Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, we wanted to announce officially ticket sales info
Speaker 1: for the last bit of our twenty twenty three tour.
Speaker 1: We're gonna be in Orlando on August twelfth. We're going
Speaker 1: to be in Nashville, Tennessee, on September sixth. We're gonna
Speaker 1: wrap it all up in Atlanta, Georgia on September ninth.
Speaker 2: What. Yes, it's true. And our tickets are starting to
Speaker 2: go on sale right now. There's an artist pre sale
Speaker 2: that's us for the artists starting on Tuesday, June thirteenth,
Speaker 2: then ending that day too, but figure out there's another
Speaker 2: pre sale on the fourteenth and the fifteenth, and then
Speaker 2: just regular on sale tickets start on Friday, June sixteenth,
Speaker 2: And for those pre sales, you can use the code
Speaker 2: s YSK live for your pre sale tickets.
Speaker 1: That's right, And for each of these days, everything is
Speaker 1: going to go on sale at ten am local time.
Speaker 2: So for tickets and information, you can go to our
Speaker 2: website Stuff youshould Know dot com, or you can go
Speaker 2: to link tree slash s ysk and you'll get everything
Speaker 2: you need there.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, and Welcome to the podcast. So I'm Josh, and
Speaker 2: there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're all sparkling, clean,
Speaker 2: spotless and not smelly at all for this edition of Stuff,
Speaker 2: don't you know?
Speaker 1: Actually I'm a little smelly today.
Speaker 2: Are you smell? Pull? I think you're you're nice, I
Speaker 2: would say ripe, but not in an unpleasant way.
Speaker 1: Oh wait, you didn't scratch. You're supposed to scratch then stuff.
Speaker 2: Oh oh oh wait, oh yes, that is quite unpleasant.
Speaker 1: That tickles. All right, that was my joke.
Speaker 2: That was a great joke. Chuck, now you think so too,
Speaker 2: But she's on mute so we can't hear her laughing.
Speaker 1: I am a little bit smelly, but that was not
Speaker 1: in preparation to record it. Just haven showered in a
Speaker 1: couple of days.
Speaker 2: You know, a couple of days for real?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean yeah, like two days.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, I mean I'm not being judgy. I'm just surprised.
Speaker 2: I do every day.
Speaker 1: Oh I'll skip. I skip days all the time.
Speaker 2: But when I do it, it's all over the place.
Speaker 2: Like if I have an appointment in the morning, obviously
Speaker 2: I'm taking a shower before that. If I don't have
Speaker 2: an appointment, I'll probably take a shower before bed. If
Speaker 2: we go to dinner, it might be in the middle
Speaker 2: of the day. Who knows it based on my schedule.
Speaker 2: But there's rarely a day that goes by where I
Speaker 2: don't take a shower. Not because I think it's dirty
Speaker 2: to not take a shower, sure, but because I feel
Speaker 2: like I think I just sleep better if I've had
Speaker 2: a shower that day. If I don't, I think I
Speaker 2: sleep worse.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, well, a shower is a great, wonderful,
Speaker 1: relaxing thing when you're an adult, when you finally appreciate bathing.
Speaker 1: And I certainly do appreciate bathing, but you know, sometimes
Speaker 1: you just or maybe you don't because you do it.
Speaker 1: But sometimes I just don't want to feel wet. I
Speaker 1: don't want to get wet.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, I know what you mean. I that
Speaker 2: doesn't actually happen to me. Mine is I do. I
Speaker 2: don't feel like going to the trouble of taking a shower.
Speaker 2: I just feel like feeling like I feel after the shower.
Speaker 2: So that's my motivator. I have no problem with being wet,
Speaker 2: now that you mentioned it.
Speaker 1: Shower before bed, that's nice. I should do that.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, chuck, you don't know what you're missing. Shower
Speaker 2: before bed, wrap yourself in some fresh linen that you
Speaker 2: throw away the next.
Speaker 1: Day and it doesn't wake you up too bad.
Speaker 2: No, well, I would not recommend taking a cold shower
Speaker 2: before bed. I recommend taking a cold shower throughout the day,
Speaker 2: but not before bed. You want to take like a nice,
Speaker 2: tepid to warm a shower, and it's like it's like
Speaker 2: it's like dipping yourself into a warm glass of milk
Speaker 2: rather than drinking it.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, at the risk of still going on
Speaker 1: and on here at the beginning, I have a five
Speaker 1: second story of living in Athens one summer in my
Speaker 1: friend's place who had moved out, and he was like,
Speaker 1: you know, my parents paid the rent. You don't have
Speaker 1: a place to stay. You should stay there, And I did,
Speaker 1: but he could off the utilities. So I lived by
Speaker 1: candlelight and took cold showers for three months, because that's
Speaker 1: what you do in college. Sometimes that's so colonial. It
Speaker 1: was very fun.
Speaker 2: Actually, that's cool. Yeah, so you basically glamed.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I didn't hang out there a lot, you know,
Speaker 1: I just slept there, basically.
Speaker 2: Slept there, and the cold showers. That's amazing. Yeah, so Chuck,
Speaker 2: you taking cold showers and sleeping by candlelight really kind
Speaker 2: of dovetails with a large section of this episode. Yeah,
Speaker 2: which is around, like I said, the colonial era, which
Speaker 2: we'll get to later. I don't really have a very
Speaker 2: good segue other than this because we actually don't want
Speaker 2: to talk about the colonial era yet, so let's start
Speaker 2: further back.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're talking about the history of hygiene. And this
Speaker 1: is another great one from Olivia. I've been not obsessed,
Speaker 1: but just really interested lately in histories of commonplace things,
Speaker 1: and exercise was one, and now we're doing bathing. And
Speaker 1: as Olivia points out, and as many anthropologists that pointed out,
Speaker 1: and animal behaviorists, you know, animals before human beings have
Speaker 1: a lot of practices that we would then probably can
Speaker 1: call hygienic, like bathing type of things, using communal toilets
Speaker 1: within a species, stuff like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely. There's a behavioral scientist named Valerie A. Curtis
Speaker 2: who wrote a book or not a book. I'm sorry,
Speaker 2: it was a paper about I can't remember the name
Speaker 2: of it. I'm sorry, I thought I wrote it down.
Speaker 2: But basically Curtis makes the point that you could trace
Speaker 2: hygiene and hygienic behaviors back to unicellular life, Like, that's
Speaker 2: how old it is. Is Wow, you look at hygiene
Speaker 2: and hygienic behaviors as a means of either ridding yourself
Speaker 2: of disease or preventing disease, because those unicellular bacteria or bacteria,
Speaker 2: they had ways of like getting rid of parasites and pastigens.
Speaker 2: And that's essentially what you're doing. You know, when you're
Speaker 2: washing yourself off, you're ridding yourself of parasites and pathogens. So, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's a really ancient impulse that we have. It's just
Speaker 2: now we don't think of it as like disease prevention.
Speaker 2: We associate it mostly with beauty. Yeah, so we've kind
Speaker 2: of divorced it from its original roots, but we're still
Speaker 2: doing the same thing. We're just not thinking of it
Speaker 2: the same way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And it's interesting you'll notice as we go through
Speaker 1: this stuff. At different times in the history of humans,
Speaker 1: we bathed for different reasons, and sometimes we were right
Speaker 1: on base. Sometimes we were off base. But it wasn't
Speaker 1: always like to get clean. Sometimes it was social reason.
Speaker 1: Sometimes the side benefit was you got a little clean.
Speaker 1: Sometimes they didn't bathe because they thought water was bad.
Speaker 1: So it's really interesting how we've i don't know, kind
Speaker 1: of been all over the map throughout human history as
Speaker 1: far as bathing goes, starting with hair.
