Stuff You Should Know - The Stinky History of Human Hygiene

Episode Date: June 13, 2023

Ever wondered when and why people started caring about body odors and cleanliness? Well look no further than today's episode. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

So, there is a ton of stuff they don't want you to know. Yeah, like does the US government really have alien technology? Or what about the future of AI? What happens when computers actually learn to think? Could there be a serial killer in your town? From UFOs to psychic powers and government cover-ups, from unsolved crimes to the bleeding edge of science, history is riddled with unexplained events. Listen to stuff they don't want you to know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you find your favorite shows. Get ready for season four of The Restless Ones, an original podcast presented by T-Mobile for Business and iHeartRad Radio. Join me as I sit down for in-depth discussions with the people at the intersection of technology and business. You'll learn how each of these leaders is building a bridge to what's next and leveraging transformative technologies like 5G to create a more connected and meaningful future today. Listen to the restless ones, available on the I HeartO app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey everybody, we wanted to announce officially ticket sales info for the last

bit of our 2023 tour. We're going to be in Orlando on August 12th. We're going to be in Nashville, Tennessee on September 6th. We're going to wrap it all up in Atlanta, Georgia on September 9th. What? Yes, it's true. And our tickets are starting to go on sale right now. There's an artist pre-sale, that's us were the artists. Starting on Tuesday, June 13th, and then ending that day too.

But if you're not, there's another pre-sale on the 14th and the 15th, and then just regular on sale tickets start on Friday, June 16th. And for those pre-sales you can use the code SYSK Live for your pre-sale tickets. That's right and for each of these days everything is going to go on sale at 10am local time. So for tickets and information you can go to our website at stuffyshino.com or you can go to link tree slash SYSK and you'll get everything you need there.

or you can go to link tree slash sysk and you'll get everything you need there. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too and we're all clean, spotless, and not smelly at all. For this edition of Stuff Push Up. Actually, I'm a little smelly today. Are you, let me smell, hold on. I think you're nice. I would say ripe, but not in an unpleasant way.

Oh, what, you didn't scratch. You're supposed to scratch, then, snow. Oh, oh, oh, wait. Oh, yes, that is quite unpleasant. That tickles. All right oh, oh, wait. Oh yes, that is quite unpleasant. That tickles. All right, that was my joke. That was a great joke, Chuck. Do you think so too, but she's on mute

so we can't hear her laughing? I am a little bit smelly, but that was not in preparation to record a just seven-hour to a couple of days, you know? Couple of days for real? Yeah, I mean, yeah, like two days. Okay, yeah, I mean, I'm not being judgey. I'm just surprised, I do every day.

Oh, I'll skip my skip days all the time. But when I do it, it's all over the place. Like if I have an appointment in the morning, obviously I'm taking a shower before that. If I don't have an appointment, I'll probably take a shower before bed. If we go to dinner, it might be in the middle of the day. Who knows?

It's based on my schedule. But there's rarely a day that goes by where I don't take a shower, not because I think it's dirty to not take a shower. Sure. But because I feel like, I think I just sleep better if I've had a shower that day. If I don't, I think I sleep worse.

Yeah, I mean, well, a shower is a great, wonderful, relaxing thing when you're an adult, when you finally appreciate bathing. And I certainly do appreciate bathing, but you know, sometimes you just, or maybe you don't, because you do it, but sometimes I just don't wanna feel wet. I don't wanna get wet.

Yeah, yeah, I know what you mean. That doesn't actually happen to me. Mine is, I don't feel like going to the trouble of taking a shower. I just feel like feeling like I feel after the shower. So that's my motivator. I have no problem with being wet now that you mentioned it. Shower before bed. That's nice. I should do that. Oh, yeah. Chuck, you don't know what you're missing. Shower before bed, wrap yourself in some fresh linen that you throw away the next day and it doesn't wake you up to bed. No, well I would not recommend taking a cold shower before bed. I recommend

taking a cold shower throughout the day but not before bed. You want to take like a nice tepid to warm a shower and it's like, it's like dipping yourself into a warm glass of milk rather than drinking it. All right. Well, at the risk of still going on and on here at the beginning, I have a five-second story of living in Athens one summer in my friend's place who had moved out and he was like, you know, my parents paid the rent, you don't have a place to stay, you should stay there. Nice.

And I did, but he cut off the utilities. So I lived by candlelight and took cold showers for three months because that's what you do in college sometimes. That's so colonial. It was very fun, actually. That is cool. Yeah. So you basically glammed.

Yeah. I didn't hang out there a lot. You know, I just slept there basically. I slept there and took cold showers. That's amazing. Yeah, I didn't hang out there a lot, you know, I just slept there basically. I slept there in cold showers. That's amazing. Yeah. So Chuck, you taking cold showers and sleeping by candlelight, really kind of dovetails with a large section of this episode. Yeah. Which is around, like I said, the colonial era, which we'll get to later. I don't really have a very good segue other than this because we actually don't want to talk about the colonial era yet So let's start further back. Yeah, we're talking about the history of hygiene and this is another great one

from Olivia. I've been not obsessed but just really interested lately in histories of commonplace things and Exercise was won and now we're doing bathing. And as Livya points out and as many anthropologists have pointed out and animal behaviorists, you know, animals before human beings have a lot of practices that we would probably can call hygienic, like bathing type of things, using communal toilets within a species, stuff like that. Yeah, absolutely.

