The Status of Flatus

The Status of Flatus: What is a fart? What's the science behind passing gas and why does volume, frequency and stench very so much from person to person? Answers await, gentle listener, as Robert and Julie discuss the biology behind breaking wind.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to all your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
what does a fire breathing dragon have to do with
the human digestion system? A lot, it turns out, and
in fact, it has a lot to do with gas

(00:24):
and belching. And you guys know that we we promised
that we would roll out an episode about inflate us,
about gas, the toutes parts, you name it. If you promised,
it was like a blood oath to our listeners that
we would do a fart episode for everyone. But no
one asked for by the way, no well no one
ever asked for it, but it happens, and so here

(00:45):
it is an entire episode devoted to the interesting science
of of cutting one as it were. You say that
with a question mark. I think it's you know, it's
definitely interesting science. I think it comes down to the
individual a listener, I mean, what what is your individual
relationship with gas? And are you the type of person

(01:06):
who is repelled enough to where no amount of interesting
science is really going to make you respect flateus in
any way or do you or do you? Are you
already totally on board? And in science the coding of
science can only make flateus all the more exciting. My
feeling is that everybody does it, so everybody should have
an interest in it. Well, everybody does it, but people

(01:26):
do it to different degrees, and people do it with
with varying degrees of pride or or or disgrace. Well.
As as I've shared before, I come from a various
schatological family, so this is a topic that has been
plumbed in the family. I'm not scared to talk about it.
And uh, I feel like there's lots of really great
information here. Uh, in particular this idea of this fire

(01:50):
breathing dragon. And this is fascinating to me. This was
in Mary Richard's Gulp. She spoke with herpetologist, Steven s
cor who became infixated on the question of why a
python or a boa um has an unusually large see
some Okay, so I see someone like this little digestive pouch.
It's near the colon and normally you see implant eating animals,

(02:13):
and so he became obsessed with why, why which is
a python have this? So he tried to figure out
the role of the season, whether or not it was
just there to break down the plant material in the
animal that the python had just ingested. Um, And he
began to actually measure the amount of hydrogen coming out
of a python, ex like what it was exhaling after

(02:34):
it was given a bunch of rats to eat. Okay,
So he did that with something called a chromatograph, and
that measured the amount of hydrogen alright. What he actually
found out, though, was that the amount of hydrogen that
was being exhaled by these creatures was enormous. I think
about this hydrogen concentration is flammable. These guys and gals

(02:58):
were exhaling something about Okay, so what does any of
us have to do with belching or gas or inflate us. Well,
it turns out Square has this really great theory that
early man would stumble across, say a python that had
just or it was in the middle of digesting a gazelle,

(03:19):
and so, as you know, the python would be useless
and trying to defend itself. Correct, you just eating this
huge meal, bloated. It's not gonna amediately run off. I
never room for another one, right, So early man says,
a easy food. I've got dinner tonight. I have two
things for dinner tonight. Right. I think that Mary rich
had described it as Neanderthal for duncan. Okay, so early

(03:43):
man or woman hauls us off to a campsite. There's
a fire, someone is being you know, joyful, and they
begin to say, step on this python's head or they
kick it, and what happens. A huge flood of this
hydrogen just rolls out of the mouth, meets the fire,
and then and then you have a fire breathing reptile. Yeah,

(04:07):
so s course says, think about the thousands and thousands
of years of these tales of bringing down a fire
breathing giant to your campsite. Because I could see, on
one hand, someone could be like, whoa, that thing can
can breathe fire? I was really I was. I was
really lucky that I didn't get toasted back there, or
they'd see what happened and they realized, well, this thing
doesn't actually breathe fire, but it sure did look like it.

