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Laundry Done Right · Revisionist History

• 0:15
  Speaker 1: Pushkin.
• 0:22
  Speaker 2: We all here, so there's thirty five people here now
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: thirty six so we're getting close.
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: Okay, thank you. Every Wednesday afternoon, Pushkin Industries, the company
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: that brings you this and many other audio delights, has
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: a staff meeting. Not long ago, I asked if I
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: could take over the meeting for a frank discussion of
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: a very delicate subject, laundry.
• 0:53
  Speaker 3: Now.
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: I know there's been a lot of chatter around this
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: podcast episode of mine, and there's two questions I keep hearing.
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: One is is there a right answer? And the answer is,
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: of course, is the right answer. There's always the right answer.
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: With Revision's history on zoom, I can see all these
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: faces looking at me, wondering where on earth am I
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: going with this? Is there going to be laundry shaming?
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: And the answer is yes, but the person being shamed
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: is me. The whole reason I'm doing this episode is
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: I became aware that my laundry practices were sorely deficient,
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: and I wanted to understand why. I'm going to pick
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: on a couple of people who were generous enough to
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: share their detergent preferences with me, and I'm going to
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: ask them a few short questions. John Schnarz, Maybe we
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: should start with you, John John Schnarz, Pushkin's vice president
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: of business development, sensitive, highly evolved, modern male, father to
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: many small children. Do you have a top loading or
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: front loading washing machine?
• 1:56
  Speaker 4: Top?
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: Oh? Interesting? Do you have the piston that comes up?
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: I thought it was what is called a agitator. I
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: believe by this point in my research, I knew a
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: lot about washing machines and top loading machines are well,
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: they're not good. I was embarrassed for John, a senior
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: officer of Pushkin, should know better. Let's skip to Carrie.
• 2:25
  Speaker 4: Thank you.
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: Carrie Colon, one of our top people making audiobooks Whip Smart.
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: If anyone could teach us something, it would be Carrie. Also,
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: she's a mom, does a lot of laundry. What's your
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: temperature use? Do you very temperature?
• 2:41
  Speaker 5: I vary temperature based on instructions?
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: What are these? So tell me those those particular protocols.
• 2:47
  Speaker 6: Well, actually I should know. I'll back up.
• 2:50
  Speaker 5: I go on normal wash, and so my washer will
• 2:53
  Speaker 5: tell me. If I just say normal, it does its
• 2:56
  Speaker 5: boooooop and.
• 2:57
  Speaker 6: Then it comes out with whatever.
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: The machine.
• 3:01
  Speaker 5: I defer to the machine unless there's something that I
• 3:04
  Speaker 5: think I'm supposed to pay special attention to in there.
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: Yes, okay, thank you, it's been very helpful. What was
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: I thinking looking back? I don't know. I didn't really
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: explain myself. I just crashed the staff meeting to ask
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: people about their laundry habits in the hopes that the
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: senior Pushkin leadership would teach the younger people on our
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: team something about how to conduct themselves in the world.
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: What it means to be mindful, purposeful, environmentally conscious, to
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: lead with empathy, to lean in. And when I didn't
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: hear that, I felt betrayed. I want to check in
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: with Brendan. You out there? Yeah, you are a eCos
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: nice Brendan Francis Newnham, another of our top people. If
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: you google the words Brooklyn natural wine, farmers market, vinyl records,
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: and whatever other affiliated terms show up automatically in the
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: search field, you get Brendan eco h an eccentric choice, Uh,
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: first of all, top loader, front loader, laundromat nice, Oh
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: oh oh, old school? Thank you? Yeah?
• 4:21
  Speaker 3: Uh?
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: And uh do you separate? I do?
• 4:25
  Speaker 3: Yeah?
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: And what's your system for separation here?
• 4:29
  Speaker 7: I do darts and lights?
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah? Do you wash the other different protocols.
• 4:34
  Speaker 6: Yes, I do my my whites, I do hot water,
• 4:38
  Speaker 6: and then my darks I do warm water.
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: You do your whites in hot water. Yeah, okay, good,
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: that's all. I also add bleach into my whites with ghosts. No, no, no,
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: that's all. I've heard enough.
• 4:53
  Speaker 2: Here.
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: I thought that Pushkin was in laundry terms the shining
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: laundry mat on the hill, and it's not.
• 5:03
  Speaker 3: But that's okay.
