Stuff You Should Know - How Soap Works

Episode Date: July 30, 2020

Soap is a miraculous substance – and mysterious too: we have no idea how humans first figured out to make it. We lived with soap for millennia before we thought to use it to wash ourselves with it, but once we did a love affair with cleanliness was born. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the

cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello friends, we have a book coming out finally, and it is awesome. You're going to make me say the title again?

Yeah. Fine. It's stuff you should know, colon, an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. And get this Chuck, you don't have to wait to order until the book comes out. You can do what we in the book biz call pre-ordering it. And then when it does come out, you'll be the first to get it or among the first. Well, and not only that, you get a pre-order gift. You get this cool custom poster from the illustrator of the book, Carly Monardo, who

is awesome. We worked with another great writer who helped us out with this thing, a great deal. His name is Nils Parker, and it was just a big team effort, and it's really, really cool. We love how it's turning out. Yeah, we do. So, anywhere you can buy books, you can go pre-order the stuff you should know, colon, an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things.

And then after you do, you can go on over to stuffyoushouldreadbooks.com and upload your receipt and get that pre-order poster. So thank you in advance for everybody who is pre-ordering. That means quite a bit to us, and we appreciate you. Stuffyoushouldreadbooks.com, pre-order now. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck, Brian over there, and Jerry flitted in and

out like a little COVID fairy, and this is Stuff You Should Know. I don't think you want the COVID fairy to visit. How about the COVID safety fairy? You want the soap fairy? Yeah, because the soap fairy can take on the COVID fairy and smack that B word down. Yeah, and more specifically, it can pry it open and say, spill out your guts coronavirus. It's pretty amazing what it does. I mean, soap, just from this research, I'm just fascinated with it.

It's a magical potion, and I think the fact that we have no real clue how we figured out how to make soap just makes the whole thing even that much more delightful. Yeah, and knowing how it actually works is really neat, and hopefully this convinces some people that it does work better than hand sanitizer. Yeah, rather than just running your hands under some water for a half of a second and then wiping them on your shirt. Well, that too. Yeah.

We are talking about soap, and I want to check before we start, I want to give a special shout out to Dr. Brauners because they are soap makers. They also requested this episode years ago. Oh, yeah? Yeah, they wrote in and said, hey, here's some free samples. How about an episode on soap? We said, okay, we can't be bought with free samples, but an episode on soap is a good idea, so finally we're getting around to it.

Yeah, and we had those big jumbo daddy liquid castile soaps by our sink here at work. Yeah, remember we had that castile soap fight? Yeah, the great castile soap fight of the aughts. Yeah. Aught 12. No, their stuff's good, and you know, if it wasn't for the fact that my wife makes soap, then I would be firmly on the Dr. Brauners train, I like their stuff. I feel like you can do both.

No. No? Okay. Emily wouldn't allow that. She's like, it's them or me. Well, I mean, how about this? Tell you me to open a business for 20 years and then say, I feel like I might like to use your competitor some as well.

Okay, all right. All right. But I'll bet the people at Dr. Brauners use Emily's soap. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe. Let's find out. Maybe they can write in. So, yes, Emily does make soap too.

She sells it at loveyourmama.com, doesn't she? Yeah, I mean, I haven't had to buy soap in 15 plus years. It's been great. Do you help out making the soap? I did in the early days. I've made quite a few batches in my day, but just not anymore. What's your specialty? Well, I mean, I didn't have a specialty.

I would just make whatever she told me to make. I see. I got you. It's fun. I've got it. I have to make genitals soap again. Oh, God. And that's not soap for the genitals, it's soap in the shape of genitals.

And also for the genitals. Sure. I guess you probably shouldn't really make a distinction there. No. Well, like we said, soap is kind of magic, Chuck, and I feel like we should just kind of off the bat talk about why it's magic, because it's one of those things where science can explain it, but that doesn't really make it any less impressive, you know? Actually, it makes it kind of more impressive to tell you the truth.

Yeah. And, you know, what soap is is just a couple of things. Like if you were to go back a long time and we'll talk about the history or go out in the middle of the furthest reaches of, oh, I don't know, the jungle where people are sort of making their own versions of soap, you really just need a couple of things, which is some sort of a fat or an oil and an alkali. And that's really it. You know, people can use, a lot of people through history have used animal fats and

stuff like that. Obviously Fight Club had the big joke about using lard from liposuction lard, I think, right? Yeah. So that's fat too, but you know, Emily's is an olive oil based soap and I'm a big fan of that. Yeah. Yeah.

They figured out finally you didn't need to sacrifice goats anymore, you could just use... Sacrifice olives. Right. Yeah. Same ceremony, it's just dinkier. That's right. So, yeah, that's, I mean, that's all there is to it.