(04:28):
And I'm going to claim that it does because I
look all the more awesome for having killed it. Slated right,
and I fast forward, you know, fifty thou years to
modern humans in eight year olds all around camp fires
trying to light their farts. Right there. We have a
long tradition of this relationship with gas and man. Yeah,
anybody who's read Mary Roaches Packing from Mars book about

(04:49):
the space program and human space exploration, now, so there's
a there's a lot of scatological content in here, because
you're talking about sending humans and their digestive systems into
a strange environment that doesn't necessarily play by the rules,
and at the very least is contained within a very
small space, and inevitably you have astronauts that are going
to pass gas and uh. I believe it was measured

(05:11):
out to be like three coke cans worth of worth
of gas is coming out. So there were a couple
of interesting bits there involving NASA research. One was a
quest of by um Edwin Murphy UH in an attempt
to find though what what the ideal fart profile for
an astronaut would be um and basically they wanted a

(05:32):
little or no methane or hydrogen, because, as we just
touched on, hydrogen is explosive and methane is not desirable either.
But in his work. This guy Murphy had apparently encountered
one ideal astronaut candidate, and then this is the quote.
A special interest for further research was the subject who
produced essentially no flatus on one grounds dry weight of beans,

(05:54):
as opposed to the average gut, which will during a
peak of flash ones period five or six hours post
being consider umption, pass anywhere from one to almost three
cups of latest per hour. So, uh, that is particularly interesting.
Interesting not only because NASA you know, wants that ideal
fart profile for an astronaut, or or that you know
you would given the chance, but that there are individuals

(06:17):
that are almost non farters, which is interesting. It is
amazing to me because I mean, presumably again everybody does this,
and I do think it's very kind of NASA, by
the way, to try to recruit people who don't do
it so much, because, as we discussed in our Emotions
in Space episode, can get dicey up there, and if

(06:39):
you're next to someone who keeps putt putting, you know,
for six months straight, that that can make things very tense.
So let's talk about fart. What is it? Well, basically,
the act of farting, of course, is the means by
which the body rids the colon of unwanted gas, and
by virtue of that unwanted pressure, you have this gas

(07:00):
that builds up and the average person releases between five
two thousand million liters of this per day. But but yeah,
what does it consist of? Well, about its carbon dioxide, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen,
and methane and go again, varying degrees of that depending
on the particular part part because some people don't produce methane.

(07:21):
I think it's like only one third of us produce
methane yep. And most of these gases are either swallowed
inadvertently when you're eating your food or release from the
food as it is digested. And uh, it's amazing because
when it's in your body, it is odorless, and we
don't think of it as being odorless. Right. And the
other key thing that of the ingredients that are just

(07:42):
listed that is odorless, all the hydrogen, the methane, oxygen,
all of it, that is not the odor producing content.
It is that one percent that is responsible for the smell. Yeah,
we'll get to that one percent and a bit. Yeah,
spend such a political term day as one percent. That's
kind of funny thing one peron that stinking up the
whole system exactly. Um, So, as you had mentioned, we

(08:05):
do expel quite a bit of it. But the man
who inspired really thoughtful study of how much we expel
and even excessive gas is a man who in nineteen
six complained of a five year epic bout of the
twos he UM. He contacted gas from entrologist Michael Levitt,
and in order to study the man, Lovett had to

(08:26):
create a baseline of normal flattist output so or flatists,
I should say. He recruited volunteers to keep flat too,
graphic lags flogs of gas activity, recording every stirring in
every output. He prefers that actually, but he did, and
others have relied on um studies that use a rectal

(08:47):
tube in collection syringes to determine average output. That is
year old way of trying to figure out how much
people are expelling. So basically the farting jar scenario, Yeah,
but a little bit more foolproof and a lot more
going on. And the syringes there just to extract the

(09:08):
molecules and then to to figure out what sort of
molecules are in there. Um, these days. Hydrogen output is
measured in the breath because a fixed percentage of hydrogen
produced in the colon is absorbed into the blood and
when it reaches the lungs, it's exhaled. Now, what he
found was that this man was passing gas thirty four