There's a behavioral scientist named Valerie A. Curtis who wrote a book, not a book, I'm sorry, it was a paper about, I can't remember the name of it, I'm sorry, I thought I wrote it down, but basically, Curtis makes the point that you could trace hygiene and hygienic behaviors back to unicellular life. Like that's how old it is. If you look at hygiene and hygienic behaviors as a means of either ridding yourself of disease or preventing disease, because those unicellular bacteria,

or bacteria, they had ways of getting rid of parasites and pathogens. And that's essentially what you're doing, when you're washing yourself off, you're ridding yourself of parasites and pathogens. So yeah, it's a really ancient impulse that we have. It's just now, we don't think of it as like disease prevention. We associate it mostly with beauty.

So we've kind of divorced it from its original roots, but we're still doing the same thing. We're just not thinking of it the same way. Yeah, and it's interesting. You'll notice as we go through this stuff, at different times in the history of humans, we bathe for different reasons, and sometimes we were right on base, sometimes we were off base, but it wasn't always like to get clean. Sometimes it was social reasons. Sometimes the side benefit was you got a little clean. Sometimes they didn't bathe because they thought water was bad. So it's really interesting how we've kind of been all over the map throughout human history as far as bathing goes, starting with air even.

Well, also, but even before that, like it's kind of wax and wane, which I didn't realize, I thought it was just a steady progress toward the point we're at now. That's not the case. We were chunking. We were taking shower every night.

Yeah, they were, right, exactly. There were chunks of time where we bathed and then that just kind of went away, like you were saying. It's just at different times and places. It wasn't just like a linear progression. And one of the ideas that we're, I guess, gonna kind of get rid of in this episode

is that people in the days of your historical people were not just dirty, gross people who had never even occurred to you, to groom or bathhe or whatever. Like the stuff they had available to them and the ways that they were grooming seems not quite enough, probably to those of us in the West today. But it was still the same impulse, it was still the same thought, and they were still very festitious in their own way. So the idea that everybody was gross back then is wrong.

It actually, they were in a real minority and most people who were purposefully gross, especially during the medieval era, we're doing it to punish themselves to be better Christians essentially. Everybody else was like, we're gonna just figure out how to take a bath in the river or comb our hair.

Yeah, exactly. And, you know, on the note of not yucking yums, there are plenty of people, and I think even sub-movements of groups of people who don't like to bathe or usopher deodorant and embrace the natural odors of the body and may not even wash their hair because that's a thing they're trying to do. Like, that's your jam, that's fine. It's, you know, certain things are more acceptable than others in certain societies and cultures, but like, if that's your deal, we're not pooping it.

We're just telling you the history of this stuff. Yeah, I feel like you're sub-tweeting the French right now. But I mentioned hair and one of the first things we can debunk, thanks to an anthropologist named Judith Berman from a 1999 paper that Judith wrote, was that cavemen, even going all the way back then and we'll use that in quotes, cavemen were just these wild messy-haired beasts that had like, you know, basically birds nest in their hair. And that wasn't necessarily the case. No, I mean, look at even as recently

as unfrozen caveman lawyer, he had a huge wild mane of hair. But yes, she points out in this great title, paper, Bad Hair Days in the Paleolithic, that people have probably been cutting their hair for a very long time, millions of years, and that even, I think, Berman pointed to Venus figurines,

saying they even had different hair styles back then. This is literal prehistory. These are prehistoric people, and they were cutting their own hair. They were creating hair styles. And if you look at some cave paintings, some of the figures are beardless. Others have beards.

So that shows that they actually also cut their beards and trim their body hair, probably because they were combating lice at the time. Yeah, lice comes back quite a few times, so. Yeah, they're probably if you're triggered by that it's inducing word then just get ready. And also just real quick lice, by the way, are a form, they're a type of wingless insects who feast on human blood typically at the scalp. But there's also body lice which you can fight a chest hair and armpit hair. And then there's pubic lice also known as crabs.

Either way, you don't want them anywhere on your body. But if you don't bathe a lot, you can have them on your body pretty easy. Yeah. And if you grew up in the 70s and 80s, do they still do life checks? No, we had life checks in school. There's a big controversy about it, about whether they should or not. And they're like, no, this is unnecessarily

excluding kids and other parents are like, these kids are gonna spread life. So there's like, just like everything else, there's problems in debate at the board of education about that. There's debate at boards of educations. Yeah, it's crazy so Coming hair, you know shampoo hasn't been around that long and we'll get to Sort of where that came from. Thank you proctor and gamble, but Coming hair was one way that they sort of cared for hair before there was things like

shampoo because we have the sebum, which we'll talk about on the skin and in the hair. That's the oil, the hair oil. And if you comb that sebum out of your hair, you are helping to protect your hair, can get rid of some odors. It will, you know, when you don't want your hair, it'll look and get kind of greasy. But I get the feeling that greasy thing is more of a modern thing that we want to get rid of. And back then, it was just like at least combed the seabem through the hair to help protect it.