And an alkali in this case, while an alkali in every case is a type of base, it's the opposite of an acid on the pH scale, it has a high pH. And usually traditionally when making soap, it comes in the form of lye. And lye you can get by chopping down some wood, specifically hardwood, you don't want softwood, burning it, taking the ashes, boiling them, and then scraping off what floats to the top. You have lye right there. And that's one of the two main ingredients along with fat, like you said, in making soap.

That's it. That's what it does to soap, right? But it's so, like you would never put those two things together, that it's almost like it makes more sense how we figured out how to make alcohol than it does how we figured out how to make soap. You know what I mean? Yeah. Totally.

It's not very intuitive. No, it's not at all. But that is what soap is. And we've been making it for at least about 4,800, 5,000 years as we'll see. But before we get to the history, Chuck, let's talk a little bit about how the whole thing works. Okay? Yeah.

So, you know, you've got water and that's a key component to washing your body. And if you've ever heard the term oil and water don't mix, that's true because it's all about, you know, it goes down to a molecular level and water molecules, they like each other a lot, but they don't like oil. They don't like fat because the oil molecules are big and they don't have these poles that have different electrical charges. And it really is interesting that it comes down to literal chemistry in this case. Yeah.

Do you remember, I think in our pepper spray episode, we explained why if you rinse your face off with water after you've been pepper sprayed, it doesn't work. It's because the water and the, I think the capsaicin don't bind together. But if you use something like milk, like a fat, that fat binds to capsaicin. So that's why you'd want to use milk to wash your eyes out after being pepper sprayed. Yeah. Yeah. The end.

So there's a very similar thing going on with water. Water like you said, likes to bind to itself and that binding chuck is what accounts for surface tension, which is how you can fill a glass of water up with water slightly over the rim of the glass and it will hold its shape. It's because water molecules are so attracted to each other that they form like basically a, well, a tense surface, hence surface tension. So when you add soap, things change. So comes along and says, I see what you like.

See what's going on here, but I'm going to shake things up a little bit. Yeah. And it's, it's so cool because soap basically gets oil and water to party together. So comes in, they have these pin shaped ends and each end, it's, it's almost like it was meant to be this way or something. They have very distinct ends and they bind with the water on one side and the oil on the other as if it was just made to say, you guys need to get together and clean things. Yeah.

But not only do they like bind with the water on one end and oil on the other end, they have like polar opposite ends as a single soap molecule does. So not only does like the end like to bind with oil, which means it's oleophilic. It hates water, which makes it hydrophobic. And because that end is hydrophobic, it does everything it can to get away from water, including pushing through water and separating water into its constituent molecules, which loosens that surface tension of water, which makes soap a surfactant, a surface active agent, which means that it, it makes water a little more permeable.

Like water can get into tinier cracks and crevices than it normally would because that, that hydrophobic end of the soap molecule is keeping the water from, from coming together because it's just plowing right through trying to get away from the water. Yeah. And that's the tail end. The head end of the soap has a little bit of a negative charge and that says, all right, I really want to bond with that positive hydrogen atom and water. So that major makes it hydrophilic.

So that end loves water. The other end loves the oil. And when they come together, and I love the way Dave Ruiz put it, he said, the hydrophilic head and the hydrophobic tail act like a team of bouncers that surround the particles and say, get out of here. And I think the one thing we didn't mention that makes us all work is the fact that, and the reason why just rinsing your hands off doesn't work as well as with soap is that all those, all the dirt and all that stuff that builds up on your body has oil in it.

Right. Right. So let's give an example here, Chuck, let's say that you have some cake frosting on your hands. Don't I ask? Well, you just, you know how you take care of that. Yeah. But you've licked it so, so much so that now it's just kind of getting gross.

Okay. And you just need to, you finally reached that point where you need to wash your hands. You're going to suggest washing that off of your hands. Right. Okay. No, not that. No, that, we're past that stage, the licking stage. Okay.

And we're at the hand washing stage now. When you, when you wet your hands with water, you get it nice and primed. And when you add soap and you lather the soap up, what you're doing is you're, you're introducing those soap molecules, which are again, special magic little molecules into this, you're creating like a solution, a soapy water solution. And so those soap molecules are basically trying to get away from the water on one side. And on that side, they're saying, oh, hey, a little bit of oily, hydrogenated cake frosting. Great.

I want to be attracted to you. And a bunch of different soap molecules are going to do that to a single little particle of cake frosting. And they essentially surround it. So the tail ends of a bunch of different soap molecules are all pointing inward, enveloping basically a little particle of cake frosting. And then on the outside, they're connecting to the water molecules that are surrounding that.