Speaker 2: Well also, but even before that, like it's kind of
Speaker 2: waxed and waned, which I didn't realize. I thought it
Speaker 2: was just a steady progress towards the point we're at.
Speaker 2: Now that's not the case. There were a shower every night, Yeah,
Speaker 2: they were right exactly. There were chunks of time where
Speaker 2: we bathed, and then that just kind of went away,
Speaker 2: like you were saying, it just at different times and places.
Speaker 2: It wasn't just like a linear progression. And one of
Speaker 2: the ideas that we're I guess going to kind of
Speaker 2: get rid of in this episode is that the people
Speaker 2: in the days of your historical people were not just dirty,
Speaker 2: gross people who had never even occurred to to groom
Speaker 2: or bathe or whatever.
Speaker 1: Like.
Speaker 2: The stuff they had available to them and the ways
Speaker 2: that they were grooming seems not quite enough, probably did
Speaker 2: those of us in the West today, but it was
Speaker 2: still the same impulse, it was still the same thought,
Speaker 2: and they were still very fastidious in their own way.
Speaker 2: So the idea that everybody was gross back then is wrong.
Speaker 2: It actually they were in a real minority. And most
Speaker 2: people who are purposefully gross, especially during the medieval era,
Speaker 2: we're doing it to punish themselves to be better Christians. Essentially,
Speaker 2: everybody else was like, we're gonna just figure out how
Speaker 2: to take a bath in the river or comb our hair.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. And you know, on the note of not
Speaker 1: yucking yems, there are plenty of people, and I think
Speaker 1: even sub movements of groups of people who don't like
Speaker 1: to bathe or you soaper deodorant and embrace the natural
Speaker 1: odors of the body and may not even wash their
Speaker 1: hair because that's the thing they're trying to do. Like
Speaker 1: that's your jam. That's fine, it's you know, certain things
Speaker 1: are more acceptable than others in certain societies and cultures.
Speaker 1: But like, if that's your deal, we're not poopooing it.
Speaker 1: We're just telling you the history of this stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I feel like you're subtweeting the French right now.
Speaker 1: But I mentioned hair, and one of the first things
Speaker 1: we can debunk, I think anthe in part to an
Speaker 1: anthropologist named Judith Berman from a nineteen ninety nine paper
Speaker 1: that Judith wrote was that cavemen, even going all the
Speaker 1: way back then, and we'll use that in quotes, cavemen
Speaker 1: were just these wild, messy haired beasts that had like
Speaker 1: you know, basically birds nest in their hair. And that
Speaker 1: wasn't necessarily the case.
Speaker 2: No, I mean, look at even as recently as Unfrozen
Speaker 2: caveman Lawyer. He had a huge, wild mane of hair.
Speaker 2: But yes, she points out in this great titled paper
Speaker 2: Bad Hair Days in the Paleolithic that people have probably
Speaker 2: been cutting their hair for a very long time, millions
Speaker 2: of years, and that even I think Berman pointed to
Speaker 2: Venus figurines saying like they even had different hair styles
Speaker 2: back then, Like this is literal prehistory. These are prehistoric people,
Speaker 2: and they were cutting their own hair, they were creating hairstyles.
Speaker 2: And if you look at some cave paintings, some of
Speaker 2: the figures are beardless, others have beards, So that shows
Speaker 2: that they actually also cut the bes and trim their
Speaker 2: their body hair, probably because they were combating lice at
Speaker 2: the time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, lice comes back quite a few times, so yeah,
Speaker 1: they're probably If you're triggered by that itch inducing word,
Speaker 1: then just get ready.
Speaker 2: And also just real quick lice. By the way, are
Speaker 2: there a type of wingless insects who feast on human blood,
Speaker 2: typically at the scalp. But there's also body lice, which
Speaker 2: you can find a chest hair and aren't pit hair.
Speaker 2: And then there's pubic lice also known as crabs. Either way,
Speaker 2: you don't want them anywhere on your body, but if
Speaker 2: you don't bathe a lot, you can have them on
Speaker 2: your body pretty easy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And if you grew up in the seventies and eighties,
Speaker 1: do they still do life checks?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 1: Yeah, we had lice checks in school.
Speaker 2: There's a big controversy about it about whether they should
Speaker 2: or not, and they're like, no, this is unnecessarily excluding kids,
Speaker 2: and other parents are like, uh, these kids are gonna
Speaker 2: spread lice. So there's just like everything else, there's problems
Speaker 2: in debate at the board of education about that.
Speaker 1: There's debate at boards of educations.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's crazy.
Speaker 1: So combing hair, you know, shampoo hasn't been around that long,
Speaker 1: and we'll get to sort of where that came from,
Speaker 1: Thank you Proctor and Gamble, But combing hair was one
Speaker 1: way that they sort of cared for hair before there
Speaker 1: was things like shampoo because we have this sebum which
Speaker 1: we'll talk about on the skin and in the hair.
Speaker 1: That's the oil, the hair oil. And if you comb
Speaker 1: that sebum out of your hair, you are helping to
Speaker 1: protect your hair, can get rid of some odors, it will,
Speaker 1: you know, you know, when you don't want your hair
Speaker 1: look and get kind of greasy. But I get the
Speaker 1: feeling that greasy thing is more of a modern thing
Speaker 1: that we want to get rid of. And back then
Speaker 1: it was just like, at least comb the sebum through
Speaker 1: the hair to help protect it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it helps protect it. It also breaks up areas
Speaker 2: where dirt and dust and grime and light lice can
Speaker 2: collect and feed. So you're kind of you're doing like
Speaker 2: a one two punch with combing. And we figured this
Speaker 2: out a very long time ago. There's a comb from
Speaker 2: Syria from the well a little more recent than that,
Speaker 2: but from the Bronze Age. We found a comb that
Speaker 2: had an inscription that said, may this tusk root out
Speaker 2: the lice of the hair and beard. So clearly a
Speaker 2: lice comb. But I think they, like you were saying,
Speaker 2: they found a comb that was at least ten thousand
Speaker 2: years old, all the way back in Syria.
Speaker 1: It's an old comb.
Speaker 2: I mean, if you think about it, also look at
Speaker 2: the flintstones. People used to use fish skeletons for combs,
Speaker 2: Like it just makes sense, you know.
Speaker 1: Sure Simpsons always. I never was cool enough to carry
Speaker 1: the comb in the back pocket. But that was a
Speaker 1: big eighties look was that?
Speaker 2: H m hmm?
Speaker 1: What was the brand? I want to say, Goodies? Was
Speaker 1: that it?
Speaker 2: Yes, you're right, yep, good was it?
Speaker 1: So they make headache powder and combs two different things.
Speaker 2: It could be two different things, but it's also possible.
Speaker 2: But they're like ge they they do a lot of
Speaker 2: different stuff.
Speaker 1: They bring it things to light.
Speaker 2: So yeah, those combs with the handle and then like
Speaker 2: the comb on the side just above where your fist
Speaker 2: holds it.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, sure yeah.
Speaker 2: And then you also had the afropick too.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, with the black power fist. Those are great.
Speaker 1: So pre shampoo though, besides combing, there was washing going on.
Speaker 1: We talked about this stuff in our soap episode. We're
Speaker 1: going to go over a little bit of it today.
Speaker 1: But ash, which has lye was used to wash hair,
Speaker 1: It was used to wash skin. We'll get into the
Speaker 1: animal fat stuff a little bit later, but if you
Speaker 1: were well to do prior to the French Revolution, you
Speaker 1: might powder your hair, and I never knew what that was.
