Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: Fecal Transplants: You Gonna Drink That Poop?

Episode Date: September 23, 2017

In this week's SYSK Select episode, there's an emerging field in health care called medical ecology that's concerned with understanding how the 100 trillion microbes living inside us keep us healthy. The field's first breakthrough is the fecal transplant, taking poop from a healthy person and putting it into the gut of a sick person. It's a real thing and it actually works. 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. Hello, stuff you should know listeners. Welcome to the Saturday Selects, a Chuck edition. This week I'm going with one from January 24, 2013, entitled, Fecal Transplants, colon it. You gonna drink that poop?

This one came up recently, and I can't remember exactly why in my real life. Oh, I know why. So I was watching the great Tig Notaro show, One Mississippi, which has a second season, this starting kind of right about now. And on that show, I think she had a fecal transplant. And I think she did in real life.

So maybe you think of this one as just being a really interesting kind of, despite the fact that they're poop shakes, cutting edge medical technology, I guess you would call it, or at least procedures. And a serious note, it really helps people out who have real problems. So we do make quite a few jokes, but it was pretty cool show. So give it a listen, I hope you enjoy it.

Welcome to, Stuff You Should Know, from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And we are so fly by the seat of our pants, we just now decided which of the two episodes we're going to record first. That's never happened. I looked at Josh while he was talking,

I pointed to the thing, and he just nodded. That's, we're gonna do poop. Yep. We're doing poop. Yes, I can't wait to hear your intro for this, because I can't imagine what kind of shit we're doing right now. Because I can't imagine what kind of intro you would have

for drinking a poop shake. Exactly, zero intro. Okay. Now that you've put me on the spot, all right. I had only recently heard of this, Yumi pointed it out to me about six or so months ago. And then Presto, Bamo, Chango, we've got an article on the site finally.

Yeah, this is pretty, a new article, right? Yeah, and it was at least October. Wow. At the earliest. This has come up a couple of times in our show already. Yeah, we did a little video that's now vanished. Yeah. On fecal transplants.

That's right. Oh yeah, that's right, this work came up. And then this, but yeah, this article is by a dude named Nicholas Gerbis, or Gerbis. I don't know who he is, he's a freelancer, but this guy is top notch. Yeah, he wrote some funny sentences. He did, but it's like every sentence in this article

is underlined and highlighted. Yeah, it's a very good comprehensive article on poop shakes. Thick stuff, so Chuck, did you know that if you are infected with something called the Norovirus, which is very frequently contracted in dorms, prisons, cruise ships, aren't they all virtually the same thing? Pretty much.

When you poop, each gram of stool has literally billions of Noroviruses in it. Yeah, and I believe one of the ways you can contract this is by eating sushi from fish that had been swimming in contaminated waters, right? Oh, is that the same one? The Norwalk virus and the Norovirus are the same one? It's one and the same.

Oh, okay, yeah, that sounds familiar. That was in the first pilot 1.0, right? That's right. But yeah, okay, so the Norovirus, you can get it from eating sushi. You can also get it if you happen to be friendly with a person who's just filthy and has the Norovirus and doesn't wash their hands after pooping

and then shakes your hand or feed you like a gummy bear or something with their poopy fingers. And you accept that gummy bear and maybe their fingers get inside of your mouth just a little bit, then all of a sudden you have the Norovirus and you're in big, big trouble. For the most part, though, it was always regarded as like this kind of, just a terrible thing

to have for a few days. It's extremely virulent, extremely easily passed. It could survive for days, weeks on a surface, but ultimately you just pooped a lot, you vomited a lot and then it was done. Not so any longer, thanks to the rise of misprescribed antibiotics. Yeah.

About 50% of antibiotic prescriptions are considered unnecessary. Yeah, I try to avoid it. It's good and it's nice that you're doing your part. I try to do my part too and it stinks that we have to suffer, right? Because other people are getting antibiotics at the drop of a hat, but that's the point.