Yeah, it helps protect it. It also breaks up areas where dirt and dust and grime and lice can collect and feed. So you're just kind of you're doing like a one-two punch with combing and we figured this out a very long time ago. There's a comb from Syria. From the from the well a little more recent than that but from the from the Bronze Age we found a comb that had an inscription that said, yeah, may this tusk root out the lice of the hair and beard. So clearly a lice comb, but I think like you're saying, they found a comb that was at least 10,000 years old,

all the way back in Syria. It's an old comb. I mean, if you think about it also, look at the Flintstones. People used to use fish skeletons for combs. Like, it just makes sense, you know? That was insured. Simpsons. I I always I never was cool enough to carry the comb in the back pocket, but that was a big 80s look. Was that a? What was the brand? I want to see goodies. Was

that it? Yes. You're right. Yep. That was it. So they make head head powder and combs for that two different things. It could be two different things, but it's also possible. But they're like GE. They do a lot of different stuff. They bring things to light. So yeah, those combs with the handle and then like the comb on the side just above where your fists hold it. Yeah, yeah, sure.

And then you also have the afro pick too. Oh, yeah, with the black power of this. That's great. So, pre shampoo though besides combing there was washing going on. We talked about this stuff in our soap episode. We're going to go over a little bit of it today, but ash which has a lie was used to wash hair, was used to wash skin. We'll get into the animal fat stuff a little bit later, but if you were well to do prior to the French revolution you might powder your hair

And I never knew what that was I thought it was some kind of taupe But I think it could actually be flower like wheat flower Well, yes supposedly one of the I guess Insighting ideas of the French revolution was that the aristocrats were using flower in their hair when other people couldn't even afford bread. That's really in your face. That really ticked some people off enough to like chop the heads off of the people who had flower in their hair.

That's right. So you mentioned Lai. I saw that you could wash your hair with it and it has a conditioning effect too, which is weird because it also goes in and breaks up all of that Sebum pocket or the pockets. But I just have to say this on a very personal note. I have been in a strange tunnel where things that I'm seeing, reading, watching on TV, I Immediately see in real life. I want to give you two examples. One on our exercise episode I was driving around QAing. You saw a guy jogging? No, listen.

That would have blown my mind. No, this is even crazier than that. I mentioned what I couldn't even remember the name of, but people have since written in the aberolar, that little weird thing that helps you do crunches. Yeah, yeah. I couldn't even remember the name of it, let alone, I can't remember the last time I saw one. Within an hour of queuing that episode and hearing that part, I drove past a garbage can near my house that had an abroller sticking out of it. Did you grab it?

No, I was too astonished. I think I almost ran into a stop sign. It was so nuts. And then the reason I brought this up is I watched a video on medieval hair washing. And it was this medieval person leaning over a basin, washing her hair with the water going down her hair dangling in front of her. Less than an hour later, I go across the street to the park where there's like travelers that camp there.

One of them was washing her hair that way. I've never seen her there before. I've never seen anybody wash the hair at this park, but within an hour of watching a medieval woman wash her hair like that, I saw a real life woman at the park doing the same thing. Wow. I mean, this is been, these are like two of just fistfuls of examples that have been happening to me lately. I don't know what's going on. I love it. Podcasts imitate life. Or live imitate podcasts. Yeah, pretty much. Well, with body hair, I'm curious

to see what else comes true with this one. Okay. But with body hair, it kind of depends on the time in place in the world, on whether or not people thought it was, should be on your body or should not. And that continues today with some people. But when the Europeans came over and met indigenous Native Americans, the Europeans were like, boy, you guys are really hairy. And Native Americans were like, no, bro, you're really hairy. We actually pluck a lot of our hair and are not known to be very hairy as a people.

And that really confused me because I've always thought that Native Americans have less body hair, just sort of genetically or whatever. I think they do and I think they're like, what this is saying is that they get every last one whenever they have the air and hair come up, pluck it. Well, why would the Europeans call them hairy? I think this is one hairy

that there are a lot of dumb Europeans who travel there and we're confused with buffalo skins. Oh, really? That's my hypothesis. Oh wow, all right. That's all I was. Man, if you see a guy wearing a buffalo skin tomorrow, that would be, I will be reporting back on that.

What about removing hair, like, you know, pubic hair and stuff? Actually, that goes back to ancient Egypt. Did you know that? I did not know that. That inspires me, but I didn't know that. There's a technique called sugaring. It's like waxing, but you use basically this kind of thick, honey-colored paste. And it does the same thing. It just pulls the hair out in a different direction. The Egyptians used to do the exact same thing.

Yeah, I believe it because, as you'll see, Egypt comes up a lot. They were big into what they thought of as hygiene at the time. That's as hygiene, but also beauty too. They were the ones that kind of established it. They would pluck their eyebrows. I saw in different places in different times people used to use mouse skin to cover their eyebrows so that you basically didn't have eyebrows because that would give the effect of a high forehead,

which was viewed as aristocratic, that dates all the way back to the Egyptians too. There's nothing hygienic about that. You're actually, you want your eyebrows because they trap the dirt and the grime and stuff that keeps it, that gets in your eyes. Yeah, that's why they're there, right? Yeah. So to pluck it, it's strictly a cultural beauty standard. Right, exactly. And I think that didn't the word shampoo come, I think it was originally a verb that the, well, I guess the Native Americans didn't use it, but we used that word to describe

what they were doing, right? Yes, they would, they would anoint their heads with essential oils, I believe. Yeah. And shampoo was a verb and then it became a noun once they bottled it, I guess. Exactly. So I guess we're kind of jumping around a little bit from ancient Egypt to 20th century United States, but that is where we come upon the safety razor created by King C. Gillette.