Speaker 1: I thought it was some kind of talk, but I
Speaker 1: think it could actually be flour, like wheat flour.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, supposedly. One of the I guess inciting ideas
Speaker 2: of the French Revolution was that the aristocrats were using
Speaker 2: flour in their hair when other people couldn't even have
Speaker 2: for bread. That really ticked some people off enough to
Speaker 2: like chop the heads off of the people who had
Speaker 2: flour in their hair. That's right, So you mentioned LII.
Speaker 2: I saw that you could wash your hair with it,
Speaker 2: and it has a conditioning effect too, which is weird
Speaker 2: because it also goes in and breaks up all of
Speaker 2: that seabum pocket I heard the pockets. But I just
Speaker 2: have to say this on a very personal note. I
Speaker 2: have been in a strange tunnel where things that I'm
Speaker 2: seeing reading, watching on TV I immediately see in real life.
Speaker 2: I want to give you two examples. One on our
Speaker 2: exercise episode, I was driving around qaing it.
Speaker 1: When you saw a guy jogging.
Speaker 2: No, listen, that would have blown my mind. No, this
Speaker 2: is even crazier than that. I mentioned what I couldn't
Speaker 2: even remember the name of but people have since written
Speaker 2: in the abroller, that little weird thing that helps you
Speaker 2: do crunches. I couldn't even remember the name of it,
Speaker 2: let alone. I can't remember the last time I saw one.
Speaker 2: Within an hour of queueing that episode and hearing that part,
Speaker 2: I drove past a garbage can near my house that
Speaker 2: had an abroller sticking out of it.
Speaker 1: Did you grab it?
Speaker 2: No? I was too astonished. I think I almost like
Speaker 2: ran into a stop sign. It was so nuts. And
Speaker 2: then the other one that The reason I brought this
Speaker 2: up is I watched a video on medieval hair washing
Speaker 2: and it was this medieval person leaning over a basin
Speaker 2: washing her hair with like the water kind of going
Speaker 2: down her hair kind of dangling in front of her like.
Speaker 2: Less than an hour later, I go across the street
Speaker 2: to the park where there's like travelers that camp there.
Speaker 2: One of them was washing her hair that way. I've
Speaker 2: never seen her there before. I've never seen anybody wash
Speaker 2: their hair at this park. But within an hour of
Speaker 2: watching a medieval woman wash her hair like that, I
Speaker 2: saw a real life woman at the park doing the
Speaker 2: same thing.
Speaker 1: Wow, I mean this has been These.
Speaker 2: Are like two of just fistfuls of examples that have
Speaker 2: been happening to me. I don't know what's going on.
Speaker 1: I love it podcast imitates life or life imitates podcast.
Speaker 2: Yeah, pretty much.
Speaker 1: Well with body hair, I'm curious to see what else
Speaker 1: comes true with this one. But with body hair, it
Speaker 1: kind of depends on the time and place in the world,
Speaker 1: on whether or not people thought it was should be
Speaker 1: on your body or should not, And that continues today
Speaker 1: with some people. But when the Europeans came over and
Speaker 1: met indigenous Native Americans, the Europeans are like, boy, you
Speaker 1: guys are really hairy, and Native Americans were like, no, bruh,
Speaker 1: you're really hairy. We actually pluck a lot of our
Speaker 1: hair and are not known to be very hairy as
Speaker 1: a people. And that really confused me because I've always
Speaker 1: thought that Native Americans had less body hair, just you know,
Speaker 1: sort of genetically or whatever I think they do.
Speaker 2: And I think they're like, what this is saying is
Speaker 2: that they get every last one whenever they have the
Speaker 2: airant hair come up.
Speaker 1: Well, why would the Europeans call them, Harry, I.
Speaker 2: Think this is wrong, Harry, that there were a lot
Speaker 2: of dumb Europeans who traveled there and were confused with
Speaker 2: buffalo skins. Oh really, that's my hypothesis.
Speaker 1: Wow, all right, man, if you see a guy wearing
Speaker 1: a buffalo skin tomorrow.
Speaker 2: That would be I will be reporting back on that.
Speaker 1: What about you know, removing hair like you know, pubic
Speaker 1: hair and stuff.
Speaker 2: Actually that goes back to ancient Egypt. Did you know that?
Speaker 1: I did not know. That doesn't surprise me, but I
Speaker 1: didn't know that.
Speaker 2: There's a technique called sugaring. It's like waxing, but you
Speaker 2: use basically this kind of thick, honey colored paste and
Speaker 2: it does the same thing. It just pulls the hair
Speaker 2: out in a different direction. The Egyptians used to do
Speaker 2: the exact same thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I believe it because, as you'll see, Egypt comes
Speaker 1: up a lot. They were big into you know, what
Speaker 1: they thought of as hygiene at the time.
Speaker 2: Hygiene, but also beauty too. They were the ones that
Speaker 2: kind of established it. Like they they would pluck their eyebrows.
Speaker 2: I saw in different places in different times, people used
Speaker 2: to use mouse skin to cover their eyebrows so that
Speaker 2: you basically didn't have eyebrows, because that would give the
Speaker 2: effect of a high forehead. Which was viewed as aristocratic.
Speaker 2: That dates all the way back to the Egyptians too.
Speaker 2: There's nothing hygienic about that. You're actually you want your
Speaker 2: eyebrows because they trapped the dirt and the grime and
Speaker 2: stuff that keeps it that gets in your eyes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's why they're there, right, Yeah.
Speaker 2: So to pluck it. It's strictly a cultural beauty standard.
Speaker 1: Right exactly.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: And I think doesn't the word shampoo come I think
Speaker 1: it was originally a verb that the well, I guess
Speaker 1: the Native Americans didn't use it, but we use that
Speaker 1: word to describe what they were doing.
Speaker 2: Right, Yes, they would. They would anoint their heads with
Speaker 2: essential oils.
Speaker 1: Play. Yeah, and shampoo was a verb, and then it
Speaker 1: became a noun once they bottled it, I guess exactly.
Speaker 2: So, I guess we're kind of jumping around a little
Speaker 2: bit from Inci and Egypt to the twentieth century United States.
Speaker 2: But that is where we come upon the safety razor
Speaker 2: created by King C. Gillette, I think all the way
Speaker 2: back in like nineteen oh four, and this was I
Speaker 2: think for men at first. Yeah, it was for men
Speaker 2: at first, and men used to go to the barber
Speaker 2: and get shaved every week. Yeah, And the Gillette company said, no, no, no,
Speaker 2: you want to do this every day or else you
Speaker 2: look like a total slob. And by the way, by
Speaker 2: our refillable razor cartridges. And then about two decades later,
Speaker 2: women started wearing clothes that showed their like underarms and
Speaker 2: legs and all this, and Gillette saw another chance to
Speaker 2: double their market and they did.
Speaker 1: That's right, all right, should we take a break? Yes,
Speaker 1: all right, we've gone through hair and we'll jump into
Speaker 1: the bathtub next.
Speaker 2: Okay, so we're jumping into the bath chuck cold hands,
Speaker 2: jump in together.
Speaker 1: I gotta hold my nose with my other hand, so okay,
Speaker 1: fair enough.
Speaker 2: So bathing is a really, really old thing. Look at elephants,
Speaker 2: look at hippopotami. They bathe. Humans bathed to all of
Speaker 2: the same impulse. But we kind of like it took
Speaker 2: us a very long time to get from bathing to
Speaker 2: the kind of bathing that we get to today. Bathing
Speaker 2: back then was just either submersing yourself in water or
Speaker 2: using a very little amount of it, depending on where
Speaker 2: you were in the world and what time of the
Speaker 2: what period and history you're talking about.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it was often a social thing, and not
Speaker 1: even necessarily for for cleaning your body, I guess, just
Speaker 1: like I said earlier, sort of like a secondary benefit.
