Stuff You Should Know - Bidets: Now More Than Ever

Episode Date: April 14, 2020

We all know the benefits of bidets. But with toilet paper in short supply, they're more important than ever before. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart radios, How Stuff Works. Hey and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh, there's Chuck. We've lost Jerry some time ago, but this remains, as always, Stuff You Should Know,

because Jerry's here in spirit, I can tell you that. Jerry's alive, okay, that sounded very ominous. It totally did, now that you mentioned it. We lost Jerry, she's here in spirit, no, Jerry's alive. She may not have ever existed, who knows. It's all one big, weird dream, right? Yeah, did you see what I titled this episode, by the way? No, I haven't looked yet.

Biday's colon, now more than ever. That's great, good job, man, because that is true. Like having a biday right now can really keep you out of the rat race to find toilet paper. Dude, the first, because you know, I used to have one of the toilet attachments and it got lost in the renovation and move,

and I kind of forgot about it. And the very first thing I did when I heard about this toilet paper surge was get online and buy another one of those things. Yeah, yeah, we had just happened to get one for our other bathroom right before all this happened. So we're all set on the rear situation with the water application.

Clean bottoms. Yeah, so I was raised a toilet paper guy. Oh, of course. And I know how you feel about that. Middle class kids. Every once in a while though, I'll remember in our toilet paper episode, you went, I'm just gonna come out and say it,

wiping, using paper to wipe your bottom with, and that's it, is just gross, gross, gross. It's dry paper. And like seriously, I hear that in my head a lot. It's hilarious. But to me, that to me is like, okay, this makes sense, feels normal. And I've gotten used to a bidet,

but even still, like, I'm using a little bit of toilet paper there too. Also, we should probably say, this episode is chock full of TMI. So just buckle in for that. But yes, if I use a bidet, I still use a little bit of toilet paper. And the thing that I think got me out of all of this, Chuck,

just want to say up front, is the science is still out on which one actually is more beneficial for you health-wise. There are people saying toilet paper is. Yeah, I've seen it. And I think this is what I suspect, because there is such a dearth of studies on this, and some of the studies that have been done

are showing mixed results, that it basically depends on how your doctor, or whoever you're asking, feels about toilet paper or bidets. That's what they're going to recommend. Is your doctor or whoever likes a bus driver? My doctor drives a bus too, yes, but these are hard times. All right, so we're talking about bidets,

which is if you don't know what this is, you have been living under a rock, but for a lot of Americans, and we'll get to why Americans haven't been hip to them a bit later, but some Americans still might not be hip to these. A bidet is a little, and they can be different things,

but the kind of classic modern bidet looks like another little toilet installed beside your toilet or near your toilet. Not quite right, though. There's something you can't put your finger on that ain't quite right about that toilet. Yeah, like if you walked into a room and you never seen one before,

you wouldn't be like, well, there's one for pooping and one for peeing. Yeah, I think that definitely does cross your mind. Either that or else you go, agoo? But there are different ways that you can have these modern bidets. Some of them have little water streams that squirt up.

Some of them have a little, like a shower handle, but the long and short of it is, it's another appliance in your bathroom with water and a little basin that you straddle after you do your business and clean yourself up with water instead of dry toilet paper. That's the classic bidet, right?

Yes, the classic bidet, not the bidet of olden days. No, no, no. Should we talk about the other types or go back to the olden days now? Let's go back to the olden days and we'll catch up again. All right, that's a little tease, everybody. We're gonna talk about other types of bidets eventually.

Yeah, and I didn't see exactly, I saw it anywhere from late 1600s to early 1700s. Yeah. Definitely European. And the first bidet, the word means pony or cob, which is kind of a short little short legged strong horse. Yeah, and at the time, the French were crazy about those kinds of horses.

