Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: We all here, so there's thirty five people here now
Speaker 2: thirty six so we're getting close.
Speaker 1: Okay, thank you. Every Wednesday afternoon, Pushkin Industries, the company
Speaker 1: that brings you this and many other audio delights, has
Speaker 1: a staff meeting. Not long ago, I asked if I
Speaker 1: could take over the meeting for a frank discussion of
Speaker 1: a very delicate subject, laundry.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 1: I know there's been a lot of chatter around this
Speaker 1: podcast episode of mine, and there's two questions I keep hearing.
Speaker 1: One is is there a right answer? And the answer is,
Speaker 1: of course, is the right answer. There's always the right answer.
Speaker 1: With Revision's history on zoom, I can see all these
Speaker 1: faces looking at me, wondering where on earth am I
Speaker 1: going with this? Is there going to be laundry shaming?
Speaker 1: And the answer is yes, but the person being shamed
Speaker 1: is me. The whole reason I'm doing this episode is
Speaker 1: I became aware that my laundry practices were sorely deficient,
Speaker 1: and I wanted to understand why. I'm going to pick
Speaker 1: on a couple of people who were generous enough to
Speaker 1: share their detergent preferences with me, and I'm going to
Speaker 1: ask them a few short questions. John Schnarz, Maybe we
Speaker 1: should start with you, John John Schnarz, Pushkin's vice president
Speaker 1: of business development, sensitive, highly evolved, modern male, father to
Speaker 1: many small children. Do you have a top loading or
Speaker 1: front loading washing machine?
Speaker 4: Top?
Speaker 1: Oh? Interesting? Do you have the piston that comes up?
Speaker 1: I thought it was what is called a agitator. I
Speaker 1: believe by this point in my research, I knew a
Speaker 1: lot about washing machines and top loading machines are well,
Speaker 1: they're not good. I was embarrassed for John, a senior
Speaker 1: officer of Pushkin, should know better. Let's skip to Carrie.
Speaker 4: Thank you.
Speaker 1: Carrie Colon, one of our top people making audiobooks Whip Smart.
Speaker 1: If anyone could teach us something, it would be Carrie. Also,
Speaker 1: she's a mom, does a lot of laundry. What's your
Speaker 1: temperature use? Do you very temperature?
Speaker 5: I vary temperature based on instructions?
Speaker 1: What are these? So tell me those those particular protocols.
Speaker 6: Well, actually I should know. I'll back up.
Speaker 5: I go on normal wash, and so my washer will
Speaker 5: tell me. If I just say normal, it does its
Speaker 5: boooooop and.
Speaker 6: Then it comes out with whatever.
Speaker 1: The machine.
Speaker 5: I defer to the machine unless there's something that I
Speaker 5: think I'm supposed to pay special attention to in there.
Speaker 1: Yes, okay, thank you, it's been very helpful. What was
Speaker 1: I thinking looking back? I don't know. I didn't really
Speaker 1: explain myself. I just crashed the staff meeting to ask
Speaker 1: people about their laundry habits in the hopes that the
Speaker 1: senior Pushkin leadership would teach the younger people on our
Speaker 1: team something about how to conduct themselves in the world.
Speaker 1: What it means to be mindful, purposeful, environmentally conscious, to
Speaker 1: lead with empathy, to lean in. And when I didn't
Speaker 1: hear that, I felt betrayed. I want to check in
Speaker 1: with Brendan. You out there? Yeah, you are a eCos
Speaker 1: nice Brendan Francis Newnham, another of our top people. If
Speaker 1: you google the words Brooklyn natural wine, farmers market, vinyl records,
Speaker 1: and whatever other affiliated terms show up automatically in the
Speaker 1: search field, you get Brendan eco h an eccentric choice, Uh,
Speaker 1: first of all, top loader, front loader, laundromat nice, Oh
Speaker 1: oh oh, old school? Thank you? Yeah?
Speaker 3: Uh?
Speaker 1: And uh do you separate? I do?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: And what's your system for separation here?
Speaker 7: I do darts and lights?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Do you wash the other different protocols.
Speaker 6: Yes, I do my my whites, I do hot water,
Speaker 6: and then my darks I do warm water.
Speaker 1: You do your whites in hot water. Yeah, okay, good,
Speaker 1: that's all. I also add bleach into my whites with ghosts. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: that's all. I've heard enough.
Speaker 2: Here.