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: Actually it wasn't okay. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: This episode is about an odyssey I embarked upon in
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: the darkest days of the pandemic, an odyssey which ended
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: in me shaking my head at my fellow Pushkinites over
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: their laundry room conduct, even though I knew deep down
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: that I was no better than they were. Where do
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: you go when you've become consumed with questions of clothes
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: and laundry and detergent The answer is obvious. You go
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: to the north side of Cincinnati, about a fifteen minute
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: drive from downtown, to an industrial zone with a cluster
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: of nineteenth century Granite Buildings, the Proctor and Gamble Fabric
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: and Home Care Innovation Center, the research arm of Procter
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: and Gamble, the consumer products Giant, which makes basically every
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: thing in your broom closet, your laundry room, and your
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: medicine cabinet. I went there on snowy winter's day to
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: meet a guy named Todd Kleine. You look chemist by trade.
• 6:24
  Speaker 7: So I studied chemical engineering. So close to a chemist.
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, Todd is maybe my age. Kind of intense wiring
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: runners build. He and I actually ran eight miles a
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: night before through downtown Cincinnati, over the bridges along the
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: riverfront up through Grant Park, which I realized later is
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: a very Todd Cline thing to do. Put the visitor
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: through his paces. And have you been at P ANDNG
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: your whole lot? O?
• 6:51
  Speaker 7: I have been, and it feels like my whole life
• 6:53
  Speaker 7: because I've been here twenty five plus years now. So
• 6:57
  Speaker 7: I started on metamusol, which at that time was positioned
• 7:03
  Speaker 7: as a supplement for laxative. So I was, you know,
• 7:06
  Speaker 7: the twenty two year old single guy the school and
• 7:09
  Speaker 7: they said, you're working on metamucil. Doing what? And it
• 7:13
  Speaker 7: is still one of my favorite things I've ever worked on.
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: Klein worked on re engineering the formulation to make it
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: more palatable. Then he was assigned to the painkiller A Lap,
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: then Folger's Coffee back when Procter still own those brands,
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: A Procter they like to move people around. And after
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: that he was posted to Swiffer.
• 7:34
  Speaker 7: So my team was doing Swiffer wet Jet, which I
• 7:37
  Speaker 7: don't know if you've seen those. It's a mop that
• 7:39
  Speaker 7: you push a button, solution sprays out, and there's a
• 7:42
  Speaker 7: pad that collects all the dirty solutions. So you've got
• 7:46
  Speaker 7: the mop part, then you've got a separate solution on
• 7:50
  Speaker 7: putting out something that will both help dissolve soils, break
• 7:57
  Speaker 7: up soils, but not leave streaks on the floor, and
• 8:00
  Speaker 7: also leave a nice scent.
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: There are a few greater pleasures in life than discovering
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: that something once considered uninteresting is actually InCred interesting.
• 8:12
  Speaker 7: You're trying to get those scrubbing on hard things, suck
• 8:16
  Speaker 7: up solution and then hold it there because you're sucking
• 8:19
  Speaker 7: up dirty solution and you don't want it going back
• 8:22
  Speaker 7: down on the floor. So we actually use the same
• 8:26
  Speaker 7: polymer inside the pad that we use in diapers to
• 8:29
  Speaker 7: hold the urine with mops. A lot of times when
• 8:33
  Speaker 7: you're mopping floors, you're slashing dirty water around a lot,
• 8:36
  Speaker 7: and with swiffer you actually suck it up and it
• 8:38
  Speaker 7: holds it there.
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: Madameusel A, leave Folger's swiffer the Maslow's hierarchy of consumer products.
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: I will warn you about halfway through this episode, you'll
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: say to yourself, Wow, Malcolm really fell hard for those
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: Procter and Gamble people, didn't he. Let me just address
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: that issue now before things get out of hand. Yes,
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: I did. I was raised in a household in the
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: nineteen seventies where my father used a handsaw to cut
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: all the wood for our woodstove because he refused to
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: use a chainsaw. I think he considered chainsaws decadent. My mother, meanwhile,
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: in the dead of winter, would bundle up in a
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: parka like an Eskimo and hang the family's laundry outside
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: on a clothesline because she disapproved of dryers. These are
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: my people, my heritage, people who dwelt on the particulars
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: of their domestic conduct. At some point in the midst
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: of the COVID lockdown, I reflected on my own domestic
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: practice what do I do. I go down to my
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: basement and I throw my clothes heedlessly into my shiny
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: red LG washing machine, grab whatever detergent I can from
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: a row of random bottles on the shelf, mindless consumption
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: of huge amounts of hot water, chemicals and electricity, without
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: so much as a stray thought to my intentions. We
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: like to think it doesn't matter these little things, but
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: there are twenty five billion loads of laundry done every
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: year in the United States and Canada. That's twenty five billion.
