Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Lint!

Episode Date: September 22, 2025

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why lint is secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5(Alex’s old podcast hosting service required a minimum of 5 characters per episode title, and he's keeping that going for fun. So that’s why this episode’s title has an exclamation point)

Lint, known for being from clothes. Famous for being on clothes. Let me get a roller. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why Lint is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Hey there, Cipelopods. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is.

My name's Alex Schmidt and I'm not alone. I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden. Katie! Yes. What is your relationship to or opinion of Lint? So we're talking about Lint, the stuff you find in your pockets. Hopefully not your belly button. Keep that clean.

Oh, it'll happen. You got to get in there. You got to clean that thing out because who knows what's hiding in there. Lent, Legos. I have unfortunately learned what's hiding in there. But go out. Go out. It's cool.

Yeah, I'm a little, I'm like, I'm ready to learn, but I'm also a little nervous because I feel like I'm going to learn some really gross stuff about Lent. Because like I assume a lot of it is like biological. Like, a lot of Lint is probably fibers, but there's got to be, like, human stuff in it. Yeah. Try not to think about it. But now I'm going to think about it for an hour and a half, and then I'll stop thinking about it again. Yeah, this, I don't think it'll be a gross out time. Oh, good.

But maybe I'm just comfortable with Lint. I don't know. Right. But it's very textile. Yeah. But I don't have percentages or anything, but Lintz is much more of just clothing material. Dust is more like schmutz and cells and stuff. Lint is mostly just closed.

Right. But pieces of it. Yeah, I guess Lint is probably a little more fiber-based. Yeah. My least favorite thing is when I'm wearing a sweater and I'm trying to pick off what I think is Lint and it's still attached to the dang sweater because it's actually just a little pilling of the sweater. Yeah.

And then like I'm tugging at it and it's not coming off. And then if I tugged too hard, the entire sweater. unravels into a pile of yarn. It makes sense. I've never really understood how to combat lint. It just shows up. It gets on stuff. And it's the number one fake out that I get for when I think there's like a spider or mouse poop

or something. It's always lint. I'm like, oh, is that like some kind of vermin poop? And then it's just lint. Just lint. Yeah. Or like ants. Like, I'll think that something's like a big ant crawling somewhere, and then I realize it's just Lent blowing in the wind.

It's just out there. I guess this does make me think about, I guess I consider Lent to be a mess, but never, like, gross. I don't think I've ever been like, disgusting. It's just like, oh, there's some mess to clean, you know? Also, I've got bigger fish to fry because I have a dog, so she has just huge tumbleweeds of dog hair. I gave her a bath recently, and it looked like a dog had exploded in the bath because all of the fur was like stuck to the sides. Lint is low on my list of enemies in this household. Yeah, I think I used to worry about Lint on the surface of my clothes.

And then we got Watson, the cat. And he's extraordinarily cuddly and long hair and orange. And so that's what's on my clothes. Yeah, I've moved on. Yeah, you got to move on. Yeah. Okay, so then I'm, I'm soothed a little bit. Let's learn about Lent.

Yeah, let's do it. And on every episode, we lead with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week, that's in a segment called, We're counting up, up, up, it's our podcast. You know, together we're glowing. It's Alex with Katie Golden. Oh, oh, up, up with our numbers. It's not time for this, that's action.

This episode's going to be golden. Nice. That's from the popular new movie, um, uh, Lent Hunters. K-pop Lint Hunters. That's the one for me, right? That's for grown-ups, folks, demons, children's stuff. Yeah, I don't, I don't believe in demons, but I do believe in Lent. So if there was a K-pop group that promised to read the world of Lent, I would, uh, you know, Be a fan. But will the world learn that the leading K-pop girl is secretly lint herself, you know? She's secretly half-lint. Yeah.

And that name was submitted by Tech Jack on the Discord. Thank you, Tech Jack. We have a new name for this segment every week. Please make them as silly and wacky as possible. Submit through Discord or to siftpot at gmail.com. And we're starting with fine art. The first number is about 1,000 hours. That's about as much time as I spend on Baldur's Gate.

I thought it was going to be lint fighting or something. No, no. A thousand hours is how much time an artist spent gathering and assembling drier lintz in order to create a replica of The Last Supper, Leonardo da Vinci's painting of The Last Supper. This is very impressive. I'm looking at it. It does indeed look like the last supper.

supper. The colors are very vibrant. I'll say that, first of all. They did a great job. It looks fluffy. I want to touch it. Yeah. In 2011, Laura Bell of Roscommon, Michigan, in kind of the center of the mitten there, Laura Bell completed about 800 hours of careful lint collection from her household's laundry. And also, apparently, she was tactical about her dryer loads in order to generate colors and even bought some extra towels in colors. She was missing to just run through the dryer. So she's like producing lint. Building your palette is a huge task with dryer lint art, it turns out. Right. Makes some sense. I, yeah, it's, it's, it's the whole thing. It's the whole dang supper. It's very detailed. Everybody, the whole long table

that you have in your head. The gings all there and it's vibrant. It's actually a lot more vibrant than the real last supper, which I've seen. Oh, cool. Yeah. Da Vinci really screwed that up because he used a type of paint that he kind of just invented on the fly and it didn't work very good. I like the idea that it actually would have been smarter to use dryer lint. Like, maybe it would have lasted.

