Ep 200 Poop Part 1: How the sausage gets made
This Podcast Will Kill You
Exactly Right and iHeartPodcasts
4.8 • 17.7K Ratings
🗓️ 10 February 2026
⏱️ 72 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It might be stinky and it might be unpleasant to behold, but we all do it. For many of us, our poop is out of sight, out of mind once we flush it away. But for the next hour and fifteen minutes or so, we’re going to bring it back into mind as we delve into the rich world of poop. This episode, the first of a two-part miniseries on poop, features a wide cast of characters all with some role in the production or management of poo, like our intestinal tract with its sphincters and microbiota, dung beetles that perform the duties so crucial for ecosystem function, and the sperm whale that produces a revered substance used in perfumes. We’re going behind the scenes to understand how the sausage really gets made (in a manner of speaking) and why we need a big perspective shift to stop seeing poop as waste and start seeing it as a resource.
Correction: EW says that elephants poop 15 pounds a day, but in reality it’s more like 10x that - 150-200 pounds! Sorry for the mistake - we noticed it while listening through.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is exactly right. |
| 0:06.0 | Hello. |
| 0:07.0 | My story about poop is an embarrassing one, and one I am comfortable to share, but one that is embarrassing. |
| 0:14.0 | And like a lot of embarrassing stories, it happened when I was much younger. |
| 0:18.0 | I was in fifth grade at my first experience of staying away |
| 0:23.7 | from my parents with my school class. It was at an outdoor ed adventure in the woods where you do |
| 0:30.5 | ropes courses and team building exercises and you stay in a cabin. I remember being excited for it. |
| 0:36.5 | I remember having good friends in elementary |
| 0:38.9 | school. And I remember the first day going rather well where we were in the woods, playing outside. |
| 0:44.8 | The first night was a large like sort of cafeteria style lunch where we had, I don't remember |
| 0:51.3 | what the food was, but I sat with my friends. Everything was rather normal. |
| 0:55.5 | And then we took a long walk to, there was a planetarium attached to this outdoor ed facility. |
| 1:01.6 | And we were going to see a late night, probably like eight or nine o'clock, planetarium show. |
| 1:07.6 | And I remember walking with my friends talking. |
| 1:10.6 | And my memory is a little fuzzy at this point, |
| 1:14.1 | possibly for reasons to protect myself, but at a certain point during this walk, I think I attempted |
| 1:20.8 | to fart and poop came out. And then poop continued to come out. And at a certain point, I don't know what happened in my brain, |
| 1:30.7 | but I was okay with continuing to let poop come out |
| 1:35.2 | because there was really nothing I could do. |
| 1:37.4 | I was committed to going to the planetarium. |
| 1:39.8 | I was committed to seeing this through, |
| 1:42.5 | and I truly didn't know what else to do and I'd already |
... |
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