Recast: Ella on That's Absurd, Please Elaborate

News and guest introduction

0:00Hi, folks. As you can tell, we're doing a little recast this time with some serious, but not that serious, but serious news. Everyone's okay. But if you've seen on either Instagram or our Discord channel, Ella had a fire at her house. Everyone's okay. Everyone's perfectly healthy. But, you know, that- Understandably. Although, listeners, let me tell you, Ella, Ella, Ella's so truly, like, she wanted to be on this recording, even though she doesn't have a microphone. She was like, okay, can we move it to this time? Because I have to move for this. And we were like, Ella, you don't. You're not required. You perhaps more so than ever have a reason not to.

0:48But she really, we all really, we all really want to, you know, do the best we can for the podcast. And Ella really, in spite of this- Literally, Tom sent this message and was like, you know, we don't, we can record without you. And Ella's response was very much like, oh, yeah. I was like, I guess so. I guess you could.

1:07But we just want to reiterate that she's got friends and family to help her out, so- And more importantly, Teddy and Charlie are both also okay. Yes. Which we were worried about, so- I included that with- Everybody. Everyone included that in my mind. Yeah. Yeah. And you know what? To stroke Ella's ego, we picked a great episode of hers. This is her guesting on a friend of the show's show. This is Ella's appearance on That's Absurd, Please Elaborate, with friend of the show, Trace Dominguez.

1:39Ella is, you know what? I won't spoil what it is, but it's truly- No, let's let everybody enjoy it. So delightful. And yeah, can't wait for you guys to listen. Fingers crossed we'll be back next time. I think we should be, but we'll play it by ear. And yeah. So yeah, everybody send your love to Ella and hopefully we'll be back in a few weeks time. Until then, enjoy this recast featuring specifically Ella from the three of us, which is hilarious.

Welcome and show premise

2:08Hello and welcome to another episode of That's Absurd, Please Elaborate. In this show, we science things. But not like literally though, because we're just really talking about this. We don't like go do the research, but we do research the research. Does that make sense? I think that makes sense, right? We science square them. We're another, or more of like a derivative. Yeah, I was going to say like a derivative of the science.

2:40We don't do the science, but we read the science. We're the slope of the science tangent to the curve of the science. Perfect. Nailed it. The people who love calculus will think that's very funny. The seven people in our audience will love it. I'm Trace Dominguez. I'm a science communicator. And every week we answer questions that you all send us or foreshadowing that our guests provide that we then try and go and find if there's any science research about it. If you want to send us a question, go down into the show notes. There's a form there. There's a phone number. There's an email. You can send it to us all sorts of different ways.

3:15And I'm here with two people who aren't me. Julian Huguet. Hi, Julian. Hi, Trace. Always good to see another person who isn't me. I'm also here with Dr. Ella Hubber or Ella Hubber, PhD, depending on how you want to do it. From the co-host of the podcast. It's a science and comedy podcast, which sounds familiar. Let's learn everything. Hello. Hello. Thank you for having me. Thanks for being here. I'm waving. You can't see it, but I'm waving. We added socials. Maybe somebody will use this in a video.

3:46This is a terrible social video.

3:50Yeah, it would be a pretty bad social video. That's why we don't make the socials. We have Sabrina make the socials. She's much better at it than we are. Sabrina, use that waving clip. I like it. As your boss, you have to do as I say. She doesn't.

Wind turbines and stopping the wind

4:03So anyway, this week we're going to answer two questions. One of them is about renewable energy and another one is about pee. So this is going to be a fun episode. Julian, why don't you go first and tell us your question? Well, my question comes from a one. Let me see if I'm saying this right. Dr. Ella Hubber. Oh, that's you. That's you, in fact. Oh, great. I'm here. That's you. The doctor is here. Ella, what was your question for me that I had to look into?

4:34So my question, and I have to admit, it's actually a question from my husband, because I had a different one and it was terrible. It was about black holes or something. And he came up with this and it was great. And the question, at least I think it's great. Let's see what the answer is first. The question is, wind turbines steal a little bit of energy from the wind, you know, as it's going, as they're spinning. So how many wind turbines would it take to stop the wind?

5:04Yes. All of the wind. All of the wind. I didn't specify, but yeah, I'm guessing all of the wind in the entire world. Thank you, actually, Mr. Dr. Hubber, for the question. I love how you're like, I had an intense, complex one, black hole related, and it was too smart for this show. So I needed somebody to come up with something dumb. And my husband came through. And I think in my relationship with my wife, I am also the dumb ideas guy.

5:37So I can relate, Mr. Dr. Hubber. I do love this question, though. This question is literally a meme. Were you aware of that? No, he may have been, though. It's from 2015, so it's an older meme, but it checks out. Nice. Thank you. That's like a meme within a meme, though. That's like a double meme. That's like the derivative of the meme. That's the slope tangent to the line of the meme. You've already made that joke. You did that already. Anyway. Oh, no, it's a second order derivative of a joke.

6:08Okay. You said, sorry, you sent an Imgur link or Imgur, whatever you want to call it. Yeah. We're not allowed to access that website in the UK anymore. You can't? No. Oh, my gosh. Okay. So I'll just take your word for it. I will describe it because it's not a very interesting meme. It's a picture of an older white gentleman, Representative Joe Barton from Texas, and it has a, well, it's purported to be a quote, but it's text on an image of a person's face, which is almost never a quote, as the internet has taught me.

6:40But anyway, it says, wind is a finite resource, and harnessing it would slow the winds down, which would cause the temperature to go up. Cool. It's a finite resource. That's the thing, right? So this is a meme where a lot of people clown this guy because he was a representative from Texas from 1985 to 2019, which term limits is a whole different conversation we should have at some other date. But anyway, he made these statements in 2009 during a hearing on switching over to renewable resources to avoid climate change.

7:16And fact-checking websites would say that this meme is unfair, which, you know, that's the first time that's ever happened, because he is quoting an article from Dr. Jay Apt of Carnegie Mellon University that does, in fact, say wind is a finite resource and that slowing down the wind could have consequences. The article also says that the mixing of air caused by wind turbines may cause temperatures near the surface to rise.

7:47And depending on the scale, you know, if we're meeting 10% of global energy demands by the year 2100, when we are going to need a lot more energy, we presume, maybe it will raise the temperature in places as much as one degree centigrade. Obviously, all that doesn't fit on a little meme, but I'm going to be even more fair than the fact-checking websites and say that he's still getting this wrong because in his testimony, he was like, well, we're trying to avoid global warming, but actually this science-y paper says that wind is going to cause more global warming.