Might have lasted longer as long as you don't get moths. It is very bright colors. Apparently, the hardest part was finding orange lints in the same shirt. shade of the hair of the Apostle Philip in the painting? Oh, well, yeah. I mean, we all know, like, if I had seen the hair of the Apostle Philip and I had been like, that's not the right orange, ruined. It would have been ruined.

Also, this painting would be a good stuff topic because we all have it in our head and none of us really know any of the details in our head, you know? Yeah. I know what Jesus looks like in it, and that's it. And then there's guys. Jesus and Judas. Like Judas is kind of making it stink face at Jesus, which is lovingly, I'm looking at Judas's stink face in Lent here. Jesus looks very peaceful.

It's very good. Yeah, she did an incredible job. Although I would say the details of the table of what they're eating is rather abstract. Yeah. Yeah, and I feel like she was proud of the amount of time and effort it took to get any of this down in Lint. It was about 800 hours of Lint collection, another 200 hours of assembly. And she told NPR that she was proud of it, even though she did not win the art competition she entered it into. What? She didn't win?

She's not a professional artist. She works as a home health aide and raises her kids. and Laura Bell entered a contest in Grand Rapids, Michigan with a $250,000 prize, but lost to something else. What? Now I need to know what she lost to. Was it like the Statue of Liberty made out of toenails? It's just a mural of a cavalry in the U.S. Army in the 1920s won the contest,

which is so boring compared to this. I want to find out who that artist is just to like be mad that they paint. some horses, because this is incredible. This is so good. This is really cool. It's really cool. She's using a medium that I don't think has ever been used in art. It turns out there are a couple other paintings made of lintz, and they're mostly owned by the people that Ripley's believe it or not.

So after Laura Bell lost the art contest, Ripley contacted her and bought this painting for an undisclosed amount. Well, maybe she came out on top. hopefully yeah and and either way she said quote i learned that i do have great patience and i had to push myself really hard to finish this so she felt pride you know yeah i mean it's textile art i think it's a maybe underappreciated sort of art form it seems like the fine art community really looks down on it and so i think that's why she goes boo screw you fine art i'm mad i mean it's really interesting because lint is just one of those things like a bi-primely product of our consumption of so many textiles. In a way, it is waste, right? Because it's part of

the textile that just goes out there, gets in the environment. I mean, a lot of textiles are also not natural fibers. So it's potentially a pollutant, right? Like some kind of synthetic textile. Personally, I don't think about it that much. I don't think about the impacts of Lent just being out there. So I feel like when you collect it all in a work of art, you're like, there's a lot of lint. That's, that makes a whole thing. Yeah, a lot of the rest of the show is about the meaningfulness of lint and usefulness of lint. It's more than just trash. I think my relationship to it going in was lint is trash, and that was it. I, yeah. And then it turns out there's a lot to it. Also had an awareness that, like, you need to clean the lint trap of your dryer

regularly. Otherwise, it's a hazard. And it's really satisfying when you peel it off. Yes. Thank you. It's nice. Yeah. It's very nice. Yeah. That gets us into our next number. Our next number is more than 3,000 structures per year. All right. That's a lot. Yeah. More than 3,000 structures per year. That's the amount of U.S. buildings that catch on fire due to dryer lint issues. Oh, no. Like specifically, either not cleaning the lint trap or another lint issue with a electric dryer. I don't have a dryer anymore. Apparently in Italy, they don't believe in dryers, which has been a lot to adjust to. But yeah, when I had a dryer, I was always really, because I think I'd read about some story where someone's house burned down because of the lint trap, something sparked, set it on fire. And so I was always very careful about cleaning out the lint trap. I used to live, I don't know if I've ever owned my very own dryer.

Because when I lived in an apartment, I was always using the communal washer dryers. And I was always cleaning those things out before and after. And it would always annoy me when someone would leave all their lint in. Because I don't mind handling my lint, my husband's lint, the lint of my loved ones. But the lint of a stranger. I don't like touching. I don't know. It's like, I don't know where this lint came from.

It's somehow more repulsive. Yeah, yeah. It is. It's like, is this like your dirty underwear? I don't want to know, like, clean it out. And also, this amount of structures, they didn't necessarily proceed to burn down. It's just like a significant fire that had to be addressed. Yeah.

Okay. But either way, a set of estimates kind of pulled together. I got matching figures from Popular Science Magazine and from the National Fire Protection Association. And they say that over 15,000 structures in the U.S. catch fire due to laundry machines each year. and more than 90% of that is due to dryers and then the biggest reason about a quarter of those dryer fires is from lint and other similar particles catching fire So is it just like basically if you leave the lint in the lint trap

Lent is very flammable I would assume because it's fluffy made out of textiles and there's like kind of because it's fluffy there's like air trapped inside of it which makes it seem like perfect tinder Yeah, lint is excellent kindling. It always has been, it turns out. Because the next number here is the 1300s AD. Ooh, that's, you know.

