented.

And now let's all pause for a moment and realize that in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise, the entire concept is a series of reptiles eating greasy pepperoni pizza in a sewer. That is, if you think about it, grosser than anything that's ever been come up with in a horror movie. Where it's like these mutant turtles happily eating pizza next to this drifting fatberg in the New York City sewers. Because, again, I know that we instinctively think, well, a sewer, of course, is dirty or whatever. But we still kind of have this maybe romanticized view of, well, you could go down there and have an adventure. And I'm sure you could for a while, as Jack will tell you.

But in this specifically the New York City system with that many people, you know, flushing that much grease. So, again, it's grease mixed with poop. But the issue is that the grease is sticky and it doesn't dissolve. Right. Right. So just basically imagine, you know, like what's left in a deep fryer after it solidifies. It's got all the bits of stuff in it that you dump out. And then that mixed with a whole bunch of feces and toilet paper and flushable wipes and condoms and everything else that finds its way into.

washable wipes and condoms and everything else that finds its way into, I'm guessing there's a bunch of dead rats that get swallowed up in there, probably because they climb on it and then they just can't get out. It's really the worst thing you can imagine, period. Yeah. That it's so kind of ironic to me that it is the result of us with this mentality that when I flush it, it vanishes from the universe. Like anything that I put down a drain, it's, it's, it's literally, it's so much someone else's problem that I've never given a second thought.

It's like, well, hold on. If this solidifies in my own drain or if this is like what becomes of it, once I wash it down the sink or, or whatever. And the answer is we don't think about it. It's just somebody, somebody is surely taking care of it once I wash it down the sink or whatever? And the answer is we don't think about it. It's just somebody is surely taking care of it. And it's like, yes, they are, to the point that they have to stop and break apart huge chunks of pipes and dig up stuff and spend millions and millions of dollars cutting up this fabric and hauling it out of the sewer. Because, again, they can't just flush it. They're at the end.

They're at the end of the sewer because again they can't just flush it they're at the end they're at the end of the line they don't have there's not some other sewer they can flush it into so they don't have to worry about it yeah this is guys pulling the one big handle to flush it like come on come on there's got to be such an existential thing with like being at the end of the someone else's problem chain right and it's like oh weird there's no place else to pass this off to yeah i will say that the giant rats i met down in the sewer were much less wise than but yeah and i really like getting into the the guts of this and being fascinated by it because this this fatberg thing in particular is new like this is one of the few new sewer things in a long time and the the experts that national geographic and the new yorker talked to said that the u.s and

the uk are the main countries for them and it's because of aging sewer systems, more fat and trash from growing populations, more meat access. And then the other newest thing is flushable wipes. They are often sold as flushable, but the poorly built ones do not really dissolve. And then they're perfect fatberg builders, and they mess up an entire sewer system for a whole city. Yeah, there's a fascinating little war going on between the manufacturers of those wipes and the makers of sewer systems. Because I don't doubt that a brand new house in a brand new part of the city in a brand new addition,

like maybe they have wider pipes or whatever, but anything that's been built a while ago, as many homes are, is going to have tend to be smaller pipes. They tend to have a lot of roots that make their way into them because of that depth, you know, like roots seek out water and they can like have these thread like roots that basically partially clog every sewer line. And then the grease basically just coats the wall of the sewer line over the years.

So any kind of like any house out in the suburbs, out in the country or whatever that's been around for a while, if you were to look at its sewer line, it has layers of grease that probably go back 50 years on there. So then you introduce something like a flushable wipe that maybe in theory would be okay, that if they dissolve, they don't dissolve fast enough. And this is making tons of work for plumbers and sewer workers and everybody

else around the country, because they just, if you've got a sticking point in a pipe or a kink or a bend, when it flushes, it will get caught on that. And that wipe will just sit there and absorbed every sticky thing you flush down. But in general,

I don't, I guess I don't people, I don't think people realize any solid thing that isn't toilet paper that you flush, whether you're talking about, I keep mentioning condoms. This is something that when we did articles about crack with people who worked in sewers, something they mentioned a lot that condoms keep, like they find their way into the drains because well that's where we put stuff and they're like yeah we just had to fish those out and put them in trash bags and send them off to the landfill it's like anything solid you flush that doesn't dissolve that's what becomes of it it gets filtered out there's literally just a metal screen that catches solid objects at the sewage plant and then somebody comes out with like a rake or something and just gets it all off there, puts it in a trash bin and sends it off to the landfill.

