Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Sitzpinklers Unite

Episode Date: July 17, 2024

Sitzpinklers - men who sit down to pee - is a big thing in Germany, and a handful of other places. And if Josh and Chuck have any say it’ll catch on like wildfire around the world. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For so many people living with an autoimmune condition like myasthenia gravis or chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, the emotional toll can be as real as the physical symptoms. That's why in an all new season of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition from Ruby Studio and Argenics, host Martine Hackett gets to the heart of the emotional journey for individuals living with these conditions. To find community and inspiration on your journey, listen now on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Ben's here too, sitting in for Jerry, who usually sits in for Dave. It's very confusing, so let's forget the whole thing and get started, because this is short stuff. Hey, happy day after birthday, friend. Oh, thank you very much. I appreciate that, friend. What'd you do?

Oh, geez. I can't really get into it here, but it was a good birthday. Okay. You'll tell me in private. We had a good time, but no, I appreciate you getting those posts on social media up. That was very nice of you. It made me feel very loved.

Hey, of course. People love you, and they said so in the hundreds and thousands. I know, it was really nice. Thanks a lot. Yeah, you texted me, you're like, you're getting a lot of love over on Instagram right now. Well, I have to get you to open Instagram.

Yeah, I know. It works like a charm. It's no good. My good deed goes unseen if you don't watch it. But thank you for that. Of course. We'll have to go back and edit all this out because this is short stuff. No, that was only a minute, 10, 11, 12. We're doing great. All right, well then we have to talk really fast for the rest of the episode.

Well, we're talking about something near and dear to my heart that I've talked about on stage in front of thousands of people. And that is the fact that I, not always, but I mostly try to sit down when I go pee-pee. Mm-hmm. I do too. I'm a sitspinkler. Oh, you started doing that? Yeah, I think I confessed along with you on stage in Seattle, too, if I remember correctly. But yeah, yeah, no, I totally, now I own it. At the time I was a little wary. Now I'm like, yeah, I sit down to pee. It works really well.

The only time I don't is in public because I would rather cut off the lower half of my body than ever sit on a public toilet seat. Yeah, and if I remember correctly, my onstage joke was that I sit to pee but I stand up when I poop. That's right. That was a classic. Yeah, I've been doing that though for, I feel like it's semi-new, like in the past like six or seven years, I started seeing Down to P, and the first adult male that I saw doing this was my brother-in-law. Oh, okay. Oh, your brother-in-law.

Yeah, my brother-in-law when I lived with my sister's husband, Karsten, who is German. Oh, that makes sense, because this is a very German thing. I didn't know that. I didn't either. I think actually Yumi found this one, because we were talking about, I don't remember what we were talking about, we looked it up and it turned out that this is a big thing in Germany, and they have a word for it.

Sitzpinkler. Can you say it with a German accent? Yeah, Hasselhoff. I wonder if he does. No, you said it right, basically. Sitzpinkler. Yeah, there you go. That's what I was looking for. You just got to add a little flair. It makes sense, too, that the Germans would have a word for it, because the Germans have a word for everything. But the reason why a little bell went off in my head when you said your brother-in-law is German

is because it's a big deal in Germany. As a matter of fact, there was a YouGov poll of eight Western European countries, plus the US, Canada, Mexico, Australia, and Singapore. And the whole point of this poll was to find out where men sit down to pee the most. It was groundbreaking scientific poll. And Germany won out.

I didn't quite get this, because it says 62% of German men sit every time. No, a combined 62% sit every time or most times. Oh, okay, every time being 40%, 22% most times. I got you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I being 40%, 22% most times. I got you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, that means that for the most part, by far, most German men, you'll find them

sitting down when they're peeing most of the time. Yeah. And behind them was Sweden at 50%, Denmark 44%, Australia, which kind of surprised me, at 39. I thought they would be pretty low on the list. Yeah. But the US, Mexico, Britain, and Singapore rounded out between 20 and 24 percent. Yeah.

Which, all of that's a little surprising. I thought Singapore would be up there. With you, I thought Australia would be down there because they're so rough and tumble. Yeah, you don't seem to be. That's such a sexist or misogynistic, I don't know what it is exactly, but it's just a really kind of wrong thing to assume. Like, oh yeah, Australians are rough and tumble. They ride kangaroos around and drink

like 55 gallon drums of Foster's and eat it out back every night. But if so, of course they don't sit down to pee. And that's kind of like this idea behind the sitzpinkler thing. Like it's used in Germany, or it used to be used as an insult. Like you're a sitzpinkler, you're kind of,

you're effeminate, you're kind of a wuss, you're just not a manly man. And somehow, someway, German society said, nine, we're taking that and we're going to own it and we're gonna turn it on its head and we're going to start a campaign, starting around 2004, to basically train German men to sit down to pee.