And one of the reasons why you and I choose to suffer, people haven't caught on yet is because if you expose a virus or bacteria to an antibiotic, something intended to kill it and it doesn't kill it, that antibiotic or that virus or bacteria has just been effectively naturally selected. Yeah. And it goes on to reproduce and reproduce

and eventually it develops resistance to these antibiotics and so the medicine we have becomes useless to it. That's happened with norovirus. It's also happened with another very nasty virus called clostridium difficile. Yeah, it is moody difficile. And difficile is what French and Spanish for hard

and difficult. I think so. And the reason they call it that is because this is a very intractable bacteria. Yeah, and they call it an emerging epidemic, which is kind of scary to say that, but especially in hospitals and nursing homes because it generally affects old folks

and they will, I guess they're so jacked up on antibiotics that their gut that can't kill this thing once it gets in there. Well, yes. Or if they're on antibiotics for something else, like they're in the hospital for something else and they're given antibiotics, the antibiotics go in and just wipe their guts clean

of good bacteria and bad bacteria. So normally we have bacteria that fight, see difficile, but if it's all gone, then yeah, you're in big trouble. The clostridium comes in and finds root and gives you a lot of problems and maybe kills you. Yeah, it is a big deal. Gastrointestinal infections as a whole

are way up these days. The death number doubled from 1999 to 2007. And I think more than 17,000 people a year in the US die from gastrointestinal infections. Yeah, 83% of the gastrointestinal infection fatalities are in patients 65 and older. Yeah. Sadly, the next biggest age group is five and under.

Yeah, the old and the young. And it's a really nasty way to die. Yeah, and two thirds of those are the C. difficile specifically. Right. Which is why they're calling it an epidemic. Yeah. And the way you die from this is you vomit

and diarrhea so much that you become dehydrated. When you become dehydrated, your electrolytes are out of balance. The electrical system that keeps your heart and rhythm malfunctioned so maybe you have a heart attack or you have a stroke or you go into shock and die. Yeah, and even if you're young, it's important to stay hydrated when you're sick like that.

Even if you have the stomach flu or something and you're vomiting up stuff, you've got to try to at least keep some water down. And if you can't, then you should probably go to the hospital and have fluids introduced intravenously. Yeah, not a bad idea. Better safe than sorry. Sure.

I always keep an IV in the trunk of my car. Oh yeah. Just in case I start to dehydrate. So, I think we've made the case that C. difficile is a big problem, right? It is. And the fact that it's, they call it intractable. Like it's just really hard to get rid of.

Even once you get rid of it, there's like a 20% relapse rate. Oh really? Yeah. And when you're on antibiotics, you have a seven to 10 times greater chance of contracting it. And even two months after you finish the course

of antibiotics, you're still three times as likely to contract it as normal. So, you really want to stay away from the antibiotics if at all possible. Yeah, of course, if you need them, take them. We're not advising you to not take things to make you better, but. If you have the sniffles,

if you have like a nasal infection or something like that, a sinus infection and then what they call them. Yeah. You kind of need to tough it out for the greater good of humanity. All right, let's talk about bacteria and what is called the microbiome. That is an ecosystem in your body

of little tiny bacteria, like a hundred trillion bacteria in the human body doing all kinds of good stuff. Yeah, and there's 10 times the amount of foreign bacterial cells in your body than your cells. Yeah. Actual human cells, 10 times more.

And that's a good thing. We've talked about good bacteria and bad bacteria before. And probably the monsters and cytos thing, right? What was that one? Yeah, probably digestive system too. Yeah, that too. But anyway, to recap quickly, we have lots and lots and lots of helpful bacteria

and there's a burgeoning field in medicine. Some might call it a fringe on the fringe right now, but it's called medical ecology and it's kind of neat. It's basically like instead of going to war with your body, they're saying you should be more like a gardener and manage your body like a garden of all these live things inside of you.

Flora, bacterial flora. Yeah, you don't want to kill these things. No, especially not the good ones. And that's what we've been doing with antibiotics. We just send something in there that kills everything. That's right. There's a really cool thing. Have you heard of the human microbiome project?

I have. This is based on examinations of 242. Healthy folks that they've tracked for two years and they're basically sequencing genetic material of bacteria recovered from sites on the body and they've recovered more than five million genes at this point. So they're really like mapping this stuff out

for the next wave of medicine coming through down. Right, like that's gotta be a pretty good first step toward tailoring medicine to avoid killing good stuff. Yeah, and this goes along with your hygiene hypothesis that we just talked about when we recorded yesterday. And the five second rule. Yeah, which is, that's probably out already, right? Yeah.

