August 31, 2023 • 44 mins
Today, soap is ubiquitous. It comes in thousands of forms, brands, and varieties -- but this wasn't always the case. In today's episode, Ben, Noel and Max explore the theoretical origin story of soap, and how humanity eventually decided (after a few stops and starts) to literally clean up its act.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
(00:27):
the show, Ridiculous Historians. This is gonna be a clean one.
I think you as always so much more. Tuning in.
Shout out to the man myth legend, super producer, mister
Max zestfully clean Williams.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Soap me up, Daddy, don't never say that again.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
Shout out too, I will not. That is me. I'm triggered. Yeah,
and you're old brown and I've been bullet Yeah it
is we. Yeah. Oh gosh, I've got an image in
my head that I can't shake.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
You know, some times a lot of our conversations fall
into like catchphrase things, and we just find weird moments
of speech that have suddenly become strange.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
And I think we just had one right before going.
I think we did too, and it really it was
very affecting. Sometimes we just can carry on entire conversations
just with only catchphrases, right, yeah, sometimes the same one
over and over and over. Sure.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Yeah, we did an entire Illumination Globe Blood Limited commercial.
It's just zeros and ones, that's right. It's probably some
of our best writing. Our mental health is good.
Speaker 3 (01:36):
Yes, Yeah, a clean Bill of Mental Health, if you will.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
There we go, and as you might be able to tell, now, folks,
we are going to explore something a lot of people
don't think about, which.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
Is just so. I thought it was anti psychotic meds,
antipsychotic med I think about those all the time. Those
are the fun ones. Nor soap is okay. So maybe
we started out with a little bit of darkness here
and then we pivoted to something that seems very squeaky
clean and all American and wholesome. But boy, howdy, does
(02:13):
soap have a messed up history, like really really grizzly,
you know. I mean, anyone who's seen the movie Fight
Club probably knows, at least to a degree where soap
comes from, or at least the very earliest formulations of
soap from animal and or human fat mixed with ashes,
(02:37):
and then it creates this like alkali, right, Like, we'll
get to a lot of this stuff. But sure, I
just was really kind of taken aback by some of
the sort of it's one of these accidental discoveries. But
the circumstances that led to the accidental discoveries quite gruesome.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
Yes, So that is a heads up for you. Friendly disclaimer.
Still we think it's such a fascinating and dare we say,
ridiculous story. The first thing you have to know, and
this also shout out to our research associated mister Max Williams. Here,
this is something that I know is important to you.
Speaker 3 (03:10):
Matter.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
I almost said the line again, but I respect a nol.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
So this, this is the first.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
Thing you need to do. The world is filthy. Ever
since the first guy looked through the first microscope, people
have been kind of avoiding admitting that the world is
riddled with bacteria, all kinds of viruses, ugly dangerous things.
(03:41):
They're all over you, inside of you.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
Can you imagine that moment, that realization where it's saying,
there's like tiny things that are just crawling all over
us all the time. I mean this Dutch fellow by
the name of amazing name Antoine Phillips van Lewinoke, who
created lenses. He didn't exactly I don't think he invented
did he invent the compound lens? I know he is
(04:06):
credited with inventing the microscope, which is basically like a
reverse telescope. You know, it's like it's using a series
of lenses to magnify something that's very small as opposed
to seeing something that's very far away.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Yeah, he made a lot of contributions to the microscope,
to microbiology, you name it. And this guy came into
force back when it was pretty common for self taught
experts and scientists to make all these breakthroughs. And he
just happened to look too closely at the world and
found something terrifying. Oh boy, But we also know, just
(04:44):
just a pro bacteria point here, we also know that
your gut biome, the bacteria that live inside you, they
are absolutely vital to a good and healthy life.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
And I will also argue that sort of like just
living in squalor, or like licking a public toilet seat
or something like that. I don't know that I've ever
seen someone like get sickened or die from just like
the world, you know what I mean, just encountering Like
I am a firm believer in the five second rule.
If I drop a fry on the ground, I will
(05:13):
brush it off and I will eat that fry.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
No.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
Yeah, I read something on here that said, like the
transmission of the common cold would go down by twenty
percent if everyone washed their hands for twenty seconds. So
I read that, and I'm like, nah, because I believe
in the five second rule also, so.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
Well, you know, we have to consider that there are
so many moments in every human life where you run
into something that would have been really gross if you
realize what was happening, but you made it through because
the human is a resilient creature.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
That's my point. Yeah, it's like, we're not. You're not
just gonna walk outside and inhale some piece of you know,
filth and then just keel over dead. But to that point,
and I don't want to de realist too it, We're
gonna give it to the story. I heard a really
cool piece of NPR the other day about how there
are some communities in the States that are starting to
move towards waste water processing and like converting it into
(06:07):
drinking water.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
Well, that's a noble attempt, and it's one you would
want to be very confident in before deploy.
Speaker 3 (06:15):
Well apparently they are, and then they and they had
to They said the biggest stumbling block or the biggest
roadblock is what they referred to as the ick factor.
That like to sell the community on it, they have
to like be on board, you know, they're like, you know,
they would be like, okay, are you okay with using
this to water your plants? Yeah, totally, they start washing
gray water. I recently installed a dehumidifier in my basement
(06:39):
that fills up with water every single day, and it
is apparently some of the cleanest water. It's already predistilled,
and I, you know, you could drink it. The dehumidifier
instructions say not to what do you do with it?
I water my garden with it actually, which is right
outside the door, so there's a little bucket. I pull
it out and I wanted the plants, so it's great. Yeah. Also,
my basement is never smelled fresher. And because as we know, bacteria,
(07:02):
you know, forms in moist conditions.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
Yeah, uh, bacteria also produce your farts. If you're a human,
million it's not on you. So another thing we need
to know is right now, humanity is overall way cleaner
than it was in days of yore. As Jim Nizele
points out in Farmer's Almanac, centuries ago, the human race stink, stink,
(07:27):
and stunk, But today things were a little bit different.
All thanks to an invention called soap.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
We got there. It did man, that's okay, that's what
the people are here for. I always think of that
scene from Monty Python on the Holy Gril where everyone's
just covered in feces, you know, because that wasn't that
far off. I mean, that's this hilarious movie. But you know,
without drainage for sewage, like there were there was a
time where it would just run through the streets and
(07:55):
soap wasn't a thing, and if it was, it was
not something that everyone had access too for sure. And
now soap is ubiquitous.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
You go to various businesses and they will have soap
for free.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
It's one of those things. Ye.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
Soap is a twenty two billion dollar industry globally. Now
thirteen billion bars are sold every year in the US alone.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
But how do we get there?
Speaker 1 (08:21):
We're going to learn that with some great articles from
our pals at the New York Times, some great work
for Time magazine, and of course the Cleaning Institute dot org,
because that's of course that's a thing, right, that's another
weird job. You're on a date and they say, so
what do you do? When you say, oh, I work
at the cleaning Institute. That sounds sketchy.
Speaker 3 (08:46):
Yeah, Well, like, are you like a crime scene cleaner? Right? Like,
what are we talking here? I remember then they're referred
to in that movie The Professional. They referred to professional
assassins as cleaners. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
I'm also thinking of a one of my favorite weird
Stephen King cameos in the in the TV show Sons
of Anarchy is a small spoiler. He shows up as
a cleaner, and in that use of the word, a
cleaner is someone who covers up a crime.
Speaker 3 (09:15):
Scene, like Winston Wolf in pulp fiction. Yes, yeah, yeah,
just so. But when you think to your point about
the absolute bookoo amounts of money that pour into the
soap industry, companies like Procter and Gamble you may have
heard of, You know that they represent tons of different brands,
but some of them are you know, Ivory Soap, which
is a legacy soap brand. You know, brands that are
(09:38):
ubiquitous now like Dove, Irish Spring, Olay I guess, yeah,
I mean whatever they used to call it oil of Olay. Yeah,
now it's just olay. Yeah, it's a fun word to say.
A bullfighter. What does that spring in Ireland smell like?
Is if fresh? I guess because of leprechan magic presumable.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
And I got to be honest. Nowadays, I'm not like
a bar of soap. Person.
Speaker 3 (10:05):
Now, Max and I were talking about the same thing.
It's lately the thing is much more body wash, which
is still, you know, a similar thing. It's just a
liquid form, and it's easier to dispense, and you know,
bars of soap get gross and you don't only want
to share it, like if you live with somebody, Yeah,
I can't really trust them not to rub it directly
on their bits.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
I remember bumming around. I was living a much different lifestyle,
and I was going from.
Speaker 3 (10:28):
Back when you were a beat poet.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
I was going from hostile to hostile. And the thing
that got me is they have bars of soap.
Speaker 3 (10:36):
I know, you see one little curly on there.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
That's exactly what happened, you know, I and I was
not you know, I was by no means a billionaire.
But I thought, I'm gonna have to just buy a
bar of soap. It's my bar. I take it with me.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
I even got wrap it up nice and tidy. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
So the liquid body wash stuff that a lot of
people are using now is it's somewhat poetic that that
has evolved from the original soap. Here's the gross part
we were teasing earlier. According to Dan Copple, writing for
Wirecutter out New York Times, soap likely originated as an
(11:15):
accidental invention, a byproduct of cooking meat over a fire.