Right. So that's basically stage one. And the cake frosting starts to sweat a little bit. It's like, well, what's going to come next? What's coming next? I really like being surrounded like this without knowing what's coming next. The cake frosting doesn't want to know what comes next because it doesn't pan out well for it.

Yeah. So it gets surrounded. And like you said, the tails are pointing in, the heads are pointing out, and it surrounds and basically traps the dirt and the oil in what are called micelles, M-I-C-E-L-L-E-S. And that's a little bubble around the dirt, basically. And all those little outside pointing heads lift that dirt from the surface. And all of a sudden, it's floating around a little bit now and not bound to your skin. He's like, I don't know what's happening.

And that's where your good friend water comes in to just wash it all down the drain. Yeah. Because so remember, in addition to being oleophilic where it's attracted to oils, it's also a surfactant. So it breaks water molecules up, which means that that water can get into smaller crevices. For example, underneath that piece of cake frosting. So it makes it easier for it to just get carried away too. So it's all just kind of coming together into this amazing little process that happens every

time you wash your hands and form those little micellar bubbles. That's where all those particles go. They just get carried off thanks to these soap molecules surrounding them, connecting with the water molecules and then just getting rinsed away. It's kind of like, you know, that scene in true lies where Jamie Lee Curtis is hanging from the helicopter and Arnold Schwarzenegger is holding on to her and he's actually holding on to the helicopter. So Arnold Schwarzenegger is the soap molecule, Jamie Lee Curtis is the cake frosting and

the helicopter is the water that's rinsing it all the way down the drain. That's right. And the dirt saying, I'll be back and the soap saying, no, you won't terrible. The famous retort to all be back. And the coolest thing about all of this, I mean, that's just how it takes care of the dirt on your body, which is amazing in and of itself, but it can do the same thing with viruses and bacteria, especially, well, not especially, but including the coronavirus because a lot of these things have this double layered lipid membrane, including the coronavirus

and the deal with that hydrophobic into the soap. It's really, really sharp and so it can actually, you get a bunch of those guys together and it can wedge in between those membranes and kind of, if you get enough of them pried up like it's a crowbar or something, and then that's when the virus is all of a sudden, you know, like Arnold Schwarzenegger just taking care of business. Yeah. It basically gets ripped apart by so many, like death by a thousand paper cuts, but instead of paper, it's soap molecules and the lipid memory that protects the virus just gets

torn right open, which spills the virus proteins out and those virus proteins actually get enveloped by even more soap molecules. So not only does it like get rid of microbes, it actually like kills certain kinds of microbes. Just we're just talking about regular, plain old soap and water here, everybody. Yeah, and you know, not to get too ahead of the game, but that's why soap is better for washing your hands during, well, at all times, but especially during a time like this, because I think people just figure like, because we have this association with like alcohol and that smell, like it just kills everything on contact.

But it doesn't kill everything on contact. And if you're in a pinch and you don't have soap and you're at a store or something and it's good to have that stuff to use, but it doesn't necessarily kill it 100%. And what you're not doing is washing it off with water and down the drain. No, you're not. And so there's two problems here. Yes, it killed a bunch of stuff, especially things that alcohol can kill, but the stuff that it can't kill, you just basically gave an alcohol bath to and it's still there on

your hands. So when you do touch your face again, inevitably, those things are going to be introduced to your mouth, including things like polio virus, which as we learned recently, you don't want to go into your mouth. Should we take a break? I think we should. And then what? We'll come back and talk history.

Maybe. Yeah, let's do it. Okay. Hey, everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren and Nova Scotia, who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel.

So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best

decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the

nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Chuck, so soap, like we said, we're not entirely sure how we ever figured out how to make soap, but we do know from records, hieroglyphics, cuneiform tablets, all that jazz, that in Mesopotamia, people were making soap, taking an alkali and a fat, mixing them

together, adding heat and some water and through hydrolysis, going through this process called saponification and producing soap. That's how you produce soap. It has to have gone through saponification to be considered soap, right? That we've been doing this, we humans, for at least 5,000 years. Yeah, it's kind of cool. When I was making batches of soap, I heard that word a lot from Emily because there's a lot of mixing involved and I would think I was done with the mixing and she'd say,

it hasn't saponified yet. It was just sort of an easy test. You would lift the mixer out and kind of sling a little bit of it on the surface and it's almost like seeing when a pasta noodle's done. You can just sort of tell by the way it's, the thickness is and the way it sits. When you finally reach that saponification point, you're ready to rock. It's a great word. Yes, it is.