About 700 years ago. Around the 1300s AD, modern English got the word lint. Its origins are old English words involving flax. Flax is a plant fiber that's used to make linen. Lint comes from old English words for the extra bits of the flanks. flax that break off or end up left over in the spinning process, and also old English words specifically for using that as kindling for making fires. Whoa, that's cool. So it's like byproduct of the, of making the fibers, and then you can use that.

What would they do? Would they sort of like bundle out up and use it as kindling? Yeah, yeah, they would just like gather it, pick it up, because it kind of gets scattered or dropped in the spinning process. It reminds me of a modern person keeping. like old newspapers to help start a campfire. They did it with Lint. Yeah.

One key source this week is a book called The Golden Thread, How Fabric Changed History. And that's by one of my favorite nonfiction writers, Cassia St. Clair is a cultural historian and a design journalist. She has another amazing book called The Secret Lives of Color that's helped a lot with our episodes about colors. The Golden Thread's about fabric. And she talks about how Lint has meant a few extremely related things across time. because if you're a person like me who does not make their own clothes or harvest any plants,

I just think of lint as being in that dryer trap. But lint is also a word for the extra bits that come off of a fiber plant when you're harvesting it or processing it and the extra bits from that plant as it's turned into fabric, the extra bits that come off of that or can be combed out of fabric. Lint is a word with a few different meanings for the same thing of extra bits from the fabric process. And so that includes the lint that comes off of finished clothing and your laundry system. The word means more things than I was totally aware of going in. Right, right.

We truly, in at least the modern U.S., just treat lint as trash and don't use it for anything and put it in the trash can. Unless it's art. Unless you're making the last supper, yeah. And yeah, and why do dryers generate so much lint, right? Like, why are they heaping with kindling? Right. Part of the answer is that our clothes generate lint all of the time. Oh, like right now?

And yes, right now, basically. What? Here's how popular science defines it. Lint is composed of tiny bits of fabric fibers that are shed from the edges of our garments. Fabrics made of natural fibers like cotton and wool generate more lint than fabrics made of rayon or other synthetic materials. Bits of fiber break off from our clothing from the friction of wear, end quote. So, like, just moving through the world, your own clothing moving on your own body or other pieces of clothing makes lint. And then your dryer tumbles stuff or adds heat or something else, so it generates tons of lint.

It's just friction all the time. Do we know why synthetic fibers are less likely to lint than natural fibers? They're just, like, artificially and tightly assembled. I see. That just holds together tighter than natural fibers. Right. Like each microscopic fiber thing maybe is more snugly fit together than, say, with wool or cotton. Yeah.

Yeah, that's fine. Yeah. And yeah, so that also means the history of clothing drying is basically a history of lint mitigation. Like if you're just hanging up your clothes, there's not a lint issue. But when people said, how do I make a machine that dries clothes, they basically needed to not start fires. handle lints as best they could. So it's constantly producing lint, but is it the fact that, like, in the dryer, it's getting like tumbled around?

Yeah. So, like, whatever lint is on the clothes is then suddenly being rubbed off the clothes, heated up by hot air. Yeah, your whole electric dryer is friction and heat, making new lints or pushing the lint that was already generated all the way off. Right. because it's like a heated barrel. Yeah.

Not a good place for kindling to be. Yeah, it's a big risk. And when people tried to make a machine that dries clothes, they just kept basically putting clothes near flames. Apparently in the 1800s, a French inventor named Pochon made a tumbling chamber that you just hand crank, and then it's over an open flame. And it would make all the clothes smell like smoke, and it would start fires. Ah, well.

An American inventor tried to set up an indoor clothing line that hangs over the household stove, started a lot of fires. Yeah. And then industries, like big laundries, they figured out how to do a tumbling electric dryer, and its main challenge was lint trapping. The big number there is 1909. Mm-hmm. 1909, an inventor named Elmer Wingate patented one of the first popular electric rotary clothes dryers. And according to Ernie Smith, writing for TDM.com, the main big innovation of it was a lint trap. Right.

Because then, like, finally you have less drier fires. I'm interested in how it protects from fire because you're collecting all the lint into a convenient sort of mat of lint. if heat gets to that, it seems like that would be extremely flammable. So it's like you not only have to collect the lint, but then prevent it from turning it into like a log of Tinder that you've collected. Exactly. Like they needed to do what a lot of our home dryers have today. And basically our home dryers are all just smaller versions of these industrial ones from

before the 1940s. But yeah, they just figured out a way to have the lint end up in a chamber that's, you know, to the hot tumbling part, but not as hot and not going to burst into flames so much. Popular mechanics also says that at least once a year you should clean out the dryer vent that sends all the hot air back out. And so that is something that gathers lint too, because not all of it gets caught in the trap. I had no idea you had to do that. I've never had a dryer of my very own. So I've never been responsible for doing that. But it's good to know.