Yeah, and apparently that has something to do with how you're supposed to use it. I still don't fully follow that. So like these original bidets, it looked like a little kind of mini bathtub, but it also had something like a saddle shape and you squatted over it like you would almost like you were riding

like a little cob horse. Okay, all right. Well, that makes a little bit of sense, I guess. And it also had like four legs coming out of the body. If you think about it, it kind of makes sense that it looks like a little tiny horse without the top half or a head or a neck or ears or a mane or a tail or hooves,

but other than that, all that, it's the spitting image of a cob horse. Yeah, I think they looked a little more like Ottomans with a little chamber pot in the center. Yes, but Ottomans came from the Turks and the French probably hated the Turks at the time because that was geopolitics, so they would never made that comparison,

even though it was like this great elephant in the room. That's right. But these things were in the bedroom in France in the early 1700s next to the chamber pot. And the very idea of pooping and peeing in your bedroom was pretty new. Like the outhouse was, you still had an outhouse,

but from what I saw chamber pots and bidets were for nighttime business, like when, so you don't have to leave your bedroom. Right, yeah. I mean, it's really kind of sweet, if you think about it. It's like, there's just poop and pee in your bedroom, especially on a cold night. But eventually people were like,

well, there's a lot of cholera around. There's a lot of typhoid. We should probably move these to a separate room. And eventually they did. And they called those bathrooms. Yeah, or restrooms or toilets. Or WCs. Or poop station veils.

Or lews. Oh, I've got one for you. I wanted to say this in the last episode we recorded the wastewater episode. All right, let's hear it. So, you know the word lew means bathroom or toilet in the UK at least, if not more. And they think, so when we were in Edinburgh

doing those shows, remember you took a nap and I got all bored. So I went and walked around the city by myself. Okay. I went to old time Edinburgh, like old time, like 17, 16. I went there too. Don't make me update you just some napper. I must have been napping when you went

because I don't know why you wouldn't have just gone with me when I tried to wake you up. But regardless, on this tour, maybe you'll remember this. The tour guide said that they think the word lew came from the Scotch people, the Scottish people saying guard lew when they threw their wastewater out into the streets. Oh yeah, that's right.

Like they would shout, guard lew. And they think that guard lew came from guard lew, which means watch the water in French. And so they think that guard lew came from watch the water and then lew came from guard lew. And then that's where we got that term for the toilet in the UK. I love that.

That's one for your next dinner party. Oh, I cannot tell you how many dinner parties I busted that out at. So bedays, back to the bidet, they are or were more of a high society thing. Like, you know, you were using an outhouse if you weren't, I don't know necessarily aristocracy, but you had to be like middle and upper class

to have a bidet in your bedroom or in your house and probably a chamber pot even for that matter. Well, for a couple of reasons too. I think one, you typically had servants who were going to take it away for you. That's number one. You gotta change that then. Number two, right.

And the number two, you know, if this bidet is basically just a wash basin with water, they didn't have running water at the time, which meant you had to haul water. So you probably had a servant hauling water for you as well. So yeah, you were probably this thing that was like a luxury to the rest of the world.

It was just nothing to you because you didn't have to do anything. You just used it. You didn't have to do any prep or take away or anything like that. That's right. And they don't know for sure who invented it, but this dude, Christophe de Rozier,

made one for the French Royal Family in 1710. A lot of people point to him as being the inventor of the bidet. Didn't take long, you know, within the next 30 or 40 years or so, they started having things like little hand pumps so you could kind of have a little rudimentary spraying device to help yourself out. That's nice.

It is nice. It is, I mean, because prior to this, it was just, again, a wash basin that you would straddle and just kind of flip it up onto your underside, your fanny, as it were. With your hand, right? With your hand. And eventually that water comes back down

and mixes with the water you're flipping up and you reach some critical point. Tipping point, as Malcolm Gladwell would put it, and now you're just flipping poop water up onto your nether regions, and it's no longer helpful. So the idea that you could just sit there and spray a pump, a stream of water on there,

and not have to just flick the stuff out of the basin onto you, that's an enormous advancement. And it came along pretty early. I think the 1750s, right? Yeah, that's about when the little spray thing came along. That's beautiful. And Chuck, one other thing too,

I think about the same time that that pump handle came along. They also installed like a refillable tank. So you fill the water with tank, and everything that was in the basin was all just wastewater. So you were good to go by 1750, as far as Badais were concerned.

Yes, everything was totally clean and totally safe by 1750. Nothing could possibly go wrong. So these were big, obviously in Europe, they spread, Italy and Portugal were really big on the Badais, still are. I saw Italy may have been the actual inventors of them, and the French possibly just popularized it.

I could see that. Yeah. The French, they steal everything. They did, but at the same time, they were also, they were a superpower at the time, and they were also basically global taste makers. So once they became into Badais, the rest of the world followed suit pretty quickly,

or most of the rest of the world. Not if you were England or America, you probably went, no, thank you, Frenchman. Yeah. South America, Argentina, Venezuela, they're pretty popular in the Middle East, and of course, Asia and Japan very much leads the way in not only Badae use, but Badae technology these days.