Speaker 1: I thought that Pushkin was in laundry terms the shining
Speaker 1: laundry mat on the hill, and it's not.
Speaker 3: But that's okay.
Speaker 1: Actually it wasn't okay. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're
Speaker 1: listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.
Speaker 1: This episode is about an odyssey I embarked upon in
Speaker 1: the darkest days of the pandemic, an odyssey which ended
Speaker 1: in me shaking my head at my fellow Pushkinites over
Speaker 1: their laundry room conduct, even though I knew deep down
Speaker 1: that I was no better than they were. Where do
Speaker 1: you go when you've become consumed with questions of clothes
Speaker 1: and laundry and detergent The answer is obvious. You go
Speaker 1: to the north side of Cincinnati, about a fifteen minute
Speaker 1: drive from downtown, to an industrial zone with a cluster
Speaker 1: of nineteenth century Granite Buildings, the Proctor and Gamble Fabric
Speaker 1: and Home Care Innovation Center, the research arm of Procter
Speaker 1: and Gamble, the consumer products Giant, which makes basically every
Speaker 1: thing in your broom closet, your laundry room, and your
Speaker 1: medicine cabinet. I went there on snowy winter's day to
Speaker 1: meet a guy named Todd Kleine. You look chemist by trade.
Speaker 7: So I studied chemical engineering. So close to a chemist.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Todd is maybe my age. Kind of intense wiring
Speaker 1: runners build. He and I actually ran eight miles a
Speaker 1: night before through downtown Cincinnati, over the bridges along the
Speaker 1: riverfront up through Grant Park, which I realized later is
Speaker 1: a very Todd Cline thing to do. Put the visitor
Speaker 1: through his paces. And have you been at P ANDNG
Speaker 1: your whole lot? O?
Speaker 7: I have been, and it feels like my whole life
Speaker 7: because I've been here twenty five plus years now. So
Speaker 7: I started on metamusol, which at that time was positioned
Speaker 7: as a supplement for laxative. So I was, you know,
Speaker 7: the twenty two year old single guy the school and
Speaker 7: they said, you're working on metamucil. Doing what? And it
Speaker 7: is still one of my favorite things I've ever worked on.
Speaker 1: Klein worked on re engineering the formulation to make it
Speaker 1: more palatable. Then he was assigned to the painkiller A Lap,
Speaker 1: then Folger's Coffee back when Procter still own those brands,
Speaker 1: A Procter they like to move people around. And after
Speaker 1: that he was posted to Swiffer.
Speaker 7: So my team was doing Swiffer wet Jet, which I
Speaker 7: don't know if you've seen those. It's a mop that
Speaker 7: you push a button, solution sprays out, and there's a
Speaker 7: pad that collects all the dirty solutions. So you've got
Speaker 7: the mop part, then you've got a separate solution on
Speaker 7: putting out something that will both help dissolve soils, break
Speaker 7: up soils, but not leave streaks on the floor, and
Speaker 7: also leave a nice scent.
Speaker 1: There are a few greater pleasures in life than discovering
Speaker 1: that something once considered uninteresting is actually InCred interesting.
Speaker 7: You're trying to get those scrubbing on hard things, suck
Speaker 7: up solution and then hold it there because you're sucking
Speaker 7: up dirty solution and you don't want it going back
Speaker 7: down on the floor. So we actually use the same
Speaker 7: polymer inside the pad that we use in diapers to
Speaker 7: hold the urine with mops. A lot of times when
Speaker 7: you're mopping floors, you're slashing dirty water around a lot,
Speaker 7: and with swiffer you actually suck it up and it
Speaker 7: holds it there.
Speaker 1: Madameusel A, leave Folger's swiffer the Maslow's hierarchy of consumer products.