8:20And it's like, it's not what it's saying. He's conflating a couple different things. Like the wind slowing down thought is separate in this article from the air mixing and causing temperatures rising thought. And he gets that, he gets that mixed up. Sounds like he needed a science communicator to help him out. Yeah. Sounds like science is nuanced. Honestly, reading the article, I can see how he, he got these things mixed up because they are right next to each other, but they are separate thoughts. And it's not made clear.

8:52How next to each other are they? Is it like one sentence? Literally, they're one sentence after the other, but. In the abstract or in the paper? Literally in the paper. It's an article just published on like fallacies of renewable power that, you know, like a lot of people think it's going to be this big rosy picture and maybe we should temper some of those expectations a little bit. Which, of course, then people who are proponents of fossil fuels, like Representative Barton was throughout his whole career, take it and go, it's totally pointless to switch to renewables. We might as well just keep burning coal.

9:22It sucks sometimes trying to communicate things with nuance. Yeah. Anyway, he says also in this testimony, like, oh, well, wind is, is God's way of moving heat around. And that's, that's not right. Uh, because you, you can't, you can't prove that. I can't prove that. Because he's approaching it, though, is like wind is like blowing on an area to cool it down, like, like it's a hot pocket, you know, that you've microwaved for too long and you need to, and so that's why wind happens.

Why wind happens

9:54That's not why wind happens. Does anybody know why wind happens? Oh, that is such a good question. I feel like I should know the answer to that. I'm going to throw out a one word thing and it's going to be like, you can't do one word to explain why the wind happens. I didn't put this restriction on you. I can't look, why, why did you ask me to do that?

10:16Yeah, Julian, geez. I'm going to do one word. That's not fair. These restrictions are hard. I was going to say currents, but actually I feel like currents and the wind actually are like, they, they move both because of the same reason. Is it the planet moving? Okay. Fluid. It's really the sun. Oh. And the planet moving has a part to do with it. But really, I mean, the whole reason ultimately is the sun warming places up unevenly, right? Some places absorb more heat, the air above it gets warmer, and that hot air rises, right?

10:52It spreads out, it becomes less dense, it moves up. And so nearby air that is cooler rushes in to fill this space that's left behind, right? This, this open area that the warm air is vacating. In, when you get weather reports, is this the same thing as like when you hear high pressure and low pressure? High pressure and low pressure. Yeah, these are related. This is exactly why you get these fronts moving around because you have like a high pressure area or like a low pressure area moving under a high pressure area, that sort of thing.

11:24Right. It's, it's exactly why it causes us. And pilots will tell you, airplane pilots, especially small airplanes. Gotta bring it back to airplanes. Of course I do. I was going to skate by that, but it's relevant. When they fly at night, some pilots prefer flying at night because the air is a lot calmer. You don't have that updraft, you don't have the wind moving in, so it's not as bumpy and it's not as windy. So yeah, it's really solar energy being turned into wind energy, which then we're ultimately harvesting and turning into electrical energy.

11:56Wow. That makes me think that I feel like I just figured out a bunch of the answer now, which in a good way. Okay, maybe me too, but then I'm going to pose a different question as well. If we have enough solar panels, can we stop the wind?

12:12I did not research that. That is unfair. You can't do that to me. Okay. Well, you told her she could only use one word. I did. I was so cool. We're all changing the rules here.

12:26Okay. So putting a wind turbine down or a bunch of them in a big wind farm, it's not going to stop warm air from rising. It's not going to stop that vacancy from forming and other air from rushing into fill its place. It's not going to stop wind from happening. But does it slow the wind that's moving in? It seems like it would. I mean, your husband's got a point, right? Like we're taking energy out of this wind. It's kinetic energy from the moving air particles. We are harvesting it. We're turning some of that into electricity.

12:58So therefore, the wind must be slowing down, right? We must be reducing the amount of kinetic energy in the air. It's just conservation of energy.

Global wind energy potential

13:07So let's go back to this paper, right? It talks about how wind is a finite resource. How finite are we talking, right? I mean... Two. Two. It's two winds. Two winds. I found a 2025 University of Michigan wind energy fact sheet that's got a bunch of useful numbers. And it estimates that if we used all of the global onshore and offshore wind energy to its full potential, we put as many wind turbines all over the place to get all the wind energy we could,

13:43we would be able to generate 872,000 terawatt hours of electricity annually. Which is over 30 times what we used in 2023. What, the whole planet? The whole planet. Wow. The global consumption. We would have over 30 times the whole planet's global consumption if we went absolutely bananas putting wind turbines all over the place. For just the US alone, we could get 43,000 terawatt hours per year, which would exceed how much the US uses by over 4,000 terawatt hours.

14:20So, it's finite in the sense that, yes, eventually you run out of places to put them and maybe good, suitable places to put them. But it's not finite in the sense that, like, oh, well, we're still going to need to fill this gap somewhere else with more electricity until, you know, AI data centers make everything. We need insane amounts of electricity, you know, in, like, five years. That's a joke. I don't actually know how long it's going to take. But. Two. Two. It's two. Yeah, it's two. Okay. So, we could keep putting up new wind turbines all the time.

14:51We'd be okay. We wouldn't, you know, use up all the wind to the point that we can't generate more electricity. But I did find research saying that we do need to be mindful about where we put them. There was a 2021 paper published in Nature Scientific Reports, and they simulated the effects of wind farms in the North Sea. And they used planned wind farms that hadn't been built yet. And they simulated how the air moves throughout the course of many, many years, like over a decade. And they found that the wind farms could create a breaking effect on the wind that could extend as far as 40 kilometers downwind.

15:29And in stable conditions, like in March and April, it could extend as far as 100 kilometers. So, that slowed down wind actually would reduce the power output of neighboring wind farms by as much as a quarter, if we are not mindful of that. So, yes, the air is slowing down. Yes, we need to be mindful of where we put them to get the most out of this investment of putting up these big, huge towers and turbines. But if we went absolutely hog wild, could we completely stop the wind, right?

16:04That is ultimately your husband's question. Mm-hmm.

16:11No. Oh. I know. That was great. Thank you. But it's because we have to think a little more carefully about exactly what that would mean if wind would come to a stop, right? It's flowing along. It comes to a turbine. The turbine spins, and it takes all the kinetic energy out of the wind particle. So, just on the other side of this turbine, you have completely still air. Well, then how does more wind keep coming in, right?

16:41It's not possible. Yeah, because there's already wind there. Because you're saying it's, like, circular. Wait, no, I don't get it. So, I'm saying you basically would be building a wall of air particles, right? Okay. And new wind coming through would not be able to push through the turbine because there would just be completely static air on the other side of it, right? The air on the other side has to keep moving. Which means it's still wind. Right. It might go from, it might go from, like, five wind to two wind, but it was, it's still wind.