Yeah, it's a classic example of what I've talked about before, the Japanese say, oh, I really like this invention. We can improve it by 130%. So let's do that, and that's exactly what they did. That's a good Japanese accent. Thanks. I added a little vocal fry there at the end

to make it particularly confusing. So maybe let's take a quick break, go clean our bombets, as my daughter says, and we will talk about what's the deal with America and why we hate cleaning our buttholes the right way, right after this. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show,

Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars,

friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger

and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God.

Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy, teen crush boy bander

each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So, Chuck, you were talking about buttholes, I believe, before the break. Let's pick up, let's pick up where you left off. Yeah, what's up, America? Why don't you clean your butthole the right way?

I thought this was pretty interesting. There's a guy who, I guess, is a bidet expert who is speaking with the New York Times, and we happen to overhear it. He had some theories about why America didn't like bidets, and one you kind of touched on before, which was that England hated France at the time. They were rival world superpowers,

much akin to America and the United States during the Cold War, I mean, in the USSR, America, USSR, Draco versus Rocky during the Cold War. So the English hated everything associated with the French, and they would just have never gone for bidets, but that seems to have carried over into the colonies like America, which is a pretty good theory

for why Americans have never adopted bidets. Yeah, and those were in the early days of non-adoption. World War II happened, and this sounded kind of, like, I wasn't sure I believed this at first, but then I saw it in a different way in a bunch of different places, so I do believe it. Yeah. But apparently American soldiers would go to brothels

in Europe and in Japan, and depending on what theater of war you were stationed at, and you would see these bidets and you would associate it, and there were a few different things going on. You might associate it with sex work, I think, ooh, gross. At the time, there were people that thought using a bidet after sex could be a contraceptive practice, not true at all.

Yeah, they thought that douching was a reliable contraceptive practice, and it wasn't until like the 20s or 30s where it was proven basically indisputably that, no, it basically does absolutely nothing. Absolutely. But the idea that you would use the bidet to do that, kind of further associated it with sex work as well.

Yeah, and then the other thing, which is incredibly sexist and maybe throw in just a dash of misogyny, is that women, on their period, it hasn't been that long that women have been able to get products to deal with that and to talk about it, as if it were just a normal thing that happens to the human body. It was very much under the table.

I think we should do something, man, if we dare go down that road on... Springtime Flower Blossom episode. Well, I was thinking maybe a shorty just on like tampons and maxi pads and the development of those things, because it took way too long for the awful, awful reason that manufacturers just didn't want anything to do with that. Right, yeah, for sure, I'm down.

All right, well, let's do it. But menstruation had a lot to do with bidets not being used in America, because no one wanted to talk about menstruation for a long, long time. So you've got GIs returning from overseas where they visited brothels and aren't particularly looking forward

to introducing their wives to bidets because they associate them with sex work. They're also really useful for menstruation, which wasn't talked about at the time. And then they remind everybody of the king of France, who everybody hated, and you put those three things together, that makes it really difficult to market in America. And so they think that one or all of those reasons

are why Americans never really got into bidets, not until the Japanese said, hey, everybody, check this out. But we'll get to that not quite yet. Yeah, another reason, and this was mentioned as a chicken or the egg thing, I personally think, because the idea is that American bathrooms aren't big enough for this extra thing in there.

But I think had we adopted it to begin with, we would have made our bathrooms a little bigger to fit these things, personally. For sure, totally, because I mean, our bathrooms are enormous now, and they could totally fit a bidet, but if you look at most bathrooms, say like a master bath in the suburban house,

like the bathroom's big, but the toilet's still small, the little toilet area. Yeah, I think we totally would have expanded our bathrooms to allow it. I think we just didn't need to have bigger bathrooms because we didn't have it. So I say disdain for bidet led to smaller bathrooms rather than vice versa.

Where do you fall? Yeah, I agree. I'm kind of mad because this was my chance when we renovated our house to put a real deal bidet in there. Would you want one? Yeah, I didn't even think about it. But like you said, our toilet is wedged in a little zone like all toilets.