Yeah, I love it. They even have this, this is incredible, a device sort of like a, what do you call the things, a duvet, a duvet, a bidet. A duvet. You don't want to mix those up. you know spread a duvet over your toilet and then just pee all over it nothing would splash sort of like a bidet you know some bidets talk to you I know in Japan and Germany has kind of gotten on that

with their WC geist or toilet ghost or sp-K, which is spook, which is a person who has recorded a message that says things like, excuse me, except in German, there's a penalty for peeing while standing in this house, you better not risk any problems and sit down. Yeah, so if you lift the toilet, it triggers that voice. I kinda like that. Yeah, sometimes they'll be recorded in the voice of a famous German Chancellor.

Sometimes it's just like a lion's roar. But I mean, that's how invested in getting men to sit down to pee they are in Germany. Like they really take it seriously. And there's another country that takes it at least as seriously, and that's Japan. And what I found very interesting is that Japan, I said that Germany really started this drive to get men to sit down to pee, to turn men into sitzpinklers in 2004. The same thing happened in Japan.

Back in around 2000, in fact, there was a survey in 1999, only 15% of Japanese men sat down to pee, but by 2020 it was up to 60%. So something really radical happened here on planet Earth in the early 2000s that just turned everything on its head or put everything on its bottom. Right. And I guess we'll come back and talk a little bit

about some of the reasons why that might happen, right, for this? Indubitably. Some of the reasons why that might have happened right after this? Indubitably. Welcome to Good Game with Sarah Spain, your one-stop shop for the biggest stories in women's sports. Every day I'm bringing you the stakes, stats, stars and stories to keep you up to date. If you're new to women's sports, welcome.

Can't wait to show you around. And if you've been around, let's make things nice and comfy for our new friends. We want Good Game to be just like women's sports, the best of the competition, teamwork and rivalries that we love, minus the toxic masculinity and drunken brawls. Where else but women's sports? Do we see a player passing her ex-wife on the WNBA's all-time leading scorer list, and then watch her new fiancé, teammate and MVP candidate talk about it afterward on SportsCenter? Shout out to Duana Bonner and Alyssa Thomas.

The tea, y'all. The tea is so good. Good Game is where we go to celebrate, debate, and dissect those stories and all aspects of women's sports. Join us. Let's have some fun. Listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Late on the evening of March 8th, 1971, a group of anti-war activists did something insane. Holy s***, we are really here. This is really happening. They weren't professional criminals. They were ordinary citizens, but they needed to know the truth about the FBI. Burglars forged blackmail letters and threats of violence were used

to try to stop anti-war marches. Even if that meant risking everything. I just felt like I was living in the heart of the dragon and it was just my job to stop the fire. I'm Ed Helms, host of Snafu, season two Medburg, the story of a daring heist that exposed J. Edgar Hoover's secret FBI. If it meant some risks that were involved, well, that's what

citizens sometimes have to do. Listen to season two of snafu on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. So, one thing I thought was, you know, since it really increased a lot over the past like 20 years or so, I thought there may have been something I missed, like, you know, since it really increased a lot over the past like 20 years or so, I thought there may have been something I missed like, you know, Captain America sat to pee in a Marvel movie or something like that. But I couldn't find anything. I think it's just literally people, men, realizing that it's a lot more hygienic to sit down and you risk a lot less, almost down to zero basically if you're doing it right,

that there's gonna be pee elsewhere that's not in the toilet. Yeah, I think men finally started listening to women when they're like, this is so gross, why do you do this? Get out of the house forever. Yeah, because it is. So there's a, I mean, when you sit down to pee, your chance of getting pee anywhere but in the toilet is almost zero.

You're doing something really wrong if you're sitting down to pee and pee spraying everywhere, right? But there might be a duvet stuffed in the toilet bowls, in fact, you might want to check that. Oh, God. But if you stand up to pee, the chances are essentially 100% that you're going to get pee splattered somewhere, someway. Sometimes, this is a terrible thing to say, but it's true, some men just miss entirely. And they'll pee like basically behind the toilet. They'll get it in front of the toilet, on the sides. There's a whole thing that every man listening knows about

where there's a lot of opportunity to get pee outside of the toilet bowl when you pee standing up. Yeah, and you know, I was gonna say not to get too gross, but I guess we're kind of there already. You know, people get distracted, especially in the age. You know, I've seen plenty of grown men on their smartphone, like at a urinal. Urinals, by the way, is a whole different horror show that we won't even get into. Because there's no way that P isn't going Places even if you're properly peeing in a urinal But I've seen guys on their phone like you get distracted and all of a sudden like you look down

You're like that's not going where I thought it was going Yeah, not for 30 seconds But like you know all it takes is as a second of a peepee stream and you've got a real mess on your hands Yeah, and I think the thing that really is the judge of character is whether you correct your course once you realize it. If you just keep peeing off to the side of the urinal, you're a bad, bad person. Well, Brigham Young University, they study fluid dynamics there in their physics department.