Okay. But yeah, the hygiene hypothesis is that if you're exposed to bacteria, you learn to, your body, your microbiome begins to include bacteria that can defend against the bad stuff. Yeah. And so if you're exposed to it early on,

you have a greater advantage toward being healthy as an adult, having fewer allergies, that kind of stuff. Have you ever had a friend that had a kid that was a little kooky with the Purell? I've seen it. Like before you touched my baby here, squirt, squirt, squirt all over you? Yeah.

Usually when the baby's very young. Yeah. Although I also have friends that like won't touch babies cause they think they're just dirty. It's hilarious. I was like, are you, I don't hold babies usually cause I'm afraid I'm gonna drop them. Yeah.

And I thought that was the same. Well you just carried that thing off football. That's probably one of these problems. Well, that's how you carry a baby. No. It's not a ruck sack. How's the rhyme go? Face in the armpit, elbow over the body,

hold it real tight and run like hell. I think that is it. I don't think so. I think you cradle and nuzzle. Well anyway, I thought my friend was afraid of dropping the baby and he's like, no, I don't touch them cause they're just like bags of germs. Well, all humans are filthy dirty

and babies just don't appear that way cause they haven't been around long enough to stink really bad. Right. You know, they smell all downy sweet. And you just, from the day you're born, you start smelling worse and worse and worse until the day you die.

They have puppy breath to start. I remember going, man, I remember my father's bathroom experience as being a kid and being like, oh my Lord, like, am I gonna smell that way one day? Yeah, I remember that too. And then that mixed with like shaving cream smell. Yeah.

Man, they should not have liked it. Now I smell that way. I know. You don't, you smell fine. Yeah. 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 back to bacteria. If we were talking about millions and millions and millions of these in our body, our mouth has hundreds of thousands of bacteria species, not just bacteria.

And they are in our teeth and our gums and our tongue. They're in our lungs, which we didn't think we used to have them in our lungs. Apparently there's 2,000 per square centimeter. Yeah. And the gut is where you're going to find some serious action. 25,000 to 30,000 different species of bacteria.

Yeah, and they live in colonies we're starting to learn. Kind of millions? Colonies, where they, I guess bacteria kind of likes to stay with their own ilk. Sure. And if you put it all together, you've got like a whole neighborhood of bacteria. But I'm pretty confident that once we start to figure out

like this colony tends to live in this part of the body and this colony lives here, I'll bet it helps things function more correctly. And if you move colonies around, I'll bet you find dysfunction. Life balance, or not life balance. Well, I think that's one of the reasons why it's still fringy like you just kind of put your finger

on it like there's balance and all that to it. Sort of esoteric. Right, but as you and I know, homeostasis is the goal of everything. That's right. We've talked about it before. So you've got it in your mouth. You've got bacteria in your guts.

And I mean, I think the fact that bacteria have more cells in our bodies than we do kind of supports this idea that Nicholas Gerbis pointed out is that bacteria are probably the most successful life forms on planet Earth. Yeah, what are these guys doing? Oh, well, they are breaking down things into other things. They break down nitrogen in the soil to make it absorbable for plants.

They produce vitamins in your gut. Yeah. Bacteria do. Yeah, how about that? They produce oxygen that we breathe through waste processes. They help maintain your protective qualities of your skin, which is nice. They turn the tables on those plants.

They break down nitrogen in the soil for plants to take up. And then when we eat the plants, they break the plants down into a digestible slurry. Gross. What's it called, bolus and chime? I think chime. Chime and bolus, or is it bolus? Bolus and chime.

They also help prevent and reduce swelling, which is a big deal, because swelling can be one of the danger factors if you're sick or injured. A lot of times, people die simply because they can't get the swelling down in order to perform procedures they need to perform. Yeah. So thank you, bacteria, for helping with that.

And then we were talking about babies, too, Chuck. If you wouldn't hold a baby, then you probably shouldn't shake hands with the baby's mother, because that's where the baby gets most of his or her initial bacteria is from the mother. There's about 600 different species found in breast milk. The sugars in breast milk go directly toward cultivating bacteria in the baby's gut.