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: The little things add up. So there in my basement
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: on laundry day one evening, I resolved to do better,
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: and off I went, in a blinding snowstorm to Cincinnati
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: to see Todd Klein, P and G's North American Fabricare
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: Section head for Research and Development. In Hindi, there is
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: a word for an opportunity or occasion of seeing a
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: holy person, darshan. I requested a darshan with the Guru
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: of American Laundry. We began our tour in a long
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: room full of washing machines what looked like at least
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: one hundred of them, front loaders, top lofeors, big industrial
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: strength Maytag machines Japanese washing machines, which I'd never seen before,
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: and which are so wonderfully and perfectly Japanese that I
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: felt like grabbing my laundry and jumping on a plane
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: to Tokyo. Figures the Japanese machine would be like more complex,
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: very cool. Yeah, it looks like a let's say, looks
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: like a flight of the moon. Each of the one
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: hundred plus machines in that long room was linked to
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: a network of black pipes, which allowed the Procter people
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: to mimic the typical temperature, water hardness, chlorine concentration of
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: every major water system where Procter and Gamble detergents are sold.
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: You want to simulate how a tide pob washes whites
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: in Raykivic in a late model LG front loader, they
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: can do that. How many people work in just in
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: this facility in R and D for detergents.
• 12:02
  Speaker 7: Oh wow, at least a couple of hundred.
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: All those people for the past decade or more or
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: had been focused on the question of how we could
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: do our twenty five billion loads of laundry in a
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: more environmentally friendly way. They begin with a comprehensive statistical
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: analysis of the carbon footprint of every input in the
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: laundry process. Raw materials in the detergents, do they have
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: a big carbon footprint? Actually not really. Manufacturing every tide
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: plant now runs on wind power, transportation and packaging pretty insignificant,
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: particularly if you're talking pods in a recyclable tub, which
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: are highly concentrated and easy to ship. The environmental impact
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: of a load of laundry turns out to be driven
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: by what we the people at home do. Blind showed
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: me a chart with all the calculations.
• 12:58
  Speaker 7: And when you look at the carbon footprint, you can
• 13:03
  Speaker 7: see that the product use phase is by far it's everything.
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: Product use is industry jargon for your laundry ritual. So
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: it's what percent is that two thirds? Two thirds?
• 13:14
  Speaker 7: Yeah, it's close to seventy percent. And what that is
• 13:18
  Speaker 7: is the energy to heat the water when people do laundry.
• 13:22
  Speaker 7: If someone chooses to use cold instead of warm, it's
• 13:26
  Speaker 7: a seventy percent reduction in energy in the use phase.
• 13:31
  Speaker 7: So you have a huge shrinking here. If they choose
• 13:33
  Speaker 7: cold versus hot, it's a ninety percent reduction in energy.
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: Cold water washing is the holy grail of the laundry business.
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: Washing your clothes in cold water means colors don't run,
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: your clothes lasts longer, you save a lot of money,
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: and you shrink your carbon footprint massively. But it's a
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: lot harder to get your clothes clean in cold water.
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: The chemical reactions between detergent and stain slow down dramatically
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: as the temperature drops. This is what the detergent experts
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: at the Innovation Center do. They try to solve this problem.
• 14:08
  Speaker 7: So factants. We use a blend of surfactants. What is
• 14:11
  Speaker 7: a surfactant. They're really the workhourse of the detergency and
• 14:16
  Speaker 7: they're a material that goes in and it basically helps
• 14:20
  Speaker 7: roll the stains off of the clothing. So they penetrate
• 14:25
  Speaker 7: into the clothing and under and lift up and capture
• 14:28
  Speaker 7: the stain, almost encapsulate it and help bring it out
• 14:31
  Speaker 7: into the water.
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: Then there are enzymes to break down the stain into
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: smaller pieces.