Speaker 1: But they have found baiting pools, like a nine hundred
Speaker 1: square foot a great bath in Mohino Dharo, which was
Speaker 1: an Indus civilization in third millennium BCE, and they also
Speaker 1: had washrooms and homes and they had for the time
Speaker 1: pretty good sewage system going on. So they're looked at
Speaker 1: as the people that you believed that hygiene was an
Speaker 1: important thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and bath houses just kind of kept going from there,
Speaker 2: not just in the Middle East, China. Rome was very
Speaker 2: famous for bath houses, and wherever the Romans went, they
Speaker 2: brought bath houses with them, so bath culture spread along
Speaker 2: with the Roman Empire as well. And I think there
Speaker 2: was an estimate that around one thousand CE, so just
Speaker 2: over a thousand years ago, Baghdad supposedly had sixty thousand
Speaker 2: bath houses. And that is a little bit of any exaggeration,
Speaker 2: most historians guess, but it does kind of go to
Speaker 2: show like there were a ton of bath houses in
Speaker 2: the Middle East at the time. It was just a
Speaker 2: part of life.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that you've probably done this right somewhere in
Speaker 1: the world.
Speaker 2: I went to the oldest Turkish bath in Europe in well, no,
Speaker 2: I guess Turkey's part of Europe now the oldest Turkish
Speaker 2: bath at least in Hungary. It was in Red Heat
Speaker 2: at the beginning of Red Heat with Arnold Schwarzenegger. And
Speaker 2: it was awesome, man, Like the old stones are like,
Speaker 2: you're still sitting in the same place that people sat
Speaker 2: in for, you know, the last four hundred, five hundred years.
Speaker 1: I think Emily went to that very bath sure on
Speaker 1: her trip last year to Hungary. And this is just
Speaker 1: like the social thing. I mean, it's like a big
Speaker 1: hot tub, like you're not bathing, right.
Speaker 2: It is like a big hot tub, and then it's
Speaker 2: like a big sauna. And like, this bath house was
Speaker 2: unusual because it was essentially coed, like throughout right, most
Speaker 2: bath houses weren't at the time. They either had separate
Speaker 2: bathouse for men and women, or they had a single
Speaker 2: bath house that men used at one time and women
Speaker 2: use at a different time. I'm not sure why this
Speaker 2: particular one bucked the trend because it was such a
Speaker 2: traditional bath Turkish bath, but it was it was definitely coed,
Speaker 2: and it was you know, just yeah, you were just
Speaker 2: sitting there bathing with tons of other.
Speaker 1: People you want to swimsuit?
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, yes you were because it was coed. But
Speaker 2: if you go to like a place like jay ju In,
Speaker 2: I think shambily. Have you ever been to that?
Speaker 1: No, I'm not into this.
Speaker 2: It's amazing, dude. If okay, start taking showers before bed,
Speaker 2: and I'll bet you'll be into bathing, like in not
Speaker 2: too long. But this is like separate, separated men and women.
Speaker 2: Uh so you're basically naked around a bunch of dudes.
Speaker 2: You don't know. I didn't do it, but listen, you
Speaker 2: just you just get used to it, and it's when
Speaker 2: you do, it's amazing. Like the whole the whole scene
Speaker 2: is just so chill and like there's just so much
Speaker 2: warm water everywhere. It's just so relaxing. It's nuts.
Speaker 1: I'm having a panic attack.
Speaker 2: Well okay, I'll give you another one. Then if next
Speaker 2: time you're in New York, go to Queens. There's a
Speaker 2: place called Spa Castle and it's almost exclusively co ed,
Speaker 2: so everybody's wearing bathing suits. But it is it. It
Speaker 2: has like all the same stuff and it's it's really great. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I would say try start with spacastle.
Speaker 1: Okay, well, and just to be clear that this is
Speaker 1: uh has nothing to do with like homophobia obviously, I'm
Speaker 1: just I was raised Southern Baptists, and I just I
Speaker 1: don't like to be naked with myself.
Speaker 2: Oh no, I'm with you.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 2: I do not either. I basically had to force myself
Speaker 2: to just get over it, and once I did, I
Speaker 2: was glad I did.
Speaker 1: But I do know it's like, are you Josh fum stuff?
Speaker 2: You should know, right, and I just the helicopter and
Speaker 2: I'm like you, no, I.
Speaker 1: Am oh man, I need that kind of confidence. So
Speaker 1: you mentioned earlier different times where people you might think
Speaker 1: were dirty and maybe weren't, and that is medieval times.
Speaker 1: We had this idea probably that it was just everyone
Speaker 1: was disgusting, But they actually bathed fairly regularly back then,
Speaker 1: but for the odd reason that they thought it would
Speaker 1: help your inside problems, like if you had poor gut
Speaker 1: health or digestive issues. They thought bathing might could help that,
Speaker 1: which is you know, they're off base.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they were a little off base. They also thought
Speaker 2: that the that washing your hair would help more than
Speaker 2: just bathing, because that's where those digestive issues emanated from
Speaker 2: your scalp, and that's why your scalp would get dirty.
Speaker 2: It's because you're you have poorly digested food. So they
Speaker 2: were a tad bit off. But again, this is where
Speaker 2: we get to the point where this is This is
Speaker 2: where bathing kind of fell out of favor in the
Speaker 2: fifteenth sixteenth century Europe. Before that, you know, the twelfth
Speaker 2: and thirteenth and I think fourteenth century, like, people actually
Speaker 2: bathed more then than they did from the fifteenth to
Speaker 2: the eighteenth century in Europe. They were way way more
Speaker 2: into bathing and cleanliness and fastidiousness than they were in
Speaker 2: the starting in about the fifteenth century. But one of
Speaker 2: the things that these people in the later years did
Speaker 2: if instead of bathing. They were still concerned with cleanliness,
Speaker 2: but like you said, they were way off and in
Speaker 2: their ideas about how to be clean. So they like
Speaker 2: they would wear linens as undergarments and change them fairly frequently.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that you know, that makes sense a little bit,
Speaker 1: because they thought that it was like the cloth absorbed
Speaker 1: bad things and that it would clinge your skin and
Speaker 1: it does have that gauzy sort of medical feel and look,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 2: And also chuck all of those that whole look from
Speaker 2: that era, the Sir Walter Ali and like Pilgrim era,
Speaker 2: and I know they're not quite the same era, the
Speaker 2: like having frilly cuffs or frilly collar. Those are showing
Speaker 2: your undergarments and they're saying, like I'm wearing undergarments. Look
Speaker 2: at how clean it is. I'm a clean person. That's
Speaker 2: what those that's what those were for. I always thought
Speaker 2: they were just fashion, but they were. Yeah, they were
Speaker 2: a display of hygieneity.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I hate that word hygiene more than I hate the
Speaker 2: word moist.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, hygiene is kind of gross.
Speaker 2: I got two words for you that are even worse
Speaker 2: than just hygiene alone. You're ready, okay. Hygienic utensil.
Speaker 1: Oh. I thought you were gonna say sebum pocket again.
Speaker 2: No, sebum, I mean, I get it, it's not a
Speaker 2: very very pretty word, but it's at least rounded. Hygienic
Speaker 2: is just it's somehow clinical and clean and gross at
Speaker 2: the same time. I don't get it.
Speaker 1: So what did you say, hygienic tool, hygienic utensil oh, utensil. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because they would use those, there were like scrapers and
Speaker 1: things that you know, if you didn't want to take
Speaker 1: a bath, you might I think King Louis the what
Speaker 1: is that fourteenth Yes, supposedly never took a bath or
Speaker 1: very few and he would I know, we talked about
Speaker 1: aqua vite on some episode, but that's the non e
Speaker 1: proof ethanol alcohol, So he would he would scrape himself
Speaker 1: with these scrapers and wipe himself down with alcohol instead
Speaker 1: of just taking a bath.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So again they were clean and trying to be clean.