So it's like if you don't put it in the trash and you insist on flushing it instead, it just winds up in the same place only through a much more difficult route and probably doing millions of dollars in damage to the system along the way. And it's the same thing with the plumbers hate those garbage disposals in kitchen sinks. Because it's like, well, you put the food down the thing, you turn that on, it grinds it up. And those garbage disposals are like a distinctly American invention, I think. But they are a nightmare for your sewer system because it's just solid food that's been chewed up somewhat. But your sewage and drainage system is not meant to handle that.

And sure enough, at the other end of it, ultimately, it's some guy scraping it off a screen and putting it in a bag and putting it on a truck to be hauled away. There's not like some magical thing they do that makes it go away they if you don't throw it away they have to yeah man i'm man throwing turkey legs down that thing i'm throwing oh man i should i really gotta rethink and entire pineapples and the first time i put a condom down a garbage disposal everybody else everybody else at the party was looking at me like who raised you but it's like isn't that what it's for well there's a there's one last takeaway for the main episode and it's gonna be real brief

but takeaway number three a bunch of the world's cities created a sewer by assimilating a stream. And I picked the verb assimilating because I think of almost like the Borg in Star Trek, like turning something into a totally different machine. If you look at far too many cities for us to run through all of them, most cities have gotten their starter sewer by just using a stream as that and then later turning it into the sewer system of the city. One prime example of it is Sydney, Australia. And Sydney Living Museums offers a tour of what's called the tank stream twice a year. And the tank stream used to be a regular stream, and it's been used by humans for at least 5,000 years, according to archaeological digs. It was used by the Gadigal people to get fresh water and fish. And then British colonists used it for fresh water. That's why they built Sydney there.

into a sewage system. They also built tanks to collect the water. That's why it's called the tank stream. But there's been so much human development now that they paved the sides of it, put sandstone blocks over the top of it, turned it into a stormwater drain. It now runs through the central business district of Sydney. And parts of it are a channel on the ceiling of an underground parking garage. Like Sydney took this tiny little stream that a few people got water and fish from, and now it's in the central, central sewer system of a world city, a giant place. I wonder if that's probably, I think that's probably what the stream slash sewer system

I was exploring, how that functioned. Because there was definitely pipes emptying into the stream. So I will definitely have some illness when I'm in my 70s from playing in people's waste when I was nine years old. You mentioned brown bits and moss and stuff. It sounds like maybe there was a stream there, and then Dayton was like, here we go. It's already flowing. We just wrap it up. Great.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And this is common in other cities, too. Quick other examples are Washington, D.C. It's famous for the Potomac, but it's less famous for taking, among other waterways, something called Tiber Creek that follows the contours of an old creek that ran into the Potomac. contours of an old creek that ran into the Potomac. And the Washington Post has done amazing stuff on it becoming just fully paved over and paved on top of and turned into part of the sewer system in order to handle DC's waste. Chicago did a larger version with the Chicago River, which they used for sewage and have also reversed the direction of a couple of times.

And then going all the way back to the beginning of the episode, ancient Rome, it's famous for the Tiber River, but it also has a little creek that was the first part of the Cloaca Maxima sewer system. So even that thousands of years ago sewer started as a little creek, and then they paved the bottom, paved the top, made it part of how they pump waste out of the city the chicago system it could be an entire series of documentaries and podcasts all by itself and i don't it probably is at this point but it's the whole story there the sheer achievement and the sheer feat of what they did and yeah because again humans actually contrary to what you may have observed recently pretty good at solving problems uh and when we have to come together and fix things we tend to do in the story of the chicago their whole system and how they had to change over time and the

problems they were trying to solve and the difficulties and all of the many many many hurdles that had to be overcome it is uh spectacular and and you can look at a photo of it now and it's beautiful. And it did not look like that. If you're the type of person who's just sure that the world is constantly falling apart and you picture the future and you can only imagine like an apocalypse, go back to Chicago a hundred years ago and ask them to ask like, what will the future look like? And they would probably say, well, it'll be like this, only way higher mountains of poop. But if you can actually show them the Chicago River now and the riverfront developments and all that, it's beautiful. And that's because people made it that way. Yeah, Chicago is the kind of city where the

whole thing burned down in the 1870s. And then they had an arguably worse experience with poop in their river. Like it was even less livable, the situation with it. And then they flushed the river instead of into Lake Michigan, all the way into the Mississippi River. And then people downstream sued and they lost. And it was just this really elaborate and ridiculous project that WTTW has amazing stuff on the PBS there. It was St. Louis sued, right? They were like, like shaking their fist up river at Chicago.