17:12Right. So, okay, maybe you can't answer this, but if you start to load wind turbines in a row and the air was slowly slowing down through the wind turbine, would it eventually stop? Like, where? Because you can't just slow down forever, or can it? Right.

The physics of wind efficiency

17:29Okay.

The physics of wind efficiency

17:30So, there was a German physicist in 1919 named Albert Betz, and he's the one who did calculations on the maximum efficiency of a wind turbine. And he realized that the particles just completely stopping after a turbine didn't make sense. And so, he came up with another framework of thinking about it. And it's kind of the inverse of how we normally think of, like, Bernoulli's principle, right, to bring it back to airplanes. When we talk about air moving over a wing, right, the air stream gets squeezed down, and because it's squeezed, the pressure drops and the speed increases over an airplane's wing.

18:11And that's because of this logical fact that the same amount of air particles before it goes over the wing has to be leaving the wing, right? And it's the same with a wind turbine. The same number of air particles in the wind stream tube before the turbine have to be on the other side of the turbine. So, if you think of it as like a tube of air coming at this turbine, if the same number of particles are on one side as they are on the other, but they're slowing down, then the diameter of the tube expands.

18:43So, really, what's happening is the air going through a turbine, it spreads out and slows down. Oh. So, even if you put another wind turbine that's the same diameter right behind it, you are not getting all of the slowed down wind on the other side of it. Okay. You need a proportionally larger turbine. And then after that, you'd need another proportionally larger turbine and another proportionally larger turbine. And there's a geometric limit on how efficient these turbines can be, like how much energy they can take out of this, which is what Betts realized.

19:22He calculated the maximum efficiency of a wind turbine is about 59%. And today's wind turbines, they're surprisingly close. They're about 50% efficient. They take about 50% of the energy out of the wind that goes over them, which is pretty impressive. That is pretty impressive. But that means every time, if we kept that efficiency and kept having proportionally larger and larger wind turbines, every time the wind passed it, you would reduce the energy by half. Right? So, you'd slow the air down proportionally.

19:53Oh. And that's based on velocity squared. So, you'd really slow it down by, like, one-fourth and then one-fourth and then one-fourth. And you'd approach zero as your wind turbine, your nth wind turbine, got infinitely large, right? Right. So, like, from a practical, realistic standpoint, it is impossible. In math calculus land, where we can go to infinity and have an infinitely large wind turbine, yes, as you approach... It would just get infinitely small.

20:24Yes. It would never quite reach zero. It would just get... Exactly. You cannot completely stop it. If you were to try and re-inject some real-world practicality, there is a minimum amount of wind you need to actually still spin these turbines and overcome the momentum, right? Right. And so, especially as our wind turbine gets larger and larger and larger, the wind speed doesn't overcome the momentum. Yeah, it would need more. So, you would hit a point, realistically, if you were insane enough to try this in the real world, you would hit a point where you have a big enough wind turbine to meet the diameter of the bigger stream tube, but the wind is not moving fast enough to actually get it to spin.

21:07Yeah, that's what I was picturing is sort of like, I mean, I didn't think of it as a progressively and ridiculously larger windmill each time, but I was just picturing like 10 windmills in a row, and the first one's kind of like going really fast, and by the last one, it's just like barely moving. Yeah. Because there's just not enough kinetic energy left in the wind for it to harvest that energy. It's not that there's no energy left, but like you said. But yeah, it makes sense that it would have to be larger and larger and larger and larger and larger, like the dominoes, like dominoes.

21:41The moment of inertia would, you know, keep increasing and you, yeah, you wouldn't be able to spin it. So, in the battle between windmills and wind, wind is undefeated. You can't actually bring it to a complete stop. I mean, that's great to know, you know, I can sleep easy to know, or my husband can, whatever. I was picturing kind of like a river, I thought, before you mentioned the like stream tube. Most of the ways we harvest energy in general are turning a turbine in some way or another, whether it's generating heat to turn a turbine or having the wind do it.

22:17All of the burning of everything, even nuclear energy, it's all just making something to turn a turbine. And so, like, I was thinking of dams. You know, you put a dam, you have a river with a very specific flow rate and a drop and all of this. You put a dam on it, and then let's say there's still drop, you could put another dam on it, and there's still drop, you could put another dam on it. But eventually the water's just kind of like trickling out of there, you know. It's still moving, because it's got to go somewhere. It turns into a lake or something, you know, whatever it is. It's still there, it's still going. Yeah. There's still energy in it, we just can't use it.

22:48I work in science journalism as my day job, and sometimes we'll get, like, press releases that are like, ooh, new form of renewable energy is being developed. And every time you look at it, and it's just another thing turning a turbine, everyone just goes, oh, well, that's boring. That's all we came up with, everything. It's like, I don't know if you know the Scooby-Doo meme where it's like, let's see who you really are. And, like, they take the mask off the ghost, and it's just... Old Man Turbine! Yeah.

23:19Every time. It's just Old Man Windmill, yet again. New source of energy. It's a turbine. It's a turbine. Total voltaics, though. Solar panels that you brought up. The only one I can think of that's not just straight taking energy from the sun and turning it into moving electrons without, like, cranking some magnets inside a coil of copper wire. Yeah. Yeah. Have you been to the San... I don't know. I've never said it out loud. Gorgino? Gior... Gior...

23:49Giorgono? There's no way that's right. San Gorgonio Pass. It's in between Los Angeles and, like, Palm Springs by Cabazon, where the dinosaurs are. Oh, the San Gorgonio! Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We all call him Sango over here. Do you? Yeah. Well, that's a windmill farm that is mind-blowing, if you are near a Google machine and want to Google it. There's literally, like, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them.

24:21It was a wind farm built because they're like, oh, this is one of the best places in the country to build a wind farm. We're going to try out some designs for different windmills. And so as you drive through, there's, like, just the regular, you know, interstate that drives through that valley on your way to wherever you're going. You just pass these windmills that some of them look ancient, you know? I mean, they're not literally probably from, like, the mid-20th century. But it's like they were testing out small ones and then they get bigger and they change the, like, kind of shapes of some of the things.

24:53It happens until you get to these modern windmills that just tower above these tiny little ones that look like mini Eiffel Towers with, like, a little propeller on the top. And you can go and find interactive maps of all of the different plots and all of the different windmills. And that pass, all of those windmills are turning. You know, it's windy enough in this one pass that on a windy day, they're all moving. Yeah. Which is pretty awesome. This makes sense. So I recently took, like, an aircraft navigation class and I'm in SoCal. And so there's a lot of places here where winter wind power is ideal because you've got, like, the Mojave Desert that's getting warmed up and all that air is coming out of it.