(09:28):
to forty two times a day. Okay, the baseline average
here of the humans who doesn't have any lactose intolerance
problems is about fourteen to twenty times a day in
case you're wondering. So the problem that they finally figured
out is that he was lactose intolerant, and as we
learned before, lactose does not get broken down for some

(09:50):
people in the digestive excuse me, in the small intestines
hangs out in the colon, and then you have other
bacteria which we're breaking that down, and then you've got
the waste p act of that bacteria, and you've got
a bunch of bunch of bunch of hydrogen being produced there. Yes,
of course, we're talking about humans as a whole in
regards to UH to flate us. But you can't help

(10:12):
but get into gender scenarios when you start thinking about
In fact, one of the articles that we were looking
at um. Uh they are. The author made a point
of of saying that men as as a whole, and
she's really generalizing here and painting with a very broad brush,
and I skilled her for it. U that all men
are just enthusiastic about their gas and just love it
and crave it and laugh at it all the time, yeah,

(10:34):
and model it. Really, I am not one of those men.
Like maybe that is the more baseline m relationship between
men and fart, but I, for my own self, I
don't engage that style of humor. For the most part,
I will laugh at a fart joke if it is
well crafted um or in some way, you know, insightful. Um.
There have been occasionally they'll get me, like the instance,

(10:57):
there was a Sarah Silverman Show episode that was very
far heavy. She's she likes the farts. Yeah, and occasionally
that will work. I mean, it's it's the right fartship.
But as a whole, I do not. I'm more of
a stereotypical if you're gonna go with these stereotypes, I'm
more of a stereotypical woman when it comes to fart
gags and self gas production than a stereotypical man. Okay,

(11:19):
So what I'm hearing is that you don't have a
cellar full of arrears. No I do not. Okay, all right,
this is good, um. And it's interesting that you bring
out the stereotypes because you know, if it's were the
Victorian age, we would say, oh, well, women just don't
produce gas at all, right, it wouldn't even be a question.
But we do have data on it, and it turns

(11:39):
out that women have are seemed to be expelling more
gas than men, as measured by the hydrogen exhaled. But
Mary Roach questions this and says in her book, could
it be that the suppression of gas could lead to
a higher input of hydrogen exhalation? So maybe if you're

(12:03):
going with the stereotypical um I almos don't want to
say stereotypical female, but let's say, let's go with you.
If you're going with a fart avoidant person like myself,
then they are going to be less inclined to just
let it rip whenever the mood hits them. Right, So
if you suppress it, then you're going to absorb more
of it through your bloodstream and then you're going to
exhale mark. Oh, so the way, you're kind of reversing

(12:26):
it and farting into your body, into your blood. You're
just breath farting, okay, right, and that makes it really
a lovely thought, doesn't it. Do I think about that
next time you give your significant other nice little kiss? Yeah,
you know, I I do. I should. At one point
about about ladies and farting. I did work in a
newspaper once and an individual in the front office was

(12:48):
terminated for engaging in a farting contest with a with
a with a customer. It was it was quite it. It
It seems like it was mutual farting, so I guess
it was just like, hey, this is we're going to
make an example of you. We just fart with the customer. Maybe,
you know, there could have been some other politics involved,
or maybe it was just kind of this unwritten rule
where if your customer comes in and celebrates his or

(13:10):
her farts, that's fine, but then you are not supposed
to then engage with them in a contest of farts
or you know, it's it's kind of like it's it's okay,
the customer uses foul language to a point, but you're
in then not supposed to engage them in that kind
of behavior, I guess. Or maybe maybe she showed him up,
maybe she shamed him and they lost the customer because

(13:31):
it was this a gastrontrology office. No, this was a
newspaper with we didn't even have a flatest section, you know,
just business and sports. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know that
I can recover from that store. I feel like I
need time to think about that and chuckle. But we
must go on, so I'm just gonna chuckle about that later. Um.
All right, so let's talk about this one. Yes, or