Speaker 3 (11:20):
Yeah, arguably the best way to cook meat.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
First.
Speaker 3 (11:24):
Yeah, I remember the spit urned dogs. That was the
whole thing, poor guys. Yeah, I mean, at least the
spitturned boys got out of it, but the dogs were
definitely overworked as well. But yeah, you have this a
giant metal thing attached to a crank that slowly turns
meat over and open fire. Well, it does create delicious meat.
(11:45):
It also has some byproducts which can be used in
their own ways. You've ever been to France, Ben, and
I know you actually have. They a big popular thing
and it's a lot of like kind of what we
would call bodega's. They have chickens that are roasting and
the fat drips down onto potatoes. Yeah, man, that's what's up.
And you can buy the potatoes separately. But back in
these days they would be an open fire. So what
(12:06):
happened is the fat would drip into the fire and
then eventually the fire would go out, leaving all these
globs of fat mixed in with the ashes.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Yeah, meat boogers and ashes too, very unclean sounding things
are key ingredients to what we call soap because what's crazy. Yeah,
what happened was you have to applaud the ingenuity and
inquisitiveness of these earlier humans.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
What happened? Who tried that? Who did something? Yet that mum?
Speaker 1 (12:34):
Who's like, I don't know, man around, Let's say, rub
it on my face might feel fresh, zestfully clean. How
much other stuff had they been rubbing on themselves?
Speaker 3 (12:44):
You know?
Speaker 1 (12:45):
They're like, I know the poison ivy didn't work out,
but I got a good feeling about these meat boogers guys.
Speaker 3 (12:56):
I mean, I just can't understand quite what aha moment
would have led someone to realize that this chemical, this
kind of slippery stuff that was created was good at
removing dirt. I also don't fully understand scientifically speaking, how
that even works. Oh, we'll get it, Okay, I'm excited.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
So you can see that after someone figured this out,
they said, you can rub this on yourself. It'll take
dirt off you, and you can, for the first time
in your life be kind of clean. Everybody loved this.
It became super popular. You can find recipes for making
soap that are almost five thousand years old, and it's
(13:37):
all around the ancient world Greece, Rome, Egypt. You know,
all the hits and alchemists made a lot of soap.
Speaker 3 (13:44):
So how come I didn't catch on Like in the
Middle Ages when everyone was covered in poop?
Speaker 1 (13:49):
Well it, I will tell you. From what I understand
about the Middle Ages and at least Western Europe, it
was pretty rare to take a bath. It was often
considered like a ritual list thing like a night may
take a bath once a year before the big jousting tournament.
Otherwise it's just sort of normalized to to stink. So
(14:11):
maybe soap was something that the elite would have. People
were trying to be clean. We're not saying they were
a bunch of degenerates.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
They I will say, there's some stuff that coming up
about why they'd invade in the medieval era.
Speaker 3 (14:24):
Oh yeah, I know what you're talking about.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
I think I think I know a bit of a reason,
some humorous level science.
Speaker 3 (14:33):
Dare I say ridiculous. I also remember, like there was
a thing we discussed in an episode of ways back
about people washing their linens and urine. Mm hmm, yeah,
a thing. I think it was underwear. I think it
was in the underwear.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
It was washing underwear in urine. And then also while
we're on the point of well we're on the point
of underpants history, check out the origin of pink lemonade.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
Remember that episode clown Tights, the Rise of the Clown.
Let's just leave it at the Yeah. Sorry, it's crazy
to me that this is something that has existed for
so very long, just based on some accidental stumbling into
like however this happened, We don't know. What we do
know is that we have recipes dating back between either
the eighth and tenth century from alchemists, like you said,
(15:16):
and this is when here spread well burnt ashes from goodlogs.
It has to be good logs over woven wicker work,
which I guess acts as sort of like a cheese
cloth kind of situation, like cloth, Yeah, and gently pour
hot water on them, so it goes through drop by drop.
After it is clarified, well, let it cook, add enough
(15:37):
oil and stir very well.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
So I want to point something out that you guys know,
I love food writing and reading. There's a great book
called Choice Cuts that has a lot of strange old recipes.
I'll bring it in one day. We should read it
out loud. And and what I love is just like
the George Washington recipe. There's a vagueness to it. Add
(16:01):
enough oil, get a goodly amount, enjoy liberally.
Speaker 3 (16:06):
I believe it was in the eggnog recipe that you're
referring to. Yeah, and this comes from actually a book
called the Maypie Clavicula, which is it's kind of cute
and Latin that translates to a little key to everything.
You know, it's like little live laugh love. You know,
it's kind of cute. I bet it had some like
(16:27):
nice life hacks in it.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
Yeah, it's like the how stuff works of it to day.
The Alchemist recipe for soap said you need to use
either olive oil or beef tallow animal fat, and today
animal fat, along with lye, is still a basic ingredient
of soap. Here's some of the science so fat reacts
(16:50):
with lye and this can be pretty toxic. So soap
makers when they're making this stuff they have to wear
protective gear. The process that can be dangerous to humans
is something called saponification.
Speaker 3 (17:06):
That's right, and we believe that the origins of that
word come from the Proto German word sipo, which means
to strain. And again going back to that alchemist's recipe,
we're talking about straining substances through kind of like a
porous piece of fabric.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
Another greasy strain is another really gross phrase.
Speaker 3 (17:29):
Why not great? Yeah, and to that point, Ben, the
Latin word sebum is also associated with this, which translates
to Greece or another alternative is from something originating from
Mount Sappo, which is a mountain in Italy where I
believe there were like sacrifices being made or something it.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
Gets its name from. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's okay.
Speaker 3 (17:55):
So the sources are great. Another meat and fat and
ash situation, Yes, not consensual.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
So the wild soap is still very much I think
in twenty twenty three we have to be very we
have to be extremely clear with you folks. The soap
from back in the day was very different. Early soap
would not have looked cool to you if you traveled
back in time and hung out in a Roman bathhouse.
(18:22):
These soaps were probably people have recreated the sancient stuff
using those recipes. These soaps were like brown or gray.
They were kind of soft and mushy. They didn't have
any nice smells at the time. They're purely functional. At
the time, they were just a huge improvement. They were
a game changer for hygiene because beforehand, before soap, people
(18:45):
would clean themselves by rubbing their bodies with clay or
scraping them with scraping pumas across their flesh.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
Sure, it was just pretty popular. People love a puma stone.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
I mean, it's just exfoliating, true, true, but exfoliating is
part of bathing.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
They were straight up at fully Lake. I don't know it. Yea,
it is a dry shower, is what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah,
that's kind of that's kind of that's kind of it.
Really quickly, we talked about another of the potential origins
of the words, so Mount Sapo alluded to some some
gnarly goings on at this place that apparently the location
(19:26):
is lost to history. What exactly was Mount Sapo famous
for in ancient Rome? Oh?
Speaker 1 (19:32):
Good, save, yes, I wast forgot about this one. Yeah,
all right, absolutely right. It is a It is believed
to be a hilly area somewhere near somewhere near Rome
and back in one hundred BC or b C, whatever
you prefer. There was a legend about this place and
(19:54):
the idea that was that Mount Sapo was a sacrificial
site for adnimals and rain water. They would kill these
animals pretty much constantly, and then rainwater would fall down
and mix with the animal fat and ashes, and then
from there it would run down to a river.
Speaker 3 (20:16):
It's very interesting and just again. I always learned about
it stuff initially from the movie Fight Club, where Tyler
Dirt and Brad Pitt's character is a soap salesman who
gets his makings his ingredients by dumpster diving at liposuction clinics.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
You get in situations you do and think about this
river that we both thought it was so cool. Is
once these sacrifices, all the gunk and the remains, once
it flows down from the mountain into the river, there
are people washing clothes in the river and they're saying, wait.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
This ninety's never been this clean in my life. What
gives go looks brand new? That's better.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
That's more.
Speaker 3 (21:02):
We were more in the token.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
The poop stains are all gone. We should make more sacrifices.
That's how soap started, according to this legend.
Speaker 3 (21:11):
But it's a good legend. It seems a little apocryphal
once again, you know what I mean. Yeah, but it
does lead. It does make more sense than the fat
dripping into the fire and the ashes and someone just
figuring out how to just to take it and rub
it on themselves. Yeah, unless they were trying to eat
the fat. Yeah, exactly. But I'll tell you what, they
never used bad language again, right, because they washed their.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
Mouths so so I think it was worth it, no
joke left behind. We were talking earlier about why the
Middle Ages, again in Western Europe, were so very dirty,
So let's maybe let's explore that, because although soap was
an amazing discovery, people weren't always using it. It was
(21:58):
considered a high craft or in art. In Italy and
Spain and France, they were making soap. There in the
Middle East, people were also making soap with olive oil,
and it was actually quite a flex to import that.