I always called it, I would always say that we're pulling into saponification station, which was my old joke. That's a good one. So saponification actually, Chuck, I didn't realize that it was from legendary mythical mountain. Did you know that? Mount Sappo? Is that the Roman one?

Yeah. That's sort of the legend and no one knows if it's true, but it sounds, it makes for a good story. From what I understand, it is definitely not true. Okay. But it does make for a good story. So we're going to tell it anyway. Sure.

Agreed on that. So yeah. In ancient Rome, there was a Mount Sappo and as the legend goes, that is not true. Ancient priests would sacrifice animals up there and when it would rain, that animal fat from that disgusting animal sacrifice ceremony would flow down along with the wood ash that you already mentioned was the alkali and go down there to the river, the Tiber River, and people were washing their clothes down there. And when that happened, they would be like, man, this stuff suds it up and my clothes

have never been cleaner. Yeah. That's not just plain clean. Yeah. That's sapo clean. Right. So from what I understand, there's just no question that there is no such thing as Mount Sappo and that this is all just kind of a made up, fun, real origin story.

There really is. From what I saw. God, I didn't know that that was fake. That Mount Sappo was fake? I just thought the legend was fake. I didn't know. Are there Romans? Are they fake?

I don't know. The jury's kind of still out. There are today, but we're not sure where they came from. No, from what I know, there's not a real Mount Sappo, but the fact is the Romans felt compelled for some reason to say, where'd this come from? Oh, well, let me explain with this made up story. So by the time this Mount Sappo legend came around, I mean, people had been making this stuff for a couple of thousand years already.

So it definitely did not originate in Mount Sappo because there is no Mount Sappo. But we do know the Romans were into it, not just from that legend, but also Pliny the Elder mentioned it in his naturalist's story from 77 CE. Do you know what else the Romans were into? Yeah, I do. They were into a lot of stuff. They're like, I got a great story for you about the soap. Come on into this room with these other 35 people.

Yeah. Have you met my friend Priyapis? I'll tell you all about it. You're going to love him. So they were definitely producing what you would call soap though by 200 BCE. That was from curd and goat fat and beech tree ash and they would clean stuff in towns with that kind of stuff. They would wash their pots out.

Other people would use it to clean cotton to make textiles and stuff like that. But it wasn't for personal use yet. No, that was like the one thing in common is people were using it for everything but washing themselves. It's like funny. I don't know if it just didn't hit upon them or whatever, but they didn't. Like apparently the Gauls even used it to slick their hair back. Not to wash their hair, just to slick it back and give it a nice little reddish tint apparently.

Nice. But Europe, so Europe had like soap making guilds from I think the 7th century for a very long time. People had been making soap in Europe, but it wasn't until after the Crusades that some of the Crusaders returned as the legend goes. Very dirty. It's not a soap style story, but they returned supposedly with Aleppo soap from Syria, which is fragrance with bay laurels, very nice, beautiful olive oil soap that you can still

get today. But the story goes that the returning Crusaders said, get this stuff. It's soap, but you use it to wash your genitals and Europe started to get very clean. At least like the elite aristocracy who had the money to afford things like that got very clean. Well, at least their genitals did. Right. It took another 300 years for some to be like, I wonder if you could use this on your underarms

as well. Right. And they went, what about your face? They're like, you know where you've been washing with that stuff? It's true. It's got hair on it to prove it. Oh, gosh. That was too much for you?

I don't know. This is all. They didn't even use the word pubic hair. I mean, we said the word genitals like five times so far. That's true. So that was how Europe supposedly started to come into soap. It was imported from the Middle East, but in very short order, I think Spain started making Castile soap out of olive oil and it took off in France and England and elsewhere.

And again, it was a luxury item, but it became much more widespread when Europe started making it themselves. Yeah. I think the Castile region, right? Isn't that where that came from? Mm-hmm. Yeah. So supposedly originally it was made from olive oil, qualified as a Castile soap, but

even now you can make Castile soap from like palm oil or coconut oil or whatever, and it's still considered Castile soap. So I think it's just a free-for-all. Yeah. You know, what I like about Emily's liquid soap and the Dr. Bronner's is that it's how liquid soap should be, which is to say thin. It's almost like has the same sort of viscosity as water. And whenever I see, and I don't want to like slam a name brand, but let's just say the

very popular hand soap that they've had around since the 80s, and the way that stuff comes out all gooey and pearly is just so gross to me. Pearly, mother of pearly. It's really nasty looking to me. Now that I've seen like good real liquid soap. Yeah. Ugh. So yeah, one of the other things I like about Castile soap with Dr. Bronner's and Emily's

in particular is that your hands feel washed afterwards. Yeah. Totally. It doesn't feel like you missed any. Like there's a residue. It's like, it's gone, but it also has left behind like a clean feeling. It's just its own thing for sure. Yeah.