We could have made our shower smaller and stuck a bidet next to it, I guess. I can see you like dropping your highlighter while you're researching this article. Like when it struck you like, oh my God, I'm gonna miss my chance. Interestingly though, the kind of one of the bigger bidet models

that was popularized around the world was invented by an American named Arnold Cohen in the 1960s. Yes, dude, so I had no idea about this, but the bidet seat that you use, that I use, that basically all Americans are starting to be like, hey, this is kind of awesome, that everybody in Japan uses,

that a lot of people around the world use today, was invented by a guy named Arnold Cohen in the 1960s in the United States. Mr. Bidet. Had no idea. I also saw him referred to as the bidet king. Yeah, man, and God bless this guy, he tried his best. He created this thing for his dad,

who was older and not doing too well, and we'll talk about medical benefits here in a minute, but if you have a rash back there, if you have a hemorrhoid or an anal fissure, something like that, there is some research, like you said, not enough, but some research that shows that a bidet can really be helpful if you have one of those conditions, and his dad did.

So he was the former ad guy, he tried his best, and it just didn't quite work out in America for Arnold Cohen. Yeah, he created a model called the American Sitzbath, S-I-T-Z bath. Which is weird, because it's not a Sitzbath. No, and there are Sitzbaths now, and I don't know if they predated it, or he just kind of adopted that or what,

but he basically took a toilet seat and modified it, added a foot pump to pump water under your bum width. He went to trade shows, he tried to market it as much as he could, and he also was very much ahead of his time, and again, this is the 1960s, and he was still a young man at the time, that he was trying to, he saw that it was a problem, how much toilet paper Americans used.

That was one of his driving forces, in addition to trying to come up with something that could help people like his dad, who were suffering from rectal issues, and he said, I think one of his quotes was, nobody wants to hear about Tushy Washing 101. It was just too difficult to market. I know.

And so he kind of, he gave up, I guess, to an extent, and I guess sometime in the 70s, he either approached a company called Toto, which stands for Toyotoki, or Oriental Ceramics in Japanese, or they approached him, and they licensed his concept, and kind of tinkered with it, made it better, made it much more automated, made it electronic, and they debuted the washlet in 1980 in Japan,

and it took a little like getting used to over there as well, but in very short order, the Japanese kind of clomped onto it, and it became like part of their culture, as much as like... Tushy? Sure. Sure.

We did a great episode on Tushy. We did. I was also gonna say chopsticks, anime, cuteness, who knows? Maple trees? A lot of stuff you could say. Sure, maple, Japanese maples. I got a couple of those. Yeah, they're beautiful, man.

Do you have the kind of like sweeping spreading kind, or the upright kind? I have one of, my favorite ones are the small, low spreaders, and I got a couple of those. I don't think they're gonna be huge, but the way I have them in our garden is just very lovely. It's one of my favorite trees. Yeah, you don't want them to be huge when they're like that,

because they're supposed to be kind of subtle, understated, and like low growing, you know? Yeah, boy, there's one around the corner for me that I just, I have Japanese maple envy in a big way. It looks like a 12 foot umbrella that's about four feet off the ground. Wow. It's just gorgeous.

That's amazing. I'll bet it's old. Yeah, it's gotta be. I just want to sit in it every time I go by their yard. You could probably lay under it and just tickle it. Did I say sit under it or sit in it? You said sit in it. Yeah, I'm gonna sit under it.

Okay. You're gonna be the weird neighbor who just sits in people's yards? Maybe. I've wanted to do that so many times, and I just, you know, I know you can't do it, especially as a grown adult. So what kind of a day do you have?

You don't have to buzz market, but I got kind of one of the like a $75 model, but I know that go under your existing toilet seat. But I know that some of these Japanese models, it's actually part of the toilet seat and has dryers and they talk to you and all that good stuff. I will buzz, buzz, buzz because I love mine.

I have two Toto washlets. Okay. And they, it's not like the highest end one where like you stand up and it flushes automatically or it talks to you or has lights. They have some that have like UV lights built in. So when the lid shut, it like kills everything in sight. But it's like a, it's like a good, good washlet.

It has like a heated seat and everything. And like it's, it's just wonderful to have. It's just really nice. And that's the one where the seat is part of the unit, right? Yeah. Like the whole thing replaces your toilet seat. And there's like a big kind of bulky contraption in back

that I think is like a water tank and where all like the machinations are. But it's like you take your old toilet seat and you throw it out the window into your neighbor's yard under their Japanese maple. Yep. Next to your old spare tires and dead possums. And you replace it with this one, you know, bidet toilet seat. You connect it to the water supply

and then you plug it in and there you have it. I'm looking at this thing now. I kind of want to get one, but I don't have a, I don't have a power outlet over there. That can be a problem. So you have to, that's like an added cost a lot of the times unless you're comfortable with just having like an extension cord and surge protector or something.