Speaker 2: They were just clean in ways we don't really recognize
Speaker 2: or think are just kind of ridiculous today. But again,
Speaker 2: if there's one thread throughout this whole episode, it's that
Speaker 2: humans have basically always had the impulse to groom themselves somehow.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and especially as different theories of disease come along,
Speaker 1: like once germ theory came along and that kind of
Speaker 1: semi coincided with plumbing getting better and better, all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, people are like, all right, if you've got
Speaker 1: a little status, then you can afford baths, and you
Speaker 1: can afford to stay clean and therefore healthy.
Speaker 2: Yeah. The first shower it's called a shower box that
Speaker 2: you could buy and install at your house, was from
Speaker 2: like the mid eighteenth century, so we've had showers for
Speaker 2: a while. And apparently the United States outpaced Europe in
Speaker 2: adopting indoor plumbing and bathroom fixtures because we were basically
Speaker 2: building this new nation and industrializing at a time when
Speaker 2: Europe was already still well established. So it was easier
Speaker 2: for us to install pipes rather than retrofit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's so funny. That makes perfect sense.
Speaker 2: It does. It's hilarious. Now we need to retrofit everything
Speaker 2: because our sewers are falling apart, as is most of
Speaker 2: the infrastructure in the United States.
Speaker 1: Oh well, speaking of soapboxes, we promised a little bit
Speaker 1: at talk of soap. We have a really good episode
Speaker 1: on soap and its history. But as a recap, the
Speaker 1: Mesopotamians used rendered fat and lye from wood ash, and
Speaker 1: that was sort of a primitive soap. But a lot
Speaker 1: of this early soap was used to wash clothes and
Speaker 1: blankets and stuff like that, and it wasn't used for
Speaker 1: washing the body until later.
Speaker 2: No, it was once we figured out and we I mean,
Speaker 2: we learned from the Middle Easterners during the Crusades that
Speaker 2: you could make soap from vegetable oil rather than pork
Speaker 2: fat soap. Yes, that's when we started using it on
Speaker 2: our bodies for sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I imagine it was a lot of that. Early
Speaker 1: soap was very filmy and kind of greasy. Yeah.
Speaker 2: And when you put a fat together with a with lye,
Speaker 2: so you derive lye from wood ash and then fat
Speaker 2: from either animals or plants, a process called sopontification happens
Speaker 2: chemical reaction. You get glycerol and I can't remember the
Speaker 2: other thing, Oh, fatty acid salts or soap salts, and
Speaker 2: that's there's your soap right there.
Speaker 1: I was about to say we could go grab Emily
Speaker 1: for specifics, but for sure, that'd be great if she
Speaker 1: just was like, no, I don't remember any of that stuff.
Speaker 1: My business is done, right. Civil War, all of a
Speaker 1: sudden people were like post Civil War, I guess, or
Speaker 1: actually during the Civil War, you know, they realized that
Speaker 1: good health could come from bathing, regularly cleaning your body.
Speaker 1: And that's when like real like commercial soap came onto
Speaker 1: the scene thanks to Procter and Gamble, who introduced ivory
Speaker 1: soap finally to the world, the floating ivory soap.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the whole it floats thing was a reference to
Speaker 2: river bathing, which most people still did at the time. Like,
Speaker 2: even if you had access to water, you probably didn't
Speaker 2: have a shower, which meant you had to heat up
Speaker 2: water pour it into a tub and it was a
Speaker 2: big process. So it was probably easier to just take
Speaker 2: cold bath in the river, and if your ivory soap floated,
Speaker 2: you could find it more easily than having to dig
Speaker 2: around on the river bottom. Yeah, river bathing just sounds
Speaker 2: really great to me. But nineteenth or earlier nineteenth century
Speaker 2: or earlier river bathing, I would not want to bathe
Speaker 2: the most of the rivers in America today.
Speaker 1: I've done it.
Speaker 2: Do you not know about our infrastructure?
Speaker 1: I've done it on camping trips, And you know, it's
Speaker 1: always important to use the I don't know what you
Speaker 1: call it, but the soap that's okay for rivers. It
Speaker 1: doesn't hurt you know, fish.
Speaker 2: Oh oh sure, without phosphates, I think yeah.
Speaker 1: But even then I'm like, is this really okay? I
Speaker 1: don't know. They say it is, yeah, I.
Speaker 2: Think fairly natural soap is fine. It's the industrial soap
Speaker 2: that's the problem, because there's so much easier to create
Speaker 2: chemicals that stand in for the natural version. Yeah, so
Speaker 2: that's usually the problem. The natural versions probably just fine
Speaker 2: for the river.
Speaker 1: I guess ari. I wouldn't do me wrong, right, no way.
Speaker 1: Shampoo also came along thanks to Procter and Gamble, the
Speaker 1: shampoo that we think of today, and that was a dream.
Speaker 1: Dr E n E was I think one of the
Speaker 1: first ones, and that was in the nineteen thirties and
Speaker 1: that's when they said, all right, like you were kind
Speaker 1: of talking about, we've developed these synthetics for factants now
Speaker 1: that clean your hair really good. And prior to that,
Speaker 1: people were using boiled soap shavings and that was sort
Speaker 1: of filming and gross. So they eventually came up with
Speaker 1: the synthetic stuff and it worked.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, good enough. At least.
Speaker 1: Do you wash your hair every day? You don't wash
Speaker 1: your hair?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Almost every day?
Speaker 1: Oh wow?
Speaker 2: All right, yeah, I have to really watch it. I've
Speaker 2: got to use like good shampoo because it's really easy
Speaker 2: to dry out and strip. And I didn't use conditioner
Speaker 2: for a while because I think I used bag conditioner,
Speaker 2: so it just like my hair would just be flat
Speaker 2: and limp and lifeless on my head and I'd be like,
Speaker 2: I'm not using this, but Now I found that if
Speaker 2: you use good conditioner and use it every couple of days,
Speaker 2: oh boy, my hair looks amazing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean different hair. People's hair is different, and
Speaker 1: different hair does better sometimes washing it a lot, maybe
Speaker 1: in conditioning, and sometimes not washing it as much. And
Speaker 1: I know, like hair styling, Like my hair styles better
Speaker 1: after a couple of days without washing it. Sure, so
Speaker 1: I only only wash my hair like once a week.
Speaker 2: Maybe you have a thick, nice mane of hair and
Speaker 2: like I do not, I've got anthony heatous hair.
Speaker 1: I have a lot of hair, but it's it is thin.
Speaker 1: It's not a I mean thin. I think thin. Is
Speaker 1: that the hair strand it's thin?
Speaker 2: Well yeah, and then collectively they're thin.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Maybe that's it because I never it looks like
Speaker 1: I have a lot of hair, but I don't like
Speaker 1: in college my little ponytail speaking around as a ring finger.
Speaker 1: Maybe I was always jealous of these guys that had
Speaker 1: those big, beefy pony tails.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I'm with you, like a horse's tail or
Speaker 2: a pony. I guess the carry Scot did he have
Speaker 2: a ponytail.
Speaker 1: He grew his hair out once when he lived in
Speaker 1: l A for a while he grew his hair out,
Speaker 1: and of course he you know, he looked like a
Speaker 1: combination of Chris Chris Cornell and wonder Woman Linda Carter.
Speaker 2: Only Scott could pull that off.
Speaker 1: Oh, I know, he looked good.
Speaker 2: Let me, I want to I want to correct myself too.