25:33And then you've got air from outside of it coming in, rushing in. But it has to go in between mountain passes. And so because of that same Bernoulli principle where it's getting squeezed, the airstreams are getting squeezed down, the velocity of the wind shoots up. And so, yeah, you can put tons and tons of wind turbines in there and get a lot of power out of them. It's, like, perfect situation for it. Yeah, it's pretty incredible. Every time I go through there, I'm just like, wow. So cool.

26:04They are hypnotizing. They are. I think I would find that very, very cool. You think in the UK, it's such a windy, windy place. You think we'd have more wind turbines, but they're relatively sparse here. We're not utilizing our full potential, I don't think. You're doing a lot of offshore, though, right? I mean, there was that study about the North Sea. Oh, yes, you're right. Offshore wind. We are doing that. Scotland, too. And offshore wind is more efficient. The winds can get higher. The towers will be taller. I did research on this that I wasn't planning on using.

26:35But they use, like, direct drives, so there's not, like, a gearbox in there, which tends to break. They just, like, drive the generator directly with these really big, high-torque blades. Cool. And the downside is, like, because they're offshore, they're more difficult to maintain, obviously. But, yeah, between land and offshore, you get more power out of offshore wind farms. And the UK, from what I know, yeah, is making use of that, to the chagrin of some American presidents. Yeah. Where it's ruining the view from the golf course.

27:07Oh, yes, of course. Yeah. I mean, I think at least one to two months out of the year are completely renewably powered in the UK now. Wow. Wow. What's it like? It's getting better. Yeah. Do you just sit, I would just flip a light switch on and off and be like, guilt-free, baby!

27:30That's great. That's very American of you. Jealous Americans, right?

Favorite energy generation methods

27:34Like. Ella, do you have a favorite way to generate electricity? Wow, what a question. What? If you had to pick a favorite, which one would it be? Yeah, controversially, nuclear power. Hey! Hey! You're amongst friends. It's controversial in the UK here. And now small, modular nuclear reactors as well, which have just gotten approval here as well. Oh, really? So they'll be starting in the next, I mean, they say they're starting now, but probably won't be 10 years before they're online.

28:06I'm a big fan of nuclear power, and obviously it gets such a bad rap. I mean, the thing that a lot of people in the UK don't know is that we actually get a very large amount of our energy from nuclear power from France. Yeah. And we just import it. So, uh, we're using it anyway. We might as well make it our own, but I guess people don't want it on their doorstep. I'll have it. Some people are going to be paid, I think, to have, like, uh, when they're at that, which are being developed now, the smallest kind of modular nuclear reactors, like, in their gardens or, like, their acreage if they have some space to do it, which would be super

28:38cool as well. Anyway, yeah, nuclear power. Yeah, I'm also very pro-nuclear power. I think my favorite, because it's just weird and cool, is, like, geothermal. I think it's just really interesting to be like, oh, we'll just use the Earth. It's warm. We got it. It's really temperature differentials and stuff. But it's very cool. I think that's neat. But nuclear is definitely. I mean, I like solar power as well, because even in a country like this, which is very overcast, it's still quite efficient, surprisingly. So that's great.

29:08But although I'm seeing, like, these pictures now, I think out of China, they're doing these massive solar farms in the sea, which is getting loads of energy, but preventing light from getting into the sea and is going to cause havoc ecosystem-wise. So there's a limit there about it space-wise. Yeah. There is no such thing as a free lunch. It's such a bummer. Do you like having electricity? Well, it's going to cost you in some way, shape, or form. Ella, I don't know if you know this, but I used to work at a historic site, and I played the fife, and I fired the cannon.

29:40Is that relevant to wind power discussion? It is and isn't. Did you put a little turbine on the end of the fife so you could harvest the flute energy? No, but I should have. As a science demo during this. The power went out on the island, actually. It was on an island. And the power went out for like weeks, like two weeks or something. They didn't have power because their under-lake cable had been messed up somehow. And so they ended up building backups and whatnot. But there were plenty of times when we worked at this historic site that we're like out there

30:12doing our thing, and the power, you know, would go out pretty regularly on this island. And we didn't even know that there was no electricity for like hours because we're just like living in the 1880s, basically like, doot-do-do, just going to go down to the campfire and get myself a lunch and blah, blah, blah. Like none of us knew, which was a unique experience. But to Julian's point, it's like very unlikely that most people would be like, oh, there's no electricity? I didn't even realize, huh? Just how much of our life has become powered by electricity in the last century is amazing.

30:47Yeah, we're hopelessly dependent on a system a lot of us don't understand. Hopefully nothing bad happens to it.

Ad break

30:53Yeah, hopefully. Well, let's take a quick break and we'll come back and we'll talk about P. Hell yeah.

31:01Hey, Caroline, you said you needed help. Whoa, whoa. What is going on here? Oh, hey, Tom. Yes, I need some guidance on making sure I've done the wiring right in this. If I point the camera in here, can you tell me if this looks right? Um, before I can help with anything, what am I looking at here? Right, of course. Sorry. Is this your room? So this is a makeshift machine for making bare hydrogen. This bit here is a residual gas stripping thing.

31:31Specifically, it's double stripping, which will hopefully convert negative hydrogen into positive hydrogen. It was the easiest way that I could think of of getting protons, like you suggested earlier. This is the bit I need help with now, but the best way that I could think of to actually use the protons on my laptop was using a low energy beam transport system. I asked Ella to Google how to make one, but she had no faith in me. She's just messaged me, actually. Do you think Sun would let us borrow the Large Hatron Collider so that we can watch Riverdale?

32:02It's a good question. Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. Um, I need you to look at me when I say this, Caroline. What, what is it? Don't look at the beam. First of all, you shouldn't be looking at the beam. I don't think so, but look at me. What? But when you asked me how to watch shows that were exclusive to the US earlier, I said Proton VPN, not Protons, the concept and the physical entity. I also didn't think you meant Riverdale, but we can discuss that later. It's, uh, I have complex feelings about it.

32:32Wait, so when you were talking about how protons add a layer of protection that keeps your browsing habits private, you were actually talking about Proton VPN? Do you think I was talking about like orbital shells? Caroline, yes, yes, clearly, very clearly. Okay, I was really confused when you said that Protons were backed by strong European privacy laws and years of expertise to create a safer, faster and more open internet for everyone. This does make more sense. Listen, Caroline, I understand that all of this security does feel like a concern, but

33:03it's just something that Proton offers and it's great to keep up with your data hygiene these days in the year of our Lord 2026. As someone who's been flying around a lot recently and who'll be going to the UK later this year, being able to access the shows I love from everywhere in the world is essential. To research topics for the live show.

