>> Speaker A: But again, he paid that much for a piece of cardboard to the onlooker. So value is. Is truly in the eye of the beholder. And in the case of fertilizer, the value of poop truly was in the eye of the beholder because people were buying it. 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. Welcome back, everyone. Thank, uh, you all for being here. It's that time of year. Um, my nose is
beginning to get just a bit more itchy. Uh, as the spring season kicks, there's just pollen. Um, and I think there's also some mold allergy that goes on here. I've shared before, we're in the Pacific Northwest, specifically here in the Willamete valley, and, um, there just seems to be. It's just a moldy environment. Things are just generally wet. About a month and a half ago, I would argue about six weeks ago, uh, our friend plump Satami Phil told us that we were going to get an
early spring. And I'm here to say, though, we're a big fan of plumps at think. I think I want my money's back, truly. Uh, yeah, because, my dude, it's just a bit. I don't know, it's been too rainy and cold for it to not still be considered. It is still winter, and here we are. But in just a couple. By the time this episode comes out, you either will have already welcomed in spring, or we are just but weeks away from spring. Uh, and during spring, everybody's kind of got
spring fever. They've been boarded up, they've been closed off. The rabbits are starting to rabbit real hard in those spring sunshine rays. But the other thing that happens as spring rolls around, as I shared, there is an allergy concern, uh, in the air, it is upon us. And one of the things that is coupled with that allergy concern is it's time to begin doing lawn and yard work, planting gardens, getting things ready. Uh, tis the season, if you will.
And for many, while we might think of gardens as the thing by which gets overtaken by mint and sometimes strawberries, in our case, um, for many, it is a time of year where there is a very specific bathroom related component that begins to come into play. Fertilizer. Manure, if you will. Fertilizer is an amazing thing. We're going to learn a lot about fertilizer this week. Kids, gather round. Uh, it's kind of the brown gold of gardening, and today it seems pretty intuitive, like,
you poop. Animals poop. And you have to use the poop for something, right? Waste not, want not that type thing. But how did we get to the point where we are using this poop to the degree in which we use it? Uh, and what was the journey by which we got to the point that we are at? In today's modern fertilizing world, the history of fertilizer is rich and full of nutrients.
The Egyptians, Romans, and Babylonians, and really, these early germanic groups are all recorded as using minerals and or manure. Manure to enhance the productivity of their farms. Now, I must say, the cows eat the grass. The cows poop onto the grass. The grass uses the life energy of the poop to grow and be better. And here we are. The nature of fertilizer seems pretty straightforward. And truly, in many ways, it is. But as we're going to see, there's a lot more going on.
They were doing much more than just animal fertilizer. Like, we get it. When the animals poop, we got to do something with it. And while that is plain and day often, like, literally being in the streets, I mean, these animals, they would walk through the streets. They would be in the common places where people are at. And so it's not uncommon to have that skeet right at home. It's something else, and it's something that. I don't know. It was
plain as day. I mean, you could be walking around, and the livestock are just going to plop a big, sloppy pile right in the middle of the walkway. Guess what? So did the people. I mean, the people were pooping there, too. And so it began to be a, uh, matter of, we have got to do something with all of these leavings. Ancient people used manure as fertilizer, and for a long time, the term manure meant all
poops indiscriminately. Human, bovine, swine, beast of any sort or otherwise, because human people would shovel all the poop in the street or pots into places outside of the camp or into fields where it would be repurposed as skeet. Now, so far, as long as things have been pooping, which I think has been as long as things have been eating, and as long as people have been planting crops, there seems to have been fertilizer. It's kind of always existed alongside, uh, of an agricultural
community. In previous episodes, we've discussed ancient sewage systems and how people have developed sewage systems to help deal with, particularly the human waste that gathers and is produced by people. And, um, in time, humans figured out how to deal with their waste, they begin to ask questions. How can we still use this for agricultural purposes? Because what the sewage system does. Before the sewage system, the human poop was mixed
right in with the animal skeet. And after sewage, you began to have a separation, a delineation, if you will, between what we would call nowadays classic manure, classic animal skeet, and human skeet, which is removed from the equation via this new sewage system. And so there began to be questions. This brown gold, if you will, that makes our plants very nice and good. It is now being removed via this sewage technology. How do we go about ensuring that we can
still use it? They began to ask questions, how do we still get it into our plants? And there have been a number of answers. The ancient Egyptians, um, either through sewage trough technology or the use of moving the poo, which, if I'm not mistaken, is by hand or by cart. Um, they would divert and dump the human waste into rivers, often the Nile. Uh, and this would add to the fertilization power of the soil in that area.