I've done it. Feels good. It feels like, oh, look what I've done. And it's kind of satisfying cleaning piles of lint. Seems like similar to sharing a sheep or something where you're just getting a nice layer of fluff from something. Yeah, and the fluff layer is meaningfully valuable as an item, especially if you are operating from an older mindset of let's use everything we possibly can. Like people used it for kindling. Another thing people use lint for is the wadding and bandages. Oh, wow. Apparently, especially in the U.S.

from as early as the 1700s into the 1900s, people would gather and recycle their lint into the absorbent wadding part of bandages because it can be that. So, like, was this on a household level or, like, the industrial dryers gathering this and then, like, selling it?

A little of both. But there's one story here from the U.S. Civil War of the household level. When the Civil War started, the Union Army lost the first battles, and everyone in the North kind of panicked. And then apparently women in Boston assembled what were called lint societies. Whoa. In order to gather lints, and then that plus like a better fabric for the outside of the bandage, they homemade bandages to send to the troops to try to help.

I understand it. I crochet as I'm crocheting. Like I get big wads of, if I'm using wool. to get like big wads of it as I'm working with it. I would assume this would be mostly like cotton or wool lint. So then you could, it would be like reasonably absorbent. Exactly. So it worked well.

Yeah. We're kind of in a new era of Lint just being trash. All the previous history of textiles, it was kind of handy. Yeah. Lint Generation leads us into takeaway number one. washing machines generate lint for similar reasons to dryers and washers spread synthetic lint to every beach on earth yeah I knew this is coming

I became acutely aware of like synthetic fabrics I don't know like maybe a few years ago I was reading some article about it and I was like oh wait this is yet another thing I have to as an individual pay attention to uh in our society this is one where i don't want it to be a bummer it's just like something to understand it's not your fault and also if you want to buy more natural fibers you'll help a bit but it's a tiny waste that we all make for sure it's not your fault um yeah uh robin williams lecturing matt damon dot jpeg oh i forgot about the reference i thought you were just shouting that to me i was like thank you but i get it no i'm telling the listeners

that it's not your fault the don't feel bad about it i i do think like it's like you said it's like you said it's like important to be aware of these things without the guilt right because it's not your fault you were born into a society where basically most clothing has synthetic fibers in it. We had no idea that it was doing anything bad. And then all of a sudden it's like, oh, you've been polluting beaches every time you wash a load. Right. Like you don't need to go around sweating about the earth every minute of every day. Although you will sweat more in synthetic fibers. They don't breathe as well, usually. I feel like all of us in a country like the U.S.

have been fooled by our dryer lint trap into thinking only the dryer makes lint. Right. But what happens is, as we said in the numbers, lint forms when fabric receives friction. If fabric goes through friction, bits of it break off, and that's lint. Washing machines, you know, that's like a wet friction chamber, you know? Yeah. It's just friction plus water. Yeah.

Most American-style dryers have a lint trap to catch all of the lint from the friction. Most washers shoot the lint back out of the house with the rest of the water that drains out. Yeah. And then that works its way into the water system of the world, just because. Right. Like it's not a hazard because it doesn't burn and it doesn't necessarily clog the plumbing. So it's just not concern for. laundry machine makers.

Right, unlike the dryer people. The other, other reason is natural fibers do break down on a reasonable timeline. And so when people were mostly wearing natural fibers and washing clothes, they said, okay, like some lint breaks off, but it's just, I don't know, like in a perfect world, a bird will make a nest out of it, but either way it'll decompose. You know, it's all right. Yeah, wool and cotton will, yeah, break down and decompose. Then the synthetic fibers do not break down.

easily. Key sources here are a 2011 study that was in the journal Environmental Science and technology, and then also video resources from the American Chemical Society. Apparently, we estimate that if you do one wash cycle for one synthetic flee sweater, so one time, one synthetic flee sweater, that can send almost 2,000 fibers into the water system. Boy. Of just lint. That's a lot. And you might like hang dry that. item. So you think you're doing no lint at all, but just the wash cycle does it because it's

just friction. Yeah. And synthetic materials are in like so many fabrics. It's not easy necessarily to avoid. There's varying degrees of how bad fiber is in clothes in terms of like how long it'd take for each particle to break down. But it's not easy as a consumer to know what that is. or how to find it. This is one of those things where you have to live and need clothes. And so even your natural fibers will put some lint out. This is just one more point in favor of Katie's blissful naked utopia. I do keep getting your flyers about that in mail.

And I feel you didn't need to put the people on the flyer. But you are. So that's fine. It's fine. People chanting, give me nudity or give me death. I mean, you know, it's a whole idea, a way of living. Lint-proof. Yeah.

Yeah, and then this 2011 study led by Mark Anthony Brown of University College Dublin, they analyzed the sand on 18 different beaches around the world and found at least a few synthetic fibers in all of it, mostly polyester or acrylic materials. But it's also tiny amounts. There's also other pollutants that are more dangerous to beach. and marine life. So this is mostly just a FYI that both your laundry machines make a lot of lint and the industries

that make them only trap lint in one of them. Right. It's so weird. Well, because, like, I wonder, too, how much of it is hard to detect because there's, like, the kind of, like, if you find, like, an actual fiber, that's a pretty large part. Like, say, you have some kind of plastic-based, like, acrylic, synthetic fiber, and then you find on the beach, like, one of the fiber. and it's, like, not shed, like, say, microplastics.