And you know, since we're talking about this, I want to say a huge thanks to people that went out and bought stuff from her store after the essential oils episode. We've given her plenty of shout outs over the years and there's always been a little spikes in her business, but I think the topic and small business and hurting because of the coronavirus and everything kind of came together and they've been overwhelmed with support. Oh, that's great. It's been really, really sweet and a little bit much even, but it's been, it's kind of

like be careful what you ask for, you know? Right. And corporate buzz speak, they say that's a good problem to have. Yeah. So if you're going to order soap, just wait a week or two. Okay. Fair warning everybody. Or just be prepared to wait a week or two on the back end.

Hey, by the way, you can also order something now too that you have to wait for and that would be our book, An Incomplete Compendium of Mostly Interesting Things, which you can order right now anywhere you buy books. And if you're lucky enough to live in the United States and Canada currently, you get a free poster as a gift or pre-order. Wow. That was a nice segue, my friend. Thank you.

So it took hundreds and hundreds of years, thousands of years, Chuck, think about this, thousands of years after the invention of soap before we finally started to use it on ourselves. And then apparently it wasn't until after the Civil War, at least in the United States, that using soap really took off and soap making and the soap making industry became like kind of a thing all around the same time. Yeah. Like I think Ivory soap was released in 1879, Paul Molyv was released around the same time.

And I never realized Paul Molyv soap is so named because it has palm oil and olive oil in it. Did you know that? I didn't, but I know those are two potential soap ingredients and palm oil is a little controversial these days because of the way it's sourced and we don't have to go down that rabbit hole, but just when you're shopping for stuff, just sort of try and figure out where that stuff's coming from is all I'm saying. And then let's see.

What else? Life Boy, the one that Ralphie hated so much. Was that Life Boy? Yeah. Yeah. That one came out in 1895. And what was remarkable about Life Boy is that they were the ones who coined the term body odor, B.O. as part of a marketing campaign to get you to actually buy and use soap.

Did not know that. I feel like we must have talked about that in our body odor episode. Do you know? I don't know. I do like that little Ivory story too though that in 1879 a soap maker at P&G made a mistake as the legend goes and forgot to turn off the mixer and then that whipped a bunch of air in there. This is what happens when you over mix something and shipped him out anyway because he was

like, I don't want to get pinned for this. And apparently a lot of people wrote in and were like, I love that floating soap. And that was sort of always the selling point for Ivory was that it floats. Yeah. And the moral of the story is that they fired him anyway for withholding the information. That's right. Jimmy Ivory. Yeah.

They kept his name. They kept his name. And then the hand soap in 1865, William Shepard patented the first liquid soap, but it took all the way until 1980 when soft soap came around. Yeah. And here's the thing. Did you know the story from the Minotaka Corporation? I didn't previous to reading this.

This is so great. Whether the Minotaka Corporation are the ones who debuted soft soap and before then it was like you had bar soap that was your option. But in 1980, they said, we're going to release this and I think it's going to be a big deal. So we're going to go around and buy up all of the soap pumps that anybody could possibly use and they cornered the market on liquid soap just from buying up all the soap pumps. You think that's a good thing? Or they release, as far as like from the lens of a robber baron, it's a great thing.

It seems like a jerk move to me. At the very least, it's a good story. And everyone they talk to, they're like, oh no, go out and make liquid soap. What you going to put it in? Yeah. What are you going to do? Deliver it by hand to people and just be like, here, hold your hands. Cup your hands.

We'll give you some of our liquid soap. You going to wrap it in paper? I don't think so. It's true. Oh, and speaking of wrapped in paper, I have one more little piece of soap lower. You ever use Irish Spring? I did in college. Okay.

Yeah, that's the appropriate time to use Irish Spring. You know that scent? There's actually a name for it. It's not like publicly named, but internally, I think Colgate Palm Olive, it's called Ulster scent. Did not know that. Ulster fragrance. And when they came out with Irish Spring, it wasn't debuted in Ireland.

No one in Ireland invented it. It was actually invented in Germany in 1970, and then it made its way to the United States in 1972. And initially, for the first like decade that Irish Spring was around, on the package, it said a manly deodorant soap. Oh, interesting. So it was for men. They couldn't call it German Spring either because that sounds like some kind of nasty

offensive or something. They call that Irish Spring, but in German. Oh, okay. I don't remember how it's pronounced. I don't remember that one. You can't put two and two together from that? No. I'll see if I can find it while we're still talking, okay?