(13:53):
should we take a break? Oh? Yeah, let's take a break.
Why not? When we come back, we will discuss the
one percent of the fart it is responsible for the smell.
We'll talk about extraordinary cases of flateust. We'll talk about
people who have elevated um passing gas to an art form.
And also the big question, if you're in microgravity, can

(14:14):
you propel yourself across a spaceship just by virtue of
your own uh slatest? All right, we're back. So as
we've discussed of flateut is, carbon dioxide, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen,

(14:36):
and methane, and uh these are coming from stuff that
either gases that are inadvertently swallowed or it is released
from the food is we're digesting it. But none of
it produces the signature odors and it varies certainly, as
we can all attest to. Uh. None of these elements
contribute to the odor. Is just of tiny one that
makes the gas so foul, that's right, that creates that

(14:59):
singular a bouquet of smell. Micro Has really live for
the most part in the colon where they attack and
consume undigested food and in turn generate their own waste products.
So in the case of microorganisms, waste usually means gas,
and in the case of these microorganism organisms, that gas
can be the really ripe stuff, usually molecules containing sulfur

(15:23):
like dimethyl sulfide and method methyl um. These are waste
products that ferment and they build up to a sufficient
level and then they're released with the rest of the
gas in the bowels. And by the way, we talked
about this before, the birth of the fart happens when uh,
you're stretch receptors um in your colon send a signal

(15:44):
to your brain, Hey, I'm having some discomfort, and then
this finkter is loosened up, and and then the message
maybe when you get a chance, please do something about this,
or maybe this is really important. So the next time
you even have like a heavy thought in the back
of your head, um, we're going to just go ahead
and let it go even have you Yeah, yeah, that's right.

(16:06):
The brain will sit there and respond and say, okay,
now you gotta tampa down, sorry, swincter, or yep, we're
overloaded here alright. So what brave soul figured out the
scent profile of late us. Well, the same Michael Levitt
who helped to determine the output of late US also
studies the qualities of of gas. These smell profiles, he

(16:29):
recruited volunteers to detect the three main elements of a
fart so hydrogen sulfide which is described as the scent
of rotten eggs uh metha nephiel that is described as
rotting vegetation, and dimethyl sulfide, which is oddly described as
sweet m Yes. So he didn't do this as a

(16:52):
cruel joke. I mean, he wasn't just trying to you know,
terrorize people with smells. He wanted to see if the
noxiousness of the scent would correlate with the combined concentrations
of these three types of sulfur gases, and it did. So.
The best part of this, all this information is he
took the data and he reversed engineer to fart so

(17:14):
he could use the combined concentrations in other scenarios. Would
would it be safe to call this a frank and fart, Yes,
it would be absolutely Um it's a frank and part.
And he wanted to figure out the absorptive properties of
charcoal underpants or seat pads, which, by the way, is
of interest to the airline industry. Which makes sense, right,

(17:36):
I think that I said, go airline industry, put charcoal
in the seat pads. Any degree to which you can
cut down on the on the amount of flatus in
that enclosed space on a long flight, the better, Yeah, exactly.
In speaking of a long flight or a spacewalk, NASA
actually has used filters in the air circulation in space
suits with charcoal to help bind sulfur and then prevent

(18:01):
the astronauts from getting drive by farted every time the
air is recirculated. Yeah, because if they build up enough
along enough space walk, then fart madness ensues. I've heard
about madness. It isn't earth. There are a lot of
I was looking on snopes to see if there were
any particular urban legends related to the farting of note,
and one of them was this bit that occasionally circulates

(18:23):
and emails about a man who who died because he
farted under the covers and uh and had the covers
up over his head. But that's just complete malarkey. That's
just a Dutch Oven. Yeah, so so yeah, so death
by by death by by Dutch Oven not really a thing. Yeah,
And you can't try to, I mean, just for fun
Dutch Oven astronauts, right, No, No, I mean they'd go