So rich people in Europe were saying, ah, yes, my
Middle Eastern soap olive oil.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
Soap is still kind of like a bespoke sort of
like popular thing, you know, like the kind of fancy
hand soaps are all the rage these days. You see
them at hotels. You U see the hotels and also
like places where they're sort of irregularly shaped and have
like kind of weird like striations in them. They almost
look like little blocks of sediments, you know, fancy one
(22:40):
c see at the grocery store sometimes. But no, it's true.
This was considered kind of a luxury item. So this
is almost some of the earliest days of bath products
as luxury. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
And a lot of people, of course were making their
own soap at home because they were this was these
were largely agrarian economies, right, So you are on a farm,
you raise and kill animals, and you want to maximize
your productivity, so of course you have a soap recipe.
You pass it down to your kids and so on.
(23:15):
Interestingly enough, though, the fall of the Roman Empire is
a big reason more Europeans didn't have soap, which I
did not know that way, I did not see that coming.
Speaker 3 (23:27):
Have we talked about the term castile soap. We have
not yet.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
That's the one from the fancy soap in Italy, Spain
and France.
Speaker 3 (23:35):
Yeah, so that was the name, and that is if
you if anyone's familiar with doctor Bronner's so very very
popular you use it to clear anything. But it is
like one of those kind of olive oil based soaps
that originated in Spain and they are still around today
and considered kind of the you know, the holy grail
of soaps.
Speaker 1 (23:56):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And soap was kind of the holy
grail in parts of Europe during the medieval period because,
as we know from soap and Detergent's history, after the
Fall of Rome, bathing habits went downhill in Europe and
this made they really let themselves go and and this
(24:18):
contributed in a very serious and disturbing way to plagues,
to illness, to infection. People were bathing and then they stopped.
That's kind of what happened. And this was a big
help to the fleas that traveled on the rats that
(24:38):
brought the Black Death to Europe.
Speaker 3 (24:40):
Oh, just a perfect storm of nastiness. Yeah, that was
in the fourteenth century. But elsewhere in the world, folks
were taking care of themselves, you know, in terms of
their personal hygiene. In Japan, people bathed every day. It
was very very common and you know, as I mean
We always think Japan is kind of having there together,
(25:02):
you know, in terms of organization, in terms of innovation, uh,
and just kind of civilization. You know, all the Asians.
Speaker 1 (25:10):
We you guys got to go to Japan with me.
We don't have to hang out together the whole time.
Speaker 3 (25:16):
No, no, I'll be right by your side.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
It's just three of us can be in a hot
tub together.
Speaker 1 (25:20):
In Japan, they've got their classy they're called on st.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
Oh I know, eisode.
Speaker 3 (25:27):
I really want to do this.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
Yeah, it's cool, for sure, and it's it's an important
point for us to make that although a lot of
people in the West only think of Western Europe when
they think of the Middle Ages, the rest of the
world was still there totally, you know, and didn't have
all the same problems. In Iceland, people loved gathering together
(25:51):
in the hot springs. Also, you know what, ma'am, we
got to go to Scandinavia one day. I would love
to go there. I want to walk in a country
where it's considered normal to have a sauna.
Speaker 3 (26:02):
Yeah, have a Schwitz. That's so crazy to me. You
ever heard that referred to as Schwitz? I think it's
a Sopranos thing. I think it might be Yiddish actually,
but it's just like getting getting your sweat on. And
then there's even like there's certain meats that are appropriate
to eat in a sauna.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
That that part the second part I I hadn't heard before.
Speaker 3 (26:27):
Uh yeah, sauna sausage. There's a whole company uh that
was obscure actually has an article in Finland. You cook
sausages in the stones. Yeah, that makes you guys.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
Do you guys remember this from the uh Sausage War
episode the Expedition.
Speaker 3 (26:45):
Oh that's right.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
Yeah, at the very end of were talking about like
they have like a little like in the saunas. They
have just like a stone cut out sausage in and
they getting in there. And also expedition remember that.
Speaker 3 (26:57):
Yeah, Yeah, that's fun one to say. Yeah, and that's
how it's pronounced. Yeah. And now there are modern innovations
that keep your sausage from getting soggy. It's like a
little sleeve that you put it in. It's sort of
like a stone and the sausage goes inside and then
that goes on the rocks.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
So they're doing hot pocket rules amazing. So there's another
thing that happens here aside from the fall of the
Roman Empire. Medical experts of the time, working again with
the limited information they had, they started putting out some
scare pieces, some propaganda about bathing. They began to think
(27:33):
that bathing was a vector for spreading illness, and powerful
people believed them. King Louis the fourteenth over in France
was convinced that baths were bad for you, like they
were like unnecessary surgery. Apparently he only took three baths
throughout the course of his life and just you know,
(27:57):
covered his his swamps.
Speaker 3 (28:00):
Yeah, with scented oils and lotions and perfumes. I've done
that every time in a pin.
Speaker 1 (28:07):
Sure, every time I go somewhere and I smell a
little bit like close.
Speaker 3 (28:11):
Little underarm sprits, Yeah, it's because I have not showered.
It's definitely for you guys.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
If you guys ever put deodorant on a turd, I
haven't either. I have on when I'm a teenager.
Speaker 3 (28:22):
That's a weird question.
Speaker 2 (28:23):
Basically, what it smells like, they said, was dedorant, and
turn is what it smells like. The Uran doesn't cover what.
Speaker 3 (28:31):
You're saying, So this is a hypothetical.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
So no, this person actually did it. But what I
feel like this is a common thing to do.
Speaker 3 (28:38):
It's not.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
No, it's not agreed. Thanks, I'm such a never friend
of mine from like the end of middle school told
me to do that. You're wrong.
Speaker 3 (28:47):
I once pooped my pants in middle school and hit
it in a drawer in my friend's house.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
I once pooped in another guy's pants. That's crazy.
Speaker 3 (28:55):
You win, you win. All this is coming out any
of us watched or staying in. But here's what I
do know. I always thought of King Louis the fourteenth
is the real fancy lad you know it wasn't he
(29:16):
the son king? Wasn't he like the Versailles guy, you know?
And he wore like fancy ruffles and was it all
into the height of fashion and all of that stuff.
He was, Yeah, Louis the Great?
Speaker 1 (29:27):
Yeah, and he was I think the longest running ruler
of France.
Speaker 3 (29:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
And then didn't his son king Yeah, his grandson was
the sixteenth. He got shoved into the guilloteen. I think
that French Revolution is right after the fourteenth.
Speaker 3 (29:43):
Yeah. Point being though, is I just didn't really pick
You'll get all these paintings of him with his glorious
flowing locks and all of this stuff, and you just
don't picture him smelling like crap.
Speaker 2 (29:55):
Yeah, but at all. Frederickston was very in shape and skinny,
and he's the he was the king of Sweden who
aid himself to death.
Speaker 3 (30:02):
Yeah. Yeah, but he just loved those buns man. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
I mean, so like these paintings are generally not true,
well not super duper accurate.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
I mean, imagine if you are the painter and you
have to make a picture of the most powerful person
in the country who can just have you killed. Yeah,
you are going to you know, judge it up a
little bit, sure, give him some definition, you know.
Speaker 3 (30:30):
I would also say that the modern equivalent would be
like the way the social media pictures are curated. Nobody's
that happy, nobody lives that happy. A life is so contented.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
Agreed, Agreed, social media curation and portraits of royalty may
not be the full truth. Soap is now modernized. How
did it become a modern thing? Well, technology, There were
advances in production and more sophisticated manufacturing techniques that are
(31:03):
responsible for the soap we have today. Soap is way
older than the United States, obviously, and the soap making
business in the US is also older than the United States.
It started way back in the sixteen hundreds, and it
wasn't anybody's job. It was just another household shore you
(31:26):
had to do. So if you think laundry stinks now, folks,
imagine another part of doing laundry was making the soap
you would use. So you're like, the clothes are getting
pretty dirty. I guess I have to kill an animal,
render its fat, start a fire, make some soap, and
(31:46):
then find a river.
Speaker 3 (31:49):
Yeah. I have noticed that some kind of more traditional
soaps they don't really smell good. They kind of have
an acrid kind of smell all to them, you know
what I mean. Like, even just like a really basic
bar of soap, when you wash your hands in it,
there's a certain chemically kind of unpleasant odor. Certainly Trump's
(32:11):
whatever odor was there before it literally Trump said, gets
rid of it. But the smell isn't pleasant. It wasn't
until oils and the scents were introduced, and then that
that became more of a thing.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
And this, you know, it reminds me of a common
scene in grocery stores. When you go to the cleaning aisle,
you'll it'll typically be on a bottom shelf. You'll see
that soap you're talking about. I always think of it
as the industrial stuff. It's like the soap, the lie soap,
the kind of thing that can hurt your hats.
Speaker 3 (32:41):
Right, that's yeah, yeah, or you know it's because that's
literally the substance is used to like dissolve a body.
No comment, Okay, fair enough, So we'll call Stevi King.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
There's something unique about the early North American soap industry.