So should we talk about how you should wash your hands since that's relevant? Yeah, I think so. And I know we talked about this on the COVID episode, but I love the way that this doctor put it. It was a health official, I think, that said, wash your hands like you've been chopping jalapenos and you need to change out your contact lenses. That's really great advice. It was sort of like when we did, this reminds me of when we did poison ivy, and they said

you need to scrub like there's grease, like auto, black auto grease on your body. You remember saying that? No. I mean, that was just the advice from the poison ivy episode. Okay. But that's what I'm saying. Like, I don't remember giving that advice. I'm impressed is what I'm saying.

I remember that because you got to get that poison oil off your body and it's very greasy. I got poison ivy again the other day, man. It's terrible. How bad? It was very concentrated in a small area, I think on my... Genitals? Yeah. On my ankle, around my ankle, I think.

But it was like, it was just a study in self-control, not to touch it. I'd had zero calamine lotion or anything like that that I could use. It was bad. It was really bad. Well, I officially get it now because I think when we recorded that, I had not yet, I didn't think I was allergic or whatever, but I've since gotten it a couple of times, including a couple of weeks ago, just like you. Wow.

Not much though, just a couple of tiny little spots. Maybe yours was sympathy poison ivy. Oh, maybe. Because I had it, you know? Yeah. My genitals itched. Your genitals always itched in sympathy for me. Oh, man.

I think how many times have we said that now? Eight. We should put in a little ding or a buzzer or something. Let's see if we can get Jerry to do that. All right. Hey, do you want to know what Irish spring is in German? Yeah. What?

Irish or fridling. Oh, all right. How is my German? Great. Is that how you would say it? Irish or? I guess so. How's it spelled?

Just Irish with an E-R? No, I-R-I-S-C-H-E-R. Of course, there's a C. Yeah. Yeah, that sounds about right. Yeah. Okay. And then fridling.

There's even an umlaut. Love those umlauts. So do you want to take a break and talk about how to wash hands or do you want to wash hands and then take a break? No, let's take that break. Okay, everybody. We'll be right back. Hey, friends, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place

be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba, who got the idea to Airbnb the Backyard Guest House over childhood home, now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you get your podcasts. All right, we're going to wash our hands. We're going to do it. You've got to wet them. You've got to start with water, you've got to soap up, and then you've got to really start scrubbing, especially now these days when they've—and this is just—you should just do this from now to the end of time now that we really know how to wash hands. You know, scrub those palms, scrub the backs, get in between those fingies, get into those

fingie nails. They say to sing Happy Birthday a couple of times. Or your ABCs once. Sure, if you know them. I like to use really hot water just because it makes me feel like I'm getting them cleaner. It hurts me. Does it really? Yeah.

Do you use cold water? No, no, no. I'm not crazy. I do like warm water, warm toward the hot side, but definitely not hot. I wouldn't characterize it as hot. Yeah, like it's so hot it can barely stand it. Really? Uh-huh.

Oh boy. That to me is just—I shy away from that. Here's something that I've been wanting to say for a long, long time because this has been one of Emily's big sort of things to stuck in her craw is—I guess that's not the right thing. Something stuck in your craw. No, that's not quite right, but you know what I mean. A thorn in her side.

Okay. I can see both working. Is that antibacterial soap is not more effective, people. It's not, it's not, it's not. No. And in fact, it's actually kind of harmful in the larger scheme of things, but it doesn't do anything that soap can't do. No.

You're falling for some marketing gobbledygook. Stop it. I mean, it makes sense, you would think like, okay, I'm washing my hands, but I'm also washing my hands with something that has an antibacterial agent in it. So it's killing stuff. And yes, it kills some things. It's true. But the problem is, is the stuff that it doesn't kill stays around and evolves to be resistant

to those antibacterial agents, right? And the problem is, is that those same bugs aren't just on your hands and don't just encounter soap, we use antibiotics against them. But if they've learned to be resistant from soap washing by, you know, billions of people every day, it makes it way harder to kill them with antibiotics. And so they finally figured out that some of the antibiotic resistant bugs that we were starting to see were basically in training through antibacterial soap. And eventually, I think the FDA banned two of the ingredients that were commonly used

in antibacterial soap, right? Yeah, they banned triclosin and triclocarbon and said, use regular soap, everybody. The FDA said that. It's not just me talking. No. And I mean, it's because that regular soap does all the same things that antibacterial soap does too. And I have to say, Chuck, so we're talking about hand washing.

One of the things that I found astounding in all this is that, so hand washing is so prevalent now, but it's not like it was anything new when the COVID pandemic came around, right? Right, sure. But apparently it's still relatively new as far as hand washing guidelines go. That wasn't until the 80s that the CDC issued their first hand washing guidelines. And that was for hospitals. They didn't have hand washing guidelines issued by the CDC until the 80s. Isn't that astounding?

