SHHH: The Poopcast (aka S**t and Shame with Shawn)
31 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 6 years ago - ★★★★★ - 10 ratingsaka Shit And Shame With Shawn. Join Shawn Shafner 'The Puru', performer, activist, and educator for serious but entertaining talk about poop, fecal matters, LGBT shame and other unnameable taboos that clog our bodies, minds, and communities. Shawn and his esteemed guests talk (and might even sing) about taking responsibility for our literal shit and our metaphorical shit, to transform them from waste to resource. It’s time to get our shit together, before it hits the fan.
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Episodes
Here We Go “Around the Toilet” with Charlotte Jones and Jen Slater
May 31, 2018 04:58 - 1 hour - 47.1 MBDisability, gender and sexuality, politics of public space, and intersectional accessibility. Some enchanted conference, across a crowded plate of beans at Sheffield Hallam University, Dr. Charlotte Jones and Dr. Jen Slater discovered a shared passion for poop. One year later, “Around the Toilet” was born, performing collaborative arts-based research on bathrooms as places of inclusion and/or exclusion. Shawn Shafner (The Puru) sits down with the dynamic doo-o to discuss how restrooms can be...
Oh, SuSanA: Oxfam’s Esther Shaylor and the Online Sanitation Portal
April 03, 2018 20:47 - 58 minutes - 40.6 MBHuman-centered design, dignified aid, and internet innovation for water / sanitation. Engineer, mother, and communications expert Esther Shaylor introduces Shawn Shafner (The Puru) to the Sustainable Sanitation Alliance (SuSanA), a network of WASH stakeholders and online resources for all. Esther explains how market-based solutions are changing development practices, and we discuss the perils and virtues of Wikipedia, storytelling’s primal power, and why a batch of tasty biscuits is worth it...
POOP TALK Director Aaron Feldman Brings Fecal Matters to Film
March 01, 2018 05:07 - 51 minutes - 35.4 MBTaboo-breaking comedy, toilet knives, wiping stones and Jewish perspectives on poop. Celebrities are just like us! Director Aaron Feldman’s new film POOP TALK finally proves it, as Kumail Nanjiani, Eric Stonestreet, Dr. Drew and more divulge the contents of their colons. In this hour with Shawn Shafner (The Puru), Feldman explains how his own sensitive stomach inspired the film, why colon cancer specialists are praising its creation, and how a silly film about poop might also be a profound m...
Muck Makes Brass: Scaling Social Impact with Andy Narracott
January 30, 2018 14:29 - 1 hour - 84.5 MBBusiness for social change, avoiding burnout, effective altruism, ineffective development practices, and the UK’s first luxury mobile toilet. The average person spends 80,000 hours working. Water / sanitation engineer Andy Narracott tells host Shawn Shafner how a near-death experience helped shift his 80k hour goals from making money to making change. Andy also hands out pro tips for social entrepreneurs and everybody else gleaned from his podcast Finding Impact. To start: find out your “w...
Shame on Who? Jennifer Barr Researches Development with Dignity
December 31, 2017 22:46 - 1 hour - 90.8 MBCommunity Led Total Sanitation as colonial hangover, how to poop while on the trail, shoehorning sanitation inside other sectors, and the importance of sunblock. Shawn “The Puru” Shafner spends an hour with anthropologist and Emory University PhD candidate Jennifer Barr. Jennifer spent 13 months living in Delhi and writing case studies of NGOs including Sulabh, India’s toilet-building monolith, and Safai Karmachari Andolan (SKA), a grassroots organization dedicated to the liberation and reha...
Wee My Valentine: An Hour with Wastewater Expert Nancy Love
September 27, 2017 02:40 - 1 hour - 41.6 MBBuilding water infrastructure in Addis Ababa, filtering Flint’s taps to keep kids healthy, and tackling traditional paradigms of where to put your pee. In this episode, Shawn Shafner (The Puru) sits down with Nancy Love--professor, pioneer, engineer and expert who literally wrote the book on Biological Wastewater Treatment. Often the lone woman in a male-dominated field, Nancy recounts how a little girl on the family golf course became one of the most sought-after professors at the Universit...
Art Monastery Project: Creativity, Community, Contemplation and a Compost Toilet
July 31, 2017 18:52 - 46 minutes - 64.4 MBWhat happens when you take a bunch of artists and put them together in a beautiful house in rural Vermont with a shared schedule dedicated to creativity? The Art Monastery Project. While in-residence at the monastery, Shawn Shafner (The Puru) hosts a roundtable of “Artmonks” at their finest. St. Francis, King Solomon, Buddha and a bunch of Rabbis all appear, alongside bat guano, bugs, and indigenous wisdom. Plus Abbess and co-founder Betsy McCall passes on a blessing to say when peeing on th...
