Latest / Privycast / Ep. 21 The Brown Note
Transcript
- 0:00There's a myth a lot of us grow up believing that hair loss is just a part of life.
- 0:04It happens.
- 0:04It runs in the family.
- 0:05Once it starts, there's no stopping it.
- 0:08But here's the truth.
- 0:09That's outdated thinking.
- 0:10Scientific understanding of hair loss has advanced in recent years.
- 0:14Today we have a deeper knowledge of underlying causes and we've developed science-backed solutions that are both effective and safe.
- 0:20And that's at the very root of happy hair.
- 0:23Dermatologists led innovation offering stronger, FDA-approved ingredients that work.
- 0:28But what really sets Happyhead apart is how personalized it is.
- 0:32They don't do one-size-fits-all fixes.
- 0:34You fill out a comprehensive consultation, and their board-certified dermatologists assign a formula specifically for your hair loss pattern, goals, and lifestyle.
- 0:42And whether you're early in your journey or more advanced, Happyhead offers targeted options that actually work.
- 0:47Topical treatments, oral capsules, or potent dual-action bundles all deliver directly to you, discreetly and freshly compounded in the US.
- 0:55Most people start seeing results in three to six months.
- 0:58But the real magic?
- 0:59It's sustainable.
- 1:00This isn't just about growing hair, it's about keeping it long term.
- 1:04So no, hair loss isn't inevitable anymore.
- 1:07Visit happyhead.com and find out what's possible when science, expertise, and personalization come together.
- 1:13Hair happiness starts here.
- 1:16Even though I was pretty confident I was not going to poop, it's like, is this the one time it's gonna work and I'm just gonna like destroy my podcast situation right now?
- 1:37Hello, welcome back to Privy.
- 1:40Privy is a podcast about bathrooms recorded from a bathroom.
- 1:47I'm your host from the hot seat, Hunter Hoover, and I love toilets.
- 1:54This week, my buddy uh introduced me to a new app, and we will cover this app on the show at some point, but...
- 2:05Essentially this app allows you to log your logs and it maps them for you, which is great because not only can you see where you've pooped, but you can see where your friends have
- 2:18pooped.
- 2:19It's a delightful delightful thing to be able to track and now share with others.
- 2:25thank you for sharing this with me and I'm very excited for the future use and coverage of it.
- 2:30So yeah, good week, but it's almost May and
- 2:35This week, know, we've chatted about laxatives whenever that comes up.
- 2:41We always have to remember our fiber buddies, you know.
- 2:43When you're about laxatives, you can't really go wrong in the area of fiber it up.
- 2:48Like, get some fiber in the situation, mix some fiber up in that.
- 2:52You're gonna be doing better.
- 2:54We've also discussed the idea of sound to cover up the noises that you are making in your closet of leavings.
- 3:02And...
- 3:04Whether you're listening to this, episode of privy, or you're listening to something else, or you're just playing racket over the sound of your butt cannon, it is what it is.
- 3:17But here is the idea.
- 3:19There's this idea in bathroom culture that seems to want to combine these two things, laxatives or things that make you soil and sound
- 3:34that you play while you're in the bathroom into an urban myth for the centuries.
- 3:42The Brown Note.
- 3:44Here at Privycast, our goal is not to discuss whether or not the Brown Note works.
- 3:51Enough people have proven that, and I will play the Brown Note for you here in a moment to see if you soil yourself.
- 3:59And as I tested, not one minute ago, I listened to the
- 4:04again quote brown note in headphones that are of a pretty good quality and I'll tell you I didn't brown myself so there's that.
- 4:16Rather we want to look at the what like where did this come from like and does this idea of a note hat that that makes you poop yourself
- 4:32How does it get locked into our cultural mythos and how does it get propagated and what are the implications of this note, the brown note?
- 4:44So before we get into that, we've got to discuss the history.
- 4:49Where did the brown note come from?
- 4:53How has it passed around as this bathroom hack today where you hear this thing and you
- 5:02You poop uncontrollably.