Speaker 1: I will warn you about halfway through this episode, you'll
Speaker 1: say to yourself, Wow, Malcolm really fell hard for those
Speaker 1: Procter and Gamble people, didn't he. Let me just address
Speaker 1: that issue now before things get out of hand. Yes,
Speaker 1: I did. I was raised in a household in the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies where my father used a handsaw to cut
Speaker 1: all the wood for our woodstove because he refused to
Speaker 1: use a chainsaw. I think he considered chainsaws decadent. My mother, meanwhile,
Speaker 1: in the dead of winter, would bundle up in a
Speaker 1: parka like an Eskimo and hang the family's laundry outside
Speaker 1: on a clothesline because she disapproved of dryers. These are
Speaker 1: my people, my heritage, people who dwelt on the particulars
Speaker 1: of their domestic conduct. At some point in the midst
Speaker 1: of the COVID lockdown, I reflected on my own domestic
Speaker 1: practice what do I do. I go down to my
Speaker 1: basement and I throw my clothes heedlessly into my shiny
Speaker 1: red LG washing machine, grab whatever detergent I can from
Speaker 1: a row of random bottles on the shelf, mindless consumption
Speaker 1: of huge amounts of hot water, chemicals and electricity, without
Speaker 1: so much as a stray thought to my intentions. We
Speaker 1: like to think it doesn't matter these little things, but
Speaker 1: there are twenty five billion loads of laundry done every
Speaker 1: year in the United States and Canada. That's twenty five billion.
Speaker 1: The little things add up. So there in my basement
Speaker 1: on laundry day one evening, I resolved to do better,
Speaker 1: and off I went, in a blinding snowstorm to Cincinnati
Speaker 1: to see Todd Klein, P and G's North American Fabricare
Speaker 1: Section head for Research and Development. In Hindi, there is
Speaker 1: a word for an opportunity or occasion of seeing a
Speaker 1: holy person, darshan. I requested a darshan with the Guru
Speaker 1: of American Laundry. We began our tour in a long
Speaker 1: room full of washing machines what looked like at least
Speaker 1: one hundred of them, front loaders, top lofeors, big industrial
Speaker 1: strength Maytag machines Japanese washing machines, which I'd never seen before,
Speaker 1: and which are so wonderfully and perfectly Japanese that I
Speaker 1: felt like grabbing my laundry and jumping on a plane
Speaker 1: to Tokyo. Figures the Japanese machine would be like more complex,
Speaker 1: very cool. Yeah, it looks like a let's say, looks
Speaker 1: like a flight of the moon. Each of the one
Speaker 1: hundred plus machines in that long room was linked to
Speaker 1: a network of black pipes, which allowed the Procter people
Speaker 1: to mimic the typical temperature, water hardness, chlorine concentration of
Speaker 1: every major water system where Procter and Gamble detergents are sold.
Speaker 1: You want to simulate how a tide pob washes whites
Speaker 1: in Raykivic in a late model LG front loader, they
Speaker 1: can do that. How many people work in just in
Speaker 1: this facility in R and D for detergents.
Speaker 7: Oh wow, at least a couple of hundred.
Speaker 1: All those people for the past decade or more or
Speaker 1: had been focused on the question of how we could
Speaker 1: do our twenty five billion loads of laundry in a
Speaker 1: more environmentally friendly way. They begin with a comprehensive statistical
Speaker 1: analysis of the carbon footprint of every input in the
Speaker 1: laundry process. Raw materials in the detergents, do they have
Speaker 1: a big carbon footprint? Actually not really. Manufacturing every tide
Speaker 1: plant now runs on wind power, transportation and packaging pretty insignificant,
Speaker 1: particularly if you're talking pods in a recyclable tub, which
Speaker 1: are highly concentrated and easy to ship. The environmental impact
Speaker 1: of a load of laundry turns out to be driven
Speaker 1: by what we the people at home do. Blind showed
Speaker 1: me a chart with all the calculations.
Speaker 7: And when you look at the carbon footprint, you can
Speaker 7: see that the product use phase is by far it's everything.
Speaker 1: Product use is industry jargon for your laundry ritual. So
Speaker 1: it's what percent is that two thirds? Two thirds?
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's close to seventy percent. And what that is
Speaker 7: is the energy to heat the water when people do laundry.
Speaker 7: If someone chooses to use cold instead of warm, it's
Speaker 7: a seventy percent reduction in energy in the use phase.
Speaker 7: So you have a huge shrinking here. If they choose
Speaker 7: cold versus hot, it's a ninety percent reduction in energy.
Speaker 1: Cold water washing is the holy grail of the laundry business.
Speaker 1: Washing your clothes in cold water means colors don't run,
Speaker 1: your clothes lasts longer, you save a lot of money,
Speaker 1: and you shrink your carbon footprint massively. But it's a
Speaker 1: lot harder to get your clothes clean in cold water.
Speaker 1: The chemical reactions between detergent and stain slow down dramatically
Speaker 1: as the temperature drops. This is what the detergent experts
Speaker 1: at the Innovation Center do. They try to solve this problem.