Speaker 2: Your hair could be thin individually, and also it can
Speaker 2: be thin in number.
Speaker 1: I think I both.
Speaker 2: So it sounds like you have thick hair that's thin
Speaker 2: in number. Oh, all right, that'd be my guess. Okay,
Speaker 2: either way, your hair looks magnificent all the time.
Speaker 1: I thinks you're testing. I like it. It's good. Uh.
Speaker 1: Should we take a break or should we keep going?
Speaker 1: Should we talk perfume and then break?
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's do that, and we should direct people to
Speaker 2: our perfume episode. You know, we've done an episode in
Speaker 2: almost every section in here.
Speaker 1: I know it's funny. Yeah, we really haven't. Do we
Speaker 1: do deodorant?
Speaker 2: Yeah? The difference between anty person and deodorant very well
Speaker 2: A long time ago.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's an old one. Perfume though, is you know
Speaker 1: I've talked about it plenty of times, and how much
Speaker 1: I hate colonnes and perfumes and getting in lift cars
Speaker 1: and elevators and just ended up smelling like someone else.
Speaker 1: I think it's I don't want to Yu young, but
Speaker 1: you're making someone else smell. So I feel like it's
Speaker 1: okay to stand up and say please stop doing that. Sure,
Speaker 1: because that smell gets on you. But ancient Egypt and
Speaker 1: places like that would have been a nightmare. And like
Speaker 1: the Versai, like all these places, all they did was
Speaker 1: just cake perfumes and smells onto everything instead of really
Speaker 1: bathing and watching, right.
Speaker 2: Because then you have like all these crazy floral and
Speaker 2: sweet sense on top of body odor, which means it's
Speaker 2: kind of intermingled with body odor. So it's not Yeah,
Speaker 2: it would not have been pleasant for me either.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's no good. Ancient Egypt they use ostrich egg
Speaker 1: apparently in tortoise shell.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I could not find anything on that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that must have I don't know what kind of
Speaker 1: odor that would have. Maybe that was a stabilizer or something,
Speaker 1: and they.
Speaker 2: Smell like tortoise.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 2: Well, the thing is, I think we must have mentioned
Speaker 2: this in the Perfume episode two. With distillation in the
Speaker 2: thirteenth century, you finally get alcohol based perfumes, and that
Speaker 2: like revolutionized everything. I don't think we talked about because
Speaker 2: this was news to me. The first known or recorded
Speaker 2: alcohol based perfume was called Queen of Hungary Water, supposedly
Speaker 2: hails from the thirteenth century, named after the thirteenth century
Speaker 2: Queen Elizabeth or Isabelle of Hungary at the time.
Speaker 1: With an.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, that's very Hungarian, and it was scented with rosemary.
Speaker 1: I like rosemary. Sure do you ever stroke a rosemary
Speaker 1: plant on a dog walk from a neighbor?
Speaker 2: My friend, we have long branches of rosemary like sitting
Speaker 2: around our house in vases and stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's great.
Speaker 2: Stay answer your question every time.
Speaker 1: I mean, we have our own rosemary. But yeah, when
Speaker 1: we're on walks and we see rosemary, basically everyone in
Speaker 1: the family just runs their hand along one of them
Speaker 1: and then kind of wipes it on their shirt or something.
Speaker 2: And for that reason, you should never use rosemary that
Speaker 2: you grow in the front of your house that people
Speaker 2: can contact in your foot.
Speaker 1: Oh man, they didn't think about that.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's on them. If they're using it, you
Speaker 2: can go ahead and walk in touch, that's what people do.
Speaker 2: But if they're using it to cook with, that's their fault.
Speaker 2: They need to grow it in the.
Speaker 1: Back, so someone's marinating steak might have a little.
Speaker 2: Chuck on it, a little bit of chuck.
Speaker 1: I like to think that adds a little certain something.
Speaker 2: It doesn't icy.
Speaker 1: So we talked about germ theory of disease for a while.
Speaker 1: That was called the miasma theory of disease Anetinc.
Speaker 2: Episode.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's when they thought that, you know, the
Speaker 1: nasty smelling air could be a carrier of disease. And
Speaker 1: I guess what they were talking about was airborne illnesses,
Speaker 1: which could happen for sure, But going around and spraying
Speaker 1: really sweet smelling herbs and things I don't think really
Speaker 1: helped much.
Speaker 2: No, definitely not. Their treatment for it didn't make sense.
Speaker 2: But it's always it's puzzled me why people just poo
Speaker 2: poo this like it's idiocy, Like it makes a lot
Speaker 2: of sense. Actually, sure, there's probably even I think there's
Speaker 2: diseases that you that have like distinct smells that humans
Speaker 2: can detect, So it makes sense to me. And I
Speaker 2: mean there's actually something called tularimia, which is a type
Speaker 2: of disease. I can't remember exactly what kind it is,
Speaker 2: but you can get it from inhaling the decay of
Speaker 2: a rotting rabbit or cat carcass.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, and it's bad.
Speaker 2: It's bad news because that's actually the worst version of tularimia.
Speaker 2: You can get it all sorts of ways, like through
Speaker 2: touch and all that stuff too, but when you inhale it,
Speaker 2: the respiratory version is really bad and it stinks. Obviously,
Speaker 2: the carcass of the cat or rabbit stinks at that point,
Speaker 2: but you're actually getting yeah, exactly, you're getting disease from
Speaker 2: an offensive smell that's mixed with those odor molecules. So
Speaker 2: I mean, there's at least one disease that miasma theory
Speaker 2: holds up with. All right, I think we've talked about
Speaker 2: that dying on this hill.
Speaker 1: All right. Well, let's take a break and we'll talk
Speaker 1: about deodorant and wind it down with bad breath right
Speaker 1: after this. All right, So deodorant. The first commercial deodorant
Speaker 1: that really sold was called Mum Mum all the way
Speaker 1: back in eighteen eighty eight, and it was a cream
Speaker 1: that you applied that would kill odor producing bacterias. It
Speaker 1: was kind of greasy. Nineteen oh three surprised me, ever,
Speaker 1: dry that was the first antiperspirant, all the way back
Speaker 1: in nineteen oh three.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it used the same stuff that they used today,
Speaker 2: aluminum salts that plug the pores that keep you from sweating.
Speaker 2: That's how antipersperants work. So, speaking of this stuff, deodorant,
Speaker 2: anti pursprant, it's significant and unique in that this is
Speaker 2: not an ancient type of grooming. This is actually really new,
Speaker 2: Like this doesn't have its roots in Greece or Egypt
Speaker 2: unless you count perfumes. The actual attempt to counter body
Speaker 2: odor with theodor and antiperspriant is twentieth century I mention basically.
Speaker 1: That's right. And a teenager invented something called odor rono
Speaker 1: like odor oh no, named Edna Murphy. She was the
Speaker 1: daughter of a surgeon and he had apparently sweaty hands,
Speaker 1: so she invented this anti perseprint to keep daddy's hands
Speaker 1: dry and then started selling it door to door and
Speaker 1: pharmacies and stuff. It did not catch on initially because
Speaker 1: people are like, oh, I've got these dress shields to
Speaker 1: soak up my underarm sweat and keep my shirt from
Speaker 1: getting pit stains.
Speaker 2: Rubber dress shields.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I can't. They still make dress shields people
Speaker 1: wear my guests rubber ones. I don't know about rubber,
Speaker 1: but I mean dress shields are a thing I didn't
Speaker 1: know that. Yeah, look up dress shields isn't there. You
Speaker 1: can buy them on a you know, dress shields dot com.
Speaker 2: You can buy cat based dress shields.