The greek people who had invented even more complex sewer systems, uh, had methods by which they would divert human, uh, waste into specific bodies of water. The biggest example of this is in the region of Attica, which most prominently contains ancient Athens. They collected much of the human waste in a large reservoir and diverted it into the to. I hope I got that right, Cephesus river, which would then allow them to use it as fertilizer in that region.
Because all Rome ever did was really copy Greece, even in their deities. I mean, for goodness sakes, the stuff that they just slapped a new label on, like, that's a lot of what Rome did. Sorry, Rome. Um, and, guys, you can thank me. You've now thought of the roman empire for today, but their methods of repurposing night soil were similar. And this also is good time. That is what they called this
stuff. They called human poop, used to be repurposed in the morning night soil, seemingly because it was so widely repurposed as part of the soil. And literally, it is the soil you produce during the nighttime. Ancient Japan relied heavily on human feces for fertilizer. It's so valuable that just as ancient Rome paid a high price for urine, we talked about that in our history of urine episode. Go check it out. Uh, urine for a history lesson, I think, is what it's called.
Um, merchants in ancient Japan would sell their poop and other people's poop, more on that in just a second, to farmers to use as fertilizer now, what's wild here? This is the peach on top of the pie right here. It was believed by people at this time that the turds of the rich were sold for more money than the turds of the lowly. Hats off to you, turds of the lowly. You might be worth something, but even your turds are worth less than the rich. Quote unquote rich people.
But this was because it was believed in some cultures, Japan being one, ah, a culture that believes in reincarnation and coming back, and two, that those who come back in a higher status in life may be closer to the divine, uh, goal, that the rich were blessed by the gods or whatever deity they served. In many instances, it was believed then that their poop was literally richer. Get it in nature.
Now, what's interesting is while they were rich, because there was gold in their pockets, it was believed their poop was rich because, well, maybe something was in their poop. A less spiritual argument for this, and one that I can kind of begin to see and we're going to look at, was that the rich, because of their wealth and status, could afford a much healthier diet, and as such, produced a much healthier
pile more on those healthier piles. Later in the episode, ancient south american cultures also used human poop to fertilize. The aztec people were known for their chinampas, islands of mud and poop, where the real good crops grew. And it was said that they could harvest crops, like seven times a year off of these poo islands. Medieval Europe spread poop all over the place as fertilizer, and this led to the job of gong
farmers. But as we said, as sewage systems and the use of sewage systems, specifically in areas where there was large gatherings and larger concentration of people, the repurposing of the poop into usable material took more and more time and energy to make it
a usable product. One thing was for sure, the sewage and sanitation systems were expensive to maintain, they were costly to upkeep, and they really didn't generate as much from what they were spending in that most of the time, the end result of what it generated as usable product was nothing. Zero. So you have this brown gold fertilizer, human poop, and other excrement that is in high demand. It's a resource that is in need to make
better crops. And whenever you have a resource that is in need and people willing to buy it or get it in some way, there seems to be the potential for conflict over that resource. When we treat poop like it's gold. People are going to fight over it like it is gold today. There are wars fought over oil, natural gas, and other deposits, as if they are precious and needed, and that they are a necessity, because in many ways, they truly kind of are.
Like, we really take our use of oil and other natural components for granted. I just get in my car and I drive to get something. Uh, you don't even think of it half the time, but you rely on these things. But before cars were running on dead dinosaur deposits, farms were leeching the goodies from human and animal poop. As the need for more and more of this fecal matter fertilizer grew, countries began exporting and in some cases, importing poop to make up for their lack of soil and nutrient rich
soil. And as this began to be the case, it drove the value of the poop higher and higher. As people begin to use the turds more frequently to make the soil better, it makes the cost of the poop go up, and the desire to which people want it go up. This is basic economics. I always talk to people whenever I want to try to convey economics and what makes something valuable. I always use the example of Pokemon cards.