It gets started because of bacon and canned lighting in
general was a big part of commercial cleansers because both
making candles and making soap, both of them traditionally rely
on byproducts from animals. So as the US becomes more
(33:14):
industrialized and people are less and less likely to raise
their own animals for meat, they're going to purchase stuff
from butchers. That means they're also less likely to make.
Speaker 3 (33:25):
Soap at home. So that's when we have, you know,
the first steps of the I guess soap industry starting
to pop up, right, soap revolution, soap evolution. But it's
earlier than you might think. Back in seventeen ninety one,
we've got a French chemist by the name of Nicholas LeBlanc.
Speaker 1 (33:45):
Yeah, he patents this process where you can make soda
ash from salt. Soda ash is important because you can
combine it regular fat and you'll make soap. And that discovery,
the blancs breakthrough makes soap making one of the fastest growing,
most explosive industries in the United States.
Speaker 3 (34:07):
By eighteen fifty.
Speaker 1 (34:08):
We also see real life factories coming into play, and
the soap business is boomy. It's good to be This
is back when you could be a soap tycoon.
Speaker 3 (34:18):
Yeah, I mean, and even like I think there were
like traveling salesmen and stuff like that, you know, with
their suitcases full of bars of soap. And this was
also the time remember that propaganda of like you know,
the previous era, the sort of main people question soap.
Now we have I think a little bit more medical
kind of support for soap. That's good and like expressions
(34:40):
like cleanliness is next to godliness and all of that stuff.
God is empty. It's yeah, he is, he really is.
It's cool to be clean though, you know what I'm saying.
This is definitely starting to be the message. So during
the Crimean War in the eighteen fifties, we have Florence Nightingales,
very important figure in the mystery of medicine, who's credited
(35:01):
with kind of changing the way nursing is done and
really made a big deal about washing those hands because
that could potentially save lives by preventing the spread of cholera. Yeah, yeah,
and she is.
Speaker 1 (35:21):
She's in the pantheon of people who who were underappreciated
by civilization. I would argue she's up there with Samalwis,
the guy who asks surgeons to wash their hands before
they do operations, right, or assistant childbirth. So this is
very important stuff. Also in the mid eighteen hundreds, in
(35:43):
eighteen thirty seven, there's this candle maker out of Cincinnati,
William Procter, and he says, oh, yeah, well making candles
making soap. I have the ingredients for both, and he
puts them together. He teams up with a guy named
James Gamble and makes a company that ultimately becomes not
(36:04):
just a huge deal in the soap business, but the
world's largest consumer products company ever.
Speaker 3 (36:10):
Procter and Gamble, P and G, baby and G. What
do they not make? I don't know, humans?
Speaker 1 (36:18):
Yeah now as of now, yeah, they're making prototype humans.
So Procter and Gamble is also one of the first
soaps to gain national distribution. It's the Ivory brand, which
is still around today, right.
Speaker 3 (36:35):
Yeah, and it's still distributed by parct and Gamble. They're
the kind of company that has been in the game
for so long, diversified so much, and they've created so
many like ubiquitous kind of brands. So remember that cast
deal soap we were talking about from Spain that was
sort of the fancy lad soap. This plain white soap
was designed to be competition for that, like perhaps the
(36:59):
people soap.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
The people's soap, soap for the people. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It was pretty affordable, and the name was from a
biblical passage. The company said, the name of the soap
is an indicator of its purity. There even came to
(37:20):
be a kind of modern legend, a creation myth about
how Ivory was made. The story was that there was
a mixing machine left on someone took a long lunch
break and extra air accidentally pumped into what was what
was being mixed, And in two thousand and four, weirdly enough,
(37:44):
people working for Procter and Gamble went through Old Man
Gambles diary from eighteen sixty rude.
Speaker 3 (37:52):
Yeah, they read his diary and dear diary. Yeah, that's exactly.
I got a crush on this diary.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
I made floating soap today I think will make all
of our stock that way. So the legend that was
the quote, Yeah, that was the quote. The legend was
probably made up.
Speaker 3 (38:10):
Got it. But here's the thing. A lot of the
soap that you think is soap isn't in fact soap scale.
There's a lot to be said, as we alluded to earlier,
about the chemistry of soap and how it actually works.
It something that's always eluded me. This seems like a
mystical substance. A lot of these manufacturing processes stayed very
(38:33):
much the same until nineteen sixteen during World War One,
and then there was another change that happened during World
War Two, as often as the case during wartime, because
of shortage and things that were needed as part of
the supply chain, because a lot of these fats that
were needed to make chemicals were being used elsewhere, probably
for those like k rations or whatever.
Speaker 1 (38:54):
Yeah, and back to our pal Dan writing for Wirecutter,
he said, German and Ears figured out they could use
a different cleaning product that didn't need animal fat and ashes.
It was a synthetic substance they called detergent Latin for
to wipe away. Detergents didn't have soap. They used enzymes that,
(39:19):
through chemical reactions, lift stains off of clothing and skin.
American companies get on board with this and again the
early nineteen hundreds and they start making new detergents and
mixing ingredients up to see what other properties they can discover.
(39:40):
And eventually, after the times of privation had passed, they
were left with something that actually worked better than the
original soap. And they said, okay, well, you know, history
is cool, but we're going to have to go with
a thing that's a better cleaner.
Speaker 2 (39:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (39:57):
It also doesn't like SuDS up the same. It behaves
differently when mixed with water, Like I don't know if
anyone's ever been unfortunate enough to accidentally put the regular
soap into a dishwasher or something like that, you're gonna
have like SuDS shooting all over your kitchen. Totally. Yeah,
it's a rite of passage as an adult. But that's
the thing like with you know, if you look at
(40:20):
what laundry detergent does, for example, in the washing machine.
It's not full of bubbles. It's much of much like
you know, it's clearly a different process. It's more of
a smooth operator. It's a smooth operator. It creates kind
of like this slurry, you know.
Speaker 1 (40:34):
And as a result, like you were saying earlier, Man,
what people are calling soap today is not completely soap.
Most of the cleansers, the majority of them liquid and solid,
are gonna be synthetic detergent products. And people like these
products because they don't form gummy deposits. The origin story
(40:55):
of them is not as disturbing to some people. And
modern cleansers also include a lot of other ingredients. Stuff
to make it the bar of soap, brighter stuff to
make the liquid, you know, look bluish water, softeners, antibacterial
stuff like alcohol, and these bars can have some of
(41:16):
the same ingredients as soap, Like when you see what
is it, the animal fat is still in some of them.
It's just not called that anymore.
Speaker 3 (41:26):
Yeah, And some of the main ingredients in these are
something that we both tittered at. I guess a little
bit off my sodium talowate. It's just because it's a
funny word.
Speaker 1 (41:34):
I don't know why it feels like someone trying to
do pretend Latin.
Speaker 3 (41:38):
It does sound that way. And then sodium lard eate,
which sounds like what it is, or it can also
include vegetable fats such as sodium palmitate and sodium coco eate,
which sounds delightful. But chemically speaking, they're not actually soap,
but it does seem that they mean they're obviously it's
(42:00):
like chemically or like scientifically in terms of what the
process is doing a similar job, right right.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
Yeah, And this is one of Max, I think this
is one of the big questions for you, and I
appreciate this because we've got to give a shout out
to our alma matter. How stuff works. Maybe we end here,
how does soap actually work? Well, it's less of a
disinfectant and more of what you called, Max, I think
(42:27):
quite appropriately a germ slipping slide. They're not killing the germs,
they're moving them. The slipperiness of soap lowers the surface
temperature of water when you mix them together, and rubbing
your hands together while washing gets the dirt to temporarily
bond with the water and soap, and then it.
Speaker 3 (42:46):
Leaves with the water. It lifts it right off. Yeah,
it's interesting, just like those commercials exactly leaving U zestfully clean.
I'm sorry, man, I think you got that jingle stuck
in my head a little while ago. I think, ye,
not fully clean and unless you zest fully clean.
Speaker 1 (43:04):
Yeah, it's jaunty. It's a jaunty jingle. And this has
been a pretty fascinating episode. It took us a lot
of places. We got into some pretty dark territory. We
got into some really interesting stuff about hygiene, and we're
going to have to continue the journey next week.
Speaker 3 (43:25):
To our personal hygiene journey. Our personal hygiene journey. Yeah, man,
we're look at us. All three of us are being
pretty good. Now, we're working out, we're taking showers. Oh man,
I took one three days ago. I feel like you're
high roading me. But congratulations. My favorite place it took
us was the top of the Sacrifice Mountain. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
Can you imagine finding that place in the modern day,
(43:49):
Probably pretty creepy piles of bones and whatnot like the
Predator's Layer, but it would be an adventure. Indeed, it
would until the predatory is too.
Speaker 1 (43:58):
Thanks as always to super producer mister Max Williams, thanks
to research associate Max Williams, thanks to Chuck Palinook, thanks
to Brad Pitt, thanks to Ed Norton.
Speaker 3 (44:11):
He's apparently a bit of a pill, but he's a
fabulous actor, and of.