• 14:36
  Speaker 7: So we have specific enzymes for protease that goes after
• 14:41
  Speaker 7: protein based stains, amylase goes after starch based stains, manninase
• 14:46
  Speaker 7: goes after more gelatin manotype stains, And we develop enzymes
• 14:52
  Speaker 7: that are formulated specifically for cold water.
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: He went on, he talked about special antioxidants, something called keelants,
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: the challenge of removing body odor from t shirts. Cline
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: made the point over and over that the only way
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: for a detergent to be in vironmentally friendly was if
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: it's effective in cold water, and the only way it
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: could be effective in cold water is if it's designed
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: to the most exacting specifications.
• 15:20
  Speaker 7: When you're washing your clothes, surfactants and polymers and enzymes
• 15:25
  Speaker 7: are there to get the soil off of your clothes,
• 15:29
  Speaker 7: but when they come off, your clothes are swashing around
• 15:33
  Speaker 7: in this water, so you pull everything off, and then
• 15:36
  Speaker 7: your clothes.
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: Are circuitting in the dirty wall.
• 15:39
  Speaker 7: Exactly, so the other polymer we use is there to
• 15:42
  Speaker 7: prevent the dirt from redepositing back onto your clothes.
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: The most environmentally sustainable detergent is, by definition, the most
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: sophisticated detergent. You can't limit your carbon footprint without putting
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: an army of engineers and bench scientists on the job,
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: But just spend a few minutes online reading detergent rankings
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: on environmental websites. The importance of water temper almost never
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: comes up. Instead, it's all about simplicity. I mean, just
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: listen to this, picked at random from the Mountain of
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: laundry advice on the Internet. The eight best green laundry
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: detergents of twenty twenty one from something called the Spruce
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: Ready best budget eCos liquid laundry detergent, the kind that
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: Brendan uses, remember him, Brooklyn Brandon. eCos boasts that their
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: liquid detergent is made from plant based ingredients, as if
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: they're telling us it's safe enough to drink. Meanwhile, the
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: site earthfriendlytips dot com writes glowingly of something called Molly's SuDS.
• 16:56
  Speaker 8: Mollie SuDS is one of the best eco friendly laundry
• 16:59
  Speaker 8: detergents because it was developed to be Earth safe and
• 17:02
  Speaker 8: people safe. It contains no chemical based sutsing ingredients. Instead,
• 17:08
  Speaker 8: it's formula I did with only five earth derived ingredients.
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: Only five earth derived ingredients. What does that even mean?
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: Even the name makes no sense. Molly's SuDS. As it happens,
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: SuDS are the problem in laundry.
• 17:25
  Speaker 7: High efficiency machines have sensors that at the end of
• 17:28
  Speaker 7: the rent cycle, since are there any SuDS left or not?
• 17:31
  Speaker 7: And if there are, they'll do an extra rent cycle,
• 17:34
  Speaker 7: so you'll use extra water.
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: If you're a detergent company that wants to be seen
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: as green, you don't call out SuDS in your name.
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: You boast about all the sophisticated engineering advances you've made
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: to suppress your SuDS. The biggest question the environmentally conscious
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: consumers should be asking is which detergent will allow me
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: to do as many as possible of my laundry loads
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: in cold water. Tardkline has devoted years of his life
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: to answering that question.
• 18:06
  Speaker 7: We do a lot of technical testing maybe instead. Up
• 18:09
  Speaker 7: over here, He.
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: Led me over to a counter where he had a
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: series of Haines t shirts in both one hundred percent
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: cotton and cotton poly blend. On each shirt there was
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: a grid of little circular stains. And where you've got
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: nes cafe coffee, grape juice and blueberries, and then gravy
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: blood and us clay and then barbecue Hershey's what's that?
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: What's GCS chocolate? Just chocolate and French is mustard. So
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: we have a grid of nine stains of nine stains.
• 18:42
  Speaker 7: Yeap, and here's rice starch and soy milk, as well
• 18:44
  Speaker 7: as these two that say see them those are body soils,
• 18:48
  Speaker 7: so we will use stain sets like this. They're technical stains,
• 18:51
  Speaker 7: so they're designed not to be fully removed when we
• 18:54
  Speaker 7: do it, and we use spectro photometry to measure what
• 18:58
  Speaker 7: percent of each stain is removed. But what you can
• 19:00
  Speaker 7: see here is this is tied on cold. Relative to
• 19:08
  Speaker 7: the competitor.