Yeah. It's a really good point though, that the, I think it's just a lack of imagination and not like saying that as a critique, but that we can't imagine the solution to all these problems we have no idea what the future is going to look like because that that would mean that we've solved all these problems and so all we have are the problems that occupy our day-to-day life and we just assume that's going to be the it's just that but more Yeah, it's not our fault that we don't have all the answers, but there are answers that the smartest people living currently can't imagine to our current problems. I think that's right, yeah.

Even probably trying to imagine right now before the Internet existed, it was probably very hard. Just the basic communication infrastructure we all of a sudden have if you if you have never heard of that idea and you try to imagine the future it's like i guess everyone has amazing phone books now like or they have you know like like the greatest the print newspapers ever constructed like that's your idea of the future yeah instead of this yeah and i guess that's part of someone if you ask somebody imagine the best possible future like utopia like a star trek utopia where they've got

you know star trek had that by they invented a technology that could just produce stuff out of thin air right they have like a machine that just makes their food right with no no raw material it can just do it and it's like well yeah at, yeah, at some point, maybe 500 years from now, that thing exists. But here's the thing. If that were to come about, that society, and you were to fast forward 300 years and to see people living in that world, what we now consider the dream Star Trek world, where basically everybody has whatever they want, you would still have people walking around saying, man, just burn it all down. This just can't get any worse because their individual situation is one that they hate

or are upset with or whatever, or there's a war going on or anything like that. And everyone just kind of adjusts to what they have and so you know the fact that they're a little replicator thing can't make earl grey tea quite the way they they like it it's just like oh this is so stupid so stupid this thing like it's always it's never it doesn't get it hot enough it's just it's just just burn it all down it's like you could and i know that's true because if you went and grabbed anybody who lived 150 years ago and showed what we're doing today, they would like, what do these people have to be miserable about?

Like, what are they talking about? What do they have to be angry about? And it's like, well, all of our reasons for being angry are legit. But there is still that greater context that if you try to trade lives with any of those people, even like a very wealthy person from 150 years ago, and then after a month you're like, okay, let's trade back, they would kill you rather than trade back. They would physically murder you to not be sent back to 1854 or whatever in this place that, you know, to know, to live in a city and not have a smell

like feces 24 hours a day and to just know what that's like and then to have to go back to it. They, no, there's no way. That's why I love subjects like this, because I feel like it's easy to completely forget where you've been. Well, this is where we've been. It used to be forever, cities endlessly trying to figure out, what do we do with the fact that there's like six inches of human waste everywhere? And you can't just keep it. It turns out we can't just shovel it into the stream. And you can't just keep it.

It turns out we can't just shovel it into the stream. It turns out that the canal they built, what did they call it, Alex? The Man Killer, the first one they built in Chicago or Washington, D.C.? Which one was that? Yeah, Washington, D.C. Apparently, and this is City Lab and the Washington Post, even though Washington, D.C. was a planned city, they didn't plan a sewer. They just planned which way the streets would go and how nice it would look. And so then they, people were just pooping everywhere. And then they

also built a small canal for commercial traffic in 1815 that immediately became a dumping ground and is now part of the sewer system. Like just as soon as people had a little bit of flowing water, they were like, great, that's where my poop goes. Forget it. I don't want to deal with it. And that canal was called the man killer because they were fishing so many corpses out of this vast stream of feces. Okay. So, again, city of Washington, D.C. got its own share of problems these days. And I would say they've got a stream of feces known as

