There's a myth a lot of us grow up believing that hair loss is just a part of life. It happens. It runs in the family. Once it starts, there's no stopping it. But here's the truth. That's outdated thinking. Scientific understanding of hair loss has advanced in recent years. Today we have a deeper knowledge of underlying causes and we've developed science-backed solutions that are both effective and safe. And that's at the very root of happy hair.
Dermatologists led innovation offering stronger, FDA-approved ingredients that work. But what really sets Happyhead apart is how personalized it is. They don't do one-size-fits-all fixes. You fill out a comprehensive consultation, and their board-certified dermatologists assign a formula specifically for your hair loss pattern, goals, and lifestyle. And whether you're early in your journey or more advanced, Happyhead offers targeted options that actually work.
Topical treatments, oral capsules, or potent dual-action bundles all deliver directly to you, discreetly and freshly compounded in the US. Most people start seeing results in three to six months. But the real magic? It's sustainable. This isn't just about growing hair, it's about keeping it long term. So no, hair loss isn't inevitable anymore. Visit happyhead.com and find out what's possible when science, expertise, and personalization come together. Hair happiness starts here.
Even though I was pretty confident I was not going to poop, it's like, is this the one time it's gonna work and I'm just gonna like destroy my podcast situation right now? Hello, welcome back to Privy. Privy is a podcast about bathrooms recorded from a bathroom. I'm your host from the hot seat, Hunter Hoover, and I love toilets. This week, my buddy uh introduced me to a new app, and we will cover this app on the show at some point, but...
Essentially this app allows you to log your logs and it maps them for you, which is great because not only can you see where you've pooped, but you can see where your friends have pooped. It's a delightful delightful thing to be able to track and now share with others. thank you for sharing this with me and I'm very excited for the future use and coverage of it. So yeah, good week, but it's almost May and This week, know, we've chatted about laxatives whenever that comes up.
We always have to remember our fiber buddies, you know. When you're about laxatives, you can't really go wrong in the area of fiber it up. Like, get some fiber in the situation, mix some fiber up in that. You're gonna be doing better. We've also discussed the idea of sound to cover up the noises that you are making in your closet of leavings. And...
Whether you're listening to this, episode of privy, or you're listening to something else, or you're just playing racket over the sound of your butt cannon, it is what it is. But here is the idea. There's this idea in bathroom culture that seems to want to combine these two things, laxatives or things that make you soil and sound that you play while you're in the bathroom into an urban myth for the centuries.
The Brown Note. Here at Privycast, our goal is not to discuss whether or not the Brown Note works. Enough people have proven that, and I will play the Brown Note for you here in a moment to see if you soil yourself. And as I tested, not one minute ago, I listened to the again quote brown note in headphones that are of a pretty good quality and I'll tell you I didn't brown myself so there's that.
Rather we want to look at the what like where did this come from like and does this idea of a note hat that that makes you poop yourself How does it get locked into our cultural mythos and how does it get propagated and what are the implications of this note, the brown note? So before we get into that, we've got to discuss the history. Where did the brown note come from? How has it passed around as this bathroom hack today where you hear this thing and you You poop uncontrollably.
And is there more or some other approach to using sound to help you brown? So here's what I'll say. When we get into the history of the brown note, the history of the brown note almost looks like one of those insane person pin boards where they're like tracking a killer and they've got all these like connected pieces that are swerving all over the place and they've got this like big thing circled in the middle.
And in this case, The big thing circled in the middle is a crowd of people fill in their pants with human waste. Now, they're interconnected strings and to figure out how we get down to like MythBusters blasting themselves with like giant rock concert subwoofers, it's a long road from the introduction of the Brown Note to the MythBusters testing this. But all we have is time here at Privy. So to understand where this came from, we have to Quit talking entirely about bathrooms.
Leave the bathroom. Go out into the world and talk about bugles and the history of the megaphone. Horns and bugles have been found way, way, way back in history. Used for calls to war, calls for worship, and to alert uh towns and other parties of people that there is danger or something that they need to do. So horns and bugles go way back. you would sound the horn. One toot for charge, two toots for retreat, that type of thing. get the idea.
Horns have been in use for a long time for calls to arms, calls to gather, et cetera. But the horn or bugle, if you've ever played one, is good at emitting tones, but it doesn't serve well to project the spoken words of a person's voice. Thus enters the introduction of what we would call today the megaphone. And, you know, they're taking this same shape that is able to project a noise from a horn or a bugle out to the far reaches of others to hear.