It is, but I wonder if that was just because they were like, duh, everybody. And then someone said, well, you should probably just codify it. I don't know. I saw that it was in response to some hospital-acquired infection outbreak. So maybe the CDC was like, you know this, right? Yeah. And it turns out that hospitals were like, no, not really. Yeah, very interesting.

All the doctors were walking around touching their genitals and they're doing surgery. Ding. Yeah. So here's another thing, liquid soap versus bar soap. You would think that, and I think a lot of people may be disgusted by bar soap that other people use, especially when they're hairy, but they have done studies. They did a study in 1965 where they contaminated the hands of the researchers with 5 million bacteria and then had them wash their hands and then had other people afterward and found

that the bacteria was not transferred to the second user. This was confirmed in 1988 with another study. And the conclusion they came to basically is there could be some surface bacteria on a bar soap that's just left out like that. But it definitely doesn't transmit infection. Huh. Why wouldn't it? I don't know.

Because it's soap. They just showed that it didn't, huh? Yeah. They showed that it didn't transmit infection and I mean, I don't know, maybe it's the properties of the soap at work or maybe it just doesn't live that long on a surface like that. I could see that. I could see soap not being a very hospitable surface for microbes, but when I do pick up a bar soap in the shower, like I always give it a rinse off first, you know what I mean?

You got to get it wet. Get the layer of gunk off first, you know? Yeah, that's true. And I think people probably would be grossed out if public restaurants just had a bar of soap in there, but it's not going to get you sick, but I get it, you know? You have those pumps of individual soaps. I get it. It's true, plus also usually when you encounter liquid soap, it has like other stuff in it

that maybe moisturizes your hands or does things that a bar soap might not. What's the deal with detergent? So here's the thing. Most of the stuff that you have in your bathroom right now that you consider soap are actually detergents. A detergent is simply a synthetic soap. The only way for something to qualify as a soap is for it to have gone through a suponification station that was right past.

I'm glad this came up because Emily came through when I was researching and she was like, you know, soap isn't even soap anymore. She was like, they can call it soap legally, but it's not even soap. Yeah. So you've got your fats and you've got your alkaline and you put them together and they undergo suponification and you have soap. If you don't start with fats and alkalines and they don't undergo suponification, you have something that does the same thing and in many cases is even more desirable, has

more desirable traits than just natural soap, but it's just not soap. It's a detergent. The first detergents and plenty of detergents still around today were derived from synthetic chemicals that came from petroleum actually. Yeah, because the deal was is once they figured out soap many, many years ago, they just washed everything with soap, clothes and your dishes and they would clean floors and it was, you know, that's not what it was made for. So it would leave a residue.

It's called soap scum and especially when it's mixed with hard water, if it's really high in mineral salt, magnesium and calcium, it's going to make a lot of soap scum. And it was a big problem back in the old days when it would be left over on your kitchen floor or, you know, big time on your washing machine. Yeah, well that was a big problem because washing machines came out before laundry detergent did and it could really gum up the works when you had a soap scum layer that was hard as concrete on it. That's right, but detergent solved all that.

It did because detergent doesn't leave soap scum because it doesn't interact with calcium and magnesium in hard water, which made it vastly preferable to use for laundry, which is why the first detergents that they ever came out with were laundry detergents. And specifically from what I saw, the first detergent was DREFT in 1933, which is still around today. You can get DREFT. Oh, really? Yeah.

Yeah. It's still very much around and in Canada, it's called Ivory Snow because Canadian people are just weird with everything. I've heard of Ivory Snow. Didn't we have that year? DREFT, everything. Well DREFT came around and that handled pretty decently soiled things, but nothing too heavy. And so, was it the same company that went on to create Tide?

I'm pretty sure. It was Procter & Gamble that did DREFT, did they do Tide too? I want to say yes. I want to too. But I don't want to get sued, actually. Let's just go with yes. The next big one in 1943 was Tide. And that was a combination of these synthetic surfactants and something called builders.

And the builders kind of worked in concert with the synthetic surfactants to just kind of get out tougher stains. And in 1946, they brought it onto the test market as a heavy duty detergent. Everyone loved it. And this is kind of cool. Where did you get this, actually, this piece? I think that one was from Thought Company. And I also want to give a shout out to another Thought Company piece that was written by an

historian named Judith Ridner, who gave us a lot of the history stuff too. Well Tide has tried to improve it a lot over the years and has not stopped. And it says that each year, they basically try and duplicate mineral content of the water in all parts of the U.S., like what are all the kinds of water that we have in the United States? And let's do 50,000 test loads with Tide just to make sure we're still up to snuff. Yeah. Every year, 50,000 test loads.