I'm not. Which is fine. It's not the end of the world. But if you're not, then yes, you need to have an electrician come put a power outlet next to your water supply. I really miss the boat. Yeah, yeah. Cause you could have done that when you're doing the electric too.

I could have done that. Sorry, I didn't warn you. No, that's all right. So I guess since we're talking about bidet seats, I guess we should talk about the cheaper ones. You can get them for like anywhere from 30 to 50 bucks. And like we said, that goes under your seat and you have a little control device

on the side of your toilet seat that you just turn on the spray and it shoots out. It's cold water unless you have the means to hook it up to warm water, but ours is cold water. So, you know, it's a little bit of a, of a wake you up in the morning, you know? Yeah, I bet. Is yours warm, I guess?

Yes, it is, it's warm. The seats warm, it's just beautiful. I just want to poop at your house now. It's, you come over and use it anytime you want. Cause I know you pee sitting down, so you're a okay in my book. But these washlets, so get this man, the washlet when it was introduced in 1980

and the washlet is like, I don't know what you'd call it, but they took let's wash and turned it into the washlet when they released it. But as of 2007, Toto had sold 17 million of these worldwide since about 1980. It is amazing. As of 2009, 12 years after that, it was 50 million. Wow.

They sold 10 million since 2016. Or I'm sorry, 2019 was 50 million. 2016 was 40 million. So, at some point along the way, a big portion of the world said, I like that. I'm going to try it and I'm going to get one because the sales have taken off even before this coronavirus shut in toilet paper run

that we're experiencing in America. Yeah, I wonder, I was going to say, if they had like a counter that said like 50 million clean buttholes, but there's more than that is, you have two buttholes in your house. Right, exactly. So, I mean, that's one of the things that people point to

is like, well, you know, there's a cost savings. If this thing lasts long enough, you'll eventually pay for, it'll eventually pay for itself in savings from having to buy toilet paper. Yeah, and well, and we'll get to the waste in toilet paper, but that is a problem. Yeah, yeah, because even if the cost thing doesn't quite work out, you are still, you know,

it's coming close to breaking even. It's not like a complete like waste of money, but also money aside, ecologically, it's probably a much better thing than toilet paper by any measure, any metric. All right, well, should we take another break? I think so. All right, let's take another break

and we'll believe it or not, we're going to tell you how to use these things right after this. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts

flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast,

Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place

because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. OK, Chuck, so I teased it earlier. I think we should start with this, this, this third act by talking about the different kinds of bidets.

We've already talked about two, right? Yeah. There's the little cob horse bidet that looks like a tiny bathtub next to your toilet. There's the, the washlet is a brand name, but it's almost become a proprietary eponym. It's so, so, so. Widescred.

Yes. But that's also called the bidet seat that you replace your toilet seat with. And then the third type is a hose that looks like, you know, the dishwashing hose that you have, like as coming out of your kitchen sink. Yeah. If it's like 1985, that, but next to your toilet, that's the

third kind of bidet. It's called like a wall-mounted showerhead bidet. Yeah, I don't think these are nearly as common, are they? I didn't get that impression either, but when I looked it up, a lot of different images came up on Google Image. I don't even want to do that. All right, so can we talk about how we use these things? Yes, but I just want to say one more time.

I'm thoroughly engrossed by the wall-mounted showerhead bidet. Okay. You have to see one of these sometime. Oh, no, I've seen pictures. I just haven't seen them in person. Okay, I got you. Neither have I, but I've just, I spent a good hour like staring at pictures of these things and imagining, you know.

Sure, all the possibilities. So go ahead. I think this part, I cobbled this together from a bunch of sources from the Atlantic, from How Stuff Works. I think New York Times, but... Mental floss, I think, or something? Yeah, mental floss. And I think this came from How Stuff Works, this step-by-step

for how to use the bidet. And the first step, they say, is locate the bidet. That is a good first step. I can't believe they put that in there. I thought that was very funny. Actually, technically, their first step, if you're going by bullet points, was use the toilet as you normally do. Sure.