I think all the way back in like 1904 and This was I think for men at first. Yeah, it was for men at first and men used to go to the barber and get shaved every week and the Gillette company said no No, no, you want to do this every day or else you look like a total slob right by the way by our refillable razor cartridges and then about two decades later women started started wearing clothes that showed their underarms and legs and all this and Gillette saw another chance to double their market and they did. That's right. All right, should we take a break? Yes. All right, we've gone through here and we'll jump into the bathtub next. There's a ton of stuff they don't want you to know.

Does the US government really have alien technology? And what about the future of artificial intelligence, AI? What happens when computers learn to think? Could there be a serial killer in your town? From UFOs to psychic powers, and government cover-ups, from unsolved crimes to the bleeding edge of science, history is riddled with unexplained events.

We spent a decade applying critical thinking to some of the most bizarre phenomenon civilization and beyond. Each week, we dive deep into unsolved mysteries, conspiracy theories and actual conspiracies. You've heard about these things, but what's the full story? Listen to stuff they don't want you to know

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And honestly guys, I cannot wait. Así que no te pierdas, en un momento, de chickies and chill and dear chickies, as part of the My Cultura Podcast Network available on the I HeartartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so we're jumping into the bath, Chuck, hold hands, jump in together.

I've got to hold my nose with my other hand, so we're jumping into the bath Chuck hold hands jumping together. I got a whole mind knows my other hands so bathing is a really really old thing look at elephants look at hippopotamai they bathe humans bathe to all of the same impulse but we we kind of like It took us a very long time to get from bathing to the kind of bathing that we get to today.

Bathing back then was just either submersing yourself in water or using a very little amount of it, depending on where you were in the world and what time, what period in history you're talking about. Yeah, and it was often a social thing and not even necessarily for cleaning your body, I guess just like I said earlier, sort of like a secondary benefit. But they have found bathing pools like a 900 square foot, a great bath, and Mohano Dara, which was an endoscivilization in third millennium BCE. And they also had washrooms and homes. And they had, for the time, pretty good sewage system going on.

So they're looked at as a people that, believe that hygiene was an important thing. Yeah, and bath houses just kind of kept going from there and not just in the Middle East. China, Rome was very famous for bath houses and wherever the Romans went they brought bath houses with them so bath culture spread along with the Roman Empire as well. And I think there was an estimate that around a thousand CE, so just over a thousand years ago, Baghdad supposedly had

60,000 bath houses and that is a little bit of an exaggeration, most historians guess, but it does kind of go to show like there were a ton of bath houses in the Middle East at the time. It was just a part of life. Yeah, and that you've probably done this right? Somewhere in the world. I went to the oldest Turkish bath in Europe.

In, well, now I guess Turkey is part of Europe now. The oldest Turkish bath at least in Hungary. It was in red heat at the beginning of red heat with Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was awesome, man. The old stones are like, you're still sitting in the same place that people sat in for the last 400, 500 years. I think Emily went to that very bath on her trip last year to Hungary. And this is just like the social thing.

I mean, it's like a big hot tub. Like, you're not bathing, right? It is like a big hot tub and it's like a big sauna. And like this, this bathhouse is unusual because it was essentially co-ed like throughout. Right. Most bathhouses weren in at the time. They either had separate bath houses for men and women, or they had a single bath house that men used at one time,

and women used at a different time. I'm not sure why this particular one bucked the trend, because it was such a traditional bath, Turkish bath. But it was definitely COVID, and it was, you know, just, yeah, you were just sitting there bathing with tons of other people. You and I swim soon? Yes, yes, you were.

Because it was co-aid. But if you go to like a place like J.J. and I think, Chambley, have you ever been to that? No, I'm not into this. It's amazing, dude. If you, okay, start taking showers before bed and I'll bet you'll be into bathing like in not too long but this is like separate um separated uh men and women uh so you're basically naked around a bunch of dudes you

don't know not into it but listen you just you just get used to it and it's when you do it's amazing like the whole the whole scene is just so chill and like there's just so much warm water everywhere it's just so relaxing it's nuts. I'm having a panic attack. Well okay I'll give you another one then. Next time you're in New York go to Queens there's a place called Spa Castle and it's almost exclusively co-ed so everybody's wearing bathing suits but it but it has like all the same stuff and it's really great. I would say try start with spa castle.

Okay. And just to be clear, this is, it has nothing to do with homophobia, obviously. I was raised Southern Baptist and I don't like to be naked with myself. Oh, no, I'm with you. I don't need it. I do not either. I basically had to force myself to be naked with myself. Oh, no, I'm with you. I don't need to. I do not either. I basically had to force myself to just get over it. And once I did, I was glad I did.

But I do know it's like, are you Josh from stuff you should know? Right. Is there a big helicopter? And I'm like, you know, I am. Oh, man, I need that kind of confidence. So you mentioned earlier, different times where people you might think were dirty and maybe weren't, and that is medieval times. We had this idea probably that it was just everyone was disgusting, but they actually

bathed fairly regularly back then. But for the odd reason that they thought it would help your inside problems. Like if you had poor gut health or digestive issues, they thought bathing might could help that, which is, you know, they're off base. Yeah, they were a little off base. They also thought that washing your hair would help more than just bathing, because that's where those digestive issues emanated from your scalp,

and that's why your scalp would get dirty, it's because you have poorly digested food. So they were a tab bit off, but again, this is where we get to the point where this is where bathing kind of fell out of favor in the 15th, 16th century Europe. Before that in the 12th and 13th, and I think 14th century, people actually bathed more than they did from the 15th to the 18th century in Europe.