There's a change in the vaginal microbiome. Yeah. Where they think that, possibly, the baby's basically coated in this upon entry into the world. Yeah, that's called lactobacillus johnsoni. And that is present when you're pregnant in your vaginal microbiome. Right, and they think that you get coated on the way out.

Yeah, and then all of a sudden, you're like, oh, OK, I've got some defenses here, and these guys are going to be my friends for the rest of my life. Well, the lactobacillus actually helps them digest the milk. So little babies that come out, that's why they say if you're born in a cesarean fashion, then you might not have what you need to digest the milk. You might have problems there.

You might have fewer defenses against IBD, inflammatory bowel disease, and what else? Mercia, staph infection? Well, yeah, that coating on your skin, they think that there's studies that suggest that you're more prone to Mercia infections on the skin. This is still very much under debate. Sure.

Huge debate between cesarean and natural birth stuff. It's like a hornet's nest. Oh, I bet, man. But they think that there is a definite link, they imagine, between irritable bowel syndrome or inflammatory bowel disorder, sorry, which includes like Crohn's disease and all sort of colitis. And it's a big deal, you can lose parts of your intestines,

you can die, you can become malnourished. And there's like a $1.7 billion expense in health care just from inflammatory bowel disorder alone in the US. And they believe that that's linked to some sort of problem with bacteria in the gut. So all of this small talk about bacteria has been leading to the setup of this podcast, which is drinking the poop shake.

Yeah. The fecal transplant. And they call it a transplant, and it makes it sound a little more like a medical procedure than I thought it was. There's no cutting, there's no lasering, there's nothing like that. This has been practiced. Something like this has been around since 4th century China.

I was looking, I couldn't find anything on that, could you? No, I couldn't. We should email the author here. But it has been around in earnest since 1958. Dr. Ben Eisenman from Denver General Hospital pioneered this, I guess it's a procedure, I was going to say technique. And it really didn't come around in earnest until about 2000.

So here's how it works. Your donor gets screened for hepatitis and HIV and other disease-causing germs that you don't want. They take the stool of the donor. Poop. Poop. They blend it with saline or, this is so gross, 4% milk. In a medical blender.

Sure, it's not that cuisine art. I bet it is a cuisine art. It makes sense that you would use milk if you want to propagate moss on something? Sure. A little bit of buttermilk, a little bit of sugar. And just take some moss and throw it in a blender all together, press blend, take it and paint it

on whatever you want. That's right. And it will grow. See our moss podcast for that one. So basically, you have the stool sample, the poop, 4% milk, and a milkshake machine. And you mix it up and you feed it to the patient through, you don't have to drink it.

No, there's different ways to introduce it. But one of them, it does end up in your stomach. And I don't understand how you don't just immediately throw it right back up. All right, so the two methods that Josh will explain are nasogastric and naso-duodenol. Yeah, we never figured that one out in our digestive episode. Remember the duodenum?

Yeah. Duodenum? Duodenum, yeah. Yeah, well, that's a tube that goes through your nose. And if it's nasogastric, it ends in your stomach, which means you have poop going directly into your stomach. And don't think that 4% milk makes it any easier to take. Through your nose, through your throat, into your stomach.

Or the naso-duodenum goes through your nose, into your stomach, and then into your intestine. So it bypasses your stomach. Oh, OK. And it goes directly to where you want it, the intestines. Wow. When that, you can also do an enema that's designed to stay in, rather than flush back out.

Oh, an enema. Yeah, what do you think I said? I don't know. I just, they should call the other ones outamas, I guess. Or a colonoscope. Not a kaleidoscope. Right. Although that would work if you turned it around

and I guess broke all the glass out ahead of time. Is this just be like a funnel then? That's true. But the point is, is you have someone else's poop, a healthier person's poop in your stomach. And they expect that about 40% to 60% of the living bacteria found in that poop is going to stick around in your intestines. What you're doing, the whole point of a fecal transplant

is to repopulate your gut flora, so that your immune system can get back in order. This is the best way they thought about to do it. Yeah, they have another cocktail that they're working on, which is just a bunch of bacteria that I guess you could take as a pill. Right. But man, this works.

Sure. Yeah, it seems to. One of the stats we have here is that people who have undergone this, and it's still, well, we'll get to how often it's practiced here in a sec, but one study found that long-term follow-up 77 fecal transplant patients reported a 91% cure rate after just one of these.