And the Greek actors in Greek plays were reported to wear these fun cone shaped masks that would help project their voices as they acted. And these were like early voice emitters and They're like a stepping stone to the invention and use of what came to be called speaking trumpets. These speaking trumpets, again, derived from these horn mask things that the Greek folks would wear.
These speaking trumpets look exactly like a bugle, except instead of a traditional mouthpiece that you would... you know, elephant honk into, they had an opening that you would put up to your mouth and you would shout into this and thus magnify your voice out the end of the trumpet. The main use for this were seaman. Sea men. Men at sea. To project their voices to other ships and harbors from a distance. You pull up to a harbor, you don't have radios. This is back before radios.
We're going way back. You pull up to the harbor, you, you know, get your, your mouth trumpet ready and you call out to the harbor for like instructions or things that you would need to do to land your craft in the thing. So you have these mouth trumpets, they're being used. Everything is going great. And later, um, the same like trumpet things. were used amongst volunteer firefighting groups to communicate with their teams over the roar of the fire. And it's just an excellent invention.
Like the speaking trumpet. It's a good idea. Especially when you don't have like electronics and stuff to communicate like at a distance. Now you can like communicate instantly within a vicinity. Speaking trumpet. Good idea. The stage is set now to introduce what is considered to be the first appearance of the brown note, or as folks who first heard it would have called it the prince's breath.
In 1841, a former seaman who quit his days at the ocean and became a blacksmith, his name was, and this is just like I think what he became known as because I could not find his full name, but Colander. He took the speaking trumpet that he had used during his time at sea and said, what if it was bigger? What if I made this tiny speaking trumpet into bigger, more power, as Mr. Toolman would say. His invention later called the colophon. He would speak and people heard it from all around.
So dude's a blacksmith, he's got metal. He's like welding together and like putting together this metal big contraption that you would speak into and it would project your voice way up and out. Kind of cool. What if it was bigger? He was commissioned to build a bunch of these call-a-phones for circuses and music halls and safety organizations because it was an easy way to speak and have a multitude of people hear it at one time. The thing was massive.
The report on it says that it took 10 horses to drag one of these on a cart. It's too big. It's very big. And he would modify his invention and he would add like a whole bunch of attachments and modular settings where you could change the pitch of your voice or the volume of the sound that you admitted. It's like a big freaking voice changer thing in the 1800s. This colander guy built a giant voice changer and he sold it to circuses. He even had a helmet set up.
so you could like have a support and then like use it for a solo singer. And the notoriety of this invention spread like the sound of the voices that were hollered into it. Enter the great exhibition of 1851. Now, to dive into this, we need to first answer the question that we're all wondering, what was the great exhibition of 1851? So the great exhibition of the works of industry of all nations. that's the long name of it, or the Great Exhibition, was held in 1851 in Hyde Park, London.
uh It was a, it was like a multi, like four to five month thing, where, and it was the first of a series of world fairs where countries from all over the world would come in and they would show off essentially the cool stuff that they had figured out in their industry. and all that stuff. And again, this is coming like on the tail end of like lot of the Industrial Revolution and folks are starting to build cool things and they want to show it off. And so they have this World's Fair in 1851.
The countries come from all around and they want to to show this. the fair was kind of orchestrated by Henry Cole and Prince Albert. We're going to talk about Mr. Albert here. in just a brief moment. But the World's Fair, you know, it's most well remembered for the Crystal Palace. Other notable uh things that showed up was a telescope. They had this giant telescope. They had all sorts of interesting ceramic things that people had built.
The Darya Inur was this rare pale pink diamond it was shown off. And all of these different things Also, it should be noted, the first modern pay toilet was installed at the Great Exhibition. The first modern pay toilet was installed there. 827,280 visitors at one cent apiece to use them. firearms, barometers, had races held, all sorts of things. But one of the things that is less featured was Collender's submission into the Great Exhibition.
Collender was commissioned by England to build an even bigger colophon, more power. He began building a 110 foot tall horn shaped device. to in a separate area of Hyde Park. And this was named the Colossophone. And in early testing, it was reported that the horn could be heard pushing 200 plus miles away in France. Though that is not verifiable in any way now. It's all planned. Prince Albert has arranged this great exhibition.
Come to England where we are hosting and He has commissioned Mr. Collender to build a big freaking monstrous horn to sing or do whatever into to be heard all around. Come marvel at our giant horn. Look at our horn. Look at it. Do it. Do it. This is where we're at. And Prince Albert, it's all planned. Prince Albert is going to sing. England's national anthem into the Colossophone during the exhibition. So the crowds gather round, he steps up, and he begins to sing. And something is wrong.