To the average onlooker, Pokemon cards are but pieces of cardboard, and they're right, but they're shiny, and some of them have really cool things on them. Uh, but too many. Like, you would look at a person that pays $5 for ten little pieces of cardboard, and you would say, uh, you're insane. That's crazy. But to the person to which the cards are valuable, they know that there are some cards that they could open up and it could be worth, quote
unquote, worth more than $5. And that worth is based on, one, the rarity of the card. Two, the agreement within the community that that card is of value based on rarity and often usability. And three, the number of the card made, thus making it more or less difficult to get, and as a result, more or less valuable. An example outside
of Pokemon, but still inside trading cards is magic. The gathering just made, uh, the one ring to rule them all card and post Malone paid, like, $4 million for it or something crazy, because there is but one, it's very rare, and it's very good. Um, but again, he paid that much for a piece of cardboard to the onlooker. So value is truly in the eye of the beholder. And in the case of fertilizer, the value of poop truly was in the eye of the beholder because people were buying it. Countries
began to export and import. And as a result, as is often the case with these type of resources, people began to fight over it. They got to fight each other over turds. It's wild. Now, for our purposes today, we are but covering the basics of fertilizer and looking maybe a bit to the current developments and possible futures of it. And, uh, we will return to some of these conflicts in later episodes. Follow along if you are ready to join us
on this bathroom journey at privycast. And right now, mid episode, I just want to take a minute as you listen to me here, mid episode, drop in. Hi, it's me, hunter. Um, it's time to get a slurp of this polar seltzer. There, I said it for the episode. If you. As you continue to listen right now in your podcatcher, if your podcatcher allows you to leave ratings and reviews, go ahead and give the show a five star rating. We'd love the
five star rating. We give us the one. And for every rating and review, we are going to donate a dollar to the wounded warriors project and living water international. Um, that helps people find the show, and it is our way of doing something in behalf of saying thank you for leaving a, uh, rating and review. Apple podcasts, Spotify, and I think the podbean app will let you, like favorite or whatever. Um, please do that. We would love to hear from you, and it would mean a lot if
you did that. But conflicts and struggles over poop were on the rise as the need for turds increased with the use of fertilizer. Conflicts include struggles in Japan over who is able to use fertilizer buildups, literally arguing over who is going to use crap. The most prominent of these, however, was in South America, in the Andes, that is the Andes mountain region. They used guano for the betterment of their crops for at least 1500 years.
And after Europeans found the benefit of using poop as fertilizer, those european countries started importing it in the 18 hundreds for their increasing demand due to the industrial revolution. Now, again, you don't always think of Shaz being listed on a country's imports and exports list, but alas, it was. It begs the question, why not just have the Shaz producing creatures produce the skeet in your own country so you don't have to transport it? Part of that is the
climate. Um, and the other part is the degree to which it is nutrient rich in other parts of the world in this century, quote, guano was taken in large quantities from Peru and Chile, and later also from Namibia and other areas to Europe and the United States. This is one of the driving forces. This demand on the guano and turd deposits in South America and these central american countries were the forces for the war of the Pacific between Peru, Chile and Bolivia.
This war has also been known as the nitrate war, a reference to the, uh, nitrates that are in fertilizers or the salt Peter war. It's people in conflict over Fertilizer and who has claims. And we are going to talk about this war one day, um, but not today. Stay tuned, stay tuned. But others are willing to pay for it and some are willing to fight to control it. It is a precedent for people treating and viewing poop and fertilizer as if it is gold, brown gold, if you will.
And as it was stated, in some cases we are even differentiating between good poop of the rich and in some parts of the world with the bad poop of the lowly in different parts
of the world. Now, I'm sure out there, I haven't been able to find this as of yet, but I'm confident that if there are people willing to pay more money for quote unquote better poop that came out of the butthole of a rich person, then there has to have been someone flapping their chaz in a pot, slapping the emperor's new product label on it and selling it for quadruple the price. Come get your fresh laid Emperor Chaz. It's fresh. He did have corn last night. Come and get it.