Imagine being the person in charge of that laundry when you just go just totally out of it. Pretty bad. 50,000. I wouldn't make it to 50. Yeah. 50 loads of laundry, no way. Taking a stand against laundry.

Although, I have to say, so one of the things we were talking about, Castile soap, in addition to just being soap, it's known to do a lot of stuff. And one of the things supposedly is laundry. So I did a test on a grease stinging on some shorts with some Castile soap. And I will report back eventually to let you know if it worked, okay? Where was the stain? I pretreated it. Around the genitals?

Okay. On the leg. On the genitals now that you mentioned it, ding, ding. So a detergent, again, it's just a synthetic soap and it doesn't do anything differently. But the reason why companies prefer detergents is because they can control it a lot more. It's something that they create themselves. They don't have to rely on nature. They don't have to keep a high priest on the payroll to oversee the goat sacrifices to

get the tallow. It's just a lot easier to control from beginning to end. The problem is, is a lot of times some of those stuff, some of those synthetic detergents can be harsh on your skin. Yeah. They can dry things out. They can be irritants for sure. If you have eczema, that's definitely something that you might, or dermatitis.

And Emily's had a lot of success with people that specifically use her soap because it's real soap and they had eczema and skin problems and that really helped it out. Yeah. Yeah. Because even soap has, it's high up on the pH scale, higher than your natural skin pH, but it's usually much lower than say like a detergent. The thing is, is modern chemistry and modern soap banking can adjust things as needed to make things easier on your skin for sure.

Yeah. And those detergents aren't great for getting that gray water, getting into the eventual fresh water supply. It's no good for animals and fishies especially. No. Supposedly, you know how soaps are surfactants? Detergents are as well, which means that they break the surface tension of water, which makes it easier for fish to absorb all the gunk that we put in the water along with detergents

too. So it's bad on that side. And it also stretches out and breaks through the membrane that keeps them gooey, which is not good for fish either. No. It's no good. Fish just need to use soap. I don't know what their problem is.

I know. Get clean. You wouldn't smell so fishy. Right. You got anything else about soap? Got nothing else. Use it, people. Wash your hands a lot.

Yeah. Wash your hands, everybody. Say your ABCs, say happy birthday twice, but really get a good lather going and wash them a lot. Okay? Okay. And since we said okay a couple times and genitals, God knows how many times. It's time for a Listener Mail.

I'm going to call this hot off the presses. You guys don't know this, but we are playing it dangerously close here lately with our recording schedule too close for our comfort. So things that we're recording are coming out days later, and that means the corrections are coming just days later. So this was about the recently released Billy the Kid one. Hey, guys, love the show. It seriously keeps my work day interesting.

Just listen to the Billy the Kid short stuff and really enjoyed it, but I thought I'd share a tidbit of info. You mentioned that Billy went to slice up a bit of yearling, aka horse meat, for a post-coital snack. I'm filming, and my family raised this horse as well as beef and show cattle. Just thought I'd share in the livestock industry, technically almost all livestock is a yearling once they've hit a year of age, especially common to call younger butcher cattle yearlings. And then I looked up the movie the yearling.

Remember that? It's about that little baby deer, so. Oh, I thought that was about a horse too. I think it was about a deer, or at least there's a deer on the cover. Well, that's probably about a deer. He'd be very misleading if it wasn't. Either that or the person who was in charge of the cover design didn't bother to read the book.

Well, Jewel says this, while it's very possible it was a horse, because people did eat horses back then. Yearling horses don't have much meat on them, so unless the family was really starving, it's unlikely they'd butcher a horse that young for dinner, more than likely Billy was carving up a little bit of beef. Okay, that makes a little more sense. Is this from Jewel, did you say, as a Jewel the singer? Well, it's from a Jewel.

I don't know. I don't think it's. No, it's not, because I'm looking at the last name now. Oh, okay. I don't know what Jewel's last name is. I didn't even realize she had a last name. I want to say it's Kiercher or something like that. Okay.

Well, either way, she's great, because I was listening to some of her old stuff not too long ago for some reason. Are you serious? Yeah. And I was like, this is still really good music. Oh, okay. Yeah. Give Jewel a listen, Chuck.

I think you'd be like, oh, Josh is right. Well, thank you, Jewel, for writing though. Yeah. Thank you, other Jewel, for writing in. And if you're the same Jewel, I'm on to you. If you want to get in touch with us like Jewel did, you can send us an email like Jewel did. Go ahead and send it off to stuffpodcasts.ihartradio.com.

Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life.

Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.