So you can, like, see the fiber, and that fiber itself might not cause that much trouble. But, like, do we know if a lot of those sort of, like, micro and nanoplastics are coming from lint? Apparently, not very much of the overall percentage of microplastic type stuff is washer lint. That could be good or bad if it's like there's just such a huge amount coming from elsewhere. It's just our trash should make so much more. Right, right, right. So that's another reason you can keep washing your clothes in a machine. Please do keep wash.

If you're wearing clothes, if you're wearing clothes, wash them is my philosophy. And speaking of people being Lint Machines, there's a heroic story. Oh boy, Lent Hero. Takeaway number two. Every year, heroic volunteers clean the Lint out of U.S. National Park Caves. Wow. When people go into caves, they leave behind lint that the cave cannot eliminate because caves do not eliminate stuff. And so then volunteers have been clearing it out of National Park Caves.

That's bananas. Of course not because caves are kind of a static system. There's not a lot of flow of water or air. Yeah. I mean, there is, like obviously some air exchange, some water that flows through cave systems. but it's not like a windy valley where if you have some lint, it's gone in a few hours. Exactly. There's not constant Indiana Jones exchange of people and things and loot.

Right. Like an actual natural cave just kind of keeps stuff in there. It's like a slower process. It's not like there's high winds that will carry stuff out and clean out the cave. And this is yet another thing where we don't think about lint's coming off of us all the time. Lint forms when fabric receives friction. So if a human goes into a cave, they leave behind lint, even if they're, like, cleaning up their camping gear or whatever. Especially if you're, like, scratching your back against one of those stalactites or stalagmites, like a bear.

I floss with them. That's just what I do, okay? It's important. Yeah, because we think of it as just a drier thing, we don't realize that's happening, scientists figured out that because there's lint left behind in our caves, that's also something we could remove. And the U.S. national parks in the last couple of decades started putting out calls for help removing lint by hand. And so many people want to help the parks have volunteers to do it. They don't even have to pay people.

So how do you go about finding lint in a cave? Free part for you as a volunteer is you received training sessions and also tours. and so park experts will show you how to spot it. It's just small and you basically are just going over the sides and ceilings and walls of the cave with stuff like rags, brushes, tweezers. Okay, but then the rags and brushes, how are they not also generating lint? Also, are all these people naked? Because if you're wearing clothes to collect the lint, you will also leave lint.

Yeah, apparently they're just removing much, much more than they're leaving behind. Okay. Starting in 2008, there's a park called Great Basin National Park in Nevada. They have a site called Lehman Cave, and Lehman Cave attracts about 40,000 visitors per year. And so that giant group does gradually leave behind a lot of lints, but just 10 volunteers were able to pull out eight pounds of it. So they probably left behind tiny amounts, too, but as a net thing, it's positive. This is why I think it's so, like our jobs as podcasters who sit on our butts and talk is like the most important job in the world.

Thank you. Because we enable people who go and do work like finding Lenton cave systems to have something to listen to while we're doing it. And I like to think, I like to think this podcast is more entertaining than the silence of a cave. this is almost definitely going to be the only podcast episode called Lint. Yeah. So they're going to find it in their app. Yeah. And then listen to it.

Like that's a pretty likely thing. If you're a Lint Hunter, let us know. Yeah. Say hi. Yeah. Because this happens all over the U.S. Apparently at Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. There's a Mammoth Cave Restoration Group that has so many Lint Removal volunteers.

There are three entire separate weekends. of training volunteers and sending them into Mammoth Cave. Incredible. People do this everywhere from Carl Spad Caverns in New Mexico to State Park Caves in Arizona. If you're interested in doing it, contact your local park that manages a cave, see if they have people do this. Because it's been more and more of a thing since the early 2000s. There's definitely a part of me that would be interested because hanging out in cave sounds fun.

Yeah. Getting to use tweezers on stuff, I don't know what's wrong with me, but like when you give me tweezers, everything looks like something to tweez. Like I'm just searching, hunting for things to tweez. My husband has learned to hide from me when I have tweezers in my hands because I'm going to find things to tweez and he doesn't want to be around when that's happening. So I feel like if you just handed me tweezers and put me in a cave, I'd be like, all right, I'm not leaving here until I've done.

tweezed everything. I love imagining very tall brat hiding behind cookie from the tweezers, but also that pretty much seems to be the volunteer mentality for this is that they would love to have some time in caves and they love cleaning stuff. Like they're not paid at least the Lehman Cave when they also bring their own food and their own sleeping bags and sleeping gear. You could sleep in the cave? That's so cool.