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: The tiding question was tied Hygienic Clean pods. The competitor
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: was one of the other best selling detergents on the market.
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: Climb wouldn't tell me what it was. The competitor washed
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: the stain grid on warm. The Tide Hygienic Clean washed
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: the stained grid on cold. He held up the results.
• 19:30
  Speaker 7: You can see particularly with particularly with the gravy blood.
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: Gravy blood barbecue and Hershey's tied totally wins. It looks
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: like it's even on blueberries clay and French's mustard.
• 19:46
  Speaker 7: It's closer on mustard. They actually it's either a tie
• 19:53
  Speaker 7: or they may actually win. On the mustard. It's a
• 19:55
  Speaker 7: pH driven stain. The rest of them, when you look
• 19:59
  Speaker 7: at the statistics and the spectrum for tarmater results, we
• 20:03
  Speaker 7: actually have significant winds there as well.
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: The laundry wizards have given us away to save money,
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: save our clothes, and save the environment. But is that
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: what we do? No, we do not. In America, less
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: than half of all laundry loads are cold water. When
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: it comes to our laundry, we are a nation divided.
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: And who is in the hot and warm half, the
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: dumb half, the laundry basket of deplorables. Malcolm Gladwell, who
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: likes to wag his finger at other people over their
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: ethical lapses and fancies himself the paragon of science based,
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: open minded rationality, physician, heal thyself. When I got back
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: from Cincinnati, I called up my old friend Dide Gordon.
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: We ride again, We.
• 21:06
  Speaker 6: Ride again as always.
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: Some of you may remember Dede. She appeared in the
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: Revisionist History episode Free Brown Williams from season three. I've
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: known her forever. When I first met her, she lived
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: in a fabulous mid century house right by the Hollywood
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: Sign in Beachwrick Canyon. I used to house sit there
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: whenever de Dy went off on her annual trips to Japan.
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: I got to take care of her dog's sage, I
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: miss Sage. D d now runs a boutique consumer research
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: outfit called the Gordon company. You go to Dede when
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: your brand has a problem and you've run out of answers.
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: I think Dede's a genius. Just to be clear, the
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: reason we're doing this is that I was astonished and
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: ashamed to learn that I had been washing my clothes
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: on warm and hot all these years, when I could
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: have had better results for on every dimension if i'd
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: washed them on cold. And so I wanted to understand
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: not just why I I went wrong, but I want
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: to understand who are these people who I should be emulating,
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: who saw the truth before I did?
• 22:16
  Speaker 6: You always start your conversations that way. I'm obsessed.
• 22:20
  Speaker 3: I need to understand what is it about these cold
• 22:22
  Speaker 3: water people that I'm not getting?
• 22:26
  Speaker 6: Why am I not like these people? Tell me? You
• 22:29
  Speaker 6: need to tell me.
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: So I was disturbed.
• 22:31
  Speaker 6: It was like, okay, I was disturbed, so disturbed. Now
• 22:36
  Speaker 6: you were you were disturbed.
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: I'd given Didi a job the kind her company does
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: all the time, consumer interviews and analysis. I asked her
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: to find me some dedicated cold water laundry people, figure
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: them out, report back. Diddy's team did hours and hours
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: of interviews with scores of people, and now I was
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: getting the report.
• 22:58
  Speaker 4: And we asked them all different types of questions about
• 23:01
  Speaker 4: their attitudes and beliefs around laundry and detergent and brands
• 23:08
  Speaker 4: and their process. We asked them about, you know, what
• 23:12
  Speaker 4: makes them tick. And we also watched some of them
• 23:15
  Speaker 4: do their laundry and they walked us through their process
• 23:19
  Speaker 4: of doing laundry, and then we had a post interview
• 23:21
  Speaker 4: with them as well.
• 23:22
  Speaker 6: It was really interesting, really interesting. I mean, these people
• 23:26
  Speaker 6: that we talked to really love doing laundry. I mean
• 23:30
  Speaker 6: they love it.
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: There was one interviewee in particular that did he wanted
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: me to listen to. I'll call her Janet.
• 23:37
  Speaker 6: She's a laundry master.
• 23:40
  Speaker 3: She hires a nanny to watch her kids so that
• 23:44
  Speaker 3: she can go do the laundry.
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: That's fantastic, okay, I mean, like, let's get real here.