They were way more into bathing and cleanliness and festitiousness than they were in the, in starting in about the 15th century. But one of the, one of the things that these people in the later years did, if instead of bathing, they were still concerned with cleanliness, but like you said, they were way off in their ideas about how to be clean. So they, like, they would wear linens as undergarments and check them fairly frequently. Yeah, and that, you know, that makes sense a little bit because they thought that it was like the cloth absorbed bad things and that it would cleanse your skin. And it does have that gauzy sort of medical feel and look, you know, and also check

all of those. That whole look from that era, the Suru Walter Raleigh in probably like pilgrim era. And I know they're not quite the same era. The like having frilly cuffs or frilly collar, those are showing your undergarments. And they're saying like, I'm wearing undergarments. Look at how clean it is. I'm a clean person. That's what those, that's what those were for. I always thought they were just fashion But they were yeah, they were a display of Hygienic Yeah, which by the way that gruffle I

Hate that word hygiene more than I hate the word moist. Oh Yeah, hygiene is kind of gross. I got two words for you that are even worse than just hygiene alone. You ready? Okay Hygienic utensil. Oh, I thought you were going to say sebum pocket again. No, sebum, I mean, I get it. It's not a very, very pretty word, but it's at least rounded.

Hygienic is just, it's somehow clinical and clean and gross at the same time. I don't get it. So what did you say, hygienic tool? Hygienic utensil. Oh, utensil. Oh, utensil. Yeah, because they would use those, there were like scrapers and things that, you know, if you didn't want to take a bath, you might, I think, King Louis, what is that?

Thor 14th? Yes. Uh, supposedly never took a bath or very few. And he would, I know we talked about Aqua Vitae on some episode, but that's the 90 proof ethanol alcohol. So he would scrape himself with these scrapers and wipe himself down with alcohol instead of just taking a bath. Yeah.

So again, they were clean and trying to be clean. They were just clean in ways we don't really recognize or think are just kind of ridiculous today, but again, if there's one thread throughout this whole episode, it's that humans have basically always had the impulse to to groom themselves somehow. of disease come along, like once germ theory came along, and that kind of semi-coincited with plumbing, getting better and better. All of a sudden, people are like, all right, if you got a little status, then you can afford baths and you can afford to stay clean and therefore healthy. Yeah, the first shower, it's called a shower box that you could buy and install at your house was from like the mid 18th century. So we've had showers for a while.

And apparently the United States outpaced Europe in adopting indoor plumbing and bathroom fixtures because we were basically building this new nation and industrializing at a time when Europe was already still well established. So it was easier for us to install pipes rather than retrofit. Yeah, that's so funny, that makes perfect sense.

It does, it's hilarious. Now we need to retrofit everything, because our sewers are falling apart, as is most of the infrastructure in the United States. Oh, well speaking of soap boxes, we promised a little bit of talk of soap. We have a really good episode on soap in its history, but as a recap, the Mesopotamians used rendered fat and lie from wood ash, and that was sort of a primitive soap. But a lot of this early soap was used to wash clothes and blankets and stuff like that, and it wasn't used for washing the body until later.

kits and stuff like that, and it wasn't used for washing the body until later. No, it was once we figured out, and we, I mean, we learned from the Middle Easterners during the Crusades that you could make soap from vegetable oil rather than pork fat soap. Yes. That's when we started using it on our bodies, for sure. Yeah, I imagine it was a lot of that early so it was very philmy and kind of greasy. Yeah, and when you put a fat together with a with lie, so you derive lie from wood ash to them fat from either animals or plants, a process called suponification happens. It's a chemical reaction, you get glycerol, and I can't remember the other thing. Oh, fatty acid salts or soap salts.

And that's, there's your soap right there. That was about to say we could go grab Emily for specifics, but for sure. That'd be great if she just was like, now I don't remember any of that stuff. My business is done. Right, yeah. Civil war, all of a sudden people were like,

post-civil war I guess. We're actually during the Civil War, all of a sudden people were like post-civil war, I guess, or actually during the Civil War. You know, they realized that good health could come from bathing regularly, cleaning your body. And that's when like real, like commercial soap came onto the scene, thanks to Proctor and Gamble, who introduced ivory soap finally to the world. The floating ivory soap. Yeah, the whole... it floats thing was a reference to river bathing, which most people still did at the time. Like, even if you had access to water, you probably didn't have a shower, which meant you had to heat up water, pour it into a tub, and it was a big process. So it was probably easier to just take a cold bath in the river, and if your ivory soap floated,

you could find it more easily than having to dig around on the river bottom. Yeah. River bathing just sounds really great to me, but 19th or earlier, 19th century or earlier river bathing. I would not want to bathe the most of the rivers in America today. I've done it. Do you not know about our infrastructure? No, I've done it on camping trips and you know it's always important to use the, I don't know what you call it, but the soap that's that's okay for rivers. It doesn't hurt, you know, fish. Oh, sure, without phosphates, I think. Yeah, but even then, I'm like, is this really okay?

I don't know. They say it is. Yeah, I think fairly natural soap is fine. It's the industrial soap that's the problem, because it's so much easier to create chemicals that stay in the natural version. Yeah. So that's usually the problem. The natural version is probably just fine for the river.