Yeah. Man. So that's why people are volunteering. Like if you're a being in a cave fan, it's a way to almost do like an internship where in exchange for your labor, you get to just have the experience, you know? That's very cool. I wonder what kind of tweezers they use. I did a lot of research on tweezers. I decided to go with Tweezer Man, which is a relatively expensive tweezers.

but I was unsatisfied. That feels like a made-up brand name, but it's fine. It's not. It's real. And I have it. Because like I was, I was unsatisfied with the capability of other tweezers. We're not being paid by Tweezer Man. We should be.

I'd like to be. Please pay us. Tweezers should be a great topic, too. Pay us, Tweezer, man. Yeah, let's do a tweezers episode. I didn't know you had this tweezers. fashion. This is great. I like, I like a, I like a quality tweez. You're going to, you're going to, you're going to, like, tweez one stalactite, and then tweez a second stalactite. I'll ruin your cave.

And then fashion those into big tweezer. Yeah. I, yeah, I highly recommend investing in quality tweezers when you go to a cave to pick lint. And the last last thing, there's an additional positive Kota where not all lint is negative for the stuff in a cave. Apparently, some lint has fibers or even microbes that the natural species in caves can eat. Cool. And some cave walls can gradually incorporate the lint over time in a way that's not that difficult or damaging for the caves.

So between volunteers pulling it out and some caves being able to handle and absorb the lints, just a lot of good stuff's going on. We're really resolving this. I'm just imagining, like, one of these pale, colorless, blind cave fish with a little lint sweater. Just like, no, this is mine. You leave me alone. I can completely see that because there, I mean, there's got to be a lot of detritivores in caves. So, like, animals that feed on dead stuff, dead animals.

And so, like, they got to eat something and maybe it's lint. Yeah, because I also want to say if you're someone just visiting a cave, you're not, like, necessarily destroying it with your lint or something. You're also giving hardworking lint collectors jobs. You're a jobs, you're a jobs creed. And the job is no money, just the experience. Right. You're being paid in cave time. Truly.

Blunking. People are like, I want to just sleep in Mammoth Cave for the night, which makes sense. It's really cool. I want us, I want to spolunk. And I don't want people to hassle me over it. So I've got my tweezers. Got my tweezers? Yeah.

And I've got the only podcast on earth about Lint. It's also probably, I imagine if you showed up in something vaguely, ecologist-looking outfit with some tweezers. And like you could get in anywhere. Like also or a lab coat in tweezers, they'll let you in anywhere. And then you're just stealing jewels and, you know, whatever, yeah. With your tweezers, one jewel at a time. Well, folks, that's a great scheme and two takeaways and many numbers. We're going to take quick break before trapping astounding stories of the future of Lint.

Future Lent. We're back, and we're going to get into some of the lint on our bodies. It's going to get a little personal. Oh, all right. Because takeaway number three, so-called belly button lints is really just regular clothing lints plus some microbes specific to your navel. Right. Again, tweezers, be very careful with those around your belly button. Oh, boy.

Also, clean them out. Clean them out, people. Before researching, I would have thought belly button lint is basically like earwax or boogers or something where it's like just junk from your body. It turns out it's almost the same as pocket lintz or something. Like it should be called lint. It's lint. It's your body's pocket and it gets in there.

Pretty much. Yeah. Especially, I can disclose, I have an any. So I have more probably belly button lint. That's one way you get it. Yeah, no, me too. And I don't want to get too gross, but I think there was some point in my life when I was a young person realizing there was stuff at my belly button where I was like, oh, this is something I should be showering. This is, I actually have to get in there.

There's also, I've seen a lot of videos on TikTok lately about men realizing that they need to scrub their legs or like any, like the whole lower half of the body. So I think people have a lot of reveals like that over time. We're not taught really how to properly clean the multiple sort of folds, crevasses that occur on the human body. Everybody just gets put in that private bathroom or whatever and told to go for it and then they make something up. Because we get taught how to use a bath as a kid, but as adults, how many of us are actually bathing? I feel like we're almost all showering. Maybe other countries are different, but American culture, yeah. Adults are like push to shower.

And then bathing is only for like some sort of treat or something. Yeah, special treat. The belly button lints, it'll just build up, but mostly because your clothing makes lint. Like for the third takeaway in a row, lint forms when fabric receives friction. So friction between your body and the clothes on it will make lint and then some of it ends up in your belly button. Makes sense. It's almost entirely from your clothes. If you didn't wear clothes, you probably wouldn't have it. Right. And then probably some, I'm not suggesting you do this, but if you pull stuff out of your belly button, even if you are regularly practicing belly button hygiene, sometimes there's a bit of an odor

there. And I would imagine that's because of the bacteria that grows in there. Yeah, there's specific bacteria in the navel, and it's the only reason belly button lint is all that different from pocket lints. Right. And also, if people don't know about the microbial life on us in general, like Katie talks about being a host of many parasites on creature feature and stuff. Yeah. We don't think about there's just lots of species on us.

So if you see a number, like, there are a few thousand different kinds of microbes in your belly button, your initial reaction is probably, ah, but it's normal. Like your whole body has thousands of kinds of microbes. It's how it works. Don't worry about it. Even if you're clean and you shower good, you're still going to have bacteria on your skin and inside your belly button. You can't really get rid of that. It's more just about clearing away dead skin cells.