They actually did studies on urine back spray when you're standing up. And like I said, even if you're doing it perfectly right, there's probably going to be some kind of spray that's going somewhere outside the toilet, even if it's just on the rim of the toilet. Yes. Yes. Because there's a lot of factors contributing to that that combine to basically say you pee standing up He's going somewhere outside of the toilet. One is that when the urine stream Exits the penis toward the toilet bowl There's a whole period where it's not it's just flying through the air

Yeah, and for about the first six inches after it exits, said penis, it's held together in a stream. Everything's going really well. And then after about six inches past the exit, it enters what's called the plateau Rayleigh instability. It's a fluid dynamic phenomenon where a stream of fluid eventually breaks up as gravity starts to pull it apart. And it breaks up into droplets and each one of those droplets can hit that toilet bowl and spray everywhere. Yeah, you nailed it.

Porcelain is also a problem because if you have a porcelain toilet, which, you know, chances are you probably do, porcelain is hydrophilic, which means it really loves fluid. So it loves loves fluid so it loves to splat it all over itself basically. It's very splatty surface that you're peeing on. To be honest I might be on something with the duvet thing. Yeah I think you might. One of the other things that people who are like yes be a sits pinkler are all about is emptying the bladder. It's a big deal to empty your bladder. It's not just for the 40 plus crowd,

even though it really is, but you really want to make sure you get all the pee out of your bladder whenever you pee. Does it everyone though? Does anyone pee to 80% and be like, that feels good enough and cuts it off? to 80% and be like, that feels good enough. Well, no, there's just like a, you can, you can run into situations where you're, um, like you can't, like it's just all you get out. Yeah. Or you're interrupted. Yeah.

Okay. Right. But I mean, even if you're not like that could be all that, like you can't get a hundred percent out sometimes when you've like. No, that's, I get you. I think it has to do with prostate, But, so people like sit down to pee. But, this is a very fraught debate because medical researchers tend to say,

if you're a man standing up to pee or sitting down to pee, depending on your condition, depending on how healthy you are and how healthy your prostate is, it's not gonna make any difference whatsoever. One way might help one guy, the other way might help another guy. So that's really not a very good argument for getting people to sit down to pee. Yeah.

So I get all that now because I, in fact, myself, since we're being honest, since this is just you and me talking and no one else is listening, have reached that age where there's like some prostate things where peeing, you know, all of a sudden you wake up one day in your 50s and you go to pee and you're like, huh, nothing's happening. Right. It's just going down my leg. Yeah. So you call your doctor and they're like, oh, well, that's just what happens. You start to have some like little prostate issues and nothing like super serious usually. But no, but that's such a double edged sword. Like on the one hand, you're like, oh, I'm so relieved this is in a terrible medical condition. On the other hand, what they're saying is like,

get used to it, buddy, because this is just what your body's doing from now on. Yeah, exactly. Women, on the other hand, it's a different story. They don't have the bladder. When you stand up to pee, which, you know, supposedly, I don't think supposedly, standing up to pee does help a man empty their bladder more fully, but the prostate is supporting us, is supporting that bladder. Women don't have the prostate, so if a woman is forced to pee standing up on the side of the road, behind the concert

venue, at the campground. In the shower. In the shower. There are all manner of reasons why a woman may have to go pee-pee standing up. They don't have that prostate supporting them, so it's much more difficult for them to empty their full contents. Yeah. The thing is, so if they sit down to pee, they're much more prone to empty their bladder. Ipso facto, everybody should sit down to pee.

The problem is when you, again, when you get into public and you hover above the toilet seat to pee, that actually has a similar problem as when you're standing up to pee. But really, if that's your choice, I feel like in that situation, just go with the not getting 100% of your pee out right then. Yeah. And the one last thing I want to say is I get that a lot of men probably don't sit down to pee still. The statistics tell me that at least. But in the middle of the

night, if you have to get up and go potty, I just think it's the craziest thing I've ever heard of to try and stand there and still try and stay asleep and pee in that toilet. That's how it's that was the gateway for me was in the middle of the night because it just makes sense. Well I remember the first time it happened to me I accidentally fell onto the toilet while I was peeing into a sitting position and I was like oh this is much nicer. I love it. Well, Chuck says he loves it. I want to end on a high note. That means everybody at Short Stuff is out.

["Short Stuff is Out"] Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, myHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.