- 5:06And is there more or some other approach to using sound to help you brown?
- 5:15So here's what I'll say.
- 5:16When we get into the history of the brown note, the history of the brown note almost looks like one of those insane person pin boards where they're like tracking a killer and
- 5:26they've got all these like connected pieces that are swerving all over the place and they've got this like big thing circled in the middle.
- 5:33And in this case,
- 5:34The big thing circled in the middle is a crowd of people fill in their pants with human waste.
- 5:38Now, they're interconnected strings and to figure out how we get down to like MythBusters blasting themselves with like giant rock concert subwoofers, it's a long road from the
- 5:51introduction of the Brown Note to the MythBusters testing this.
- 5:56But all we have is time here at Privy.
- 5:59So to understand where this came from, we have to
- 6:03Quit talking entirely about bathrooms.
- 6:07Leave the bathroom.
- 6:08Go out into the world and talk about bugles and the history of the megaphone.
- 6:15Horns and bugles have been found way, way, way back in history.
- 6:21Used for calls to war, calls for worship, and to alert uh towns and other parties of people that there is danger or something that they need to do.
- 6:31So horns and bugles go way back.
- 6:33you would sound the horn.
- 6:35One toot for charge, two toots for retreat, that type of thing.
- 6:39get the idea.
- 6:39Horns have been in use for a long time for calls to arms, calls to gather, et cetera.
- 6:46But the horn or bugle, if you've ever played one, is good at emitting tones, but it doesn't serve well to project the spoken words of a person's voice.
- 6:59Thus enters the introduction of
- 7:02what we would call today the megaphone.
- 7:05And, you know, they're taking this same shape that is able to project a noise from a horn or a bugle out to the far reaches of others to hear.
- 7:15And the Greek actors in Greek plays were reported to wear these fun cone shaped masks that would help project their voices as they acted.
- 7:26And these were like early voice emitters and
- 7:30They're like a stepping stone to the invention and use of what came to be called speaking trumpets.
- 7:39These speaking trumpets, again, derived from these horn mask things that the Greek folks would wear.
- 7:48These speaking trumpets look exactly like a bugle, except instead of a traditional mouthpiece that you would...
- 7:58you know, elephant honk into, they had an opening that you would put up to your mouth and you would shout into this and thus magnify your voice out the end of the trumpet.
- 8:10The main use for this were seaman.
- 8:14Sea men.
- 8:15Men at sea.
- 8:16To project their voices to other ships and harbors from a distance.
- 8:21You pull up to a harbor, you don't have radios.
- 8:24This is back before radios.
- 8:25We're going way back.
- 8:27You pull up to the harbor, you, you know, get your, your mouth trumpet ready and you call out to the harbor for like instructions or things that you would need to do to land your
- 8:40craft in the thing.
- 8:43So you have these mouth trumpets, they're being used.
- 8:49Everything is going great.
- 8:53And later, um, the same like trumpet things.
- 8:56were used amongst volunteer firefighting groups to communicate with their teams over the roar of the fire.
- 9:03And it's just an excellent invention.
- 9:05Like the speaking trumpet.
- 9:07It's a good idea.
- 9:09Especially when you don't have like electronics and stuff to communicate like at a distance.
- 9:14Now you can like communicate instantly within a vicinity.
- 9:19Speaking trumpet.
- 9:20Good idea.
- 9:21The stage is set now to introduce
- 9:25what is considered to be the first appearance of the brown note, or as folks who first heard it would have called it the prince's breath.
- 9:35In 1841, a former seaman who quit his days at the ocean and became a blacksmith, his name was, and this is just like I think what he became known as because I could not find his
- 9:47full name, but Colander.
- 9:50He took
- 9:51the speaking trumpet that he had used during his time at sea and said, what if it was bigger?
- 10:00What if I made this tiny speaking trumpet into bigger, more power, as Mr.
- 10:08Toolman would say.
- 10:09His invention later called the colophon.
- 10:14He would speak and people heard it from all around.