It's a combination and for defecation. That's step one as far as the editors of How Stuff Works is concerned. That is really funny. Yes, and actually, they do point out in that step one that whether or not you wipe a little with toilet paper first, I don't, I wouldn't do that. I would, and how I do it is I wet my bum first with a good spray, and then I use just a little bit of toilet paper, and that's the

great thing is, is you're not using nearly as much. You can just use a few squares to kind of just make sure everything's cleaned up and dry if you don't have a fancy pants dryer like yours. Yeah. I've found that the dryer takes so long that I don't have the patience for it. No, who does? You know, crazy psychos, maybe.

Unless you're, you know, got a good book or something. Sure. An Uncle John's bathroom reader, that would do it. That would keep me on the can long enough to air dry with the blow dryer. Or a little book coming this fall. Oh, yes. Shall we plug it? I think it's a great time to plug our book.

It's called Stuff You Should Know, an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. That's right. Coming to bookstores this fall, you can pre-order now, and I think all signs are still full bore ahead, even though we're in the midst of a global pandemic. In fact, hopefully they're thinking, this is just what people need. Yeah, and hopefully it is, and at the very least it is guaranteed to keep

you on the toilet until your legs go numb. That's right. So, where are we now? That's an old George Carlin joke. Oh, really? Mm-hmm. What, to sit on the toilet until your legs go numb? No, he did some, like, some, he was talking about some game show, and one

of the contestants was introduced, one of her hobbies was sitting on the toilet until her legs went numb. Really? Which is not good for you. They say, especially if you have hemorrhoids, it can make that a lot worse. So you're supposed to do your business and get off. I could totally see that.

You're also not supposed to, like, watch TV in bed. Bed's supposed to be for sleeping. So if you ever have trouble getting to sleep, they suggest that you, like, go read out on the couch until you start to get drowsy and then go to bed and fall asleep so that your body and your mind will start to associate bed strictly with doing your sleeping business. I say poo-poo to that because I love watching TV in bed. Yeah, hey, I'm with you.

It's a nice little treat. It's great. I don't want to do it, but, you know, I'm not one of those people. Hey, to each his own, we always say, right? That's right. To each their own. To each their own. Yeah.

All right, so I guess we're at medical. Oh, no, wait. We located the bidet. Right, right. You've done your business. So too. To me, the downside of having the separate bidet is you do your business and then you got to get up and, like, remount another device.

So, like, you've got it going on with your fancy pants wash light, I think. I think that's why I was so surprised that you wanted a regular bidet because there's like a whole drippy step moving from one to the other, you know? So yeah, I think when you get a wash light, you're not going to want a regular bidet any longer. I can't get a wash light, dude. I don't have the power. I need that outlet.

You can hire an electrician to come run an outlet. It's very easy. I know. I know. Now, I'm going to look into that. You're right. Okay. You're going to love it, Chuck.

Okay. Okay. Does yours talk? I forgot. No, it doesn't talk. That would be amazing. I've never seen a talking one except on The Simpsons. Oh, well, maybe that's where I got it.

There was, yeah, because there's that one that says, I am honored to accept your waist. I think that's where I got it. Surely some of them talk, right? Probably. I think Japan is famous for talking appliances, right? Sure. And just having weird random stuff written on their appliances.

Yeah. I mean, I've talked about that rice maker. I think you have the same one or one of the same versions. That thing makes all kinds of fun sounds. Yeah. Oh, hey, while we're talking about this stuff, let me say, Mike's Mighty Good Ramen hooked us up, dude. That was so nice.

First of all, thank you for mentioning it because you got us hooked up big time. I did not anticipate that much ramen coming. No. Like a box full of Mike's Mighty Good Ramen basically saying, hey, thanks for the shoutout. So I had never tried it before and it is really good stuff and we have a bunch for free, which is nice because it also stores really well too during times like this. Yeah. And I had already also purchased about $100 worth and it all kind of came at once.

So I have literally a big moving storage bin full of Mike's Mighty Good and I eat it for lunch every day. Today I had the vegetable coconut milk lemongrass and it is delicious. Yes. It is amazing. I think the beef is my favorite so far. Oh, I love that spicy beef. Have you augmented yours yet?