Speaker 1 (44:15):
Course thanks to our own theatrical professional Jonathan stricklandka the poster.
Speaker 3 (44:21):
Indeed, we'll see you next time, folks Stickley. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
(00:27):
the show, Ridiculous Historians. This is gonna be a clean one.
I think you as always so much more. Tuning in.
Shout out to the man myth legend, super producer, mister
Max zestfully clean Williams.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Soap me up, Daddy, don't never say that again.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
Shout out too, I will not. That is me. I'm triggered. Yeah,
and you're old brown and I've been bullet Yeah it
is we. Yeah. Oh gosh, I've got an image in
my head that I can't shake.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
You know, some times a lot of our conversations fall
into like catchphrase things, and we just find weird moments
of speech that have suddenly become strange.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
And I think we just had one right before going.
I think we did too, and it really it was
very affecting. Sometimes we just can carry on entire conversations
just with only catchphrases, right, yeah, sometimes the same one
over and over and over. Sure.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Yeah, we did an entire Illumination Globe Blood Limited commercial.
It's just zeros and ones, that's right. It's probably some
of our best writing. Our mental health is good.
Speaker 3 (01:36):
Yes, Yeah, a clean Bill of Mental Health, if you will.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
There we go, and as you might be able to tell, now, folks,
we are going to explore something a lot of people
don't think about, which.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
Is just so. I thought it was anti psychotic meds,
antipsychotic med I think about those all the time. Those
are the fun ones. Nor soap is okay. So maybe
we started out with a little bit of darkness here
and then we pivoted to something that seems very squeaky
clean and all American and wholesome. But boy, howdy, does
(02:13):
soap have a messed up history, like really really grizzly,
you know. I mean, anyone who's seen the movie Fight
Club probably knows, at least to a degree where soap
comes from, or at least the very earliest formulations of
soap from animal and or human fat mixed with ashes,
(02:37):
and then it creates this like alkali, right, Like, we'll
get to a lot of this stuff. But sure, I
just was really kind of taken aback by some of
the sort of it's one of these accidental discoveries. But
the circumstances that led to the accidental discoveries quite gruesome.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
Yes, So that is a heads up for you. Friendly disclaimer.
Still we think it's such a fascinating and dare we say,
ridiculous story. The first thing you have to know, and
this also shout out to our research associated mister Max Williams. Here,
this is something that I know is important to you.
Speaker 3 (03:10):
Matter.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
I almost said the line again, but I respect a nol.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
So this, this is the first.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
Thing you need to do. The world is filthy. Ever
since the first guy looked through the first microscope, people
have been kind of avoiding admitting that the world is
riddled with bacteria, all kinds of viruses, ugly dangerous things.
(03:41):
They're all over you, inside of you.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
Can you imagine that moment, that realization where it's saying,
there's like tiny things that are just crawling all over
us all the time. I mean this Dutch fellow by
the name of amazing name Antoine Phillips van Lewinoke, who
created lenses. He didn't exactly I don't think he invented
did he invent the compound lens? I know he is
(04:06):
credited with inventing the microscope, which is basically like a
reverse telescope. You know, it's like it's using a series
of lenses to magnify something that's very small as opposed
to seeing something that's very far away.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Yeah, he made a lot of contributions to the microscope,
to microbiology, you name it. And this guy came into
force back when it was pretty common for self taught
experts and scientists to make all these breakthroughs. And he
just happened to look too closely at the world and
found something terrifying. Oh boy, But we also know, just
(04:44):
just a pro bacteria point here, we also know that
your gut biome, the bacteria that live inside you, they
are absolutely vital to a good and healthy life.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
And I will also argue that sort of like just
living in squalor, or like licking a public toilet seat
or something like that. I don't know that I've ever
seen someone like get sickened or die from just like
the world, you know what I mean, just encountering Like
I am a firm believer in the five second rule.
If I drop a fry on the ground, I will
(05:13):
brush it off and I will eat that fry.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
No.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
Yeah, I read something on here that said, like the
transmission of the common cold would go down by twenty
percent if everyone washed their hands for twenty seconds. So
I read that, and I'm like, nah, because I believe
in the five second rule also, so.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
Well, you know, we have to consider that there are
so many moments in every human life where you run
into something that would have been really gross if you
realize what was happening, but you made it through because
the human is a resilient creature.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
That's my point. Yeah, it's like, we're not. You're not
just gonna walk outside and inhale some piece of you know,
filth and then just keel over dead. But to that point,
and I don't want to de realist too it, We're
gonna give it to the story. I heard a really
cool piece of NPR the other day about how there
are some communities in the States that are starting to
move towards waste water processing and like converting it into
(06:07):
drinking water.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
Well, that's a noble attempt, and it's one you would
want to be very confident in before deploy.
Speaker 3 (06:15):
Well apparently they are, and then they and they had
to They said the biggest stumbling block or the biggest
roadblock is what they referred to as the ick factor.
That like to sell the community on it, they have
to like be on board, you know, they're like, you know,
they would be like, okay, are you okay with using
this to water your plants? Yeah, totally, they start washing
gray water. I recently installed a dehumidifier in my basement
(06:39):
that fills up with water every single day, and it
is apparently some of the cleanest water. It's already predistilled,
and I, you know, you could drink it. The dehumidifier
instructions say not to what do you do with it?
I water my garden with it actually, which is right
outside the door, so there's a little bucket. I pull
it out and I wanted the plants, so it's great. Yeah. Also,
my basement is never smelled fresher. And because as we know, bacteria,
(07:02):
you know, forms in moist conditions.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
Yeah, uh, bacteria also produce your farts. If you're a human,
million it's not on you. So another thing we need
to know is right now, humanity is overall way cleaner
than it was in days of yore. As Jim Nizele
points out in Farmer's Almanac, centuries ago, the human race stink, stink,
(07:27):
and stunk, But today things were a little bit different.
All thanks to an invention called soap.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
We got there. It did man, that's okay, that's what
the people are here for. I always think of that
scene from Monty Python on the Holy Gril where everyone's
just covered in feces, you know, because that wasn't that
far off. I mean, that's this hilarious movie. But you know,
without drainage for sewage, like there were there was a
time where it would just run through the streets and
(07:55):
soap wasn't a thing, and if it was, it was
not something that everyone had access too for sure. And
now soap is ubiquitous.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
You go to various businesses and they will have soap
for free.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
It's one of those things. Ye.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
Soap is a twenty two billion dollar industry globally. Now
thirteen billion bars are sold every year in the US alone.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
But how do we get there?
Speaker 1 (08:21):
We're going to learn that with some great articles from
our pals at the New York Times, some great work
for Time magazine, and of course the Cleaning Institute dot org,
because that's of course that's a thing, right, that's another
weird job. You're on a date and they say, so
what do you do? When you say, oh, I work
at the cleaning Institute. That sounds sketchy.
Speaker 3 (08:46):
Yeah, Well, like, are you like a crime scene cleaner? Right? Like,
what are we talking here? I remember then they're referred
to in that movie The Professional. They referred to professional
assassins as cleaners. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
I'm also thinking of a one of my favorite weird
Stephen King cameos in the in the TV show Sons
of Anarchy is a small spoiler. He shows up as
a cleaner, and in that use of the word, a
cleaner is someone who covers up a crime.
Speaker 3 (09:15):
Scene, like Winston Wolf in pulp fiction. Yes, yeah, yeah,
just so. But when you think to your point about
the absolute bookoo amounts of money that pour into the
soap industry, companies like Procter and Gamble you may have
heard of, You know that they represent tons of different brands,
but some of them are you know, Ivory Soap, which
is a legacy soap brand. You know, brands that are
(09:38):
ubiquitous now like Dove, Irish Spring, Olay I guess, yeah,
I mean whatever they used to call it oil of Olay. Yeah,
now it's just olay. Yeah, it's a fun word to say.
A bullfighter. What does that spring in Ireland smell like?
Is if fresh? I guess because of leprechan magic presumable.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
And I got to be honest. Nowadays, I'm not like
a bar of soap. Person.
Speaker 3 (10:05):
Now, Max and I were talking about the same thing.
It's lately the thing is much more body wash, which
is still, you know, a similar thing. It's just a
liquid form, and it's easier to dispense, and you know,
bars of soap get gross and you don't only want
to share it, like if you live with somebody, Yeah,
I can't really trust them not to rub it directly
on their bits.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
I remember bumming around. I was living a much different lifestyle,
and I was going from.
Speaker 3 (10:28):
Back when you were a beat poet.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
I was going from hostile to hostile. And the thing
that got me is they have bars of soap.
Speaker 3 (10:36):
I know, you see one little curly on there.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
That's exactly what happened, you know, I and I was
not you know, I was by no means a billionaire.
But I thought, I'm gonna have to just buy a
bar of soap. It's my bar. I take it with me.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
I even got wrap it up nice and tidy. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
So the liquid body wash stuff that a lot of
people are using now is it's somewhat poetic that that
has evolved from the original soap. Here's the gross part
we were teasing earlier. According to Dan Copple, writing for
Wirecutter out New York Times, soap likely originated as an
(11:15):
accidental invention, a byproduct of cooking meat over a fire.