I guess, Ari, I wouldn't do me wrong, right? No way. A shampoo also came along thanks to Procter and Gamble, the shampoo that we think of today. And that was a dream. D-R-E-N-E, was I think one of the first ones and that was in the 1930s and that's when they said, all right, like you were kind of talking about, we developed these synthetics or factants now that clean your hair really good and prior to that people were using boiled soap shavings and that was sort of filming

in growth so they eventually came up with the synthetic stuff and it worked well. Yeah, good enough at least. You wash your hair everyday, you don't wash your hair everyday. Yeah, almost everyday. Oh wow, alright. Yeah, I have to really watch it. I've got to use like good shampoo because it's really easy to dry out and strip and I didn't

use conditioner for a while because I think I use bag conditioner. So I just like my hair would just be flat and limp and lifeless on my head and I'd be like, I'm not using this. But now I found that if you use good conditioner and use it every couple of days, oh boy, my hair looks amazing. Yeah, I mean different hair, people's hair is different. Different hair does better, sometimes washing it a lot, maybe, and conditioning, and sometimes not washing it as much.

And I know like hair styling, like my hair styles better after a couple of days without washing it. Sure. So I only wash my hair like once a week, maybe. You have a thick, nice mane of hair. And like, I do not, I've got Anthony hair. I have to do this hair. I have a lot of hair of hair and like I do not. I've got Anthony here. I have a lot of hair, but it is thin.

It's not a, I mean, thin, I think thin is that the hair strand that it's thin? Well, yeah, and then collectively they're thin. Yeah, maybe that's it, because I never, it looks like I have a lot of hair, but I don't. Like in college, my little ponytail, speaking around, it's a ring finger, maybe. I was always jealous of these guys. I had those big beefy pony tails.

Yeah, no one with you. Like a horse's tail. Her pony, I guess. I never put those two together. That carries God. Did he have a ponytail? He grew his hair out once when he lived in LA for a while, he grew his hair out.

Sure. And of course, he, you know, he looked like a combination of Chris Cornell and Wonder Woman. Linda Carter. Sure. He's great hair. He's a guy. He's got a couple of that off.

Oh, I know. He looked good. Let me, I want to correct myself to Your hair can be thin individually and also it can be thin and number I think I both so it sounds like you have thick hair that's thin and number. Oh, all right That'd be my guess. Okay, either way your hair looks magnificent all the time. No, thanks. You're just I like it. It's good Should we take a break or should we keep going? Should we talk perfume and then break? Yeah, let's do that. And we should direct people to our

perfume episode. You know, we've done an episode on almost every section in here. I know, it's funny. Yeah, we really have it. Do we do want it deodorant? Yeah, the difference between any perspiment and deodorant. Very nice. long time ago. Yeah, it's an old one. Perfume though is, I've talked about it plenty of times of how much I hate colons and perfumes and getting in lift cars and elevators and just into smelling like someone else. I think it's I don't want to get young, but you're making someone else smell, so I feel like it's okay to stand up and say, please stop doing that. Sure. Because that smell gets on you, but ancient Egypt and places like that would have been a

nightmare. And like the Versailles, like all these places, all they did was just cake perfumes and smells onto everything instead of really bathing and washing. Right. and smells onto everything instead of really bathing and washing. Right, because then you have like all these crazy floral and sweet scents on top of body odor, which means it's kind of intermingled with body odor. So it's not, yeah, it would not have been pleasant for me either. Yeah, it's no good. Ancient Egypt, they use ostrich egg, apparently, and tortoise shell.

Yeah, I could not find anything on that. in Egypt, they use ostrich egg apparently in tortoise shell. Yeah, I could not find anything on that. Yeah, that must have, I don't know, what kind of odor that would have. Maybe that was a stabilizer or something? I don't know. It smell like tortoise. I don't know.

Well, the thing is, I think we must have mentioned this in the perfume episode two, with distillation in the 13th century, you finally get alcohol-based perfumes and that like revolutionized everything. I don't think we talked about, because this was news to me. The first known or recorded alcohol-based perfume

was called Queen of Hungary Water. Supposedly he was from the 13th century, named after the 13th century, Queen Elizabeth or Isabel of Hungary at the time. With an S. Yes, yeah, that's very Hungarian. And it was sent it with rosemary. I like rosemary. Sure.

You ever stroke a rosemary plant on a dog walk from a neighbor? My friend, we have long branches of rosemary like sitting around our house invasives and stuff. Yeah. So yeah, it's great. Stains your question every time. I mean, we have our own rosemary, but yeah, when we're on walks and we see rosemary, basically everyone in the family just runs their hand along one of them and then kind of wipes it on their shirt or something. Yeah. And for that reason, you should never use rosemary that you grow in the front of your house that people can contact in your food. Oh man, I didn't think about that.

I mean, that's on them. If they're using it, you can go ahead and walk and touch. That's what people do. But if they're using it to cook with, that's their fault. They need to grow it in the back. So someone's marinating steak might have a little chuck on it. A little bit of chuck. I like to think that adds a little certain something.

It does. It's spicy. So we talked about germ theory of disease for a while that was called the measumethere of disease. That was in our case. And that's the end of the episode. Yeah. And that's when they thought that the nasty smelling air could be a carrier of disease.

