>> Speaker A: It. >> Speaker B: I just imagine he gets down there and there's just flipping alligator people. Do you know what I'm saying? Like, I don't know if that's people dressed like alligators or people who believe they are alligators or people who are living, like, have started a society based on alligator ways. Um, that sounds like a weird cult, but whatever. Welcome back to privy. Privy is a podcast about bathrooms recorded from my home bathroom.
I'm your host, hunter Hoover, and I love bathrooms. Thank you so much for being here this week with us. It was fun to hear from Nathan last episode, and, uh, if you haven't. >> Speaker A: Checked that out, go check out pooping. >> Speaker B: Sideways with Nate Fry. It's good. You know, something that I realized this week was that because I do the show, people gravitate towards me when they have bathroom talk that they need to discuss. Uh, and that's
fine. I'm actually all good with that. Um, it really mostly just gives me more and more to share here. Uh, if you didn't know, uh, if you follow the show on Facebook, we just started a new Facebook group. >> Speaker A: It's called the privies. >> Speaker B: Uh, and what this is, is it's going to be a little more, uh, user friendly and user oriented. Uh, for those who are listeners of. >> Speaker A: The show, fans of the show, um.
>> Speaker B: Or just trying to see what's going on with me in the world of. >> Speaker A: Bathrooms, uh, go join the Facebook group. >> Speaker B: Share it with friends. Um, just called the privies, and that's where more of the community based things we're going to live. We're still going to have the Facebook page. It'll still have some promotional stuff, but, uh, yeah, go join the privies. That's my top, uh, of the episode. Call, uh, to action there.
Not regrettably, I had a good time. I revisited Applebee's again, um, for the first time in a few months now. Um, and everything was fine. Honestly, things were good. I had my usual wingies, um, and so everything was fine. Uh, the key is to eat just enough. Um, on the show, we've noted, um, that sewers have been around for a long time now. They go way back. And sewers are very much the well that we will continually draw from. Don't draw water. Water from the sewer. You will
get sick. Uh, shout out to you, medieval Europe and medieval everywhere that's going to come up this week. Um, but sewers themselves, as we've noted this, they date as far back as the roman empire. And while sewer systems were rudimentary, they were. I mean, heck, sometimes they were just a channel dug in the side of the road. Um, or a ditch dug to rinse matter through. Matter being human poop. But these air quotes. Sewers existed. Now, you wouldn't look at it and go, man, what a sewer.
That's a pretty neat sewer. During the history of sewers, a lot of material has been used in those times. My favorites being sewers made out of wood. Uh, that's going to get soggy. You don't want soggy wood, you know what I'm saying? And ceramic. And I feel like ceramic. I mean, I'm sure that it was hard, but I feel like ceramic. You're doing a dance where there's going to be a crack. And as we've noted before, anytime you're dealing with human sludge, you do not want a crack. You just don't
want it. I'm assuming that, again, there has to be some level of heft to this ceramic, like, it is a thick bowl, boy. Because, come on. I mean, what are you going to do, put this ceramic pipe in the ground and then put a couple thousand pounds of dirt on top of it and pretend like it's not going to get crushed? Yeah, right. Anyway, uh, we got to move on. I'm stuck on the ceramic
pipes. We've noted frequently here the role disease, namely cholera, has played in the revolutionizing of sewer systems. >> Speaker A: Now, while our attention is often turned. >> Speaker B: Towards Europe for these, uh, mean, America was such a smaller idea in people's brains at this point. A lot of these sewer troubles come out of Europe, but we had it going on here in America at the time as well.
For some time, the method of disposal here in the states was simply to dump your poop out the window onto the street below. Now, imagine being just a kid trying to exist and live their lives playing in the street, and all of a sudden, they just get the worst shower they have ever gotten. As the neighbor dumps the bucket of sludge from their balcony. This, then, once it is in the. >> Speaker A: Street, it would be rinsed down the.
>> Speaker B: Street, or in some cases, and these are some special cases, it would just be left to stink. Like, it'll break down in time. It'll get hard and dissolve and go away. But before it does that, it would stink. Now, the other thing that would sometimes happen would they would dig trenches again alongside the street to help the flow of turds. We have to direct the turds. It's like air traffic control. It's turd traffic control. Now, this is not the world we.