Designing Out of the Pot: Mathew Lippincott
June 30, 2017 23:51 - 1 hour - 57.3 MBLegalizing green sanitation, kite safety through cartwheels, coming back from serious crisis, and all the ways your shower can kill you. In this special live episode, polymath Mathew Lippincott enlightens Shawn Shafner (The Puru) with his encyclopedic knowledge of everything. A designer who creates future technologies influenced by history, Mathew tells us how he helped create Portland’s emergency sanitation protocol, worked with RECODE to make compost toilets a legal option, and takes us un...
Empowered by Plastic Crotch Devices: Krista Eickmann from The pStyle Company
May 31, 2017 16:18 - 1 hour - 56.4 MBSustainable menstruation management, exploding the privilege to pee standing up, queering the country through relocation, and how to make money with minimal misery. In this episode, Shawn Shafner (The Puru) communes with Krista Eickmann, whose passion for menstrual cups and urine diverters once had her proselytizing these products straight from her purse to friends, family, and strangers on the bus. Reduce waste, remove the threat of toxic shock, and pee through your pants’ fly without remov...
Food Waste Wizard: Composting with WeRadiate’s Sashti Balasundaram
April 26, 2017 18:36 - 1 hour - 48.4 MBGot some peanut shells, banana peels, and old newspapers? Then you might also have the power to generate renewable enegy, fight coastal erosion, control heavy metals, increase civic participation, create nourishing soil, and much more. That’s the magic of compost! Join Shawn Shafner (The Puru) and Sashti Balasundaram, eco-educator and entrepreneur behind WeRadiate, for a bewitching episode that explains how recycling our food scraps can reduce landfill loads, create green jobs, and save all ...
Poop on A Pedestal: The National Poo Museum’s Dan Roberts
March 31, 2017 17:17 - 1 hour - 57.9 MBPassion or paycheck, profession or play, beauty or the butt? We tackle the art world’s opposing objectives to redeem or exploit our excrement, the politics of status (and Brad Pitt’s pet rat), the importance of whimsy, and how every poo has a story to tell. Join Shawn Shafner (The Puru) in conversation with Dan Roberts from the National Poo Museum on the Isle of Wight, just south of London. Imagine a room full of polished crystal balls lit beautifully from below, and inside each floats a del...
Jurassic Poop: The American Museum of Natural History Loans Us Carl Mehling
February 28, 2017 01:35 - 1 hour - 63.2 MBIn this Dinosaur-sized episode, Shawn Shafner (The Puru) joins paleontologist Carl Mehling for a deep dive into fossilized dung (called “coprolites”), the scientific method, and why truth is often controlled by the storytellers. Wanna borrow a bone from the American Museum of Natural History? Carl’s your man. We’ll go behind the scenes at the museum to understand how scientists study and share prehistoric resources, get the inside scoop on how fossils are formed, and learn what they reveal a...
Turds, Trash and Tweets: A Conversation with Raul Pacheco-Vega
January 27, 2017 01:58 - 1 hour - 42.8 MBIn this fast-paced hour, Shawn Shafner (The Puru) sits down with water and wastewater governance expert Raul Pacheco-Vega for a discussion that leapfrogs from the culture of flushing and bottled water, to the politics of poverty and what it means to pick trash for a living. Remember that kid who took their ball and went home when they didn’t get their way? Little Raul wanted to know how to keep the game going. Two Masters degrees, one PhD (with a double major in political science and human g...
Olga Gershenson: Transgender Rights to Toilets, Internet Trolls, and the Secret Language of Nerds
December 27, 2016 14:42 - 1 hour - 48.3 MBIn 2005, Professor Olga Gershenson sent out a call for academic papers on public toilets--"the holy of holy for nerds." Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender, the book that resulted, virtually created the toilet studies field. But along with the nerds, geeks and dweebs who answered the call came bigots who slandered the premise and Gershenson personally via internet, mail and fax machine (remember 2005?). In this hour, Shawn Shafner (The Puru) chats with Gershenson about this experienc...
Public Women and the Public Convenience: An Hour with Barbara Penner
November 19, 2016 20:27 - 1 hour - 50.3 MBWhat do you call a woman who’s not at home, and needs a private place to pee? A “public woman,” or “prostitute.” At least that’s what London’s men thought at the turn of the 20th Century. How far have we come? This World Toilet Day (Nov 19), Shawn “The Puru” Shafner talks with Barbara Penner, pedigreed architectural history expert*, feminist, and prolific toilet academic. Wanna know more about that space we call Bathroom? She literally wrote the book, along with many others. From Victorian w...
It's a Bird! It's a Plane! It's Christina Irene!!!