That is what you're doing when you're showering. Yeah. And yeah, also belly button lint might have a little more skin cells just because it is off, like, it's skin. Like, sure. Like, it's, I truly am much less grossed out by my belly button now from researching lids. Like, it's just a, it's just a place. It's whatever. I think that's like one of the times when I was like, something red came out of my belly button.

I was like, oh, God, what's wrong with me? And it's just lent from like a red sweater that I was wearing. I'm glad you could piece together in the chain of events. That's exciting. Right. Yeah. It's like, it's a very quick episode of house. You go and it's like my belly button is.

I'm, like, bleeding out of my belly button. And House, like, takes, like, it's Lent. Yeah, he's like, are you a fan of the St. Louis Cardinals? Yes. Well, yeah, that's a lot of it. I mean, sure. And House calls you some names and send you on your merry way. I didn't say sources here.

They include a piece for BBC Future by Jason G. Goldman and a piece for Smithsonian magazine by Aaron Blake Moore. And they both partly cover this because there was a big media event around belly button lint? Huh. And this was in Australia. There's a pop scientist named Carl Krusselnicki. He goes by Dr. Carl. And on his radio show in Australia, he got a listener question about belly button lintz. And he did a like semi-scientific survey of people about it. And the upshot was that you get more belly button lint if you have more stomach hair is what he found. That kind of makes sense. It's like a natural mesh.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So like your hair. on your body. And even if you think you're hairless in a spot, there's like tiny hairs, you know, but the bigger and thicker your hair on your body, the more lint it will generate from rubbing on the clothing you're wearing. And so that makes sense. The more Sasquatch you are. Yeah, like I'm medium Sasquatch and so I have some lint. You know, it's fine. Yeah. I feel like I've just linty beings. Yeah. Like I've got a moderate, like a touch of the squash, but not too much. Yeah, get a little squatch, you know. That's just like pleasant to me about belly button lint.

Yeah, it's nothing wrong with you. And then a whole other thing about our bodies is our final takeaway number four. Lint removal tools may help us survive in a future of tick booms. Oh boy. That's exciting. Yeah, the bad news is, especially in the eastern U.S., there's a recent tick boom. There are more of ticks, the blood-sucking insects, apparently because the climate's gotten hotter. Yeah, that's not good.

And it turns out that the kinds of sticky paper that we use in lint rollers, larger versions of that are extremely useful for monitoring tick populations and a really handy new tool for it. Oh, I do have lint rollers. It's mostly used to peel the layer of dog hair off of myself when I'm trying to... Yeah, it's for pet hair for us. When I want to show what the original color of my shirt is, I have to use it. But, yeah, I mean, that kind of makes sense. I mean, sticky traps work on bugs.

I generally against sticky traps where you have vertebrates just because it doesn't seem like so fun for them. But, like, I have a sticky trap for pantry moths because the only thing that gets on there is pantry moths. And it's, and it's easy. easily escaped by, say, like, if God forbid there was a mouse in my pantry, it could just get right off of it. But, like, yeah, it's very effective. Like, I was surprised, it's like, ah, it's probably not that important. I've only seen, like, one. So how many can there be? And it catches a lot of them. Ticks are, they like to crawl on stuff and jump on stuff. So using that seems like a fiendishly effective way.

Yeah. The key source about it is a feature for Atlas Obscira by writer. Isaac Schultz. And then we're also linking a piece about the history of lint rollers by Ernie Smith for his site tedium.co. Because lint rolling has not always been a thing. Apparently Americans started inventing it around the 1940s, some kind of basically sticky item that picks lint off of clothing or surfaces, and then obviously pet hair and whatever else you want to get. Right. Yeah, I don't love how you have to waste so much paper doing it. I'd love, I've tried to find Other types that are sort of like, it has that like weird velvet texture that you use, but it just doesn't work for the dog hair. That makes sense. Yeah. And we just want something really strongly adhesive.

Yeah. And the key inventor of it was a guy who won together in a prototype way. His name is Nicholas McKay. One night in the 1950s, he and his wife needed to chaperone school dance. And then McKay had not taken his sport coat to the drug. dry cleaners. And also it's the 1950s, so there's a lot of, like, appearance pressure. Well, gosh. Yeah, right. Like, heck and gosh. And so he threw together a tool made out of an old cardboard, the, like, cylinder of cardboard. And then a piece of wire in that and masking tape on the outside of it. Nice. And by the early 1960s, Nicholas and his wife, Helen McKay, were running a company making the on-purpose version. That's pretty much what you see today.

Golly. Yeah. It's very 1950s like, oh, no, scooter at the malt shop will mock my sweater, you know, that kind of worrying about how you look. Yeah. You want to look smart in case you run into your future wife and or husband. Every time one of us is not need and tidy, President Eisenhower cries, you know, so we have to. Yeah. So, yeah, so we've only had that for three quarters of a century.