Speaker 1: But the odor Rono wasn't going well until advertising really
Speaker 1: picked up on it and marketing and a guy named
Speaker 1: Jane Eames Young, who was a copywriter ended up being
Speaker 1: very successful, started doing something that would become a hallmark
Speaker 1: that I think someone argue still goes on today, which
Speaker 1: is selling beauty products and hygiene products out of fear,
Speaker 1: most notably targeted toward women. And you'll see this over
Speaker 1: and over from here on out, which is your breath
Speaker 1: might stink and you won't get a man. Your body
Speaker 1: probably stinks so you won't get a man. You got
Speaker 1: underarm sweat on your dress, so you can't get a man.
Speaker 1: And it was all based around this thing, like you know, ladies,
Speaker 1: unless you clean up your act literally, then you're not
Speaker 1: going to get that husband.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this guy is patient zero, James Young, the
Speaker 2: guy who created this whole thing, and they still do
Speaker 2: it today. It's crazy, but he had a I guess
Speaker 2: for odor Ono, he had an advertising campaign called Oh,
Speaker 2: I Think the Curve of a Woman's Arm, And it
Speaker 2: looked like an article in the Lady's Home Journal. It
Speaker 2: had like a headline and the sub subtitle was a
Speaker 2: frank discussion of a subject too often avoided, and it
Speaker 2: was basically about, like, do you think you're dainty? Are
Speaker 2: you sure you're dainty? Do you know it's possible you smell?
Speaker 2: And if you smell, you probably don't detect it yourself.
Speaker 2: Other people do And this is like huge, Like people
Speaker 2: did not talk about that kind of thing. And there's
Speaker 2: this whole one page ad in the Lady's Home Journal
Speaker 2: And apparently two hundred subscribers canceled their subscriptions and cited
Speaker 2: that as the reason. But as far as Oderono was concerned,
Speaker 2: it worked really well because their sales increased I think
Speaker 2: one hundred and thirteen percent year over here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a big jump, and just to keep people
Speaker 1: from emailing. Oderono was also the name of a WHO song,
Speaker 1: Oh really from the band of Who. It was on
Speaker 1: the Who sell Out, which was that one record they did.
Speaker 1: It's kind of a concept record, I guess where there
Speaker 1: were like little fake It was supposed to be like
Speaker 1: a radio station, so they made these little fake radio commercials.
Speaker 1: And Oderono was one that Pete Townsend wrote in saying
Speaker 1: about the deodorant Oderono, and he has a big giant
Speaker 1: stick of Oderno on the album cover that he's putting on.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's a great one to choose, because that
Speaker 2: was the one that changed everything. That really kind of
Speaker 2: created marketing to people's worst fears and self consciousness about themsel, you.
Speaker 1: Know, and all of the ads kind of from here
Speaker 1: on out for a long time. And like I said,
Speaker 1: still today there are ads that sort of poke around
Speaker 1: that they're not as overt like the one I think
Speaker 1: it was. I think, oh no, it was Oderono again
Speaker 1: that said beautiful but dumb. She's never learned the first
Speaker 1: rule of long lasting charm, which is, you know, don't
Speaker 1: stink right exactly.
Speaker 2: And again it was women that were targeted at first, because,
Speaker 2: like you said, you're never going to get a man
Speaker 2: because you smell, so you odor ono. And then eventually
Speaker 2: men fell under the spell of James Yelling and his ilk.
Speaker 2: And there was a deodorant called top Flight, which was
Speaker 2: first sold in the thirties, and I think another one
Speaker 2: called Seaforth marketed to men that you know, we're in
Speaker 2: the Great Depression and everybody's job is insecure, So do
Speaker 2: you want to be the one at the office that
Speaker 2: stinks because you're going to be the first one they
Speaker 2: cut when layoffs come around? Like, that's nuts. And when
Speaker 2: you look at it historically, it's like that's crazy. And
Speaker 2: then you look at our ads today and it's like,
Speaker 2: this is the same thing. It's just more sophisticated.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the Sea fourth was at least one version of
Speaker 1: it in the forties was sold in it looks like
Speaker 1: a whiskey jug. And actually found the one. It wasn't
Speaker 1: eBay it with some other sales site, but it's supposedly
Speaker 1: still had product in it really and it was only
Speaker 1: twelve dollars, So I was like, maybe I should buy this.
Speaker 1: I gotta see what that tastes like or tastes like gross?
Speaker 1: What it smelled what it smells like.
Speaker 2: Was it Etsy that you saw it on? No, I
Speaker 2: don't remember where it was, but it was probably Etsy,
Speaker 2: you think, so, Chuck, I think we should finish up
Speaker 2: wind down, as you put it before with bad Breath,
Speaker 2: And I would direct people to our halatosis. I think
Speaker 2: Colon Worst Smell Ever episode, Yeah, which is a good one.
Speaker 2: But again, this is this has got some new stuff
Speaker 2: in it. If you ask me, like, did you know
Speaker 2: that in the Talmud, bad breath is considered a quote
Speaker 2: major disability and grounds for divorce.
Speaker 1: It's in the Talmud.
Speaker 2: Yeah, in that nuts I had no idea, but it's
Speaker 2: been around a long time. People are like, hey, you
Speaker 2: can do something about that, and you should for the
Speaker 2: rest of our sake. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think it's interesting how like maybe underarmed body odor
Speaker 1: was just sort of accepted and people are like, I
Speaker 1: guess that's what people smell like. But it seems like
Speaker 1: from the beginning bad Breast people are like mm mmmm no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: that's I don't like.
Speaker 2: That, and that interesting. I don't know why it really is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't either.
Speaker 2: So people have been combating this. This is like the
Speaker 2: opposite of deodorant. Like, people have been trying to do
Speaker 2: something about us for a really long time. We've recognized
Speaker 2: plants having some plants having like fresh smells or almost
Speaker 2: antiseptic smells, and cultures around the world who were never
Speaker 2: in contact with one another. All were like, hey, if
Speaker 2: I chew this, it might do something for my breath.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And all kinds of cultures all over the world
Speaker 1: have and still do chew on little twigs and sticks
Speaker 1: of different plants because A they might make things smell
Speaker 1: a little better. B you're kind of scrubbing your teeth
Speaker 1: like you would a toothbrush, And I think that's it,
Speaker 1: just A and B sure, yeah, it makes well.
Speaker 2: No, there's another one that's ant in bacterial most of
Speaker 2: the time.
Speaker 1: Oh, there you go. I knew that was a number three.
Speaker 2: And yeah, ab and three yeah.
Speaker 1: And they've also ground up different kinds of powders to
Speaker 1: make into what you know, would qualify as toothpaste.
Speaker 2: Yes, And these were very misguided because they were like, oh,
Speaker 2: if we use an abrasive, it'll get that gunk off
Speaker 2: really really well. So they would use everything from like
Speaker 2: ground up oyster shells to sand to pulverize bricks to pummus.
Speaker 2: And they figured out pretty quickly at different times in
Speaker 2: different places. And then I guess the knowledge was lost
Speaker 2: or not passed on that you couldn't get too abrasive
Speaker 2: because you'll pull the enamel right off of the teeth.
Speaker 2: So there were probably a lot of unhappy people walking
Speaker 2: around at different periods in history with stripped enamel off
Speaker 2: of their teeth and really really sensitive teeth because their
Speaker 2: roots were that much more exposed, which is awful.
Speaker 1: It is awful. Yeah, And I think like people can
Speaker 1: overbrush today and do similar damage, right sure.