33:25Of course. Plus, it's easy to get started. Right now, Proton VPN is offering our listeners 70% off a two-year plan when you go to ProtonVPN.com slash learn. That's Proton, P-R-O-T-O-N-V-P-N dot com slash learn for 70% off your two-year plan. That's ProtonVPN.com slash learn. So, Riverdale. Yeah, so by season three, that's when you're going to have to really... But the thing is, the first few parts are essential because that's sort of how you get into the headspace that they're trying to get at. And if anything, you need to establish the shark before you can jump it, is what I always

33:58say. In the iterations of Evangelion, you sort of have these almost like biblical character texts, right? Because it's like, these are the icons, right? Like, they more so stand in for perspectives than they do for the characters themselves. And also the differences between sort of the platonic ideals in the original comics versus how they are... Hi, I'm Justin McElroy, and I host Sawbones with my wife, Sydney. I'm here with MaxFun member of the month, Amanda Adams. Thank you so much for being a supporter, and thank you for being our member of the month.

34:28Woohoo! You're so welcome. How long have you been listening to Sawbones, Amanda? It's been probably a good 10 years. I very much enjoy Dr. Sydney and everything she does, and it's wonderful to be able to support it. Let me ask you about the most important moment in your life when you decided to become a MaxFun supporter. Honestly, I am just proud I can support the people who make me hours and hours of content every week. I feel honored to do it. Amanda Adams, thank you so much. I really appreciate your support. Congratulations on your whole month.

35:00Thank you so much. It has been a good month already. Support the shows you love, including this one. Check the show notes for a link or go to MaximumFun.org. Join.

35:14Hi, everybody. It's Ellen Weatherford. And Christian Weatherford. People say not to judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree. But we can judge a snake by its ability to fly, or a spider by its ability to dive. Or a dung beetle by its ability to navigate with the starlight of the Milky Way galaxy. On Just the Zoo of Us, we rate our favorite animals out of 10 in the categories of physical effectiveness, behavioral ingenuity, and, of course, aesthetics. Guest experts like biologists, ecologists, musicians, comedians, and more join us to share

35:45their unique insights into the animal kingdom. Listen with the whole family on MaximumFun.org, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if humans peed once a year

35:52Welcome back to That's Absurd, Please Elaborate. I hope you enjoyed thinking about your favorite type of energy during the break, which I'm going to just do that thing where you guess, and it's probably solar. I don't know why. I think you were thinking about solar. If you were, send us an email. In the meantime, let's talk to Ella about pee. Ella, my favorite thing. I was thinking about solar, and that's the end of email.

36:24That's the email. That's the only email I want to get. So, Ella, as you already know, but I'll read it for you, your question comes from Julia, who asks, what if humans only peed once a year? Great question. Great question. There are several steps we need to go through in order to kind of answer this question. And the first one is figuring out what happens normally when we pee. We need to understand what happens normally when we pee in order to understand what would happen if we weren't peeing. Do you guys know why we urinate?

36:55Because it's funny. It's hilarious. Other than that. We don't do it to scent things like my cat would do.

37:06We've talked about this before. It has to do with you got too much nitrogen. Got to get rid of that nitrogen. That's a key point here. Yeah. It's a problem. So, it's the end result of removing waste products from the blood and keeping substances like nitrogen, but also potassium, sodium, water, and balance. That's easy enough. But I do want to do a kind of quick high school biology tour of the key parts of this process, which will make some things later clearer. Yeah. So, step one, you eat, in particular, you eat food rich in like protein, meat, fish, eggs,

37:41dairy, legumes, etc. And the protein gets broken down into excess amino acids and then into something. And the protein gets broken down into stuff, but it includes excess amino acids that go to the liver where they are processed by something called deamination. And this is where a nitrogen-containing amino group is removed from the amino acid and converted

38:12into a keto acid, which can then be converted to glucose or fat and into ammonia.

38:21Very, very toxic ammonia. So, then ammonia is immediately converted in the liver to urea. Urea leaves the liver via the blood and it's less toxic than ammonia, but it's still quite toxic. So, then it goes to the kidneys and it's filtered out of the blood along with excess water and salt and hormones and drugs and anything else you've got in your blood that you shouldn't have there. That's urine. Okay. Your kidneys filter about 113 to 141 liters of blood every day, and that makes around

38:55one to two liters of urine. Sorry, I don't have that in imperial units. That's fine. Don't figure it out. It's 170 quarts. I just wanted to switch to quarts because our units don't matter. It's close. I mean... 148 quarts. It's like 3.8 liters to the gallon and four quarts to a gallon, so it's pretty close. Yeah, it's true. 37 gallons. I genuinely have no idea. So, great. I love how you said that disdainfully, like, don't know, and I don't care.

39:28And I won't figure it out. Sorry. This has no bearing on my life over here in the UK. I love that. I'm envious of it. I mock it, but we use a mix of imperial and metric in a way that makes absolutely no sense. So, whatever. You use stone, which I'm still like... We do. When I was living in the UK, somebody was like, oh, yeah, I, like, dropped a stone over the last few months, and I was like, I don't... Why did you drop it? I don't... Like, in your garden? I don't understand where you dropped it. Yeah, it's really hard.

40:02I have no idea how much I weigh, because I'm constantly trying to convert between three different things. Whatever. Anyway, so you've got your urine. It travels down your ureta into your bladder, and your bladder is a stretchy sac, which can expand, but only to a point. So, a normal adult bladder can hold around 500 milliliters of urine before it's full, and then it takes... And it takes about nine to ten hours to get to that point. It can be faster. Depends how fast you're drinking.

40:32Then you pee. Yeah. But what happens if you don't pee? Any guesses? You just don't pee. You wiggle a lot. That's what I remember. You do the pee dance, things start to hurt, it gets really uncomfortable, and then you just pee anyway. And then... Pretty much. Yeah, you pee, or... Well, there's two things that can happen. Either it comes out the way that, like, the body's kind of set up for it to come out, or it comes out not... Your eyes. ...how the body is designed. You leap urine.

41:04No, like, your bladder explodes. Right? Does it explode? Many people believe that. Right? I've read Roman history. I know about Caligula. Didn't Tycho Brahe have that problem, too? Yeah, Tycho Brahe died of not peeing. One of our favorite astronomers. You can die of not peeing, but probably not because your bladder exploded.

Holding urine and bird biology

41:25Okay.

Holding urine and bird biology

41:26Let's get the kind of boring, realistic stuff out of the way here. If you hold your pee... I'm sorry, but this is a PSA. You need to know this. Ah, PSA! If you hold your pee, it can cause bacteria to grow in your bladder and lead to infections. It can overstretch your bladder muscles, so they weaken and you get incontinence. Urine can back up into your kidneys and cause pain, infections, damage your kidneys, and you can get bladder stones. Don't hold your pee, kids.

41:56Like, really don't. Yeah, let it out, you know, in the appropriate location. I mean, at an appropriate facility, yeah. Yeah, at an appropriate location. Nah, just anywhere. Any anywhere.