Those in attendance are reported to look as if they have been struck, quote, ill both mentally or physically. There were reports of pain. Reports said that people peed their pants and soiled themselves on the spot. The prince uh himself is reported to have rushed from the stage seeing this production and what it caused in the audience. said that he fled from the stage feeling that it was his performance that struck the people ill.
And later, folks who observed the occurrence believed that had he continued to sing his anthem, the people caught within the frequency wave of his voice could have died. Word started to spread and the derogatory name calling began, as it always does. Thus the term Prince's Breath. Prince Albert, essentially they were saying, had such gnarly breath that he almost killed a bunch of people.
However, this story was lost in time, almost for a century, because Queen Victoria told the papers to stop publishing the incident. Stop making friend of Albert! Don't do it! Stop it! And when you're queen, you can tell the papers to stop publishing things about Albert. And thus they did. And thus the Brown Note was first created. So, as with most history of myths, it comes at you from multiple angles.
Because there's also a claim that the history of this is an aircraft in the 1950s that was believed to have made a sound with its engine that The Air Force crew was noted to become nauseous around the jet. The plane was this test engine and the engine idled at the speed, I believe, of sound and it kept producing a sonic boom permanently while idling on the ground. Needless to say, this project was canned for safety reasons. But further research begins to be done. Can we weaponize sound?
Like, what can we do with sound waves? Then, New Science publishes their article about the Colossophone and the Prince's breath that we just talked about and people start murmuring. The myth begins to spread. Hey, I heard the government was using sound. They're testing using sound as a weapon. yeah, I read that article in New Science that said that Prince Albert made a whole bunch of people poopy themselves in public with sound. And thus, What do we call this?
This note, this frequency that makes you brown yourself. I know, the soil frequency. Scratch that, the brown note. Yes, that's it. You have heard of the brown note. yeah, and with many things, it enters pop culture. And once it gets into pop culture, it gets pop propagated. The Mythbusters tested the myth. They did bust it, by the way.
South Park had a Episode titled the worldwide recorder concert where the boys rewrite a recorder solo To emit the frequency of the brown note and have the entire world poop their pants Countless TV shows manga comic books movies video games etc feature the use of sound or sound warfare and some even specifically Note the brown note being used to incapacitate people but Here's the thing.
As I said at the top of this, I sat here in my own restroom and played the brown note into my own ears and I didn't defecate. I was perfectly fine. The Mythbusters blasted at themselves from close range and it is what it is. Like they did not poop themselves on the spot. So why is this brown note myth still going around? Why? Three reasons. One, sound is incredibly tricky.
If you've ever talked to somebody who's like a sound technician or like a person who like studies how to get good acoustics in a room, it is an art and it's crazy what they have to figure out. Sound is tricky. And there are a number of people who argue the mythbusters were too close to speakers. Maybe I had the wrong type of headphones. Maybe I was too close to my headphones. Maybe I wasn't far away enough. I know. But frequency has to carry for some time, possibly for someone to poop.
This is one argument that maybe you have to hear the sound at a distance in order for it to affect you. Who knows? I don't. Not me. Two, it is kind of based in some fact. We know that if you blast someone with a sound low or high enough, it can harm them or kill them or cause them to have some sort of a bodily response. So the idea that you can use sound to produce a reaction or response in a human person, that is factual, that's real. So it has a little bit of fact behind it.
And three, This is a classic example of the MacGuffin meets Schrodinger's cat. So the MacGuffin is a literary device that causes someone to thus pursue a goal. In this case, you hear about the Brown Note and thus it causes you then to pursue wondering and pursue the adventure of discovering the Brown Note. However, here's the thing. You you hear about the MacGuffin, there's a Brown Note. Oh, and now it is its own MacGuffin. because you want to know, well, will I brown myself on the brown note?
Who knows? But it's also a Schrodinger's cat, where once you test it, you can't roll back the clock. Like opening the box to check on the cat is the only way, but then the cat will like get out. I don't think that's how Schrodinger's cat works. I'm not a person that knows that. That's not my thing. But to test the brown note on yourself, the only way to do it is to do it. But if you poop yourself, that's bad.
So there's this like one part's fear, I don't want it to work on me, but I'm also overly curious. And thus, it sets itself up perfectly. Perfectly. to this cycle of curiosity and anxiety that lives on in the brown note. Will I chas myself royal if I hear this? Nah, I ain't gonna chas myself royal. wait, but what if I did? What if I'm the guy that chases himself royal because of this thing?
And I'll admit, 20 minutes ago, when I played the brown note in my own skull, there was this moment where like, I had a little anxiety. Even though I was pretty confident I was not going to poop, it's like, Is this the one time it's gonna work and I'm just gonna like destroy my podcast situation right now? Cause like, I can't defecate that hard right now. I got too much stuff going on. The cycle continues and the myth progresses. Now, here's what I will say.