Speaker 3 (11:20):
Yeah, arguably the best way to cook meat.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
First.
Speaker 3 (11:24):
Yeah, I remember the spit urned dogs. That was the
whole thing, poor guys. Yeah, I mean, at least the
spitturned boys got out of it, but the dogs were
definitely overworked as well. But yeah, you have this a
giant metal thing attached to a crank that slowly turns
meat over and open fire. Well, it does create delicious meat.
(11:45):
It also has some byproducts which can be used in
their own ways. You've ever been to France, Ben, and
I know you actually have. They a big popular thing
and it's a lot of like kind of what we
would call bodega's. They have chickens that are roasting and
the fat drips down onto potatoes. Yeah, man, that's what's up.
And you can buy the potatoes separately. But back in
these days they would be an open fire. So what
(12:06):
happened is the fat would drip into the fire and
then eventually the fire would go out, leaving all these
globs of fat mixed in with the ashes.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Yeah, meat boogers and ashes too, very unclean sounding things
are key ingredients to what we call soap because what's crazy. Yeah,
what happened was you have to applaud the ingenuity and
inquisitiveness of these earlier humans.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
What happened? Who tried that? Who did something? Yet that mum?
Speaker 1 (12:34):
Who's like, I don't know, man around, Let's say, rub
it on my face might feel fresh, zestfully clean. How
much other stuff had they been rubbing on themselves?
Speaker 3 (12:44):
You know?
Speaker 1 (12:45):
They're like, I know the poison ivy didn't work out,
but I got a good feeling about these meat boogers guys.
Speaker 3 (12:56):
I mean, I just can't understand quite what aha moment
would have led someone to realize that this chemical, this
kind of slippery stuff that was created was good at
removing dirt. I also don't fully understand scientifically speaking, how
that even works. Oh, we'll get it, Okay, I'm excited.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
So you can see that after someone figured this out,
they said, you can rub this on yourself. It'll take
dirt off you, and you can, for the first time
in your life be kind of clean. Everybody loved this.
It became super popular. You can find recipes for making
soap that are almost five thousand years old, and it's
(13:37):
all around the ancient world Greece, Rome, Egypt. You know,
all the hits and alchemists made a lot of soap.
Speaker 3 (13:44):
So how come I didn't catch on Like in the
Middle Ages when everyone was covered in poop?
Speaker 1 (13:49):
Well it, I will tell you. From what I understand
about the Middle Ages and at least Western Europe, it
was pretty rare to take a bath. It was often
considered like a ritual list thing like a night may
take a bath once a year before the big jousting tournament.
Otherwise it's just sort of normalized to to stink. So
(14:11):
maybe soap was something that the elite would have. People
were trying to be clean. We're not saying they were
a bunch of degenerates.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
They I will say, there's some stuff that coming up
about why they'd invade in the medieval era.
Speaker 3 (14:24):
Oh yeah, I know what you're talking about.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
I think I think I know a bit of a reason,
some humorous level science.
Speaker 3 (14:33):
Dare I say ridiculous. I also remember, like there was
a thing we discussed in an episode of ways back
about people washing their linens and urine. Mm hmm, yeah,
a thing. I think it was underwear. I think it
was in the underwear.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
It was washing underwear in urine. And then also while
we're on the point of well we're on the point
of underpants history, check out the origin of pink lemonade.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
Remember that episode clown Tights, the Rise of the Clown.
Let's just leave it at the Yeah. Sorry, it's crazy
to me that this is something that has existed for
so very long, just based on some accidental stumbling into
like however this happened, We don't know. What we do
know is that we have recipes dating back between either
the eighth and tenth century from alchemists, like you said,
(15:16):
and this is when here spread well burnt ashes from goodlogs.
It has to be good logs over woven wicker work,
which I guess acts as sort of like a cheese
cloth kind of situation, like cloth, Yeah, and gently pour
hot water on them, so it goes through drop by drop.
After it is clarified, well, let it cook, add enough
(15:37):
oil and stir very well.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
So I want to point something out that you guys know,
I love food writing and reading. There's a great book
called Choice Cuts that has a lot of strange old recipes.
I'll bring it in one day. We should read it
out loud. And and what I love is just like
the George Washington recipe. There's a vagueness to it. Add
(16:01):
enough oil, get a goodly amount, enjoy liberally.
Speaker 3 (16:06):
I believe it was in the eggnog recipe that you're
referring to. Yeah, and this comes from actually a book
called the Maypie Clavicula, which is it's kind of cute
and Latin that translates to a little key to everything.
You know, it's like little live laugh love. You know,
it's kind of cute. I bet it had some like
(16:27):
nice life hacks in it.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
Yeah, it's like the how stuff works of it to day.
The Alchemist recipe for soap said you need to use
either olive oil or beef tallow animal fat, and today
animal fat, along with lye, is still a basic ingredient
of soap. Here's some of the science so fat reacts
(16:50):
with lye and this can be pretty toxic. So soap
makers when they're making this stuff they have to wear
protective gear. The process that can be dangerous to humans
is something called saponification.
Speaker 3 (17:06):
That's right, and we believe that the origins of that
word come from the Proto German word sipo, which means
to strain. And again going back to that alchemist's recipe,
we're talking about straining substances through kind of like a
porous piece of fabric.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
Another greasy strain is another really gross phrase.
Speaker 3 (17:29):
Why not great? Yeah, and to that point, Ben, the
Latin word sebum is also associated with this, which translates
to Greece or another alternative is from something originating from
Mount Sappo, which is a mountain in Italy where I
believe there were like sacrifices being made or something it.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
Gets its name from. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's okay.
Speaker 3 (17:55):
So the sources are great. Another meat and fat and
ash situation, Yes, not consensual.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
So the wild soap is still very much I think
in twenty twenty three we have to be very we
have to be extremely clear with you folks. The soap
from back in the day was very different. Early soap
would not have looked cool to you if you traveled
back in time and hung out in a Roman bathhouse.
(18:22):
These soaps were probably people have recreated the sancient stuff
using those recipes. These soaps were like brown or gray.
They were kind of soft and mushy. They didn't have
any nice smells at the time. They're purely functional. At
the time, they were just a huge improvement. They were
a game changer for hygiene because beforehand, before soap, people
(18:45):
would clean themselves by rubbing their bodies with clay or
scraping them with scraping pumas across their flesh.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
Sure, it was just pretty popular. People love a puma stone.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
I mean, it's just exfoliating, true, true, but exfoliating is
part of bathing.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
They were straight up at fully Lake. I don't know it. Yea,
it is a dry shower, is what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah,
that's kind of that's kind of that's kind of it.
Really quickly, we talked about another of the potential origins
of the words, so Mount Sapo alluded to some some
gnarly goings on at this place that apparently the location
(19:26):
is lost to history. What exactly was Mount Sapo famous
for in ancient Rome? Oh?
Speaker 1 (19:32):
Good, save, yes, I wast forgot about this one. Yeah,
all right, absolutely right. It is a It is believed
to be a hilly area somewhere near somewhere near Rome
and back in one hundred BC or b C, whatever
you prefer. There was a legend about this place and
(19:54):
the idea that was that Mount Sapo was a sacrificial
site for adnimals and rain water. They would kill these
animals pretty much constantly, and then rainwater would fall down
and mix with the animal fat and ashes, and then
from there it would run down to a river.
Speaker 3 (20:16):
It's very interesting and just again. I always learned about
it stuff initially from the movie Fight Club, where Tyler
Dirt and Brad Pitt's character is a soap salesman who
gets his makings his ingredients by dumpster diving at liposuction clinics.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
You get in situations you do and think about this
river that we both thought it was so cool. Is
once these sacrifices, all the gunk and the remains, once
it flows down from the mountain into the river, there
are people washing clothes in the river and they're saying, wait.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
This ninety's never been this clean in my life. What
gives go looks brand new? That's better.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
That's more.
Speaker 3 (21:02):
We were more in the token.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
The poop stains are all gone. We should make more sacrifices.
That's how soap started, according to this legend.
Speaker 3 (21:11):
But it's a good legend. It seems a little apocryphal
once again, you know what I mean. Yeah, but it
does lead. It does make more sense than the fat
dripping into the fire and the ashes and someone just
figuring out how to just to take it and rub
it on themselves. Yeah, unless they were trying to eat
the fat. Yeah, exactly. But I'll tell you what, they
never used bad language again, right, because they washed their.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
Mouths so so I think it was worth it, no
joke left behind. We were talking earlier about why the
Middle Ages, again in Western Europe, were so very dirty,
So let's maybe let's explore that, because although soap was
an amazing discovery, people weren't always using it. It was
(21:58):
considered a high craft or in art. In Italy and
Spain and France, they were making soap. There in the
Middle East, people were also making soap with olive oil,
and it was actually quite a flex to import that.