(18:45):
through enough in the training. I'm sure they were, like,
you know, after you've been in that spinny thing long enough,
and I mean we've all seen the right stuff. They
went through a lot of horrible things to prove themselves
and and to you know, to get their bodies in
shape and prepare themselves for this this experience in orbit.
So and keep in mind that the air in their
space suits is actually recirculated three times a minute. So

(19:06):
now another interesting bit from Mary Roch's book, Packing for Mars.
She talked to an astronaut by the name of Roger Crouch,
and he was particularly interested in the idea of propelling
yourself through a microgravity environment like a board the space
station via your own farts. And he said that the
math and velocity of the expelled gas is very small

(19:28):
compared to the mass of the human body. So he
tested it out found that it produced no real effect,
though he did, uh, he did have this theory that
the underpants and the pants might be prohibiting the expulsion
of gas, and so he but he did not get
to test this naked, but he apparently has lingering thoughts
that that nude farting in microgravity would potentially give you

(19:52):
at least a little push across the cabin. Yeah, that
really is not going to win the hearts and minds
of your fellow astronauts and face if you just drop
trial and then try to propel yourself with your own parts.
Can you imagine the dude's doing like the crying in
space videos and all the different viral videos of Colonel Hatfield. Yeah,
I wonder, I wonder if he's on board for this.

(20:13):
That's going to be a big shock when that when
that YouTube video rolls out that might be the one
that never really makes it too right. So though, if
you were going to do that experiment without underpants and
really truly test it, you would want to eat the
gasest inducing foods that you could. And it turns out
that the most eruptive edibles are beans, carrots, raisins, bananas,

(20:36):
which is odd to me. Onions not odd milk and
milk products for the very reasons that we talked before
about milk being hard to digest and break down as
opposed to something like um, let's say meat, fish, grapes, berries,
these are these have the least amount of complex carbohydrates.
It's it's this, uh, this really damning conundrum that that

(21:01):
I that I have encountered, and then I think a
number of people encountered that the healthier that you try
to eat, you know, you're trying, you're trying to eat
all these vegetables and these whole grains and lintels and beans,
and it's just it's making you're gassier, and you feel
like you're being punished for this diet. Uh. Dr Robert
Lustig even put it this way. He said, in life,
you have two choices. It's either fat or fart. So yeah,

(21:26):
it's true, like if you were to radically change your
diet from say a meat and very little um vegetable
diet to grains and vegetables, you would really need to
set aside a couple of days to transition into that.
Kid you not, Well, there's that great Portlandia sketch where
they go to the restaurant that has the raw food.
It's like an all raw food places may actually have

(21:47):
a a flateist patio with fans the fat patio. That
is just one of my favorite things, one of those
that that clip is just great because it's not hearty
horror laugh laugh, but it kind of speaks to that
whole experience when you do go to a rough foods
restaurant or a vegan restaurant and the result of that afterwards,

(22:08):
they just kind of brought it more to the forefront. Yeah,
it's it's a clever it's a clever bit of of
parody there and uh and and commentary. So that's that
is a fart gag that I at least chuckle that sure,
because really, when you get down to it, every restaurant
should have a fart patio. Now, as we mentioned before,
you you have a very rare individual like the individual

(22:28):
that NASA uncovered who barely farted at all. Just the
one person in the world, the one person that's a
mutant that that barely produces any flatus. But then there
is there's another side of that coin as well. There
this the super fartre's the the extraordinary flat went individuals
that that make life so interesting. They just thought that

(22:49):
some people have types of bacteria that produce more sulfur
than other people, so that could be part of it.
Diet is certainly part of it. And then of course,
as we mentioned earlier, some people are gonna have different
coins of ptations of hydrogen methane, so some people are
going to be more explosive, which is UH. And I
feel like we've discussed this before, but it's it's more
of a serious issue when there's some sort of surgical