- 10:18So dude's a blacksmith, he's got metal.
- 10:20He's like welding together and like putting together this metal big contraption that you would speak into and it would project your voice way up and out.
- 10:31Kind of cool.
- 10:32What if it was bigger?
- 10:34He was commissioned to build a bunch of these call-a-phones for circuses and music halls and safety organizations because it was an easy way to speak and have a multitude of
- 10:47people hear it at one time.
- 10:49The thing
- 10:50was massive.
- 10:53The report on it says that it took 10 horses to drag one of these on a cart.
- 11:01It's too big.
- 11:02It's very big.
- 11:03And he would modify his invention and he would add like a whole bunch of attachments and modular settings where you could change the pitch of your voice or the volume of the sound
- 11:13that you admitted.
- 11:14It's like a big freaking voice changer thing in the 1800s.
- 11:18This colander guy built a giant voice changer and he sold it to circuses.
- 11:26He even had a helmet set up.
- 11:30so you could like have a support and then like use it for a solo singer.
- 11:35And the notoriety of this invention spread like the sound of the voices that were hollered into it.
- 11:42Enter the great exhibition of 1851.
- 11:45Now, to dive into this, we need to first answer the question that we're all wondering, what was the great exhibition of 1851?
- 11:54So the great exhibition of the works of industry of all nations.
- 11:59that's the long name of it, or the Great Exhibition, was held in 1851 in Hyde Park, London.
- 12:06uh It was a, it was like a multi, like four to five month thing, where, and it was the first of a series of world fairs where countries from all over the world would come in and
- 12:22they would show off essentially the cool stuff that they had figured out in their industry.
- 12:28and all that stuff.
- 12:29And again, this is coming like on the tail end of like lot of the Industrial Revolution and folks are starting to build cool things and they want to show it off.
- 12:39And so they have this World's Fair in 1851.
- 12:43The countries come from all around and they want to to show this.
- 12:48the fair was kind of orchestrated by Henry Cole and Prince Albert.
- 12:55We're going to talk about Mr.
- 12:56Albert here.
- 12:58in just a brief moment.
- 12:59But the World's Fair, you know, it's most well remembered for the Crystal Palace.
- 13:05Other notable uh things that showed up was a telescope.
- 13:11They had this giant telescope.
- 13:14They had all sorts of interesting ceramic things that people had built.
- 13:18The Darya Inur was this rare pale pink diamond it was shown off.
- 13:24And all of these different things
- 13:27Also, it should be noted, the first modern pay toilet was installed at the Great Exhibition.
- 13:38The first modern pay toilet was installed there.
- 13:42827,280 visitors at one cent apiece to use them.
- 13:50firearms, barometers, had races held, all sorts of things.
- 13:59But one of the things that is less featured was Collender's submission into the Great Exhibition.
- 14:08Collender was commissioned by England to build an even bigger colophon, more power.
- 14:14He began building a 110 foot tall horn shaped device.
- 14:19to in a separate area of Hyde Park.
- 14:23And this was named the Colossophone.
- 14:27And in early testing, it was reported that the horn could be heard pushing 200 plus miles away in France.
- 14:37Though that is not verifiable in any way now.
- 14:40It's all planned.
- 14:41Prince Albert has arranged this great exhibition.
- 14:44Come to England where we are hosting and
- 14:48He has commissioned Mr.
- 14:49Collender to build a big freaking monstrous horn to sing or do whatever into to be heard all around.
- 14:59Come marvel at our giant horn.
- 15:01Look at our horn.
- 15:01Look at it.
- 15:02Do it.
- 15:04Do it.
- 15:06This is where we're at.
- 15:08And Prince Albert, it's all planned.
- 15:12Prince Albert is going to sing.
- 15:15England's national anthem into the Colossophone during the exhibition.
- 15:20So the crowds gather round, he steps up, and he begins to sing.
- 15:28And something is wrong.
- 15:30Those in attendance are reported to look as if they have been struck, quote, ill both mentally or physically.
- 15:39There were reports of pain.