So rich people in Europe were saying, ah, yes, my
Middle Eastern soap olive oil.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
Soap is still kind of like a bespoke sort of
like popular thing, you know, like the kind of fancy
hand soaps are all the rage these days. You see
them at hotels. You U see the hotels and also
like places where they're sort of irregularly shaped and have
like kind of weird like striations in them. They almost
look like little blocks of sediments, you know, fancy one
(22:40):
c see at the grocery store sometimes. But no, it's true.
This was considered kind of a luxury item. So this
is almost some of the earliest days of bath products
as luxury. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
And a lot of people, of course were making their
own soap at home because they were this was these
were largely agrarian economies, right, So you are on a farm,
you raise and kill animals, and you want to maximize
your productivity, so of course you have a soap recipe.
You pass it down to your kids and so on.
(23:15):
Interestingly enough, though, the fall of the Roman Empire is
a big reason more Europeans didn't have soap, which I
did not know that way, I did not see that coming.
Speaker 3 (23:27):
Have we talked about the term castile soap. We have
not yet.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
That's the one from the fancy soap in Italy, Spain
and France.
Speaker 3 (23:35):
Yeah, so that was the name, and that is if
you if anyone's familiar with doctor Bronner's so very very
popular you use it to clear anything. But it is
like one of those kind of olive oil based soaps
that originated in Spain and they are still around today
and considered kind of the you know, the holy grail
of soaps.
Speaker 1 (23:56):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And soap was kind of the holy
grail in parts of Europe during the medieval period because,
as we know from soap and Detergent's history, after the
Fall of Rome, bathing habits went downhill in Europe and
this made they really let themselves go and and this
(24:18):
contributed in a very serious and disturbing way to plagues,
to illness, to infection. People were bathing and then they stopped.
That's kind of what happened. And this was a big
help to the fleas that traveled on the rats that
(24:38):
brought the Black Death to Europe.
Speaker 3 (24:40):
Oh, just a perfect storm of nastiness. Yeah, that was
in the fourteenth century. But elsewhere in the world, folks
were taking care of themselves, you know, in terms of
their personal hygiene. In Japan, people bathed every day. It
was very very common and you know, as I mean
We always think Japan is kind of having there together,
(25:02):
you know, in terms of organization, in terms of innovation, uh,
and just kind of civilization. You know, all the Asians.
Speaker 1 (25:10):
We you guys got to go to Japan with me.
We don't have to hang out together the whole time.
Speaker 3 (25:16):
No, no, I'll be right by your side.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
It's just three of us can be in a hot
tub together.
Speaker 1 (25:20):
In Japan, they've got their classy they're called on st.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
Oh I know, eisode.
Speaker 3 (25:27):
I really want to do this.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
Yeah, it's cool, for sure, and it's it's an important
point for us to make that although a lot of
people in the West only think of Western Europe when
they think of the Middle Ages, the rest of the
world was still there totally, you know, and didn't have
all the same problems. In Iceland, people loved gathering together
(25:51):
in the hot springs. Also, you know what, ma'am, we
got to go to Scandinavia one day. I would love
to go there. I want to walk in a country
where it's considered normal to have a sauna.
Speaker 3 (26:02):
Yeah, have a Schwitz. That's so crazy to me. You
ever heard that referred to as Schwitz? I think it's
a Sopranos thing. I think it might be Yiddish actually,
but it's just like getting getting your sweat on. And
then there's even like there's certain meats that are appropriate
to eat in a sauna.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
That that part the second part I I hadn't heard before.
Speaker 3 (26:27):
Uh yeah, sauna sausage. There's a whole company uh that
was obscure actually has an article in Finland. You cook
sausages in the stones. Yeah, that makes you guys.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
Do you guys remember this from the uh Sausage War
episode the Expedition.
Speaker 3 (26:45):
Oh that's right.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
Yeah, at the very end of were talking about like
they have like a little like in the saunas. They
have just like a stone cut out sausage in and
they getting in there. And also expedition remember that.
Speaker 3 (26:57):
Yeah, Yeah, that's fun one to say. Yeah, and that's
how it's pronounced. Yeah. And now there are modern innovations
that keep your sausage from getting soggy. It's like a
little sleeve that you put it in. It's sort of
like a stone and the sausage goes inside and then
that goes on the rocks.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
So they're doing hot pocket rules amazing. So there's another
thing that happens here aside from the fall of the
Roman Empire. Medical experts of the time, working again with
the limited information they had, they started putting out some
scare pieces, some propaganda about bathing. They began to think
(27:33):
that bathing was a vector for spreading illness, and powerful
people believed them. King Louis the fourteenth over in France
was convinced that baths were bad for you, like they
were like unnecessary surgery. Apparently he only took three baths
throughout the course of his life and just you know,
(27:57):
covered his his swamps.
Speaker 3 (28:00):
Yeah, with scented oils and lotions and perfumes. I've done
that every time in a pin.
Speaker 1 (28:07):
Sure, every time I go somewhere and I smell a
little bit like close.
Speaker 3 (28:11):
Little underarm sprits, Yeah, it's because I have not showered.
It's definitely for you guys.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
If you guys ever put deodorant on a turd, I
haven't either. I have on when I'm a teenager.
Speaker 3 (28:22):
That's a weird question.
Speaker 2 (28:23):
Basically, what it smells like, they said, was dedorant, and
turn is what it smells like. The Uran doesn't cover what.
Speaker 3 (28:31):
You're saying, So this is a hypothetical.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
So no, this person actually did it. But what I
feel like this is a common thing to do.
Speaker 3 (28:38):
It's not.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
No, it's not agreed. Thanks, I'm such a never friend
of mine from like the end of middle school told
me to do that. You're wrong.
Speaker 3 (28:47):
I once pooped my pants in middle school and hit
it in a drawer in my friend's house.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
I once pooped in another guy's pants. That's crazy.
Speaker 3 (28:55):
You win, you win. All this is coming out any
of us watched or staying in. But here's what I
do know. I always thought of King Louis the fourteenth
is the real fancy lad you know it wasn't he
(29:16):
the son king? Wasn't he like the Versailles guy, you know?
And he wore like fancy ruffles and was it all
into the height of fashion and all of that stuff.
He was, Yeah, Louis the Great?
Speaker 1 (29:27):
Yeah, and he was I think the longest running ruler
of France.
Speaker 3 (29:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
And then didn't his son king Yeah, his grandson was
the sixteenth. He got shoved into the guilloteen. I think
that French Revolution is right after the fourteenth.
Speaker 3 (29:43):
Yeah. Point being though, is I just didn't really pick
You'll get all these paintings of him with his glorious
flowing locks and all of this stuff, and you just
don't picture him smelling like crap.
Speaker 2 (29:55):
Yeah, but at all. Frederickston was very in shape and skinny,
and he's the he was the king of Sweden who
aid himself to death.
Speaker 3 (30:02):
Yeah. Yeah, but he just loved those buns man. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
I mean, so like these paintings are generally not true,
well not super duper accurate.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
I mean, imagine if you are the painter and you
have to make a picture of the most powerful person
in the country who can just have you killed. Yeah,
you are going to you know, judge it up a
little bit, sure, give him some definition, you know.
Speaker 3 (30:30):
I would also say that the modern equivalent would be
like the way the social media pictures are curated. Nobody's
that happy, nobody lives that happy. A life is so contented.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
Agreed, Agreed, social media curation and portraits of royalty may
not be the full truth. Soap is now modernized. How
did it become a modern thing? Well, technology, There were
advances in production and more sophisticated manufacturing techniques that are
(31:03):
responsible for the soap we have today. Soap is way
older than the United States, obviously, and the soap making
business in the US is also older than the United States.
It started way back in the sixteen hundreds, and it
wasn't anybody's job. It was just another household shore you
(31:26):
had to do. So if you think laundry stinks now, folks,
imagine another part of doing laundry was making the soap
you would use. So you're like, the clothes are getting
pretty dirty. I guess I have to kill an animal,
render its fat, start a fire, make some soap, and
(31:46):
then find a river.
Speaker 3 (31:49):
Yeah. I have noticed that some kind of more traditional
soaps they don't really smell good. They kind of have
an acrid kind of smell all to them, you know
what I mean. Like, even just like a really basic
bar of soap, when you wash your hands in it,
there's a certain chemically kind of unpleasant odor. Certainly Trump's
(32:11):
whatever odor was there before it literally Trump said, gets
rid of it. But the smell isn't pleasant. It wasn't
until oils and the scents were introduced, and then that
that became more of a thing.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
And this, you know, it reminds me of a common
scene in grocery stores. When you go to the cleaning aisle,
you'll it'll typically be on a bottom shelf. You'll see
that soap you're talking about. I always think of it
as the industrial stuff. It's like the soap, the lie soap,
the kind of thing that can hurt your hats.
Speaker 3 (32:41):
Right, that's yeah, yeah, or you know it's because that's
literally the substance is used to like dissolve a body.
No comment, Okay, fair enough, So we'll call Stevi King.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
There's something unique about the early North American soap industry.
It gets started because of bacon and canned lighting in
general was a big part of commercial cleansers because both
making candles and making soap, both of them traditionally rely
on byproducts from animals. So as the US becomes more
(33:14):
industrialized and people are less and less likely to raise
their own animals for meat, they're going to purchase stuff
from butchers. That means they're also less likely to make.