Speaker 7: So factants. We use a blend of surfactants. What is
Speaker 7: a surfactant. They're really the workhourse of the detergency and
Speaker 7: they're a material that goes in and it basically helps
Speaker 7: roll the stains off of the clothing. So they penetrate
Speaker 7: into the clothing and under and lift up and capture
Speaker 7: the stain, almost encapsulate it and help bring it out
Speaker 7: into the water.
Speaker 1: Then there are enzymes to break down the stain into
Speaker 1: smaller pieces.
Speaker 7: So we have specific enzymes for protease that goes after
Speaker 7: protein based stains, amylase goes after starch based stains, manninase
Speaker 7: goes after more gelatin manotype stains, And we develop enzymes
Speaker 7: that are formulated specifically for cold water.
Speaker 1: He went on, he talked about special antioxidants, something called keelants,
Speaker 1: the challenge of removing body odor from t shirts. Cline
Speaker 1: made the point over and over that the only way
Speaker 1: for a detergent to be in vironmentally friendly was if
Speaker 1: it's effective in cold water, and the only way it
Speaker 1: could be effective in cold water is if it's designed
Speaker 1: to the most exacting specifications.
Speaker 7: When you're washing your clothes, surfactants and polymers and enzymes
Speaker 7: are there to get the soil off of your clothes,
Speaker 7: but when they come off, your clothes are swashing around
Speaker 7: in this water, so you pull everything off, and then
Speaker 7: your clothes.
Speaker 1: Are circuitting in the dirty wall.
Speaker 7: Exactly, so the other polymer we use is there to
Speaker 7: prevent the dirt from redepositing back onto your clothes.
Speaker 1: The most environmentally sustainable detergent is, by definition, the most
Speaker 1: sophisticated detergent. You can't limit your carbon footprint without putting
Speaker 1: an army of engineers and bench scientists on the job,
Speaker 1: But just spend a few minutes online reading detergent rankings
Speaker 1: on environmental websites. The importance of water temper almost never
Speaker 1: comes up. Instead, it's all about simplicity. I mean, just
Speaker 1: listen to this, picked at random from the Mountain of
Speaker 1: laundry advice on the Internet. The eight best green laundry
Speaker 1: detergents of twenty twenty one from something called the Spruce
Speaker 1: Ready best budget eCos liquid laundry detergent, the kind that
Speaker 1: Brendan uses, remember him, Brooklyn Brandon. eCos boasts that their
Speaker 1: liquid detergent is made from plant based ingredients, as if
Speaker 1: they're telling us it's safe enough to drink. Meanwhile, the
Speaker 1: site earthfriendlytips dot com writes glowingly of something called Molly's SuDS.
Speaker 8: Mollie SuDS is one of the best eco friendly laundry
Speaker 8: detergents because it was developed to be Earth safe and
Speaker 8: people safe. It contains no chemical based sutsing ingredients. Instead,
Speaker 8: it's formula I did with only five earth derived ingredients.
Speaker 1: Only five earth derived ingredients. What does that even mean?
Speaker 1: Even the name makes no sense. Molly's SuDS. As it happens,
Speaker 1: SuDS are the problem in laundry.
Speaker 7: High efficiency machines have sensors that at the end of
Speaker 7: the rent cycle, since are there any SuDS left or not?
Speaker 7: And if there are, they'll do an extra rent cycle,
Speaker 7: so you'll use extra water.
Speaker 1: If you're a detergent company that wants to be seen
Speaker 1: as green, you don't call out SuDS in your name.
Speaker 1: You boast about all the sophisticated engineering advances you've made
Speaker 1: to suppress your SuDS. The biggest question the environmentally conscious
Speaker 1: consumers should be asking is which detergent will allow me
Speaker 1: to do as many as possible of my laundry loads
Speaker 1: in cold water. Tardkline has devoted years of his life
Speaker 1: to answering that question.
Speaker 7: We do a lot of technical testing maybe instead. Up
Speaker 7: over here, He.
Speaker 1: Led me over to a counter where he had a
Speaker 1: series of Haines t shirts in both one hundred percent
Speaker 1: cotton and cotton poly blend. On each shirt there was
Speaker 1: a grid of little circular stains. And where you've got
Speaker 1: nes cafe coffee, grape juice and blueberries, and then gravy
Speaker 1: blood and us clay and then barbecue Hershey's what's that?
Speaker 1: What's GCS chocolate? Just chocolate and French is mustard. So
Speaker 1: we have a grid of nine stains of nine stains.