- 15:41Reports said that people
- 15:43peed their pants and soiled themselves on the spot.
- 15:48The prince uh himself is reported to have rushed from the stage seeing this production and what it caused in the audience.
- 15:57said that he fled from the stage feeling that it was his performance that struck the people ill.
- 16:02And later, folks who observed the occurrence believed that had he continued to sing his anthem, the people caught
- 16:11within the frequency wave of his voice could have died.
- 16:17Word started to spread and the derogatory name calling began, as it always does.
- 16:23Thus the term Prince's Breath.
- 16:26Prince Albert, essentially they were saying, had such gnarly breath that he almost killed a bunch of people.
- 16:31However, this story was lost in time, almost for a century, because Queen Victoria told the papers to stop publishing the incident.
- 16:41Stop making friend of Albert!
- 16:44Don't do it!
- 16:46Stop it!
- 16:48And when you're queen, you can tell the papers to stop publishing things about Albert.
- 16:54And thus they did.
- 16:56And thus the Brown Note was first created.
- 16:59So, as with most history of myths, it comes at you from multiple angles.
- 17:04Because there's also a claim that the history of this is an aircraft in the 1950s that was believed to have made a sound with its engine that
- 17:13The Air Force crew was noted to become nauseous around the jet.
- 17:17The plane was this test engine and the engine idled at the speed, I believe, of sound and it kept producing a sonic boom permanently while idling on the ground.
- 17:30Needless to say, this project was canned for safety reasons.
- 17:35But further research begins to be done.
- 17:38Can we weaponize sound?
- 17:40Like, what can we do with sound waves?
- 17:44Then, New Science publishes their article about the Colossophone and the Prince's breath that we just talked about and people start murmuring.
- 17:54The myth begins to spread.
- 17:56Hey, I heard the government was using sound.
- 17:58They're testing using sound as a weapon.
- 18:01yeah, I read that article in New Science that said that Prince Albert made a whole bunch of people poopy themselves in public with sound.
- 18:11And thus,
- 18:13What do we call this?
- 18:15This note, this frequency that makes you brown yourself.
- 18:21I know, the soil frequency.
- 18:24Scratch that, the brown note.
- 18:26Yes, that's it.
- 18:27You have heard of the brown note.
- 18:30yeah, and with many things, it enters pop culture.
- 18:33And once it gets into pop culture, it gets pop propagated.
- 18:37The Mythbusters tested the myth.
- 18:39They did bust it, by the way.
- 18:41South Park had a
- 18:43Episode titled the worldwide recorder concert where the boys rewrite a recorder solo To emit the frequency of the brown note and have the entire world poop their pants Countless
- 18:57TV shows manga comic books movies video games etc feature the use of sound or sound warfare and some even specifically Note the brown note being used to incapacitate people
- 19:12but
- 19:12Here's the thing.
- 19:14As I said at the top of this, I sat here in my own restroom and played the brown note into my own ears and I didn't defecate.
- 19:22I was perfectly fine.
- 19:24The Mythbusters blasted at themselves from close range and it is what it is.
- 19:29Like they did not poop themselves on the spot.
- 19:34So why is this brown note myth still going around?
- 19:39Why?
- 19:41Three reasons.
- 19:43One, sound is incredibly tricky.
- 19:46If you've ever talked to somebody who's like a sound technician or like a person who like studies how to get good acoustics in a room, it is an art and it's crazy what they have to
- 19:58figure out.
- 19:59Sound is tricky.
- 20:00And there are a number of people who argue the mythbusters were too close to speakers.
- 20:05Maybe I had the wrong type of headphones.
- 20:07Maybe I was too close to my headphones.
- 20:09Maybe I wasn't far away enough.
- 20:11I know.
- 20:13But frequency has to carry for some time, possibly for someone to poop.
- 20:19This is one argument that maybe you have to hear the sound at a distance in order for it to affect you.
- 20:25Who knows?
- 20:27I don't.
- 20:29Not me.
- 20:32Two, it is kind of based in some fact.