congress hey uh but it's not but at least it's it's not that it's it's it's not that i was just thinking about your hypothetical of like switching places with i feel like if you offered to switch places with the president like from 100 years ago he'd be like yeah sure let's we're good uh i would i would switch places with like i'm trying to think of what the future of sewage that will bring us and like if there's a there's a version of the world where like you don't even have to spend any time it just uh jk rowling uh harry potter style disappears from inside your body when you have to go to the bathroom uh and like and maybe better wi-fi i would trade my family for that just to exchange places with someone in the future heck yeah man especially i think even

on the internet one of people's first questions about the apparating in harry potter was like do they operate the poop is that how they get out there right like like we're we'd really like an even better way to do it even though what many of us have is good you know like let's let's upgrade this are we okay you have to back up are we treating it as canon that that's how they treated is that from the books that they operated the poop away no i think it was what people want jk route like it's a regular plumbing system and they were like yes but could they just do this i thought it was one of those things where jk rowling came out after the fact and was answering fan questions and said yes that's how they went to the bathroom oh no which i'm gonna fire up the device that answers any question i could ever possibly have that i used this

completely free that by the way they did not have that in Star Trek. Right. I know. J.K. Rowling wizard poop. Do-do-do. Yeah, very, very first results came up in Pottermore, the online poop, the online wizard thing that apparently, before adopting Muggle plumbing methods in the 18th century witches and wizards simply relieved themselves wherever they stood and vanished the evidence with magic she says as a direct quote from the author that is now what canon um and uh okay well yep it should have made the whole episode about that.

Folks, that is the main episode for this week. My thanks to Jack O'Brien and Jason Pargin for so many things. No joke. Anyway, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now. If you support this show on Patreon.com. Patrons get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is sewer alligators. Sewer alligators, a famous myth that has surprising foundations. We'll get into it. Visit SIFpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of more than four dozen other bonus shows, and to back this entire podcast operation.

And thank you for exploring sewers with us. Also, wow, that phrasing is interesting this week. Anyway, here's one more run through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, increased sewer access might be the biggest and best news of the past 30 years. Takeaway number two, we are filling modern sewers with fatbergs. And takeaway number three, a bunch of the world's cities created a sewer by assimilating a stream. Those are the takeaways. Also, please follow my guests. They're great. And I hope these credits feel redundant to you, but just in case, Jack O'Brien co-hosts the podcast The Daily Zeitgeist with Miles Gray every weekday on iHeartRadio. Jason Pargin's newest book

is entitled Zoe Punches the Future in the D**k. That's written under the soon to be retired pen name David Wong. We'll also link Jack and Jason's Twitter accounts and just other stuff that springs to mind for me. But, you know, the guests that you hear on this show a lot, that you hear often, are people who are, you know, pretty foundational. And I'm very grateful to them. So I really hope you will go ahead and check out what they're doing and get into it, you know, if you have not before. Many research sources this week. Here are some key ones. A great aggregated data set on modern sewers and sanitation that's coming from the World Bank and the World Health Organization and UNICEF. It's kind of aggregated and visualized really well on a site called Our World in Data, and that's a wonderful project from the University of Oxford. Also got two great sources that were

central to the section on fatbergs. A National Geographic article called Huge Blobs of Fat and Trash are Filling the World's Sewers, written by Erica Engelhaupt. And then a New Yorker article called A Fatberg's Journey from the Sewer to the Museum of London that's written by Sam Knight. And I could go on and on about the last thing we talked about where cities assimilate a stream, turn it into a tiny sewer over time. Sydney, Australia, their water department and their city museums are great sources about them that we've got linked. Also linking to stuff about Washington, D.C. and Chicago and Rome as four examples of this worldwide city thing. Find those links and many more sources in this episode's links at sifpod.fun. And beyond all that, our theme music is Unbroken

Unshaven by the Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks goes to our patrons. I hope you love this week's bonus show. I hope you love that special digital art from Adam Koford, too. You know, it should be in your Patreon right now. I am so glad you're here, whether you've been here from episode one or from yesterday. It's a huge honor that you feel like this is entertainment worth supporting. And so thank you. It's been honestly kind of overwhelming in a positive way to have so many of you become backers of this show in such a short period of time.

And I'm still kind of processing it. Mainly very, very glad about it. And the other thing I think about it is let's keep making more podcasts. This is a really fun show to do and there's more coming. So I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with the 51st episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then.