>> Speaker A: Live in, and often at the end. >> Speaker B: Of the show, we try to take time to be thankful, and I just want to take a second to be thankful right here that we don't live in a world where we just go dump our skeet and rinse it down the, down the street. Oh, yeah, that's it right there. A little, uh, uh, orange, vanilla polar seltzer for our afternoon here. But we have a lot to be thankful
for. We don't have to necessarily deal with this in the way that folks who have gone before us have now, that is going to set the stage for where we are going to be this week. And now, I admit it, I have talked about these things in the past, but I need to bring up here as an introduction to sewer systems, specifically sewer systems here in America. In America. America. Uh, the first two sewer systems to be built were reportedly in Chicago and
Brooklyn. For today's purposes, we need to discuss the Brooklyn sewer system. Now, the city at the time, townstead. >> Speaker A: Of Brooklyn, was originally settled as a. >> Speaker B: Small dutch settlement called Briochile in the east river of Long island in the 16 hundreds. New York technically had a sewer since the mid 16 hundreds. This was when they had dug a few of those trenches down the center of Broad street, and it was fed by a number of
gutters throughout the city. Could you imagine this, like, on Broad street in New York, you just had this trench dug right down the middle, and then all these people would dump their waste and wash water down it, and it would flow down the gutter and into this common thing in the middle. I got a note here. Gutters are really good for carrying rain, but they're not so good for carrying solids. Sometimes I have to. At my old house, I haven't had to do it at my new house yet.
>> Speaker A: I have less of a leaf situation to deal with. But at, uh, my old house, I. >> Speaker B: Used to have to get up and just get flipping elbow deep in my gutters. Just really cram my mop in there and just get the nasty leaves out, and you pull them, they stink so bad, and they just clog everything up. >> Speaker A: Gutters are not made for solid. >> Speaker B: You can't tell me that this New York gutter sewer didn't clog up. It
had to have. The other problem here is when it. >> Speaker A: Clogs, that water backs up and eventually. >> Speaker B: Just overflows out the side or goes into places you don't want it to go in New York. The big apple, if you will. >> Speaker A: Um, I hope you will. >> Speaker B: The gutters all flowed with human sludge, and they flowed to a central trough. Now, poop and pee, the two human pea words that come out of our bodies and puke. Hey, there's three.
Um, but this was not the only thing that would have been found in these gutters and in the common trench. We're going to call it the broad street trench, the big broad street trench. Look at the broad street trench on that one. But they dumped their trash in there, too. These are just like the cesspits we. >> Speaker A: Talked about a couple of weeks ago. >> Speaker B: They just threw crap in there. They threw everything in there
and just kind of let it wash down. And the thing is, pigs and animals would also play a huge part of waste management. Like, they had pigs that just were kind of out and about, and they would eat some of this refuse that was left behind. They played their own role in the waste management process. You look out your window, it's a brisk, stinky Brooklyn morning, and you just see the neighborhood swine wallowing in your muck, m eating your discarded socks. It's the dream.
And this procedure, this act of dumping. >> Speaker A: And rinsing it down and letting the. >> Speaker B: Neighborhood livestock help deal with it, this lasted for 200 years. 200 years. That's too long. That's too long to be using this gutter sewer system. Surely these things got clogged up at some point in that time. And I'm sure that there were folks who came to unclog these when the times got tough. But then our old time
cholera friend came knocking. The street stunk, especially broad street. It was the end of the 18. >> Speaker A: Hundreds that Brooklyn was finally consolidated into. >> Speaker B: Be a part of New York City. And I just want to note here, I got to say, could you imagine the town meeting where they're like, hey, we need to dig a big crap trench. Now we're going to draw straws to figure out which street is going to have the big, stinky trench running through
it. And they start yanking straws and broad street straws pulled, and it's like, that's where you live. Uh, it's like pulling the short straw. We need to change the term pulling the short straw to living on Broad street. Oh, man, he's having some rough luck. Yeah, well, he's living on Broad street, you know what I'm saying? The population boomed, and with it, as we noted disease, and as they started. >> Speaker A: To find that cholera and the poor.