And meanwhile, ticks are a big problem, especially in the eastern U.S. now. There's a rising population of the black-legged ticks that caused Lyme disease. Also, other ticks like the Lone Star tick are coming east because the climate's changing, and they spread other illnesses like alpha-gal syndrome. And so, according to researcher, David Allen, who is a forest ecologist at Middlebury College in the Northeast, for one thing we should not blame the ticks themselves because they mostly just want to hang out in leaf litter. They just want to be in leaf litter. They're not like mosquitoes where they're chasing us all the time.

Well, also, I mean, just like, don't be bad at the ticks. Be mad at mosquitoes. Yeah, they're just doing what they know how to do, man. They got to survive as well. Yeah, and apparently there's only specific periods in their life where they actively try to seek blood. It's a behavior called questing, is the name, the technical name. That's pretty charming.

Yeah, it is. And they usually do about three quests in their life, and only the final and third quest looks for bigger animals than rodents and small mammals and stuff. Otherwise, they mostly sit in leaf litter, and that means if you have basically a large version of the piece of sticky paper from a lint roller, you can run that through the leaves and ground in a forest and get a sample of how many ticks are living in it. and then extrapolate to do tick population estimates.

I'm looking at this. And it's kind of funny because it does just look like this guy is trying to tidy up the forest. Like, man, this forest sure is linty. I got to drag this thing around. Oh, we're going to have company. Yeah. We're having company in the forest. Got to do some dusting.

Yeah, it's really funny looking. And they assembled their own version of it when they first started doing it in 2019. that's like a three foot by three foot square of adhesive fabric. And then they drag it through about 200 feet of forest, count the ticks, also examine which species are on it. And that's really helpful for like being alerted to the tick danger in a place, in a time. That's pretty good. And it's all thanks to the fact that some guy in the 50s is like, I can't have lint on my sport jacket. Yes.

Yeah. I'm going to see Potsie later. He'll say things to me if I... Potsy. Wow, there's a name. That's from Happy Days. I came up with a good invention, though, Alex. I sticky socks.

So like sticky, one-sided sticky socks to wear when you're hiking. So on one side, the socks are sticky. And on the other side, they're just normal socks. And you can wear them hiking. So then the ticks just gets stuck. on the socks. Yeah. I guess does that bring them closer to you?

But they won't bite you through the sock. No, they're stuck there. And then you give it to your local tick scientist. Oh, I see for gathering the information. Yeah, yeah. Right, exactly. But also to prevent the tick from continuing its ascent up your body. I guess you kind of would probably also want like a sticky hat or a sticky shirt

because sometimes they fall off trees. or you get mostly there on the ground, but sometimes you can get them from a leaf or something. So, like, yeah, just like a sticky suit. Have these scientists... You just want to wear a sticky suit. I think that's what we're finding. Yeah, I really do.

I want to see what I collect. If you let me frolic with a sticky suit, what I'm going to come home with. And then you do that in the cave. Like, you're just this new prodigy of cave cleaning. They're like, we've never seen someone lint. collect like this. Make way. I'll have like, I'll have a sticky suit and I'll be dual wielding tweezers and just make light work of that cave.

Folks, that's the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro with fun features for you, such as help remembering this episode. With a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, washing machines generate lint in the same way dryers do, and washers spread synthetic lint to every beach on earth. Takeaway number two, every year heroic volunteers clean the lint out of U.S. National Park caves. Takeway number three, so-called belly button lint is pretty much just regular clothing lint. It also has some microbes specific to the navel.

Takeway number four, lint removal tools may help us survive and handle a future of tick booms. And then truly a set of amazing numbers this week, everything from the history of dryers for clothes, to the history of using lint as kindling and bandages, to the amazing artist who made a giant lint Last Supper. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode, because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at maximum fun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists, so members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode.

This week's bonus topic is the bizarre national lint problem in Burkina Faso. It changed the entire government of that African country. Visit sifpod.fund for that bonus show for a library of almost 22 dozen other secretly incredibly fasting bonus shows and a catalog of all sorts of max fun bonus shows. It's special audio. It's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at maximum

fun.org. Key sources this week include a surprising amount of journalism about Lint from NPR, the CBC, Smithsonian Magazine, and more. Also, digital resources from the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, the Museum of Nursing History in Philadelphia, also a lot of scientific resources from the journal Science, the Journal Environmental Science and Technology, the American Chemical Society.

And one book to shout out this week, it's called The Golden Thread, How Fabric Changed History, that is by cultural historian and design journalist, Cassia St. Clair. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenape Hoking, the traditional land of the Muncie-Lenape people, and the Wapinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skategook people, and others. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy,

and I want to acknowledge that in my location, and in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode, and join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing to and resources about native people in life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on

another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 88. That's about the topic of license plates. Fun fact there, in the state of Delaware, there's a license plate that is just the number one, and it is reserved for the governor of Delaware. So I recommend that episode.

I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast Creature Feature about animals, science, and more. Our theme music is unbroken, unshaven by the Budoz band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Sousa for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our members. And thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly

incredibly fascinating, so how about that? Talk to you then. Thank you.