Speaker 7: Yeap, and here's rice starch and soy milk, as well
Speaker 7: as these two that say see them those are body soils,
Speaker 7: so we will use stain sets like this. They're technical stains,
Speaker 7: so they're designed not to be fully removed when we
Speaker 7: do it, and we use spectro photometry to measure what
Speaker 7: percent of each stain is removed. But what you can
Speaker 7: see here is this is tied on cold. Relative to
Speaker 7: the competitor.
Speaker 1: The tiding question was tied Hygienic Clean pods. The competitor
Speaker 1: was one of the other best selling detergents on the market.
Speaker 1: Climb wouldn't tell me what it was. The competitor washed
Speaker 1: the stain grid on warm. The Tide Hygienic Clean washed
Speaker 1: the stained grid on cold. He held up the results.
Speaker 7: You can see particularly with particularly with the gravy blood.
Speaker 1: Gravy blood barbecue and Hershey's tied totally wins. It looks
Speaker 1: like it's even on blueberries clay and French's mustard.
Speaker 7: It's closer on mustard. They actually it's either a tie
Speaker 7: or they may actually win. On the mustard. It's a
Speaker 7: pH driven stain. The rest of them, when you look
Speaker 7: at the statistics and the spectrum for tarmater results, we
Speaker 7: actually have significant winds there as well.
Speaker 1: The laundry wizards have given us away to save money,
Speaker 1: save our clothes, and save the environment. But is that
Speaker 1: what we do? No, we do not. In America, less
Speaker 1: than half of all laundry loads are cold water. When
Speaker 1: it comes to our laundry, we are a nation divided.
Speaker 1: And who is in the hot and warm half, the
Speaker 1: dumb half, the laundry basket of deplorables. Malcolm Gladwell, who
Speaker 1: likes to wag his finger at other people over their
Speaker 1: ethical lapses and fancies himself the paragon of science based,
Speaker 1: open minded rationality, physician, heal thyself. When I got back
Speaker 1: from Cincinnati, I called up my old friend Dide Gordon.
Speaker 1: We ride again, We.
Speaker 6: Ride again as always.
Speaker 1: Some of you may remember Dede. She appeared in the
Speaker 1: Revisionist History episode Free Brown Williams from season three. I've
Speaker 1: known her forever. When I first met her, she lived
Speaker 1: in a fabulous mid century house right by the Hollywood
Speaker 1: Sign in Beachwrick Canyon. I used to house sit there
Speaker 1: whenever de Dy went off on her annual trips to Japan.
Speaker 1: I got to take care of her dog's sage, I
Speaker 1: miss Sage. D d now runs a boutique consumer research
Speaker 1: outfit called the Gordon company. You go to Dede when
Speaker 1: your brand has a problem and you've run out of answers.
Speaker 1: I think Dede's a genius. Just to be clear, the
Speaker 1: reason we're doing this is that I was astonished and
Speaker 1: ashamed to learn that I had been washing my clothes
Speaker 1: on warm and hot all these years, when I could
Speaker 1: have had better results for on every dimension if i'd
Speaker 1: washed them on cold. And so I wanted to understand
Speaker 1: not just why I I went wrong, but I want
Speaker 1: to understand who are these people who I should be emulating,
Speaker 1: who saw the truth before I did?
Speaker 6: You always start your conversations that way. I'm obsessed.
Speaker 3: I need to understand what is it about these cold
Speaker 3: water people that I'm not getting?
Speaker 6: Why am I not like these people? Tell me? You
Speaker 6: need to tell me.
Speaker 1: So I was disturbed.
Speaker 6: It was like, okay, I was disturbed, so disturbed. Now
Speaker 6: you were you were disturbed.
Speaker 1: I'd given Didi a job the kind her company does
Speaker 1: all the time, consumer interviews and analysis. I asked her
Speaker 1: to find me some dedicated cold water laundry people, figure
Speaker 1: them out, report back. Diddy's team did hours and hours
Speaker 1: of interviews with scores of people, and now I was
Speaker 1: getting the report.
Speaker 4: And we asked them all different types of questions about
Speaker 4: their attitudes and beliefs around laundry and detergent and brands
Speaker 4: and their process. We asked them about, you know, what
Speaker 4: makes them tick. And we also watched some of them
Speaker 4: do their laundry and they walked us through their process
Speaker 4: of doing laundry, and then we had a post interview
Speaker 4: with them as well.