42:07Tell them a doctor told you. Yeah, do it. Not the medical one, but whatever. She's got a doctorate. Still counts. The good news is the bladder is actually very, very strong, so it probably won't explode, despite what The Simpsons has taught us. Eventually, you would probably just pee yourself. Unless there was some other problem, like trauma to the bladder, or like a blockage or narrowing of the urethra.

42:38There have been cases of people's bladders rupturing in those instances, but it's very, very rare. So you probably don't have to worry about that. You're much more likely to get a bladder infection and piss yourself. Just in general. Yeah. Yeah. And certainly there was no holding it in for a year. You would die before then. But let's say we did have the capacity to only pee once a year. To understand what that would look like in humans, we need to look at animals that can

43:12go a long time without peeing, or don't pee at all. What? So yeah, the first animals I looked at for this were birds. Oh yeah. Because birds don't pee. They have a whole different system to us. First of all, they don't have a bladder at all. Apart from ostriches, they have bladders. Interesting. It's because they're flightless, so this will all make sense. Have you seen an ostrich pee? Did you, in the course of your research, come across like a video or something? No, I just saw that in my personal time.

43:43Have you seen it? No, I haven't. I don't know if they... It's freaky. There's like a tentacle that comes out when they pushed waste out. Yeah. They do actually urinate then, or is it... I don't know. It's just a big mess of waste. I went to an ostrich farm with my wife, and the person behind the counter was like, okay, here's your food.

44:05Here's the little handles for the food. Food's over there. And just when they pee, try not to freak out. And I was like, what? That's great. But yeah, there's this otherworldly alien tentacle that comes out. Alex Danis was at an ostrich farm recently, and I was like, what's up with them peeing? And she was like, it was weird. That's great. Okay, I'm Googling it. Ostriches, like other birds, do have cloacers, right? So instead of having a urethra and an anus and genitals, they just have this all-in-one

44:39multi-purpose machine for the cloaca. It's so efficient. I've seen it described as one hole to unite them all. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. You know, they're using it for sex, they're egg-laying, they get rid of liquid poop out of their cloaca, which gets rid of the stuff that we get rid of in urine, so they technically don't urinate. I guess ostriches kind of more so, because they'll have more water coming out, but it's also still their poop. And they don't convert, birds don't convert protein into urea, but into uric acid, which

45:14is a lot less toxic, so it requires less water to dilute it, hence having no bladder. And this is really important for birds, because they need to be light to fly, so they don't want all the extra water weight. It doesn't apply to ostriches, because they don't need to fly. I have included a picture in the chat of an ostrich eliminating waste. I looked at a couple, and I didn't like it. Ah! It's like there's a little elf foot coming out of there. Yeah, what's up with that? David, the gnome's in there, he's trying to have a baby arm reaching out.

45:47Oh, God.

45:49Well, there you go. Now you know. Wow. And it's a lot of liquid, and that's because they have bladders, so there you go. There you go. I learned something. I would recommend anyone looking up that image right now.

46:04It'll go on our socials. It'll be the waving video, and then, bam, ostrich pee when you least expect it. Ostrich bladder is a good band name. Ostrich waste. So, okay, those are birds. We could try out a bird-like system where we convert to uric acid instead of into urea and just stop peeing altogether. The problem is that no bladder also means there's nowhere to store the waste. Right. So they are pooping constantly. And this is the complete opposite of what we want in this situation.

46:36We want to hold it for a year. And I don't know about you guys, but I don't want a cloaca, especially after looking at that picture of the ostrich. I think, as a man, a cloaca would solve a lot of my self-inflicted problems. I think. Can you know what I mean? If we all have the same stuff, that might unite us more. Yeah. Julian, say more. Say more about that, Julian. I think my life, I think I would get in less trouble if I had just a cloaca, you know? Do you get in trouble a lot because you don't have a cloaca?

47:07You'll never know. Every day. Every day. Wow. I mean, I do like the idea that it's like one sphincter to rule them all, you know? Yeah. Kind of situation. It's pretty great.

47:20But unfortunately, that's not happening in this scenario. Darn it. So really, we need to be looking at other mammals' urine storing capacity as they have similar systems to us, right? And all mammals that I can tell pee. And actually, there was a paper from 2013 titled Law of Urination. All mammals empty their bladders over the same duration, which found that almost all mammals weighing more than one kilogram take an average of 21 seconds to empty their bladder. Yeah.

47:51We've brought this up on the pod before. In the best way, it's amazing. It's one of my favorite fun facts. Such a great one. And when I was researching for this topic, I was timing myself and my husband peeing. Yeah, I did too. As soon as I read this paper, I was like, got to time everybody. Everybody get out here. Let's go. He's such an important part of this episode. He contributed so much without even knowing. I love it. Was he where you were timing him or you were just like outside the bathroom with a stopwatch? No, he was not aware. And if you're listening to this, you take longer than average.

48:26Oh, wow. Is that good? Good for it. Does it come with some sort of price? Maybe he's holding it for too long. So that's not good.

48:35This is not relevant to the question at all. I just like it. Sure.

Hibernating mammals and nitrogen

48:41But moving on, if you had to guess what mammal we could look to for holding pee for a long time, what would it be? Something that hibernates. I was going to say like a bear. Yeah. Do they hold it? I mean, hibernation isn't really sleep, you know. What is it? Yeah. Do they get up in the middle of the winter and go outside and relieve themselves real quick? I would think so. I was hoping for more like exciting answers, but you guys were right. You're right. You were right.

49:11Oh, back up. Giraffes. Yeah. Because they're tall. Ostriches again. It fills up their necks. Yeah. It goes up the neck and then it kind of comes back out. Elephants. Because they're big. They don't need to worry about how much weight they're carrying. Let's just throw a big bladder in there. Camels. You're right. Leave it. You're right. We're going to look at brown bears here specifically. And it's because they hibernate for five to six months out of the year. And in that time, you're right, it's not sleep.

49:42It's what do they call it? Torpor. But they do not eat, drink, poop or pee at all during that time. Their kidneys effectively shut down during hibernation. And to prevent a toxic buildup of urea while their kidneys aren't working, they recycle it instead. Recycle it? Into what? Well, here's what happens. Their microbes break down the urea and harvest nitrogen from it. So the nitrogen is used to make proteins that they use largely in skeletal muscle to maintain muscle mass while they're in hibernation.

50:17Genius. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, it's great. That's so cool. Honestly, that... I did not know this. This is amazing. I was wondering if that has, like, medical uses for people that are, like, laid up in bed for years, you know? Yeah, maybe some gut, like, you could do some kind of fecal transplant from a bear to a human and get the microbes in. That would be... Talk about the scat man. Worst superhero origin story of all time. He was in a coba, and then he had bear feces put in his intestine.