November 03, 2016 04:55 - 1 hour - 54.9 MBFaster than a speeding bowel! More powerful than a laxative! Able to leap small-minded men in a single bound! In this episode, Shawn Shafner (The Puru) sits down with real-life Superwoman Christina Irene: writer, trainer, stand-up comedian, and a powerful advocate for women's empowerment and those with invisible disabilities. Did I mention that she also has IBS, suffered laxative dependence while on tour, helped grandma shop for colostomy bag accessories, AND sits on the board of her local S...
Lil' Tinklers Part 2: Rachel Mullen and Dan Marks
September 30, 2016 17:32 - 42 minutes - 28.9 MBThis past August, Shawn Shafner traveled to Brattleboro, VT to join Urine Diversion Summit 2016—a conference brimming with pee-ple making waves over how we “make water.” While The Puru didn’t want to disrupt the flow, he was able to divert a few participants away from micturation and into the microphone for some short interviews. Thus: The Lil’ Tinklers. In Part 2, wee-wee will learn about how shaking the dew off your lily can affect the frogs on their pads, and how wastewater treatment pl...
Lil' Tinklers Part 1: Hannah Ray, Daniella Saetta and Cat Bryars
September 29, 2016 05:04 - 43 minutes - 29.6 MBThis past August, Shawn Shafner traveled to Brattleboro, VT to join Urine Diversion Summit 2016—a conference brimming with pee-ple making waves over how we “make water.” While The Puru didn’t want to disrupt the flow, he was able to divert a few participants away from micturation and into the microphone for some short interviews. Thus: The Lil’ Tinklers. In Part 1, wee-wee will learn about how eco-toilet systems succeed, and why they sometimes don’t. First, we’ll meet Daniella Saetta and H...
Pee and Prosperity: Kim Nace of the Rich Earth Institute
August 16, 2016 06:17 - 1 hour - 46.9 MBWhat do you get when you mix 5,000 gallons of urine and 5 acres of hay? It might just be the future of our food. In this episode, Shawn Shafner (The Puru) talks to Kim Nace, co-founder of the Rich Earth Institute in Brattleboro, Vermont, where hundreds of local citizens collect their pee for science. But this is no kids stuff--the Rich Earth Institute is blazing a new trail and quickly gaining the attention of big-name foundations, National Geographic, and even the US Government. Tune in to ...
You're Tuned to CBS: SOIL's Sasha Kramer, Kory Russel and Container Based Sanitation
June 23, 2016 05:41 - 1 hour - 49.7 MBWhen is a five gallon bucket of poop more than just a five gallon bucket of poop? In this episode, Shawn Shafner (The Puru) s(h)its down with Sasha Kramer, co-founder and Executive Director of SOIL, and engineer/academic Kory Russel of re.source. Their Container Based Sanitation model is creating health and wealth in Haiti--one five gallon composting toilet at a time. We’ll discuss the energetic content of a lump of poop, delve into the roots of waste-making culture, and find out how SOIL ...
Thinx’ Miki Agrawal: Pizza, Periods, Pee and Poop
May 17, 2016 05:12 - 53 minutes - 36.6 MBThere’s so much happening in our underwear zone: poop, pee, period blood. And Miki Agrawal is tackling them all, with a side of vegan, gluten-free, farm-to-table pizza. This week, Shawn Shafner (The Puru) sits down with the serial entrepreneur and creator of Wild pizzerias, Thinx period underwear, Icon incontinence underwear, Tushy attachable bidets and an empowering guide to living your dream called Do Cool Sh*t. Amidst bites of kale, Miki and Shawn ask the big questions: how can science, ...
The Sex Episode: A Podcast Collision with Sex for Smart People* (*that means you)
April 26, 2016 06:00 - 1 hour - 45.2 MBSex and poop. Both are natural parts of having a body. Both can be intensely pleasurable. And both are rich boiling pots of shame and cultural baggage. Which is why The Puru has teamed up with S. Ryan Johnstone and Dave McGee of Sex for Smart People* (*that means you) to bring you this very special episode tackling the mother of all modern taboos. Join us for a thoughtful, compassionate, super-honest and often hilarious hour addressing anal sex, safe scat play, and how looking at your toilet...
Pooping Gold: Transforming Trauma with Amanda Miller
March 22, 2016 05:02 - 58 minutes - 40.1 MBMight the way to enlightenment just be through your anus? In this episode, The Puru cozies butt-up with Amanda Miller--writer, actor, massage therapist, yogi, and compulsively creative person--in order to investigate the inner alchemy of transforming our shit to gold. Hear how Amanda's trauma became the driving force behind her memoir and solo show One Breath, Then Another, why hemorrhoid cream should be renamed "embarrassment balm," and learn the best position for kegeling your way to nirva...