Speaker 2: And it wasn't just the toothpaste or too powders or
Speaker 2: whatever they were concocting that were problematic. The original tooth brushes,
Speaker 2: I think the first one was invented in China just
Speaker 2: before the fifteen hundreds, and it used hog bristles. That
Speaker 2: thing was in use until the nineteen the twentieth century
Speaker 2: around the world. They basically used hog bristles until nylon
Speaker 2: was invented in the thirties. And they're like, let's see
Speaker 2: if this makes a softer brush, then the hog bristles
Speaker 2: that make our gums bleed every time we brush.
Speaker 1: Have you ever bet a hog?
Speaker 2: Yeah? They're not soft. They look soft now not.
Speaker 1: It's almost like a porcupine esque. That stuff is really bad.
Speaker 2: A little bit. Also, go check out our porcupine episode.
Speaker 1: Right, all right, well, let's wind it up in with jeez.
Speaker 1: I think we've covered this too, we had didn't realize.
Speaker 2: We did an episode on the hygiene hypothesis.
Speaker 1: Yeah, is you know, can you get too clean? And
Speaker 1: the answer is yes. Since twenty sixteen, when the FDA
Speaker 1: banned some ingredients and antibacterial soaps.
Speaker 2: We did an episode on that too. Yeah.
Speaker 1: They started saying, you know, to keep saying that it's
Speaker 1: so fun, though they've said, like, you know, some of
Speaker 1: this stuff is having negative health impacts because you're wiping
Speaker 1: out all the bacteria potentially creating superbugs, the good microbes
Speaker 1: that you need, and like, let's tone it down here
Speaker 1: with the antibacterial stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I knew about the superbugs problem. What I didn't
Speaker 2: know is that there's possibility that the two main ingredients,
Speaker 2: triclosane and triclo carban are also hormonal disruptors too. So
Speaker 2: there's a lot of reasons not to use antibacterial soaps,
Speaker 2: and chief among them is you don't need it. It
Speaker 2: doesn't do anything more than regular soap, and it's probably harmful.
Speaker 2: They also kill bacteria indiscriminately, and as we're slowly realizing
Speaker 2: here in the twenty first century, the microbiome in our
Speaker 2: body and on our body is really vital to our health.
Speaker 2: So you don't want to just kill off everything if
Speaker 2: you don't have to can irritate skin in all sorts
Speaker 2: of places.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know that, seeb them. And again, like hair,
Speaker 1: everyone's skin is different. So some people skin does better
Speaker 1: if it's a little oiler. Some skin gets way too oily,
Speaker 1: And you know acne can happen. Did what on an acne? Too?
Speaker 1: But I remember, and I might have told this story
Speaker 1: in the acne when when I was little, I wanted
Speaker 1: to We're not little. I was probably like twelve. You know,
Speaker 1: my sister and other teenagers were using the like buff
Speaker 1: puffs and nutri gena soap, and I thought, you know
Speaker 1: that made you like, you know how you pretend to
Speaker 1: do older things. And so one time I got a
Speaker 1: buff puff and a nutrigena and like scrub my face
Speaker 1: really good, just like my sister did. And I had
Speaker 1: never had pimples until I did that. And I had
Speaker 1: pimples after that a little, I mean just for like
Speaker 1: that week, and then I luckily never really had pimples again.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it's because I disrupted my my natural skin
Speaker 1: oils and dried myself out really bad.
Speaker 2: I did the same exact thing and with nutrigena too,
Speaker 2: and I used it almost every day.
Speaker 1: Oh you kept using it?
Speaker 2: I did, and I'm quite sure I changed the chemistry
Speaker 2: of my face for a very long time as well.
Speaker 2: I had a really oily t zone afterward.
Speaker 1: What's a T zone.
Speaker 2: It's the part across the top of your eyebrows and
Speaker 2: down your nose. Oh, oily t zone.
Speaker 1: That's a pretty good Maybe that's the record for the
Speaker 1: album title for sebum pocket, Yeah.
Speaker 2: It is. It'd be a concept album too.
Speaker 1: What else do you have anything else?
Speaker 2: No? I think that's it.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Check out the Hygiene Hypothesis. It's interesting. Oh very
Speaker 1: I think everyone kind of gets that. We don't need
Speaker 1: to recap that.
Speaker 2: No, if you want to know about it, just go
Speaker 2: listen to our episode on the hygiene hypothesis. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 2: this one was chalk full of interesting stuff and references
Speaker 2: to interesting episodes we've done. So hopefully you'll be like, oh,
Speaker 2: perfume didn't know about that, Oh Soap didn't know about that,
Speaker 2: and you'll just go enjoy a bunch of grooming and
Speaker 2: hygiene episodes. Okay, totally, Chuck said, totally. That means it's
Speaker 2: time for listening to mail.
Speaker 1: Did we do a listener mail on another episode?
Speaker 2: Everyone almost starting back in Man a long time ago.
Speaker 2: When you had that idea.
Speaker 1: That's right, I've got a.
Speaker 2: Really good idea.
Speaker 1: All right, here we go. We're gonna call this jogging.
Speaker 1: I might need your help because there's a little bit
Speaker 1: of French in here. Okay, Hey, guys. Was delighted to
Speaker 1: learn about the history of exercise in America and surprised
Speaker 1: of how recent it was. Something in the discussions of
Speaker 1: jogging reminded me of a wonderful story I heard from
Speaker 1: a friend we'll call him Paul, paul name some time ago.
Speaker 1: Paul helped chaperon a high school exchange trip to France,
Speaker 1: and he quite enjoyed the family that he stayed with.
Speaker 1: They were kind, and the father would invite him to
Speaker 1: join him on a run. The way this invite was
Speaker 1: expressed was, how would you say, fai t du jogging?
Speaker 2: Fay do fay do jogging. Yeah. I'm not sure what
Speaker 2: that means, though, but I've seen it before.
Speaker 1: I guess do you want to jog with me? Maybe
Speaker 1: I just like to jog. Do you want a jog?
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 2: I don't know if means okay, so well you read.
Speaker 1: Yeah, look it up while I'm reading. So anyway, the
Speaker 1: Frenchman would say, faye do jogging and said in acute
Speaker 1: French accent, even the jogging, and it just was amazingly adorable.
Speaker 1: You guys should give it a try, which I just did. Paul, though,
Speaker 1: every time, would agree, thinking it would be a nice
Speaker 1: little gentle jog around the neighborhood, but every time he
Speaker 1: was reminded this was not the case. Before they'd even
Speaker 1: left the driveway, the Frenchman set off at a dead
Speaker 1: sprint because he was training for a race that was
Speaker 1: a long distance sprinting event. He was also clearly an athlete.
Speaker 1: Paul would quickly give up and revert back to just
Speaker 1: regular jogging. And it sounds like the father did a
Speaker 1: few laps around the city like this and caught Paul
Speaker 1: lapped in as it got back to the house. I
Speaker 1: think most I think about this story almost every time
Speaker 1: I hear the word jogging, and I usually mutter that
Speaker 1: in a French accent under my breath for a good chuckle.
Speaker 1: Thanks for joining me in my breakfast wanders before work,
Speaker 1: Stay well, and that it's from.
Speaker 2: James Okay, so I think what he was saying is
Speaker 2: shall we go jog? Or would you like to go jog?
Speaker 2: But what he was saying is makes the jog? So
Speaker 2: he's saying, do you want to go make the jog?
Speaker 2: That's very cute. It is that's even cuter when you
Speaker 2: know it. And that's a good reason to learn other languages.
Speaker 2: Everybody agreed. Who is that from?
Speaker 1: James?
Speaker 2: Thanks a lot, James, and also Paul indirectly too, and
Speaker 2: also Paul's exchange family. That was very nice of you
Speaker 2: to accept them into your lives. If you want to
Speaker 2: send us an email, just like James did, you can
Speaker 2: send it off to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1: Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
Speaker 1: more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.