50:50And now he's the scat man. The power of a bear when he's not sleepy. Actually, I suppose the microbes, they wouldn't be... It wouldn't be in their guts. I'm not sure where these microbes are, actually. Something to look up if you're listening. Yeah, maybe in the bottom. Other bears and hibernating mammals also do this. So, like, hibernating ground squirrels do this as well, but they're not as hench. This kind of nitrogen recycling is, like, the closest thing I could figure out that maybe a human could do to not pee for an extended period of time.

51:24But bears are able to do this because they hibernate. So, they're not taking on any new nitrogen-containing food, which is going to increase that urea load during that time. I mean, I guess in theory we could hibernate for an entire year, but that's... It feels like that's against the spirit of the question. Yeah. How do you not be... Just sleep the whole year through. Just, yeah, for a year. So, let's say we don't hibernate. What would have to change then in our lives to allow this to work? Now, most of the nitrogen in our diet comes from protein, like I said at the start.

51:57So, animal products, mostly meat, fish, eggs, dairy, and then some plant-based foods, legumes, nuts, and grains. For a start, we would just have to eat less of these things to reduce our nitrogen intake. So, this might be like a world of almost vegans. Whoa. Although, I imagine it like we'd have, like, one huge juicy steak a year before the big pee day, you know? Oh, that would be great. Before pee day. Are you in the UK familiar with Fat Bear Week? Yes. I love Fat Bear Week. Yeah, it would be like that for us.

52:27We'd just have, yeah, one big meal and get real loaded up. And then, yeah, okay. Sorry. One big, very protein, nitrogenous meal. And the thing about this is there are an estimated 1.6 billion cows in the world right now. And we just wouldn't need these anymore. So, the environment would probably hugely benefit from this arrangement because we wouldn't be doing intensive agriculture anymore. You know, no clearing rainforest for land, lower production of greenhouse gases from the digestive processes of cows, less methane and nitrous oxide from emissions from manure from the cows as well.

53:02A net positive if we peed less, perhaps. We'd all have something to talk about because if you're vegan, that's, like, definitely something that people talk about. Oh, I thought you were going to compare, like, hey, are you – it'd be like your birthday, like your one pee day. Yeah. It would be, like, a big landmark day. Oh, see, I thought it was more like, you know, a day a year. You know, everybody had the same day. No, I think it'd be like a birthday. Everyone would have a different day. So, you'd be like, oh, my pee day is tomorrow.

53:32We should do something fun, you know, like, let's go out for a meal before my birthday. We'd have to take the whole day off work because you would just be peeing the whole time. Like, I don't think it would take you just 21 seconds, right? It would just be, like, one long day dedicated. Well, no, it would still only be 500 milliliters, I think. Oh, yeah, exactly. You'd just be very efficient. Yeah. But maybe you take the day off, like, you know, some workplaces give you your birthday off, so they might give you your pee day off. Yeah, your pee day and your pee day. Wait, if everybody's peeing only once a year, think of the, like, urban design changes that we would have.

54:05No bathrooms at the mall. I mean, maybe there would be one, but it would be, like, rarely used. There'd be one for an emergency. Just in case today was your pee day and you forgot. And you forgot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a good point. Or there'd be, yeah, like, a central one that you go to on your pee day and your friends wait outside clapping. Oh, so there'd be, like, the pee church. Yeah. This is now becoming, like, quite culty. Like, this is just a normal everyday thing that's, like, every year thing that's happening. Everyone lives like this in this world, so it's just, yeah, it's like a birthday.

54:36Some people care. Some people make a big deal out of it. You know? Yeah. Some people are like, whatever, I hate my pee day. Some people take the piss, and they're like, it's my pee month, and they make you do stuff every weekend. It's just one day. Jeez, the whole month? Come on. Ridiculous.

54:57So I should say another potential change with the nitrogen recycling thing is, I said nitrogen recycling that bears do is maintaining muscle mass. So I wondered, would we all be more, like, really buff? You know, would we have to go to the gym less? I guess it depends on how much protein we're consuming. I couldn't get the numbers for this, because weirdly, people haven't looked this up. But it was just an errant thought I had.

55:29But that's the nitrogen side of things. There is another key part of this, which is we also lose water and salts, potassium, sodium, and a whole other bunch of stuff through our urine, not just urea. So we need to get a way to get rid of that stuff as well. And I imagine that that would be through our sweat. Yeah. We have three kinds of sweat glands humans do. Ecrine, apocrine, and apoecrine. And two of those, ecrine and apocrine glands, secrete mostly water, a little bit of salt as well.

56:02And the apocrine glands lose mostly proteins and lipids, as well as sugars and a little bit of ammonia as well. So we could, in theory, get rid of all this stuff through our sweat. But we would probably need to be very, very sweaty. Like, we would be wet all of the time. So we pee once a year, but we're always sweaty. Like damp. We're, like, constantly damp. Like a very moist society. I feel like this would fundamentally change societal norms.

56:36Yeah. Like, what we wear to accommodate that. Beauty standards. Like, is it better to be sweatier? Is it, like, you know, that means you're really hydrated and healthy? Everybody be glowing all the time. Yeah. Real shiny and slick. We'd be dripping. Like, the amount of, if you're thinking you're getting rid of 500, well, one to two liters of urine a day, are we now getting rid of that much through our sweat?

57:08That's intense. Wow. That is a lot. The volleyball scene from Top Gun all the time. Honestly? Hot. Down. Hot, yeah. Into it. Probably have to drink a lot more, though, than to keep up with all the fluids we're losing through the sweat. Well, isn't the idea that, no, we don't have to drink a lot more. You wouldn't be losing it through, yeah, you'd be losing the same amount. It's still moving the same amount. I guess so, yeah. You just need a ridiculously large windmill to catch the amount of sweat that you're losing. And then you just need to get bigger and bigger.

57:40Yeah, yeah, yeah. Power that, well, it'd be like a water wheel thing coming off of you. More like it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Wow, so we'd be sweatier. We'd have a pee holiday every year. Yeah, we'd be potentially stronger. Maybe buffer. Yeah, maybe buffer. We'd eat less meat. This sounds like you're just living in Marin County. I don't know. It's kind of like the monkey's paw.

58:11Like, I only want to pee once a year. Okay, but then you immediately just start dripping with sweat. And you're just like, what?

58:20Or the monkey's paw just kills you on January 1st. Like, you pee on the first day, and then you're dead. Oh, yeah. And you've only peed once that year. Actually, that's better. I think that's more monkey's paw. Wow. I feel like this is the second episode in the row where we've had the monkey's paw here. It's a popular theme. Have you seen Obsession? It's a very good, scary movie. Wow, everybody. That's wild. That's all I've got for you. Yeah, that's amazing. I mean, here I was thinking, one time somebody asked about inflating your head.