No. I'm a novice still. I'm just kind of taking it little by little, but I saw that they have like a recipe card for suggesting how to kind of dress it up a little bit. Yeah. Actually just because it's a good quick meal to go and pretty low calorie, very low calorie. But the other day I did have some beef brisket and I minced that up really small and I cooked a, I did a boiled egg and cut that thing in half and it was so good.

Man, that sounds good. Yeah. I mean, we don't buzz mark it much, but it is delicious and they hooked us up so thank you Mike. Yeah. And thank you also. The thing that made me think of it was the Zoji Rushi rice makers, they liked us talking about them and they're like, hey, you guys want some, you want a thermos?

Yeah. Which is pretty nice too. Maybe I'll get a washlet. Yeah. Toto brand washlets are really great Chuck. I can recommend them highly. All right. So let's talk about medical uses.

Like you said, there hasn't been a ton of research and there has been a little conflicting research, but a lot of doctors, GPs, do say and specialists, if you have colitis, if you have IBS, if you have Crohn's, if you have colon cancer, then a bidet seat might be right up your alley to help you out back there. It will be, but also Chuck, I just realized we never finished saying how to use the bidet. Well, no, you squirt your butt and I said that you either can dry it, pat it dry or have a dryer. Okay.

What else is there? Oh yeah, we did make it through that. Wow. It just went so quickly. I think one of the things just I want to point out really quickly is that like the whole point of it is that you're using water to clean off your bottom in the exact same way that you would use toilet paper to clean off your bottom or your other bits depending on if you have other bits down there, how do you put this?

I don't know. Well, whatever. I think you did a fine job. Thank you very much. And some people prefer to use toilet paper to dry off like it sounds like both of us do. Some people just air dry or they use the blower attachment or whatever, but like that's it. There's nothing more to it.

I've read that some people use soap, which is crazy to me, but okay. And then some people, Chuck, I ran across this. They don't even use a bidet. If they poop, they take a shower after it worked. Have you ever heard of anything like that before in your life? No. You know, I would say that's an extreme clean freak germaphobe. Clean freak is probably not a nice way to say it, but there are people that have legit

phobias about that stuff. But from what I saw, there's a significant number of people, at least in the United States who like you poop, you take a shower. That's just what you do after you poop. Interesting. I would take seven showers a day. It'd be a water crisis just from you. I know.

What a waste. So, well, yeah, that is a huge waste. And that's actually kind of a criticism of bidets is that while you're using water instead, but as we'll see in a little bit, you're using a resource one way or another down there. So that's right. There you go. But okay. So you were talking about medical issues.

Sorry about that. No, that's all right. I talked about all the ones dealing with your bottom, but apparently, and this is, I don't know how much research they've done on this, but apparently, they can help out with UTIs as well if you get frequent UTIs. Yes. And here's how. They suggest that if you are a woman, you use the bidet on your woman parts before and

after sex, and that that will help cut down on fecal bacteria entering your vagina and becoming part of your vaginal microflora, which can lead to UTIs. Interesting. I thought that was pretty interesting as well. And guys, don't take offense. Well, no, you can get a prostate infection from not keeping very clean down there. No, I just mean, if you make love and then your girlfriend or wife jumps up and runs in there and cleans out real good, just be a man about it.

Right. You should probably not take offense to that kind of thing. Should we be talking about this? Yeah. Yeah. We haven't crossed the line yet. I think you established a new line in the student loans episode, so I think we're well within that.

Well, my reasoning there is if there are any elementary school kids listening to student loans, then they're little Alex P. Keaton's, they can handle it. Alex P. Keaton, man, what a great shout out there. What else here? If you're elderly and if you have arthritis or something, it's tough, man. If you might just physically have a harder time wiping your bottom, have to use the bathroom. And apparently, as you age, one of the single biggest factors for staying independent like you can still cook, you can still clean, you can still take care of yourself, but you might

have a hard time wiping your bottom. You can still stay independent if you can get that bidet going. Yes. And again, if you're sitting there just like, wait, what are you guys talking about? If you were raised on toilet paper, from what, there's a huge divide right now in the world. Apparently, a good three quarters, two thirds to three quarters of the world does not use toilet paper or they use it much more sparingly and they use a bidet instead. And they consider that clean.