Speaker 6: It was really interesting, really interesting. I mean, these people
Speaker 6: that we talked to really love doing laundry. I mean
Speaker 6: they love it.
Speaker 1: There was one interviewee in particular that did he wanted
Speaker 1: me to listen to. I'll call her Janet.
Speaker 6: She's a laundry master.
Speaker 3: She hires a nanny to watch her kids so that
Speaker 3: she can go do the laundry.
Speaker 1: That's fantastic, okay, I mean, like, let's get real here.
Speaker 6: I mean that's some serious laundry love.
Speaker 1: Janet was maybe in her forties or early fifties, single
Speaker 1: mom of three, successful entrepreneur. God knows how did he
Speaker 1: found her. She played me tape of Janet talking with
Speaker 1: one of the Gordon Company analysts.
Speaker 4: Tom.
Speaker 9: Let's see, one of your best friends was going to
Speaker 9: describe you to me? Who doesn't know you at all,
Speaker 9: How would they describe your personality and sort of what
Speaker 9: your friends and interests are.
Speaker 2: Okay, so I've been called an angel and a heart
Speaker 2: of gold. I will help pretty much anyone who needs help.
Speaker 2: I would also think they would say energetic, all over
Speaker 2: the place, world traveler, pre pandemic, and just a very
Speaker 2: nice person and a good mom with good values.
Speaker 9: Very nice, very nice.
Speaker 2: And then some would say, yeah, she's a little crazy.
Speaker 1: Jenet talks about the television shows she watches, the car
Speaker 1: she drives, how much she loves to garden. Then we
Speaker 1: get to the good stuff.
Speaker 2: I'm a little neurotic about the laundry. I'm not neurotic
Speaker 2: about too many things, but when it comes to laundry,
Speaker 2: I like to buy good things. I dressed my children
Speaker 2: from the time they were tiny, and you know, beautiful things.
Speaker 2: I would never use like a bargain brand of detergent,
Speaker 2: for sure, there's a difference. I would send sometimes the
Speaker 2: girls to the supermarket and a number of times they
Speaker 2: bought the store brand, and I tried it and wasn't
Speaker 2: really garbage.
Speaker 1: Janet's the kind of consumer that did he lives for.
Speaker 6: I just loved her.
Speaker 3: I loved that the attention to detail there was just
Speaker 3: so every every word there was just you know, so much.
Speaker 6: She just delivered so much.
Speaker 1: But the truth is all the cold water users were
Speaker 1: like that. All the people did he interviewed detail oriented
Speaker 1: and driven.
Speaker 6: These people were disciplined.
Speaker 3: So like when we ask them about their washing machine,
Speaker 3: they could rattle off the year they purchased it, the
Speaker 3: cubic foot capacity, the number of settings, all of that
Speaker 3: without ever having to look at anything.
Speaker 6: There was like no manuals sitting on the side there.
Speaker 6: They were just able to rattle all of that off.
Speaker 6: Really impressive. No, I know they're they're superhuman.
Speaker 3: It's really what the cold water users are superhumans.
Speaker 1: D Why is it a question if we're interviewing someone
Speaker 1: to work at Pushkin or the Gordon, why aren't we
Speaker 1: asking the question how do you do your laundry? And
Speaker 1: if they say I've been doing cold water for five years,
Speaker 1: why don't we just say, well, we don't need to
Speaker 1: ask any anything else.
Speaker 3: I mean, honestly, it's got Honestly, it's got to be
Speaker 3: part of the vetting from now on, Like this is
Speaker 3: a vetting question across the board. I mean, they should
Speaker 3: be doing the same thing with our politicians, like, I
Speaker 3: want to know if these people are washing in cold water.
Speaker 3: I bet you Kamala Harris is a cold water user.
Speaker 6: You better believe she's a cold water user.
Speaker 1: Wait to stick about that. She probably know, she probably is.
Speaker 1: I'm serious actually, because I'm serious too. She's half Indian,
Speaker 1: half Jamaican. Those are two cold water laundry cultures, right.
Speaker 1: You know, when my mom was grown up in Jamaica,
Speaker 1: they weren't. They weren't washing their clothes and hot water
Speaker 1: washing cold water. So they start with the presumption of
Speaker 1: cold In what other area of life can you level
Speaker 1: up so easily? I could just set the default settings
Speaker 1: on my washer to cold and get to be a
Speaker 1: better version of myself like Kamala or Janet focused, passionate Janet.