Speaker 3 (33:25):
Soap at home. So that's when we have, you know,
the first steps of the I guess soap industry starting
to pop up, right, soap revolution, soap evolution. But it's
earlier than you might think. Back in seventeen ninety one,
we've got a French chemist by the name of Nicholas LeBlanc.
Speaker 1 (33:45):
Yeah, he patents this process where you can make soda
ash from salt. Soda ash is important because you can
combine it regular fat and you'll make soap. And that discovery,
the blancs breakthrough makes soap making one of the fastest growing,
most explosive industries in the United States.
Speaker 3 (34:07):
By eighteen fifty.
Speaker 1 (34:08):
We also see real life factories coming into play, and
the soap business is boomy. It's good to be This
is back when you could be a soap tycoon.
Speaker 3 (34:18):
Yeah, I mean, and even like I think there were
like traveling salesmen and stuff like that, you know, with
their suitcases full of bars of soap. And this was
also the time remember that propaganda of like you know,
the previous era, the sort of main people question soap.
Now we have I think a little bit more medical
kind of support for soap. That's good and like expressions
(34:40):
like cleanliness is next to godliness and all of that stuff.
God is empty. It's yeah, he is, he really is.
It's cool to be clean though, you know what I'm saying.
This is definitely starting to be the message. So during
the Crimean War in the eighteen fifties, we have Florence Nightingales,
very important figure in the mystery of medicine, who's credited
(35:01):
with kind of changing the way nursing is done and
really made a big deal about washing those hands because
that could potentially save lives by preventing the spread of cholera. Yeah, yeah,
and she is.
Speaker 1 (35:21):
She's in the pantheon of people who who were underappreciated
by civilization. I would argue she's up there with Samalwis,
the guy who asks surgeons to wash their hands before
they do operations, right, or assistant childbirth. So this is
very important stuff. Also in the mid eighteen hundreds, in
(35:43):
eighteen thirty seven, there's this candle maker out of Cincinnati,
William Procter, and he says, oh, yeah, well making candles
making soap. I have the ingredients for both, and he
puts them together. He teams up with a guy named
James Gamble and makes a company that ultimately becomes not
(36:04):
just a huge deal in the soap business, but the
world's largest consumer products company ever.
Speaker 3 (36:10):
Procter and Gamble, P and G, baby and G. What
do they not make? I don't know, humans?
Speaker 1 (36:18):
Yeah now as of now, yeah, they're making prototype humans.
So Procter and Gamble is also one of the first
soaps to gain national distribution. It's the Ivory brand, which
is still around today, right.
Speaker 3 (36:35):
Yeah, and it's still distributed by parct and Gamble. They're
the kind of company that has been in the game
for so long, diversified so much, and they've created so
many like ubiquitous kind of brands. So remember that cast
deal soap we were talking about from Spain that was
sort of the fancy lad soap. This plain white soap
was designed to be competition for that, like perhaps the
(36:59):
people soap.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
The people's soap, soap for the people. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It was pretty affordable, and the name was from a
biblical passage. The company said, the name of the soap
is an indicator of its purity. There even came to
(37:20):
be a kind of modern legend, a creation myth about
how Ivory was made. The story was that there was
a mixing machine left on someone took a long lunch
break and extra air accidentally pumped into what was what
was being mixed, And in two thousand and four, weirdly enough,
(37:44):
people working for Procter and Gamble went through Old Man
Gambles diary from eighteen sixty rude.
Speaker 3 (37:52):
Yeah, they read his diary and dear diary. Yeah, that's exactly.
I got a crush on this diary.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
I made floating soap today I think will make all
of our stock that way. So the legend that was
the quote, Yeah, that was the quote. The legend was
probably made up.
Speaker 3 (38:10):
Got it. But here's the thing. A lot of the
soap that you think is soap isn't in fact soap scale.
There's a lot to be said, as we alluded to earlier,
about the chemistry of soap and how it actually works.
It something that's always eluded me. This seems like a
mystical substance. A lot of these manufacturing processes stayed very
(38:33):
much the same until nineteen sixteen during World War One,
and then there was another change that happened during World
War Two, as often as the case during wartime, because
of shortage and things that were needed as part of
the supply chain, because a lot of these fats that
were needed to make chemicals were being used elsewhere, probably
for those like k rations or whatever.
Speaker 1 (38:54):
Yeah, and back to our pal Dan writing for Wirecutter,
he said, German and Ears figured out they could use
a different cleaning product that didn't need animal fat and ashes.
It was a synthetic substance they called detergent Latin for
to wipe away. Detergents didn't have soap. They used enzymes that,
(39:19):
through chemical reactions, lift stains off of clothing and skin.
American companies get on board with this and again the
early nineteen hundreds and they start making new detergents and
mixing ingredients up to see what other properties they can discover.
(39:40):
And eventually, after the times of privation had passed, they
were left with something that actually worked better than the
original soap. And they said, okay, well, you know, history
is cool, but we're going to have to go with
a thing that's a better cleaner.
Speaker 2 (39:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (39:57):
It also doesn't like SuDS up the same. It behaves
differently when mixed with water, Like I don't know if
anyone's ever been unfortunate enough to accidentally put the regular
soap into a dishwasher or something like that, you're gonna
have like SuDS shooting all over your kitchen. Totally. Yeah,
it's a rite of passage as an adult. But that's
the thing like with you know, if you look at
(40:20):
what laundry detergent does, for example, in the washing machine.
It's not full of bubbles. It's much of much like
you know, it's clearly a different process. It's more of
a smooth operator. It's a smooth operator. It creates kind
of like this slurry, you know.
Speaker 1 (40:34):
And as a result, like you were saying earlier, Man,
what people are calling soap today is not completely soap.
Most of the cleansers, the majority of them liquid and solid,
are gonna be synthetic detergent products. And people like these
products because they don't form gummy deposits. The origin story
(40:55):
of them is not as disturbing to some people. And
modern cleansers also include a lot of other ingredients. Stuff
to make it the bar of soap, brighter stuff to
make the liquid, you know, look bluish water, softeners, antibacterial
stuff like alcohol, and these bars can have some of
(41:16):
the same ingredients as soap, Like when you see what
is it, the animal fat is still in some of them.
It's just not called that anymore.
Speaker 3 (41:26):
Yeah, And some of the main ingredients in these are
something that we both tittered at. I guess a little
bit off my sodium talowate. It's just because it's a
funny word.
Speaker 1 (41:34):
I don't know why it feels like someone trying to
do pretend Latin.
Speaker 3 (41:38):
It does sound that way. And then sodium lard eate,
which sounds like what it is, or it can also
include vegetable fats such as sodium palmitate and sodium coco eate,
which sounds delightful. But chemically speaking, they're not actually soap,
but it does seem that they mean they're obviously it's
(42:00):
like chemically or like scientifically in terms of what the
process is doing a similar job, right right.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
Yeah, And this is one of Max, I think this
is one of the big questions for you, and I
appreciate this because we've got to give a shout out
to our alma matter. How stuff works. Maybe we end here,
how does soap actually work? Well, it's less of a
disinfectant and more of what you called, Max, I think
(42:27):
quite appropriately a germ slipping slide. They're not killing the germs,
they're moving them. The slipperiness of soap lowers the surface
temperature of water when you mix them together, and rubbing
your hands together while washing gets the dirt to temporarily
bond with the water and soap, and then it.
Speaker 3 (42:46):
Leaves with the water. It lifts it right off. Yeah,
it's interesting, just like those commercials exactly leaving U zestfully clean.
I'm sorry, man, I think you got that jingle stuck
in my head a little while ago. I think, ye,
not fully clean and unless you zest fully clean.
Speaker 1 (43:04):
Yeah, it's jaunty. It's a jaunty jingle. And this has
been a pretty fascinating episode. It took us a lot
of places. We got into some pretty dark territory. We
got into some really interesting stuff about hygiene, and we're
going to have to continue the journey next week.
Speaker 3 (43:25):
To our personal hygiene journey. Our personal hygiene journey. Yeah, man,
we're look at us. All three of us are being
pretty good. Now, we're working out, we're taking showers. Oh man,
I took one three days ago. I feel like you're
high roading me. But congratulations. My favorite place it took
us was the top of the Sacrifice Mountain. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
Can you imagine finding that place in the modern day,
(43:49):
Probably pretty creepy piles of bones and whatnot like the
Predator's Layer, but it would be an adventure. Indeed, it
would until the predatory is too.
Speaker 1 (43:58):
Thanks as always to super producer mister Max Williams, thanks
to research associate Max Williams, thanks to Chuck Palinook, thanks
to Brad Pitt, thanks to Ed Norton.
Speaker 3 (44:11):
He's apparently a bit of a pill, but he's a
fabulous actor, and of.
Speaker 1 (44:15):
Course thanks to our own theatrical professional Jonathan stricklandka the poster.
Speaker 3 (44:21):
Indeed, we'll see you next time, folks Stickley. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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