>> Speaker B: Disposal of human waste had a lot to do with that disease, America made the switch to modern sewage systems. And as is noted, brooklyn was one of the first the Brooklyn sewer started reconstruction in 1849 after a terrible cholera outbreak in the city. They had a severe outbreak in 1830 and in 1840, and things were bad. And they said, you know what? It's time to do something. In New York at the time, if you lived past the age of
21, you beat the ODs. Most people died by the age of 21, if not 30. Child mortality was 40%. And while not all of this illness and death can be directly tied to cholera, a nonzero amount of it is like, there is a portion of it that is because of cholera. But Brooklyn paved the way for the modern sewer system in America. They commissioned a man named Julius Walker Adams. He was president John Quincy Adams. >> Speaker A: He's one of those presidents that nobody knows anything about.
>> Speaker B: Um, he was his cousin, and he was commissioned with designing the first large scale sewer system in America for none other than Brooklyn, New York. He took detailed notes of his work. >> Speaker A: And these were later used in textbooks. >> Speaker B: And training for future plumbers, and likely used as a helpful template for building and constructing large scale
sewer systems. Now, these plumbers that had to kind of essentially take on the job of helping repair and build and fix these. >> Speaker A: Sewers, they were paid not a lot. >> Speaker B: It was a lot, probably at the time, but the wage for plumbers around 1850 was about three to $4 per day, with an average plumber making $20 to $25 a week. Plumbers in the area and elsewhere in the United States began to call themselves and be called sanitarians. Now,
these sanitarians, it didn't stick. I'll go ahead and bury the lead here. The term sanitarian did not stick around, and can you blame him? Uh, but eventually, the plumbers went on strike, and there were many plumbers unions forming at this time, and the plumbers from Brooklyn played a huge role in settling these union related concerns. And speaking of Brooklyn, I have digressed. >> Speaker A: We got to get back to Brooklyn.
>> Speaker B: Five years after the work began on the Brooklyn sewer, they had over 70 miles of pipelines. Now fast forward to the turn of the century. Brooklyn, that is, the 19 hundreds, and New York as a whole, boasted sewage services in every home, including the tenement housing common at the time, due to. >> Speaker A: The tenement act of 19, one that. >> Speaker B: Said every dwelling place had to have at least one bathroom. In short, the times were a change in.
But all that pipe needs someone to work on it, if you know what I'm saying. Like, if you get too much pipe, you're really going to have to work on it. Early jobs were completed by plumbers and hydraulic engineers. So much work sprung up, in fact. >> Speaker A: That a union formed for plumbers and. >> Speaker B: Other journeymen called the Journeymen and Plumbers
Society. They set up rules saying that only licensed plumbers could practice in the city in order to tap into the city's water or sewer lines for their work. However, you still did not need a license for working inside the home. Nowadays, the sewers of New York have over 6600 miles of pipes and pipelines, and there are almost 1.3 million gallons of water treated daily in the water treatment facilities. That's a lot of pipe. There's been a lot of myths about these large pipes, these big round
pipes. The pipes of Brooklyn and New York have said to be home to monsters and mad men who live there. Claims of alligator people and mole men. And if you want to see the. >> Speaker A: Result of these myths, uh, go check. >> Speaker B: Out our teenage mutant ninja reptile friends. Most assuredly, countless plumbers have treated and cared for the sewers of Brooklyn over the years. You know what? I would love to hear the reports from the plumbers who
go down. Most of these plumbers are working topside, but they do have big water treatment plumber like plumbing down below. That's like the water treatment stuff that you see in the movies, the big pipes. And I just imagine one of these guys going down there and I don't know what happens. I'm not in the hole with him, but I just imagine he gets down there and there's just flipping
alligator people. Do you know what I'm saying? I don't know if that's people dressed like alligators or people who believe they are alligators or people who are living like, have started a society based on alligator ways. Um, that sounds like a weird cult, but whatever. But there's been countless plumbers who have gone down and cared for and treated the sewers of Brooklyn over the
years. But this week, I want to bring attention to a couple of these plumbers, because they really changed the face of something for us. Sometime around the late 1970s, two brothers were born to a young family in Brooklyn, New York. They were raised in the city, saw the formation of New Brooklyn. The big high rises kind of continued. >> Speaker A: To spread far and wide, and Brooklyn. >> Speaker B: Really took on the name and the feel for what it is today.