- 20:36We know that if you blast someone with a sound low or high enough, it can harm them or kill them or cause them to have some sort of a bodily response.
- 20:46So the idea that you can use sound to produce a reaction or response in a human person, that is factual, that's real.
- 20:55So it has a little bit of fact behind it.
- 20:58And three,
- 20:59This is a classic example of the MacGuffin meets Schrodinger's cat.
- 21:04So the MacGuffin is a literary device that causes someone to thus pursue a goal.
- 21:10In this case, you hear about the Brown Note and thus it causes you then to pursue wondering and pursue the adventure of discovering the Brown Note.
- 21:20However, here's the thing.
- 21:23You you hear about the MacGuffin, there's a Brown Note.
- 21:26Oh, and now it is its own MacGuffin.
- 21:28because you want to know, well, will I brown myself on the brown note?
- 21:31Who knows?
- 21:32But it's also a Schrodinger's cat, where once you test it, you can't roll back the clock.
- 21:38Like opening the box to check on the cat is the only way, but then the cat will like get out.
- 21:45I don't think that's how Schrodinger's cat works.
- 21:46I'm not a person that knows that.
- 21:48That's not my thing.
- 21:49But to test the brown note on yourself, the only way to do it is to do it.
- 21:57But if you poop yourself, that's bad.
- 22:02So there's this like one part's fear, I don't want it to work on me, but I'm also overly curious.
- 22:09And thus, it sets itself up perfectly.
- 22:14Perfectly.
- 22:17to this cycle of curiosity and anxiety that lives on in the brown note.
- 22:22Will I chas myself royal if I hear this?
- 22:26Nah, I ain't gonna chas myself royal.
- 22:28wait, but what if I did?
- 22:30What if I'm the guy that chases himself royal because of this thing?
- 22:33And I'll admit, 20 minutes ago, when I played the brown note in my own skull, there was this moment where like, I had a little anxiety.
- 22:42Even though I was pretty confident I was not going to poop, it's like,
- 22:47Is this the one time it's gonna work and I'm just gonna like destroy my podcast situation right now?
- 22:53Cause like, I can't defecate that hard right now.
- 22:56I got too much stuff going on.
- 22:59The cycle continues and the myth progresses.
- 23:02Now, here's what I will say.
- 23:04In three seconds, you will hear the brown note.
- 23:09If you would like to skip past the brown note, I will play it for exactly 15 seconds and then you may skip.
- 23:16So,
- 23:16you will hear the brown note in three, two, one.
- 23:38Yes, shout at us if you defecated, but I trust that you did not.
- 23:46But is the brown note the only way that sound can help you brown?
- 23:52We don't need to turn to this special frequency of a note to help us go.
- 23:58There are other sounds that we can use to help us go to the bathroom.
- 24:04One example, especially with little kids, is like running the faucet when they are trying to pee.
- 24:09Our brains hear the sound of water.
- 24:12Don't think of water, waterfalls, drippy faucets.
- 24:16moist sprinklers dripping
- 24:22Don't think of those things and have to go pee.
- 24:24It's the same idea.
- 24:26And maybe you have to now, I don't know, make the space have a sound that you associate with going to the bathroom.
- 24:34Sometimes people need to just relax.
- 24:37Relaxing music, soothing tones, white noise machine, something to help you go and let go and release.
- 24:48You can go on YouTube, there's tons of playlists and videos on YouTube seemingly designed to provide a sound space to help people go to the bathroom, to help you relax.
- 25:03Or your fiber buddies will get the job done.
- 25:06And now, it's another installment of Hunter's Anecdotes to Keep You Afloats.
- 25:30Today's story is one, filled with shame and regret, and two, probably oversharing, but here we go.
- 25:38Today's Hunter's Anecdotes is the last time that I remember pooping my pants.
- 25:44And no, the brown note was not involved.
- 25:46As I remember it, my parents used to have this cabin about an hour away from where we lived in Montana growing up.
- 25:56And.