In three seconds, you will hear the brown note. If you would like to skip past the brown note, I will play it for exactly 15 seconds and then you may skip. So, you will hear the brown note in three, two, one. Yes, shout at us if you defecated, but I trust that you did not. But is the brown note the only way that sound can help you brown? We don't need to turn to this special frequency of a note to help us go. There are other sounds that we can use to help us go to the bathroom.
One example, especially with little kids, is like running the faucet when they are trying to pee. Our brains hear the sound of water. Don't think of water, waterfalls, drippy faucets. moist sprinklers dripping Don't think of those things and have to go pee. It's the same idea. And maybe you have to now, I don't know, make the space have a sound that you associate with going to the bathroom. Sometimes people need to just relax.
Relaxing music, soothing tones, white noise machine, something to help you go and let go and release. You can go on YouTube, there's tons of playlists and videos on YouTube seemingly designed to provide a sound space to help people go to the bathroom, to help you relax. Or your fiber buddies will get the job done. And now, it's another installment of Hunter's Anecdotes to Keep You Afloats. Today's story is one, filled with shame and regret, and two, probably oversharing, but here we go.
Today's Hunter's Anecdotes is the last time that I remember pooping my pants. And no, the brown note was not involved. As I remember it, my parents used to have this cabin about an hour away from where we lived in Montana growing up. And. You know, we would regularly go out to this cabin and one of the great things was that it was in the mountains and mountains have much more concentration of snow.
And there was this area near where our cabin was that I will just call the beef jerky plant because that is what it was. It was this place where the best beef jerky in the country and you can argue with me on that point, but high country beef jerky is the best beef jerky that you're gonna get. They made this jerky on this site. Yum yum meat stuff. And there was this hill that was like kind of on the beef jerky's property, but like not really on the property. They also would like start and end.
I think just start. I think it was a start point for some of the Iditarod races was right next to this hill. And so we would take our plastic sleds and stuff down to this hill and go sledding. It is incredibly cold. So we are bundled to the nines and you know, you're sledding and you're, you're exercising cause you got to walk up the snowy hill. And as soon as you walk up a hill, when you add snow, it's twice as much work.
And something that happens when you fill your tum tum with lunch and then you do exercise work stuff, it makes your body need to poop and produce the leaving of what you ate. And You know, we're a little bit away from town and we're all snowy and wet and it hits me. I have to go. I have to poop bad. And you couldn't go into the visitor center for the beef jerky plant for whatever reason, whether they weren't letting people in or they were closed.
I do not remember why, but normally I would just ran in there and gone to the bathroom. Not an option this time. So I tell my mom, like, mom, I gotta go to the bathroom and we gotta like get everything packed up into the truck, get everything ready. And we're like on our way back to the cabin. and I didn't make it and I had too many layers and I pooped my pants. I believe I was 10 or 11 years old so a little closer to modern times than I would like it to have been but I did it.
You gotta stay warm but too many clothes plus doo-doo in your undies is not a good mixture. Yep, this has been another Hunter's Anecdotes to keep you afloats. If you have a comment, want to say hello, just want to connect to us, shoot us an email. We're privycast at gmail.com. You can also find us on your favorite social media. Pick one. We're probably there at privycast. Please follow us. We'd love to hear from you as we continue to build this community.
If your podcast, listening device or program of choice allows you to leave a comment or a review, We would love you to do so. Leaving reviews is a great way to help others find the show. Leave us a review and if you leave a comment, we'll try to read it here. Please share the show. We would love for you to share the podcast with a friend. Word of mouth is huge in getting the show out there and getting the information about bathrooms.
into the hearts, not just the ears, the hearts of the people around us. As always, we want to thank Kevin MacLeod for the use of Barroom Ballet as our intro and outro music. You can find Kevin's music at Incompetech.org. His music is licensed under copyright 4.0. Thank you, Kevin. We'd also like to thank Pottington Bear for all the colors of the world in the use of the Hunter's Anecdotes intro and outro, can find Pottington Bear's music at pottingtonbear.com.
And now, this has been another episode of Privy. And as always, don't forget to flush. Tired of losing weight only to gain it all back? The weight loss experts at slimrank.com have done the research. Slimrank.com ranks the safest, most effective GLP-1 programs that get and keep the weight off for good. Stop watching the scale go up and down. Go to slimrank.com and pick America's number one weight loss program today. Slimrank.com. That's S-L-I-M-R-A-N-K.com. uh Your dream body is uh