And 98%, if you married that with additional probiotics and antibiotics or an additional poop shake. Right, for C. difficile. Yeah, that's 91% to 98%. That's awesome. I don't think that there's anything that has that kind of success rate. Maybe aspirin.

Maybe so. But yeah, it's definitely been shown to work. And it is fringe. But you can still get it done in hospitals. That's where you want to do it. Yeah, you don't want to do this at home. This is not, in fact, a couple of the best sentences in this article or in this section.

First of all, the preparation. You prepare like you would for a colonoscopy, but as our, who read this again? Nicholas Gerbis. Gerbis put it this way. We'll call him Nicky G. Nicky G says, the patient prepares for the procedure via the traditional take-no-prisoners

to date with the thunderbucket ritual used by colonoscopy patients. Yeah, he went from like science writer, science writer, science writer. To mad magazine. Yeah. And then he also says, this is not a great DIY project because stool is a level two biohazard.

Number two, if you don't test the samples for disease, you could end up in pain. And then third, remind us never to drink a frozen margarita at your house. He just went funny for one paragraph and then right back to the business. Right, well, he says that you want to screen the stool that you're putting into the patient.

Oh, yeah. And insurance doesn't cover this. Not yet. No, but they think it will as early as this year, early this year, soon. Early 2013. But even still, it's not very cost prohibitive. It's about $1,000.

I saw there's a hospital in Madison, Wisconsin that does it for $1,300. That's pretty cheap. It's not bad. And most of that cost is for screening the stool for disease. I thought it'd been the milk. No. Or, yeah, or pressing the blend button, right?

Or holding your breath. All the nose clips. So one of the interesting things here moving forward is how this is going to be, like you said, affect insurance. And how it's going to be classified if and when it becomes super legit. Because what is on the horizon is that the FDA

has declared feces a drug in this case, because it's being used as a drug in a way. And it's already a class II biohazard. Right. So now it's a class II biohazard drug according to FDA, which means, which is good, because that means it's on the way to becoming investigational status. Right.

Do you remember with the dog show episode, where we were talking about how there's the other breed? I can't remember what it was called, but it was like a breed that didn't fit in anything else. Miscellaneous, maybe? Yeah. And that's how the AKC begins to recognize a breed. Like at first place, is it in this miscellaneous thing?

Oh, sure, sure. I get the impression that this is the same process. The FDA is saying, like, that's a drug. And by doing so, we're halting all of this stuff. You can't just do it any longer really nearly. Like, no, there's a law attached to it. But we're also classifying it as something that we officially recognize, that you can now

apply for funding to study and say, the FDA recognizes, this is a drug. We want to understand it better, so give us some money. So interesting, though. How are they going to regulate? Like, this is a drug that is poop. How are they going to regulate that as far as? I mean, because we should point out

that most of the time, the donor is a family member. Family? Or um. But it doesn't have to be, or even a blood match. But I think because you share the same environment, you're probably likelier to have a similar gut for it. I think it probably has to do with it just being so gross, too, don't you think?

Maybe. That you don't want to just take some random person's poop and drink it? See, the thing is, is I'd almost rather have a stranger's poop. Because, like, what if, you know, what if I were doing this and, like, the donor is, like, just staring at you? Like, poop is going in your stomach right now.

As a random stranger, you can't do that. Let's talk about surgical theater. Yeah, it's going to be really interesting how they move forward with this. But like we said, huge results. And according to the CDC, C. difficile kills 14,000 people annually. So it's a big problem.

And they said can help with metabolic syndrome? Maybe. Yeah, so metabolic syndrome is a collection of risk factors, like insulin resistance, having a lot of weight around the middle. And basically, it adds up to a higher risk for type 2 diabetes, coronary artery disease. Yeah, stroke.

Yeah, stroke. And they've found that a poop transplant can actually reverse the course of this disorder. Yeah, they found this in mice, right? Yeah, they think that what's going on is that it improves your insulin sensitivity, reduces triglyceride levels, and they think that it has to do with the way that you metabolize sugars.