• 23:53
  Speaker 6: I mean that's some serious laundry love.
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: Janet was maybe in her forties or early fifties, single
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: mom of three, successful entrepreneur. God knows how did he
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: found her. She played me tape of Janet talking with
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: one of the Gordon Company analysts.
• 24:08
  Speaker 4: Tom.
• 24:10
  Speaker 9: Let's see, one of your best friends was going to
• 24:12
  Speaker 9: describe you to me? Who doesn't know you at all,
• 24:15
  Speaker 9: How would they describe your personality and sort of what
• 24:19
  Speaker 9: your friends and interests are.
• 24:23
  Speaker 2: Okay, so I've been called an angel and a heart
• 24:26
  Speaker 2: of gold. I will help pretty much anyone who needs help.
• 24:33
  Speaker 2: I would also think they would say energetic, all over
• 24:37
  Speaker 2: the place, world traveler, pre pandemic, and just a very
• 24:43
  Speaker 2: nice person and a good mom with good values.
• 24:47
  Speaker 9: Very nice, very nice.
• 24:49
  Speaker 2: And then some would say, yeah, she's a little crazy.
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: Jenet talks about the television shows she watches, the car
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: she drives, how much she loves to garden. Then we
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: get to the good stuff.
• 25:05
  Speaker 2: I'm a little neurotic about the laundry. I'm not neurotic
• 25:09
  Speaker 2: about too many things, but when it comes to laundry,
• 25:12
  Speaker 2: I like to buy good things. I dressed my children
• 25:16
  Speaker 2: from the time they were tiny, and you know, beautiful things.
• 25:20
  Speaker 2: I would never use like a bargain brand of detergent,
• 25:24
  Speaker 2: for sure, there's a difference. I would send sometimes the
• 25:27
  Speaker 2: girls to the supermarket and a number of times they
• 25:32
  Speaker 2: bought the store brand, and I tried it and wasn't
• 25:39
  Speaker 2: really garbage.
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: Janet's the kind of consumer that did he lives for.
• 25:46
  Speaker 6: I just loved her.
• 25:47
  Speaker 3: I loved that the attention to detail there was just
• 25:49
  Speaker 3: so every every word there was just you know, so much.
• 25:54
  Speaker 6: She just delivered so much.
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: But the truth is all the cold water users were
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: like that. All the people did he interviewed detail oriented
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: and driven.
• 26:04
  Speaker 6: These people were disciplined.
• 26:06
  Speaker 3: So like when we ask them about their washing machine,
• 26:09
  Speaker 3: they could rattle off the year they purchased it, the
• 26:11
  Speaker 3: cubic foot capacity, the number of settings, all of that
• 26:15
  Speaker 3: without ever having to look at anything.
• 26:17
  Speaker 6: There was like no manuals sitting on the side there.
• 26:19
  Speaker 6: They were just able to rattle all of that off.
• 26:22
  Speaker 6: Really impressive. No, I know they're they're superhuman.
• 26:26
  Speaker 3: It's really what the cold water users are superhumans.
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: D Why is it a question if we're interviewing someone
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: to work at Pushkin or the Gordon, why aren't we
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: asking the question how do you do your laundry? And
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: if they say I've been doing cold water for five years,
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: why don't we just say, well, we don't need to
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: ask any anything else.
• 26:45
  Speaker 3: I mean, honestly, it's got Honestly, it's got to be
• 26:47
  Speaker 3: part of the vetting from now on, Like this is
• 26:49
  Speaker 3: a vetting question across the board. I mean, they should
• 26:52
  Speaker 3: be doing the same thing with our politicians, like, I
• 26:55
  Speaker 3: want to know if these people are washing in cold water.
• 26:57
  Speaker 3: I bet you Kamala Harris is a cold water user.
• 27:00
  Speaker 6: You better believe she's a cold water user.
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: Wait to stick about that. She probably know, she probably is.
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: I'm serious actually, because I'm serious too. She's half Indian,
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: half Jamaican. Those are two cold water laundry cultures, right.
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: You know, when my mom was grown up in Jamaica,
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: they weren't. They weren't washing their clothes and hot water
• 27:22
  Speaker 1: washing cold water. So they start with the presumption of
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: cold In what other area of life can you level
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: up so easily? I could just set the default settings
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: on my washer to cold and get to be a
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: better version of myself like Kamala or Janet focused, passionate Janet.