It came into its own during their childhood. After high school, these two brothers looked. >> Speaker A: To the trades for their futures, but. >> Speaker B: They were having little to no luck. Um, they kind of fell on hard times multiple times in a row. And honestly, their families were not the most supportive of them. Um, because being a plumber at the time. Brooklyn has tons of plumbers because the city of Brooklyn, the sewers, are literally famous.
And so, with little to no luck, they pushed on and received their plumbing licenses and started a business together. Now, as I noted, Brooklyn was a pretty competitive space at the time. Uh, and I believe it still is today. Brooklyn, after all, is kind of the plumbing capital of the United States. But one day, these brothers, they went down into a sewer, uh, and they found a girl, and they saved her. And they got super famous for saving this girl. And we know them as, uh, Super Mario, bro. Let's
go. Let's go. Mario. Mario and Luigi Mario are probably Brooklyn's most famous plumbers. And you might be thinking, first of all, what in the flipping heck just happened to my ears? And you might be like, was this whole thing that was the last 20 minutes of my life just a big ruse for Hunter to talk about the Super Mario Bros. Movie? Maybe. But admit it, Brooklyn sewer history was kind of interesting, and Mario and Luigi are a huge part of it.
This week on privy, we're going to talk about our favorite little red plumber, Mario. In 1982 arcade sequel, Donkey Kong Jr. Uh, in Donkey Kong Jr. Was the. >> Speaker A: First time, uh, Mario was given his name. >> Speaker B: We're going to beat the brief history of Mario as if it hasn't been beat dead. >> Speaker A: Um, and he was named Mario by Mr. Minoru.
>> Speaker B: Arakawa butchered that, and he was the president of Nintendo, and he named Mario after the owner of Nintendo's first warehouse, Mario Segali. In 1983, the arcade game Mario Bros. Was the first game to feature Mario as the title character. And the game also featured the first appearance of Mario's brother, Luigi Mario. Two years later, in 1985, Nintendo released the game Super Mario Bros. Super Mario Bros. Let's go. Which featured Mario and his brother Luigi.
Characters moved through pipes nice in the mushroom kingdom to collect coins and secret items in their quest to save Princess Toadstool. >> Speaker A: Bad princess name from Mario's arch enemy, Bowser. >> Speaker B: Think of him as the alligator person in the sewers I mentioned before. Now in part to this underground setting, uh, Shigiro Miyamoto, who is later the guy, ah, selected a plumber as the ideal profession for the hero of this
video game. The character design was an intentional choice for reasons, because they wanted a design that created a distinctive look that was unique and instantly recognizable with the few pixels that they had to work with at the technology at the time. He wanted the end result to be versatile, an avatar that could stand beyond a single game, serve as a popular character and was kind of relatable to the everyman. Like, he's not too fancy.
He wears blue overalls. He has brown chuckaboos and a red hat. He designed Mario to be someone who might live near you, perhaps in the apartment along the way in Brooklyn. Enter the red cap, blue overall, white gloved, mustachioed Mario the Plumber, who would go on to be the official mascot of the Nintendo company and the most famous fictional plumber ever. And I gotta say, I've seen that new movie, and what else do I need to say except go see it?
If you have ever played anything Mario ever, I'm confident you'll like it. Uh, I should note here they made a plumbing website, like a website for the Super Mario Bros. Plumbing company as a bit of a marketing strategy for the movie. So I actually did decide to interact there for a bit. Now I'm going to read my texts to the Mario Bros. Because they have a feature on their app or on their website, um, where you can interact with them. I don't know, uh, but it gives you
an option to text them. So I did. So I texted them, I said hi. And they responded, thanks for your interest in the super Mario Bros. Plumbing. We're a family owned and operated business providing white glove plumbing services to Brooklyn shout out and queens. You can click the link, uh, to sign up to get exclusive. Okay, whatever. I did that. >> Speaker A: Great. >> Speaker B: We're excited to have you as a customer. We've got your number, Sam.