58:52What was that one? Anyway, Julian ended up doing the math about how big your head would have to be in order to, like, lift you off the ground if it were inflated. And I was just thinking we'd have to make the bladder so big. But if we're peeing, you know, a couple liters a day, you're looking at a bladder that's like hundreds of liters, which would be a lot. That would be a lot of bladder. Maybe there's like an external bladder that we carry around. Or maybe we decant through other means into an external bladder.

59:27Anyway, I'm not a mathsy person, so I didn't go down the math route. I went in for the, let's just completely change our biology. I love that. Oh, so acceptable. Yes, definitely. I also think that based on what you told me, or what you told us earlier, that the liver is doing all of this amazing work because the liver is so cool. And then it just like dumps this toxic waste into the blood. What's going on, liver? Liver's like a data center in there. Just like, hey, I want to screw all this up. I think the liver gets way too much credit.

59:57It's the kidneys that are really clean. Yeah, they're over there just quietly living behind everything, you know, cleaning everybody up. I got this. Don't worry, liver. You keep messing everything up. I'm done. At least the kidneys have a friend to talk to. I appreciate the whole system. I think it all works well together. Teamwork. Body. Good job. Thank you. It's beautiful. One credit. If any of those fail, it's bad news. You know, it's like cirrhosis, bad. Kidney failure, bad. Like, I'd like all of it. I'm going to take it all.

1:00:28Thank you. Wow. You say that like a man who's worried about their organs. You OK, man? You good? They're fine. They're doing well. I don't regret my 20s at all. I'm going to say this fact because it's just popped into my head. You know, our other through system, the eating system going from our, you know, mouths to our anuses and through all of that. You guys might already know this, but it's technically the outside of our body. Yeah. Are we talking like topology wise? We're talking topology.

1:00:58But even in medicine, it's not necessarily considered like internal medicine because of the way we develop as like a donut. We're a worm. We're just a big bony worm. I feel like you guys would probably know that. But just in case your listeners need reminding, I just I really enjoy that fact. It's the outside. We're a straw with flesh bits on it, like limbs, you know, but that's basically it. Yeah. Like a lumpy straw. Not very efficient straw. More complex straw. But at the point, we don't know.

1:01:28Has anyone tried to suck anything through from one side to the other? I think there's a movie about it. Oh, I'm sure. Oh, wait. Is that human centipede? That was good. That's the first one I thought of. That's the first one I thought of.

1:01:44Well, we can't end the show on that. I think we can. What? Do you want to keep stitching more onto this? Is that what you're saying? No, Julian. Hey. Well, wow.

Wrap up and credits

1:02:00What an end to another episode of That's Absurd. Please elaborate. Thank you for listening. Everyone, if you want to go and find more of Ella Hubbard, where can they find you, Dr. Ella Hubbard? You can find me on Let's Learn Everything, which is a podcast. And you can be found, I assume, where you're listening to this. Makes sense. Yeah. We'll put a link to it. You're already halfway there, listener. Yeah. Or go to let'slearneverything.com. And that everything is there. The socials, the podcast. We're doing a live show.

1:02:31Really? Yeah. In October. So there are tickets for that as well. If you end up listening to the podcast and liking it. That's awesome. So for the London-based listeners. Yeah. London. In London on the 13th of October, we've actually been sold out. But we might do a second date. So let's see. Wow. Congrats. That's amazing. Fun. Well, and then thanks to you, the listener, for listening to this episode of That's Absurd. Please elaborate. The show was created and written and produced by Julian Hugen. And by Trace Dominguez.

1:03:01And in this case, this episode by Ella Hubbard. Today's show was produced and edited by the wonderful and... I feel like he could hold his pee for a year, but he wouldn't. Because he'd know better. He's modest. Yeah. Kyle Sisk. He wouldn't want to brag, you know. Wouldn't want to rub it in. He already holds his pee for a year, but you would never know. Yeah. He doesn't say anything. Have you ever seen him go to the bathroom? Nope. No one has. I keep asking, but he won't let me. This show was associate produced by Sabrina Capello, and our music is thanks to Epidemic Sound.

1:03:31Thank you to listeners who submitted questions featured in this episode. And that would be Ella, of course, and also Julia. If you want to submit a question, look for the form in the show notes. You can email us at hello at that's absurd show dot com. Visit our website, that's absurd show dot com slash ask. Call 302 tape show. Leave us a voicemail. We couldn't do this show without your silly questions. So thank you so much to everyone who has submitted them. We have so many questions, we are overwhelmed by your amazing brains. So thank you for that. Don't hold them in, or it'll cause your brain to burst, which I can't believe the bladder

1:04:04bursting is not a real thing. That's like the most gobsmacked takeaway I have from this episode. Yeah, same. Thank you to our absurd administrators over on our Patreon, and all our patrons. Our absurd administrators are Adam, Les, Austin, Jonathan, Dan, Sabrina, Balky, Hannah, Apothecarian, Christina, Atomic Straw, Brian, Shane, Metric, Ton of Batcat, Puchu, and Connor. No new bingo winners since last bingo winners were read. Thank you to all our patrons for supporting the show and letting us do fun, silly things like the occasional live show or traveling to go and meet more people like we will at

1:04:35OpenSauce in July up in the Bay Area in San Francisco. Yeah, it'll be fun. We'll get to meet other people. We're not doing a show there, but we'll be cruising. So if you're in the Bay Area and want to say hi and meet other cool, nerdy creators and makers of things, come to OpenSauce. It'll be fun. Cruisin' for a schmoozin'. That's a thing, right? Anyway. It is now. Sure. Leave us a review wherever you're listening. If you want to see clips from the show, you can find them on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube at That's Absurd Show. And of course, a special thanks to those who listen on Nebula, because just by listening,

1:05:08you're supporting the show. If you want to join Nebula, go to go.nebula.tv slash That's Absurd Show and join, and we will get credit for that, and it will support the show directly. And you get to try it for a whole year, which is pretty awesome. Well, Ella, as a big fan of the show, I know you know what we always say at the end of every episode.

1:05:27Join us next time, where we will learn about everything. That's my favorite. Just join us next time. That's great.

1:05:39That's how we and Les learn everything. I love it. I think join us next time is perfect. It is perfect. As we say. Excellent. Join us next time. Hope you had fun. I think you're walking out. That's how we end Les learn everything. Well, we say it's where we will learn about everything. So, you know, and it applies here. It does. It does. We learn maybe more than you ever wanted to know. More than most people would even think to know. About some weird...

1:06:11Thanks for listening, everybody. We'll see you next time on That's Absurd. Please elaborate. I'll see you next time on That's Absurd.