Speaker 2: I'm going to say a year or two ago, I
Speaker 2: was reading an article about you know, what you can
Speaker 2: do for the planet and saving energy and bringing down
Speaker 2: your bills and stuff like that, and they talked about
Speaker 2: cold water washing, and I said, well, that's like the
Speaker 2: simplest change I can make.
Speaker 1: At the end of my day in Cincinnati, I met
Speaker 1: up with Amy Crabile, Brand, vice president at Procter and
Speaker 1: Gamble for North American laundry. We talked about laundry, but
Speaker 1: very quickly our conversation turned to dishwashing. Laundry's domestic cousin.
Speaker 1: Somewhere at Procter and Gamble, there is a parallel universe
Speaker 1: of dishes and dishpowders and rooms full of dishwashing machines
Speaker 1: undergoing the same scrutiny given to our laundry.
Speaker 10: Our friends over at Cascade found that people think that
Speaker 10: it wastes water and energy when you run your dishwasher,
Speaker 10: and so they'll wait to run a load because they
Speaker 10: think it's wasteful. But actually, as long as you have
Speaker 10: eight dishes, running the dishwasher every night uses less energy
Speaker 10: and water resources than running the sink for two minutes,
Speaker 10: which I know I would do.
Speaker 1: Normally running run it by again, as long as you
Speaker 1: have eight do you say eight dishes? Yes, using it
Speaker 1: the dishwasher takes less energy and less water than running
Speaker 1: the sink.
Speaker 10: Think for two minutes.
Speaker 1: Yet another entry on the list of things I didn't
Speaker 1: bother to care about. Two minutes. Yes, really, yes, that
Speaker 1: is super interesting.
Speaker 10: Yes, and counterintuitive because you would think a big machine
Speaker 10: has a lot of energy and water. But you know
Speaker 10: many of these manufacturers are also making those dishwashers more
Speaker 10: energy efficient too.
Speaker 1: Can you settle for me the angel question of whether
Speaker 1: you have to rinse your dishes free within the dishwasher?
Speaker 1: Do you know this is to be the central issue,
Speaker 1: because you can spend as much water on the pre
Speaker 1: rints as you do on the actual washing.
Speaker 10: Now settled, you do not need to rinse your dishes
Speaker 10: before you put them in the dishwasher if you use Cascade.
Speaker 1: Cascade the product of many, many millions of dollars of
Speaker 1: cutting edge research designed to remove tomato, sauce and butter
Speaker 1: and gravy from your plates, not some budget eco brand
Speaker 1: with three ingredients that does such a lousy job you
Speaker 1: end up running the dishwater shirt twice, or giving up
Speaker 1: on the dishwasher entirely and freelancing with hot water on
Speaker 1: max while the planner burns up outside. Really, really, that's huge.
Speaker 1: That changes everything, changed life. The Visious History's brought to
Speaker 1: you by Procter and Gamble. No, I'm kidding. Procter and
Speaker 1: Gamble did not pay for this episode. I fell for
Speaker 1: him all by myself. The Visious History is produced by
Speaker 1: me LaBelle Leeman Gesteu and Jacob Smith with Elouise Linton
Speaker 1: and on a Nyme. Our editor is Julia Barton. Original
Speaker 1: scoring by Luis Kara, mastering by Flon Williams and engineering
Speaker 1: by Martine Gonzalez. Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Special thanks
Speaker 1: to the Pushkin crew. Had a fine Carly Migliori, Maya Cane,
Speaker 1: Danielle Lacan, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Nicole Morano, Jason Gambrel
Speaker 1: and of course Jacob Eisberg. I'm Malcolm Glama. If you
Speaker 1: love this show and others from Pushkin Industries, consider becoming
Speaker 1: a Pushnick. Pushnick is a podcast subscription that offers bonus
Speaker 1: content and uninterrupted listening for four dollars and ninety nine
Speaker 1: cents a month. Look for Pushnick exclusively on Apple Podcasts subscriptions.
Speaker 1: Monday is laundry day in the gravel household. As we speak,
Speaker 1: clothes are circulating in cold water and hygienic clean pods.
Speaker 3: As we speak, we already know Kamala is using it.
Speaker 6: No doubt.
Speaker 3: We are convinced that Kamala Harris is using tie coldwater.
Speaker 1: I know she is.
Speaker 2: I know she is