• 27:42
  Speaker 2: I'm going to say a year or two ago, I
• 27:45
  Speaker 2: was reading an article about you know, what you can
• 27:46
  Speaker 2: do for the planet and saving energy and bringing down
• 27:49
  Speaker 2: your bills and stuff like that, and they talked about
• 27:52
  Speaker 2: cold water washing, and I said, well, that's like the
• 27:55
  Speaker 2: simplest change I can make.
• 28:00
  Speaker 1: At the end of my day in Cincinnati, I met
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: up with Amy Crabile, Brand, vice president at Procter and
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: Gamble for North American laundry. We talked about laundry, but
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: very quickly our conversation turned to dishwashing. Laundry's domestic cousin.
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: Somewhere at Procter and Gamble, there is a parallel universe
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: of dishes and dishpowders and rooms full of dishwashing machines
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: undergoing the same scrutiny given to our laundry.
• 28:30
  Speaker 10: Our friends over at Cascade found that people think that
• 28:36
  Speaker 10: it wastes water and energy when you run your dishwasher,
• 28:38
  Speaker 10: and so they'll wait to run a load because they
• 28:43
  Speaker 10: think it's wasteful. But actually, as long as you have
• 28:45
  Speaker 10: eight dishes, running the dishwasher every night uses less energy
• 28:50
  Speaker 10: and water resources than running the sink for two minutes,
• 28:54
  Speaker 10: which I know I would do.
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: Normally running run it by again, as long as you
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: have eight do you say eight dishes? Yes, using it
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: the dishwasher takes less energy and less water than running
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: the sink.
• 29:05
  Speaker 10: Think for two minutes.
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: Yet another entry on the list of things I didn't
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: bother to care about. Two minutes. Yes, really, yes, that
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: is super interesting.
• 29:17
  Speaker 10: Yes, and counterintuitive because you would think a big machine
• 29:21
  Speaker 10: has a lot of energy and water. But you know
• 29:24
  Speaker 10: many of these manufacturers are also making those dishwashers more
• 29:28
  Speaker 10: energy efficient too.
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: Can you settle for me the angel question of whether
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: you have to rinse your dishes free within the dishwasher?
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: Do you know this is to be the central issue,
• 29:37
  Speaker 1: because you can spend as much water on the pre
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: rints as you do on the actual washing.
• 29:45
  Speaker 10: Now settled, you do not need to rinse your dishes
• 29:48
  Speaker 10: before you put them in the dishwasher if you use Cascade.
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: Cascade the product of many, many millions of dollars of
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: cutting edge research designed to remove tomato, sauce and butter
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: and gravy from your plates, not some budget eco brand
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: with three ingredients that does such a lousy job you
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: end up running the dishwater shirt twice, or giving up
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: on the dishwasher entirely and freelancing with hot water on
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: max while the planner burns up outside. Really, really, that's huge.
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: That changes everything, changed life. The Visious History's brought to
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: you by Procter and Gamble. No, I'm kidding. Procter and
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: Gamble did not pay for this episode. I fell for
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: him all by myself. The Visious History is produced by
• 30:47
  Speaker 1: me LaBelle Leeman Gesteu and Jacob Smith with Elouise Linton
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: and on a Nyme. Our editor is Julia Barton. Original
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: scoring by Luis Kara, mastering by Flon Williams and engineering
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: by Martine Gonzalez. Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Special thanks
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: to the Pushkin crew. Had a fine Carly Migliori, Maya Cane,
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: Danielle Lacan, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Nicole Morano, Jason Gambrel
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: and of course Jacob Eisberg. I'm Malcolm Glama. If you
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: love this show and others from Pushkin Industries, consider becoming
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: a Pushnick. Pushnick is a podcast subscription that offers bonus
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: content and uninterrupted listening for four dollars and ninety nine
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: cents a month. Look for Pushnick exclusively on Apple Podcasts subscriptions.
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: Monday is laundry day in the gravel household. As we speak,
• 31:53
  Speaker 1: clothes are circulating in cold water and hygienic clean pods.
• 31:56
  Speaker 3: As we speak, we already know Kamala is using it.
• 31:59
  Speaker 6: No doubt.
• 32:00
  Speaker 3: We are convinced that Kamala Harris is using tie coldwater.
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: I know she is.
• 32:05
  Speaker 2: I know she is