(23:11):
recedure going on, you know, with the colon UH in
which you're going to have to cauterize wounds with a
heat element. That heat element plus hydrogen methane that's built
up that can have literally an explosive reaction, which is
not good for anybody involved in that procedure. Now, I
believe there's an Ignoble prize that was given out this right,
that's where we discussed it before. But we normally we

(23:33):
say it's just it's really very funny stuff, but this
one um study was very serious because it was like,
you know, what if if you are doing this procedure
on someone, if someone has a pole up and you're
moving it, Uh, you don't want them to explode and die. Right,
So that's that's one of the things that doctors have
been really cognizant of, and these days they actually pipe

(23:54):
in a little air um and air that doesn't have
flammable carbon dioxide as well to try to dilute any
methane or hydrogen that might be left over. Although for
anybody who's going to the guests for entrologists and and
had one of these procedures like a colonoscopy, then you
know that there's a lot of prep work ahead of
time to try to remove anything that might antagonize or

(24:18):
create a spark in your rectum. Another aspect of flate
us in in the medical community is that it can
actually be used as a disease fighter sort of. I
mean it's more like a canary in the coal mine.
So doctors can actually identify tough to spot viral or
bacterial infections of the gut in someone's gas. So what

(24:41):
they do is they just perform this test where they
collect a stool sample and then they try to take
the gases um and they extract those gases from a
smart needle and then they figure out the plate us
molecules and the machine then will analyze these molecules and
tell you what the infection. Is. Pretty cool. That is
pretty cool. Discussing the various smell profiles of human flateust

(25:05):
UH and ultimately human waste, I keep coming back to
horse excrement because really, if you've smelled horse excrement, it's
really the best excrement out there. You know, like if
you had to be around a bunch of poop all day,
it's really hard to go wrong with horse. Yeah, Or
you used to used to work at a zoo, so

(25:27):
you know that there are various odors related to different
different animals leavings, and some of them were more pleasant
than others. Well, yeah, it was funny because I worked
in the administrative building, but the keepers would come in
and they had all sorts of smell molecules stuck to
their bodies. So they might have been working with the
zeebers that day, who knows, but they passed by the
elephants and that took it all down. Yeah. So the

(25:49):
elephants not a good smell profile, okay, but the horse,
I the horse, I think is a good good smell profile.
So what do you think about the latest artist? Ah? Yes,
do you think they're even concerned with a center profile? Well,
it's it's interesting because first of all, I should I
should back up and say that I was not aware
of this until about a year ago. I was recovering

(26:13):
from Wisdom Tooth Removal, and I was I was on
pain pills and I was taking I was reading the
book Madeline is Sweeping by Sarah Shoon Leen Binnum, which
is a very dreamy book. Anyway, it's like a dream
within a dream with all this surreal stuff happening. And
then on top of that, I was a little loopy
um from everything else that was going on. But one

(26:34):
of the characters that shows up is a fart artist
or a fartist if you will, or a flatist or
a flatuist, but not a flattist, not a flautist. That's uh,
that's something that's something different entirely. But it turns out
there's one individual that was a particular note, and it
was This was a Frenchman whose real name was Joseph

(26:55):
pugel Uh lived eighteen fifty seven to five, but his
stage name was Lipped Up the Maine Uh, and he
was known for having remarkable control over his abdominal muscles,
and he seemed to be able to just fart at will,
just NonStop, just well beyond the three coke cans of
flatists that any normal individual could could muster. But there

(27:19):
was a secret to what he could actually do. Um.
He he had again phenomenal control over the muscles down there,
particularly the anal sphincter muscles, and he could actually inhale
air through the sphincter and then release it. So he
wasn't that he was releasing gas that was built up

(27:40):
as part of this natural farting process that we've discussed
in this episode. Rather he was inhaling air into the
rectum and then releasing it again. Wow. So we talked
about reverse feeding in our last podcast. Yeah, yeah, right, Yeah.
It's kind of like if you've ever been generally occasionally
counter a kid who's doing in this where they'll burp