Uh, have you ever heard of essential oils? Hoove rant here in the middle of the episode. Essential oils. Now, I'm not saying essential oils don't do anything. I'm not saying that. Okay, so all the essential oils moms, um, I'm, um, yet to find a real big essential oils dad. If you're listening to this and you either know or are an essential oils dad, email me, privycast@gmail.com, I don't believe you exist, but I believe they do something. Okay? So calm down,
simmer down. But I think we are seeing a real selling the prince's soil thing going on here. The way you know is if a person can't really tell you how it helps or how it's different, like, how is the commoner's turd different from the prince's? Other than I said, I got it out of the prince's house. How is turmeric supposed to help me? It reduces inflammation, maybe. I don't get it. How do we know? How do we know the emperor's new soil was really his. Is someone out here
testing it? Does the king's skeet smell different than peasant skeet? Like, that seems like a perfect way to set up a real sweet scam. Ah. Uh, and, um, uh, maybe that's what's going on with essential oils. I don't know. It's hard to tell. But the notion that poop is kind of like gold, even human, may actually have some science to it. Fertilizer or poop, as brown gold may be. On a study presented by the American Chemical Society, a thing that I suppose
exists. Again, I have no proof this could be a made up institution. I have no idea. I feel like there's an institution for everything. If you just say the blank blank society or the blank blank association or the blank blank conglomerate, it probably exists. But this society presented research back in 2015 showing that there was gold, silver, and other valuable metals, precious metals, found in what they call biosolids.
It's what the ancients called night soil, and it's what we here on privy like to call flipping poop. You know what I'm saying? Why do we got to have all biosolids? Uh, it's poop. The study was led by US Geological survey and was designed to set out to figure out better ways to extract, quote unquote, foreign particles from poop. Now, these foreign particles, it was always known that they existed because they had studied poop. Science is all about
studying some poop, by the way. And you might ask yourself, well, why are they so worried about getting these little bits, pieces of extras, out of the poop, like? Well, it turns out, as folks back in the day thought maybe the king's skeet actually was better. They were onto something the whole time. The food we eat, if you didn't know, it, gets processed by our tum tums and then expelled, usually through our boring holio, wet
through our peepee hole. And when do you have a rumbly tumbly goes reverso through the pie hole? That's science. There's three options, three ways out. What goes in must come out. And it turns out, sometimes what goes in is not food. They have found that some hygiene products, shampoos, and some processed food items have trace minerals in them that we cannot digest. Now, they're not going to hurt you unless you ask the red food diautism people.
These metals, they're fine, but some of these include gold, silver, copper, and other precious metals. Uh, it's one of those. Good night. We are kind of like the catalytic converters of the human. Our poop is to us as a catalytic converter is to our church bus, because people are willing to root around in my poop scoot to figure
out where the precious metals are. And some nair duel in our community has defoe cut off the catalytic converter at least three times in the last year and a half to get the precious metals inside our poop. Poop is the catalytic converter. Um, yeah. But at waste treatment plants, they have begun to treat the poop to remove these metals and precious metals, thus making the poop more poopy and better. For plant growing. Fertilizer, science has come a long way.
I don't know much about fertilizer, but the next time I buy a bag of fertilizer, I want to just look on the bag and say, the poopiest poop you can poop. That's been such a slam dunk, Dr. Seuss. Like little kids, everybody poops. Book the poopiest poop you can poop. Now, you might be thinking, what do they do with, like, for the long time, like these precious metals? What do they do with these metals? For the longest time, they've just simply tossed them out.