I guess what they were talking about was airborne illnesses, which could happen for sure, but going around and spraying really sweet smelling herbs and things, I don't think really helped much. No, definitely not. Their treatment for it didn't make sense, but it's always puzzled me why people just poo-poo this, like it's idiocy. Like it makes a lot of sense, actually. There's probably, I think there's diseases

that have like distinct smells that humans can detect. So it makes sense to me. And I mean, there's actually something called tuliremia, which is a type of disease. I can't remember exactly what kind it is, but you can get it from inhaling the decay of eroding rabbit or cat carcass. Oh my gosh, and it's bad. It's bad news because that's actually the worst version of Tularemia. You can get it all sorts of ways like through touch and all that stuff too, but when you inhale it, the

respiratory version is really bad. And it stinks obviously the carcass of the cat or rabbit stinks at that point. But you're actually getting, yeah, exactly. You're getting disease from an offensive smell that's mixed with those odor molecules. So, I mean, there's at least one disease that my asthma theory holds up with. All right. That's what we've talked about. I'm dying on this hill. All right. Well, let's take a break and we'll talk about deodorant and wind it down with bad breath right after this. There's a ton of stuff they don't want you to know. Does the US government really have alien technology? And what about the future of artificial intelligence, AI? What happens when computers learn to think?

Could there be a serial killer in your town? From UFOs to psychic powers and government cover-ups, from unsolved crimes to the bleeding edge of science, history is riddled with unexplained events. We've spent a decade applying critical thinking to some of the most bizarre phenomenon civilization and beyond. Each week, we dive deep into unsolved mysteries, conspiracy theories and actual conspiracies. You've heard about these things, but what's the full story?

Listen to stuff they don't want you to know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What's up fam, I'm Brian Ford, Artisan Vaker, and host of the new podcast, Flaky Biscuit. On this podcast, I'm going to get to know my guests by cooking up their favorite nostalgic meal. It could be anything from Twinkies to mom's Thanksgiving dressing. Sometimes I might get it wrong, sometimes I'll get it right. I'm so happy it's good because man, if it wasn't, I'd be like, you know, everybody not my mom.

Either way, we will have a blast. You'll have access to every recipe so you can cook and bake alongside me. As I talk to artists, musicians, and chefs about how this meal guided them to success. And these nostalgic meals, fam, they inspire one of a kind conversations. When I bake this recipe, it hit me like a ton of bricks. Does this podcast come with a therapist? They can. Listen to Flaky Biscuit every Tuesday on the I Heart Radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. With all the chaos and turmoil in the news, it feels like we never get to hear about the

good happening in our world. We're on a mission to change that. Welcome to the good stuff. I'm Jacob Schick, a third-generation combat Marine. And I'm his co-host and wife Ashley Schick. We believe everyone has a story to tell, not only about the peaks, but the valleys they've been through to get them to where they are today, as we get to tell stories of inspiration and perseverance. We're joined by some amazing guests who share the lessons they've learned

that shape two they are and what they're doing to pay it forward and give back. Our guests range from some of my fellow warriors to NFL cheerleaders, to extreme sports legends, to New York City firefighters who survived 9-11. Listen to the good stuff on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, so deodorant, the first commercial deodorant that really sold was called Mum MUM, all the way back in 1888, and it was a cream that you applied that would kill odor-producing bacterias.

It was kind of greasy. 1903 surprised me, Everdry, that was the first anti-perspirant all the way back in 1903. Yeah, and it used the same stuff that they used today aluminum salts that plug the the pores that keep you from sweating. That's how anti-perspirants work. So speaking of this stuff the odor in any perspirant it's it's significant and unique in that this is not an ancient in any perspirate, it's significant and unique in that this is not an ancient type of grooming. This is actually really new. Like this doesn't have its roots in Greece or Egypt unless you count perfumes. The actual attempt to counter body odor with the odor in any perspirate is 20th century

invention basically. That's right. In a teenager invented something called odorono, like odor, oh no, name Edna Murphy, she was a daughter of a surgeon, and he had apparently sweaty hands. So she invented this anti-perspirant to keep daddy's hands dry,

and then started selling it door to door, and pharmacies and stuff. It did not catch on initially because people are like, oh, I've got these dress shields to soak up my underarm sweat and keep my shirt from getting pit stains. Rubber dress shields. Yeah. Can you imagine anything else? No, I can't. They still make dress shields. People wear my guests. Rubber ones? No, I don't know about rubber, but I mean, dress shields are a thing. I didn't know that. Yeah, I'm look up dress shields, isn I mean, dress shields are a thing. I didn't know that.

Yeah, and look up dress shields, isn't there? You can buy them on, you know, dress shields. Com. Com bike, cat-based dress shields. But the Oterona wasn't going well until advertising really picked up on it. And marketing and a guy named James Young, who was a copywriter, ended up being very successful.

I started doing something that would become a hallmark that I think someone argues still goes on today, which is selling beauty products and hygiene products out of fear, most notably targeted toward women. You'll see this over and over from here on out, which is your breath might stink and you won't get a man. Your body probably stinks so you won't get a man. You got a smell or a underarm sweat on your dress. So you can't get a man and it was all based around this thing

like, you know, ladies, unless you clean up your act literally, then you're not going to get that husband. Yeah. And this guy is patient zero, James Young, the guy who created this whole thing. And they still do it today. It's crazy. But he had a, I guess for Otero No, he had an advertising campaign called, oh, I think the curve of a woman's arm.