And then it's all the message and data rates, whatever. Nobody, uh, cares. Um, and then they said, okey dokie. If you're experiencing a plumbing. So I said, hey, I have a plumbing emergency. I need help. Like, I clicked that button on their thing. It says, okie dokie. If you're experiencing a plumbing emergency, text on the double and we'll get right back to you. I did text on the double. Now, you may know I'm feigning my plumbing emergency. At this point, there is no real plumbing
emergency. You can all rest assured, my plumbing is just fine. My home plumbing, my personal interior plumbing is always sitting at kind of a liquid mess, but that's beside the point. But I texted on the double anyway, feigning this distress, and they say, thanks for the text. We're a little backed up at the moment, trying to get one up on our competition. >> Speaker A: We will get back to you as. >> Speaker B: Soon as we can. Please keep our business card handy.
And it's a link to their community business. It's. It's not a real thing, but it's. >> Speaker A: A fun little marketing know. He lets you go play around and. >> Speaker B: Get to know Mario and Luigi, and, um, it's fun. The movie was fun. Uh, what more can you know? A well made animated Mario movie. It's good stuff, and I'm willing to be wrong here, but I'm hopeful we're getting more than just super Mario two. Like, I'm really hoping we get a Nintendo
universe of movies. I would personally love a well made Zelda movie or maybe a darker Metroid prime movie. Those are the two that I'm looking at. I would even go for, like, a star Fox, I think would be pretty cool. Nintendo, if you're listening, which you're, you know, let's go. Um, that's just me. To summarize, Brooklyn has a rich history related to plumbing, and the Mario brothers have become a cultural touchstone of fiction related to these sewers. And their movie is pretty good.
I'm, uh, certainly thankful for all of know, I'm thankful for Mario, and especially just the moments. Especially, like, when you're playing Mario Kart, there's sometimes these moments where a game is so perfect, where you have these moments that live in your brain. I remember we were playing Mario Kart double dash on the GameCube. Oh, man. And we were just, like, posted up at our cabin, and I was probably my cousins and I, or some friends, and I. And I just remember playing Mario
Kart double dash and hitting people blue shells. And just, like, the thrill of going from fifth place to first place because you just roach a bunch of guys right in front of you. It's the best. And I am certainly thankful for those experiences as we close. First of all, I want to say, uh, so looking at some analytics for the show here, I want to say this. Whoever is listening to this, from Norway, France, Egypt, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, I want to say thank you for
listening. I see you. Uh, and it is an honor to have someone that is not from here listening. Now, I also want to say thank you for all this, folks, stateside and up to our frosty, forbidden canadian north listening. >> Speaker A: Thank you, guys. >> Speaker B: I'm honored to have anyone listening to this nonsense. It's always fun to see the breakdown of the audience on the map. You guys rock. Uh, leave us an email
privycast@gmail.com. If you have any feedback, concerns, questions, stories, uh, if you're bold enough, you have weird bathroom pictures. Feel free to post those on the privies page. >> Speaker A: We'd love to see those there. >> Speaker B: Uh, and feel free to just communicate with one another. >> Speaker A: We'd love to get things popping off over there. >> Speaker B: Follow us on social media. >> Speaker A: We're at Privycast on all social media.
>> Speaker B: Uh, just trying to just. Yeah, keep it going. Feel, uh, free to comment. Feel free to just interact as often as you can. Share the show. Leave us a rating, a review. If you have not leave us a rating, a review. The five star option is our preferred. You, um, could start leaving that review right now, and you would finish it before I am done flushing my toilet here in less than a minute or two. Uh, believe us, a rating and review, the five star
options are preferred. Uh, and as we approach the end of the month of April here, we want to just get those ratings in so we can donate another round of, uh, donations to the wounded warriors project. A dollar for every review left. $2 for the written reviews of iTunes. >> Speaker A: Are left to the Wounded warriors project. >> Speaker B: Reminding us that we need to keep pooping in the free world. But the free world was not always free.
We'd like to thank Kevin McLeod for the use of his music this week. Thank you, Kevin. This has been another episode of Privy. Thank you so much for joining us. Wash your butthole. Keep pooping in the free world. And as always, don't forget to flush.