And they also found in rats that if you take the poop from a lean rat and transfer it to an obese rat, the obese rat loses weight, no other interventions whatsoever, all just from a poop transplant. And again, they think it has to do with the way that the bacterial colonies help us digest food, help us absorb nutrients. So who knows, like poop transplants

could be the weight loss wave of the future. Well, they definitely know that the bacteria in a skinny person's gut is different than an obese person's gut in humans. So there could be something to do that. And we're just now beginning to wrap our heads around the idea that the gut, there's something there. There's this thing called the enteric nervous system. And it's basically your lower brain,

and it's located in your intestines. Your intestines have a sheath of neurons, but 100 million neurons, which is as many neurons as in the heads of 105 bees, by the way. But that's more than your parasympathetic nervous system has. And the vagus nerve, do you remember where we were talking about orgasms, and women can still, women who are paralyzed can still have orgasms

because the vagus nerve goes around the spinal column directly from the pubic area of the gut to the brain. Well, they found that 90% of transmissions in the vagus nerve go from the gut to the brain rather than vice versa. They're also figuring out that neurotransmitters, a lot of them, are produced in the gut. Like 95% of all of our serotonin is found in our gut. Right.

So there's definitely something going on. They're like, well, yeah, this second brain developed to carry out digestion and all this stuff, independent of the brain, so the brain can do other stuff. But scientists are also saying like, what we're looking at is way too complex to just be dealing with digestion. So what else is there?

Now they're starting to figure out like, oh, there's neurotransmitters. There's a lot of smarts in this gut brain, and they're linking it to things like Parkinson's. It's been linked to autism spectrum disorder. They're starting to figure out like, we need to pay more attention to what's going on with these microbes in this gut,

because there's definitely something here. I feel like this medical ecology thing, it could be a big revolution in science. I agree. I think they're on to something for sure. So I'm sure it'll get more proper funding as it gets more legit, and FDA will have a lot to do with that. I have a feeling this is going to become too legit to quit

in very short order. Poop shake's all around. 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 nonstop 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, 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. Uh, you got anything else? No, sir. Do you want to say fecal transplant one more time? Fecal transplant? If you want to learn more about fecal transplants,

you can type those words into TheSearchBarreHustleForce.com. And it's time now for listenin' mail. Josh, I'm going to call this, uh, condoms in the river. Oh man, I know who this one, this one's mind blowing. Did you read this one? Yeah. Guy's been an Abbot listener for some time. I came aboard around Aphrodisiacs,

got booked and listened to the entire catalog. Josh, you requested any info to make sense about the ubiquity of condoms on New York City streets. While I can't shed light on how they got there, I can share with you some first hand experience on what happens to them from that point. I'm a sailboat captain for a sail training and charter company on the Hudson River.

And I learned very quickly after starting to work here that you don't touch the river water right after it rains. This is because the New York City sewage system is so old that the rainwater from storm drains and raw sewage are mixed together and treated by one system. When we get a lot of rain, that system is overwhelmed and the overflow is released, untreated, into the surrounding bodies of water,

including the Hudson River. Now, after a long rain, you'd expect to find what I suppose you'd call a representative sample of condoms among the floating garbage. But I'm still trying to figure out why condoms represent a grossly disproportionate percentage of the overall floating trash. What should be Doritos Bag Condom, McDonnell Straw,

Yo Play Light, and Fit Cup Condom is actually condom, condom, condom, Spider-Man action figure underneath the condom, condom, condom, dead rat. The situation is disturbing enough on its own, but I teach a kid's sailing camp during the summer, as well, and the younger kids inevitably ask me what all those white things are,

and I just say, those are Coney Island whitefish. And we had someone else right in that called me Coney Island whitefish, so I guess this is what they're called. Okay, what if he's like, those are French letters? So those are Coney Island whitefish, and then I walk away without further explanation. It's the best way I can think of

to avoid further questions from the kids, and potential lawsuits from parents. Other things I've seen come up from the Hudson River in case you're curious include mating crabs, a sunburned pig, an entire telephone pole, and three dead bodies. That's disturbing. And that is Jonathan, actor, singer, sailor,

and speed-dating host. I know, this guy's quite a renaissance, dude. Yeah, thank you, Jonathan. If you have any awesome, incredible stories, we wanna hear them, whether they pertain to the podcast or not. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com.

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 slipdresses 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.