- 25:57You know, we would regularly go out to this cabin and one of the great things was that it was in the mountains and mountains have much more concentration of snow.
- 26:04And there was this area near where our cabin was that I will just call the beef jerky plant because that is what it was.
- 26:13It was this place where the best beef jerky in the country and you can argue with me on that point, but high country beef jerky is the best beef jerky that you're gonna get.
- 26:26They made this jerky on this site.
- 26:29Yum yum meat stuff.
- 26:31And there was this hill that was like kind of on the beef jerky's property, but like not really on the property.
- 26:40They also would like start and end.
- 26:42I think just start.
- 26:43I think it was a start point for some of the Iditarod races was right next to this hill.
- 26:48And so we would take our plastic sleds and stuff down to this hill and go sledding.
- 26:55It is incredibly cold.
- 26:56So we are bundled to the nines and you know, you're sledding and you're, you're exercising cause you got to walk up the snowy hill.
- 27:05And as soon as you walk up a hill, when you add snow, it's twice as much work.
- 27:08And something that happens when you fill your tum tum with lunch and then you do exercise work stuff, it makes your body need to poop and produce the leaving of what you ate.
- 27:23And
- 27:24You know, we're a little bit away from town and we're all snowy and wet and it hits me.
- 27:29I have to go.
- 27:30I have to poop bad.
- 27:31And you couldn't go into the visitor center for the beef jerky plant for whatever reason, whether they weren't letting people in or they were closed.
- 27:39I do not remember why, but normally I would just ran in there and gone to the bathroom.
- 27:43Not an option this time.
- 27:44So I tell my mom, like, mom, I gotta go to the bathroom and we gotta like get everything packed up into the truck, get everything ready.
- 27:52And we're like on our way back to the cabin.
- 27:54and I didn't make it and I had too many layers and I pooped my pants.
- 28:01I believe I was 10 or 11 years old so a little closer to modern times than I would like it to have been but I did it.
- 28:11You gotta stay warm but too many clothes plus doo-doo in your undies is not a good mixture.
- 28:21Yep, this has been another Hunter's Anecdotes to keep you afloats.
- 28:36If you have a comment, want to say hello, just want to connect to us, shoot us an email.
- 28:42We're privycast at gmail.com.
- 28:45You can also find us on your favorite social media.
- 28:49Pick one.
- 28:49We're probably there at privycast.
- 28:52Please follow us.
- 28:53We'd love to hear from you as we continue to build this community.
- 28:58If your podcast, listening device or program of choice allows you to leave a comment or a review,
- 29:05We would love you to do so.
- 29:07Leaving reviews is a great way to help others find the show.
- 29:15Leave us a review and if you leave a comment, we'll try to read it here.
- 29:19Please share the show.
- 29:20We would love for you to share the podcast with a friend.
- 29:24Word of mouth is huge in getting the show out there and getting the information about bathrooms.
- 29:33into the hearts, not just the ears, the hearts of the people around us.
- 29:39As always, we want to thank Kevin MacLeod for the use of Barroom Ballet as our intro and outro music.
- 29:47You can find Kevin's music at Incompetech.org.
- 29:51His music is licensed under copyright 4.0.
- 29:54Thank you, Kevin.
- 29:56We'd also like to thank Pottington Bear for all the colors of the world in the use of the
- 30:02Hunter's Anecdotes intro and outro, can find Pottington Bear's music at pottingtonbear.com.
- 30:10And now, this has been another episode of Privy.
- 30:15And as always, don't forget to flush.
- 30:29Tired of losing weight only to gain it all back?
- 30:32The weight loss experts at slimrank.com have done the research.
- 30:35Slimrank.com ranks the safest, most effective GLP-1 programs that get and keep the weight off for good.
- 30:42Stop watching the scale go up and down.
- 30:45Go to slimrank.com and pick America's number one weight loss program today.
- 30:50Slimrank.com.
- 30:51That's S-L-I-M-R-A-N-K.com.
- 30:53uh
- 30:57Your dream body is uh