But as every midwestern dad finding change on the ground in Joe Byron's absolute wasteland of an economy, every penny counts. It turns out every nugget of turd, gold, adds up. A separate study done around the same time estimated that people, just collective people, I guess, could produce somewhere around $13 million of precious metals through the refuse of their
poop. Your turds could be a literal gold mine, but you would have to mine it, and you would have to get enough to matter, which, as it turns out, isn't really feasible. That $13 million a year, it should be said, is for a 1 million person city. And that is an estimate. But using this math@science.org. Where they came up with this $13 million per 1 million people, we would say then that one person would produce about $13 worth of precious
metals in their poop a year. It's about enough to cover a streaming subscription for one month. Actually, no, it's not. See Joe Biden's failing economy one more time. Across a lifetime of 70 years, you're looking at less than $1,000. And, you know, things are kind of, for lack of better way of saying it, crap. When you turn to your turds to help make ends meet, like, you know that money's rough when they're doing science to figure out if the precious metals in our turds could be worth
harvesting. Turns out it would only be beneficial at a large scale, maybe at one of these sanitation plants where there's already much collection of these for runoff anyway. The gold, ironically being the part that is not helpful to fertilizer, when fertilizer and human poop has so often been considered brown gold. So we have to take parts of the poop out of poop to make the poop good for plants. How did we get here? Like, how did we figure out that that was the thing?
European scientists and chemists began as early as the 17 hundreds, exploring fertilizer technology to help improve crops. Now, while not all of these ventures involved poop, many of them involved researching what could be added to the soil or the already produced night soil, uh, if you will. Johann Meyer found that including gypsum was a beneficial
additive to the soil. Justice von Liebeg tried to save, uh, the region M money by developing a simulated poop based fertilizer by treating phosphate of lime with sulfuric acid. Now, while this was much cheaper to do than to transport the poop in from out of country, or get the poop from in country to where you needed it in the soil in country, it turns out that this simulated process was unable to produced a soil that was unable to be absorbed by plants like good old turd ferts. That's turd
fertilizers. John Bennett laws did experiments researching different manures effect on plants in the early 18 hundreds. He began in these endeavors to treat the manure and other phosphates with sulfuric acid to produce simulated fertilizer. It was cheaper, it was cleaner, and it started the modern day fertilizer industry. They found that nitrogen deposits of which poop
is rich in were good for plants. With the work of John Baptiste busingalt, Kristen Berkeland and Sam Ide developed the first synthetic fertilizer in the early 19 hundreds by combining different atmospheric nitrogen with nitric acid in, uh, a process called the berkeleyn eyed process. I know we really workshopped the name on that one. You see, it's the two gentlemen's last name. That's how they did it. However, to do this, they had to build huge factories in Norway
to produce the stuff. And the process turned out to be pretty inefficient compared to just using the very abundant supply of crap floating around. This process led to the development of the haber process, which essentially added methane to the mix and made the previous a little more sustainable. Finally, also in the early 19 hundreds, Wilhelm Ostwalt came up with the ostwalt
process to produce nitric acid. And it became the most common way to develop fertilizer globally in that it uses the Haber process to get the raw material and works from there. In time, different materials and different refining processes are added to make better and better fertilizer, resulting in healthier and richer crops, producing more and more money, richer and richer people, which, in the case that we learned in Japan, produces better and better fertilizer.
Now it's a whole industry. And I gotta say, the more natural you eat, the more valuable your poop could be to the fertilizer industry. So all our green, organic people, good job. Now my human body turns the taco bell that I ate, all that processed goodies into literal gold. But like you tell me, it's an industry. An industry built in many ways, like this process of brown gold, it's built on. This brings us to the end of another episode of Privy. Thank you all so much for being here. As we said
in the middle of the show, leave us a rating and review. We're not going to Belabor that here. Just, uh, a reminder. We give a little kickback to the wounded warriors and living water as a reminder to keep pooping in the free world. That free world was not always free, and we're looking for cleaner water for all. Send us an email, privycast@gmail.com. Follow us on social media. We're at Privycast. You can find me Hunter at owlet seven on social media. We'd love to
see you out there. Interact with us. Say what's up? Uh, thank you to Kevin and Pottington for the use of their music this week. Thanks to, um, whoever the heck we got for transition music. Who knows? It's a grab bag. Links in the doodly do for that. Links in the Doodley do for all these articles that were, for instance, this episode. This has been another episode of Privy. Thank you so much for joining us. Own your stank. Breathe more, push less. And now, as always, don't forget to flush.