They consider using toilet paper unclean. And this, whether toilet paper or bidets are clean or unclean is so culturally ingrained that it's almost unimaginable considering one cleaner than the other depending on what you've been raised on. But that is the case and they've done a lot of, well, they haven't done a lot of studies, but some of the studies they've done have shown like, yeah, this actually is cleaner or no, this isn't as clean as you think. But one thing that really kind of stuck out to me, Chuck, was the idea that water alone

can make you cleaner than wiping your bottom, which makes total sense if you step back and think about it because all you're doing is wiping paper on your bottom. But to me, it's like you're getting stuff out of there and you're getting it away, which I guess you're doing with water as well. Yeah. I mean, that's kind of it with, I mean, like you said, they've done some studies and they have shown that it can ease some of these symptoms of anal fissures and hemorrhoids. There's something called itchy anus that it can help with, that is a real thing.

But there was also a study about 10 years ago in Japan that said, if you use a warm water bidet and if you were a woman, it can kind of jostle loose your microflora in your vagina and it can just kind of knock things out of whack down there and it can lead to more vaginal bacterial infections. Yeah. So in the study, it was like 268 women and they found that normal microflora was not present in 43% of bidet users and only 8% of non-users of bidets had normal microflora not present.

That's pretty significant. Totally. Of the 50 out of the 268 who had fecal bacteria present in their vaginal microflora, 46 of that 50 used bidets. So that was a really surprising thing to a lot of people because they were like, no, no, no, this is clean. This is way cleaner than using toilet paper and this study suggests that that's not necessarily true.

Now, was that only for warm water though? From what I saw, yeah, it was warm water. Yeah. Use that cold water. Sure, it really gets you up in the morning like you said. And then I guess finally, we're at the point where we talk about just toilet paper. We covered toilet paper in our episode on toilet paper. But as a reminder, about 90% of toilet paper in the United States comes from Canadian forests

and that's not cool. Americans represent less than 5% of the world's population, but we use 20% of the world's toilet paper and that's got to stop. Yes, dude. So those Canadian forests, they're talking about old growth boreal forests. And there's a term I saw, the tree to toilet pipeline. I saw 27,000 trees a day go down the toilet in the form of toilet paper. And again, this is mostly old growth trees.

And I guess the toilet paper industry in the United States is like a $6 billion industry from what I saw. So yeah, there's a lot of, I think each American uses about 40 rolls of toilet paper every year. The average household uses 150. There's a lot of room for improvement and that's a big plus for bidets that you, even if you still use toilet paper to dry off, you're using so much less than you would without a bidet that you're just saving tons of trees by using a bidet.

That's right. You are using water, but if you've ever used one of these seat attachments or seats like you have, it's not a ton of water. It's not like a bathtub or anything like that. No, not at all. And if you have, the more advanced your bidet is, and it doesn't have to be the most high-end bidet for this to happen, but I mean, pretty quickly as far as technological development goes in the bidet you get, the amount of water is going to be much more efficient than just

like, say, squirting a dishwasher hose up there. I'm just fascinated by that. It's pretty great. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Well, there you have it, everybody. There's bidets. We told you there's going to be a lot of TMI and we delivered.

And since I said TMI, everybody, it's time for a listener mail. This is from Mary Kerr in Buffalo, New York. Hey, guys. Been listening to stuff you should know for years. It's been my companion on a many a morning run road trip and just tidying up around the house. I listened to the shorty on 666. And Chuck mentioned his license plate had 666 in there.

I thought of the story about my brother, Matt. He recently moved to Wisconsin and was at the DMV to change his license plates. The DMV employee handed him his new license plate number, which was 666MPH, like 666 miles per hour. I know. I'd love it. Not bad. The employee looked at the plates and said, do you want a different number?

And he thought about it for a second and he thought a different number would be best so that he didn't appear to be a speeding Satan lover. And so the DMV employee graciously changed out the plates. And I'm not going to read what plate they changed it out for because it's just now occurring to me that I don't want to out her brother's license plate for some reason. Oh, that's true. It was ass man. She said, just a silly story.

I couldn't help but share. Thank you for your knowledge, levity and distraction that you've provided over the years, especially in this time of stress and uncertainty. Keep doing what you're doing. And that is from Mary in Buffalo, New York. Nice. Thanks a lot. I'm very much appreciated, although I do have to say personally, I'm a little disappointed

in your brother, but that's okay because he probably doesn't care. If you want to get in touch with us like Mary did so you can hear that we're disappointed in your sibling, well, you can send us an email then. Wrap it up, spank it on the bottom and send it off to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com. What we should know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of

the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.