American Wasteland: Dr. Daniel Gerling Gets Down with Doodie
February 16, 2016 04:56 - 1 hour - 42.7 MBConstipated? Take relief: it's probably not because your sphincter is too tight. In this month's episode of SHHH, The Puru sits down with Dr. Daniel Gerling, Assistant Professor at Augustana University and perhaps the foremost expert on poop history in the United States (who else could write the dissertation, "American Wasteland: A Social and Cultural History of Excrement, 1860-1920"?). Hear Danny explain why American occupiers collected over 120,000 jars of Filipino feces, how the demodex (...
The Loo Lady: Rachel Erickson
January 12, 2016 05:35 - 1 hour - 47.7 MBWanna know how your floating ball cock measures up? In this episode, Shawn “The Puru” Shafner sits down with Rachel “The Loo Lady” Erickson. Rachel spent the past few years leading critically-acclaimed Loo Tours in London. Now back in the States, The Loo Lady explains how her unwillingness to pay-per-pee led to a full time job in the john, and trades toilet stories with The Puru, from ancient Rome through Medieval Europe and the modern day. Oh, and if you want to check out someone’s floating...
Jibril: Five Year-Old Gastroenterologist
December 15, 2015 06:19 - 1 hour - 41.5 MBThe Puru may have finally met his match. Jibril is an extraordinary five year-old living in the Bronx who just happens to be obsessed with digestion. In this episode of SHHH, Jibril schools Shawn on why poop should resemble bananas instead of asteroids, explains the genesis of the pyloric sphincter, and meditates on the difference between half-digested food and poop. Joined by his mother Fatima and a league of lego models, Jibril will refresh your knowledge of basic biology and redefine cute...
Celebrating World Toilet Day 2015 with Tom Keating
November 17, 2015 06:13 - 53 minutes - 48.7 MBThe Puru, Shawn Shafner, is gearing up for November 19, when the United Nations and people around the globe will celebrate World Toilet Day. And where better to celebrate than Atlanta, Georgia with Tom Keating of Project CLEAN? A self-pronounced “toileteer,” Tom tells us how school bathrooms can be key to building global citizenship, why sanitation is key to nutrition (this year’s World Toilet Day theme), and where The Puru will be raising a stink in Atlanta this year. Mentioned in Podcast:...
Author of Poop Culture - Dave Praeger
October 20, 2015 03:01 - 37 minutes - 34.1 MBShawn, The Puru, sits down with Dave Praeger, whose book “Poop Culture: How America Is Shaped by Its Grossest National Product,” catalyzed The POOP Project. Creator of Poop Report, the web’s first intellectual hub for scatology, Praeger details how a humorous side project became a full-fledged (and highly researched) book, how poop’s contaminating effect has led him to create a secret identity, and why he eventually got out of the “business.” Mentioned in Podcast: Shawn Shafner, Dave Praeg...
Bobby Edwards - Squatty Potty Inventor & CEO
September 12, 2015 05:02 - 52 minutes - 47.8 MBShawn is thrilled to talk to Squatty Potty creator Bobby Edwards about the undeniable anatomical superiority of squatting over sitting to poop, and how shameful Victorian taboos have all but erased the practice for 'modern' Americans. They also touch on the constipation which plagued Bobby’s mom (and business partner) eventually giving rise to the SquattyPotty, and the parallel overcoming of Gay shame and repression that have enabled Shawn and Bobby to go proud in more ways than one. Fina...
"Contamination Theories" or "3 Gays In A Room" with Jamie Benson, Dancer / Choreographer & Andrae Gonzalo, Fashion Designer - Pt. 1
September 12, 2015 04:58 - 25 minutes - 22.9 MBShawn, our Puru, talks to Jamie Benson, dancer, choreographer, and maker of shows such as the satire-drenched 'Bowel Movement', and 'Bathroom Follies', among others. In addition, Jamie’s partner, fashion designer Andrae Gonzalo joins this lively conversation focusing on shame, fear of contamination, and even damnation, from long-held taboos around homosexuality, non-conformity, and of course poop - in culture, fashion, dance and language.
Shawn Shafner Is Passionate...About Poop
September 12, 2015 04:57 - 52 minutes - 47.8 MBShawn 'The Puru' Shafner is interviewed by friend, musician, and this podcast producer, Josh Sitron, on serious issues surrounding poop, and the inherent humor that arises automatically from such conversation. We get a background about Shawn's Poop Project (The People's Own Organic Power), his hit one-man show 'An Inconvenient Poop' and a general history of fecal matters and societal taboos around poop. By the end of the interview, Josh is so interested (and disgusted, but in a goo...