(28:01):
over and over again because they're inhaling the air, and
then they're burping in haling the air and then burping.
He was doing the same thing but with his bottom.
I would love to tell some stories about my family,
but I don't think that would be correct. All I
can say is that I think maybe in past generations
we've had some artists excellent. So anyway, on that note,
we should probably bring closure to this. Yes, let's let's

(28:25):
call over the robot. Well, that was a robotic fart,
I know, but really, I mean, I thought this was
a really classy episode on farts, and here Arnie had
to come and stink up the joint. It doesn't really smell.
I mean it just it smells like a train passing
in a subway or something, you know. Kind of nothing really,

(28:48):
but don't do it again. Okay, here's some mail from
our robot. This one is from Adam. Adam writes, and
he's for solving to responding to our episode Eating Alive,
where we talked about the prospect of being swallowed whole
by a sperm whale. And he says, Okay, let's say
I was swallowed whole by a whale. I'm alive and
uninjured in the pre stomach. The situation looks grim, but

(29:09):
alas all hope is not lost, because how did I
get there? I was inspecting a gaping maw of a
giant whale while scuba diving. I have a full tank
of air and a very sharp dive knife, as does
any diver worth the salt, and a healthy desire to live.
What are my chances of jabbing and slicing my way
to freedom? Slim to none. Well, uh, yeah, it's a

(29:29):
tough one because certainly, those the squid that are being
swallowed by the sperm whale, they have rather tough beaks,
so they don't have any bones otherwise, so they can
kind of they're sort of loot in this in the
way that they can contort their bodies. Yeah, but they
could they have the ability to to use that beak
on on the predator. They're able to to use their

(29:52):
their their little suction cups with the sharp things. And
then you see the scars and the sides of sperm
whales where they've suckered and and and picked at them,
and well that's creates the ambergies right there. Yeah. Yeah,
And then yeah. Then of course, once they passed the
beaks on, they they we discussed in that episode, end
up scarring the side of the intestinal wall. So I

(30:14):
don't I feel like if you were too to try
to use that knife and fight your way out, that
you're just that's gonna cause the perm whale to really
gnash its teeth even more. Yeah, and and chaos wouldn't sue. Yeah,
it hasn't already. Yeah, I'm thinking that. I mean, certainly
you're not going to cut your way out. I guess
the only the only possibility here was if you somehow

(30:36):
create enough of the disturbance to where it vomits you.
Oh right, if you could just stick your finger down
its throat. Yeah, or I think I think Pinocchio escaped
by started They started a little fire, right, and the
smoke builds up, and then then the creature sneezes everyone free.
So this is kind of you. Obviously you're not going
to start a fire in there, um, But if you

(30:56):
were to stab away and start stabbing the size, would
you possibly be able to get those firm let us
put you up? Well, I tend to doubt it if
you had a little pocket of poison, But then you're
going to expose yourself to that poison as well. Right,
I'm trying to think of ways that you could regurgitate.
We don't know. I bet butt you guys out there
might have some ideas. Think it over. I would like
to to hear some people's thoughts on that, and hey,

(31:17):
may you know we get a spare moment here and there,
maybe I'll try and contact an expert on this, and
someone who has survived thinks well, by the way, all
guess alright, So there you have it. Um, if you
have some thoughts who would like to share with us,
particularly about this episode, which I'm sure lots of people
will have something to share about this episode, about the
science of late us, about the way culturally we understand farting. Um,

(31:41):
I know we have listeners from all over the world.
We haven't listeners who are trying, who have traveled and
are traveling all over the world. So i'm i'm I'm
definitely interested in various cultural responses to flate us and
uh passing gas in public or in private or across
uh you know, gender profiles. Uh, let us know about
all this stuff. We would love to hear from you.
There are a number of ways to get in touch

(32:02):
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(32:24):
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(32:51):
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