And it looked like an article in the Ladies Home Journal. It had a headline, and the subtitle was a frank discussion of a subject too often avoided. And it was basically about, do you think you're dainty? Are you sure you're dainty? Do you know it's possible you smell? If you smell, you probably don't detect it yourself. Other people do. This was huge. People did not talk about that kind of thing and there's this whole one page add in ladies home journal and apparently 200 subscribers cancel their subscriptions and cited that as the reason but

as far as odor oh no was concerned it worked really well because there sales increased I think 113% year over year. Yeah, that's a big jump. And just to keep people from emailing, Oteruno was also the name of a who song. Oh really? From the band The Who. It was on The Who Sellout, which was that one record they did. It's kind of a concept record, I guess, where there were like little fake, it was supposed to be like a radio station, so they made these little fake radio commercials.

And Oterono was one that Pete Townsend wrote and sang about the deodorant Oterono, and he has a big giant stick of Oterono on the album cover that he's putting on. I mean, that's a great one to choose because that was the one that changed everything, that really kind of created marketing to people's worst fears and self-consciousness about themselves, you know. And all of the ads kind of from here on out for a long time, and like I said, still today there are ads that sort of poke around that. They're not as overt. Like the one, I think it was, I think,

I don't know, it was Oderona again, that said, beautiful but dumb, she's never learned the first rule of long-lasting charm, which is, you know, don't stink. Right, exactly. Again, it was women that were targeted at first because like you said, you're never gonna get a man because you smell, so you use Oderona.

And then eventually men fell under the spell of James Young and his ilk. And there was a deodorant called Top Flight, which was first sold in the 30s. And I think another one called C-4th marketed to men that, you know, we're in the Great Depression and everybody's job is insecure. So do you want to be the one at the office that stinks because you're gonna be the first one they cut when layoffs come around? Like that's nuts.

And when you look at it historically, it's like, that's crazy. And then you look at our ads today. It's like, this is the same thing. It's just more sophisticated. Yeah, the C-4th was at least one version of it in the 40s was sold in it looks like a whiskey jug And actually found the one it wasn't eBay. It was some other sales site, but

It's supposedly still had product in it really and it was only $12 so I was like maybe I should buy this I gotta see what that that tastes like or tastes like gross What it smells like was it aty that you saw it on? No, I don't remember where it was, but it was probably Etsy. You think? So Chuck, I think we should finish up wind down as you put it before with bad breath. And I would direct people to our halitosis,

I think colon worst smell ever episode. Yeah, which is a good one. But again, this has got some new stuff in it, if you ask me, like, did you know that in the Talmud, bad breath is considered a quote major disability and grounds for divorce? It's in the Talmud. Yeah, in that nuts, I had no idea.

But it's been around a long time, people are like, in that nuts, I had no idea. But it's been around a long time, people are like, hey, you can do something about that and you should for the rest of our sake. Yeah, I think it's interesting how like maybe underarm body odor was just sort of accepted in people like, I guess that's what people smell like. But it seems like from the beginning, bad breath, people are like, mm-hmm, no, no, no, no, that's that don't like that. And that interesting, I don't know why.

It really is, yeah, I don't either. So people have been combating, this is like the opposite of deodorant. Like people have been trying to do something about this for a really long time. We've recognized plants having, some plants having like fresh smells or almost antiseptic smells and cultures around the world who've never in contact with one another all were like, hey if I chew this it might do something for my breath. Yeah and all kinds of cultures all over the world have and still do chew on little twigs and sticks of different plants because A, they might make things smell a little better. B, you're kind of

scrubbing your teeth like you would a toothbrush. And I think that's it, just A and B. Sure, yeah, it makes, well, no, there's another one that's an antibacterial most of the time. Oh, there you go. I knew that was a number three. And yeah, A, B and three. And they've also ground up different kinds of powders to make into what, you know, would qualify as toothpaste. Yes. And these were very misguided because they were like, oh, if we use it in abrasive, it'll get that gunk off really, really well.

So they would use everything from, like, ground up oyster shells to sand, to pulverize bricks, to pumice. And they figured out pretty quickly at different times in different places and then I guess the knowledge was lost or not passed on, that you couldn't get too abrasive because you'll pull the enamel right off of the teeth. So there were probably a lot of unhappy people walking around

at different periods in history with stripped enamel off of their teeth and really, really sensitive teeth because their roots were that much more exposed, which is awful. It is awful. Yeah, and I think people can overbrush today and do similar damage, right? Sure. And it wasn't just the toothpaste or tooth powders or whatever they were concocting that were problematic. The original toothbrushes, I think the first one was invented in China just before the 1500s.

And it used hog bristles. That thing was in use until the 20th century around the world. They basically used hog bristles until nylon was invented in the 30s. And they're like, let's see if this makes a softer brush than the hog bristles that make our gums bleed every time we brush. Have you ever pet a hog? Yeah, they're not soft, they look soft.

No, no. It's almost like a porcupine-esque, that stuff is really bad. A little bit. Also go check out our porcupine episode. Right. All right, well let's wind it up then with, geez, I think we've covered this too.

We had it in real life. We did an episode on the hygiene hypothesis. Yeah, is, you know, can you get too clean? And the answer is yes, since 2016, when the FDA banned some ingredients and antibacterial soaps. We did an episode on that too. Yeah, they started saying, you know, keep saying that.

It's so fun, though. They've said, you know, some of this stuff is having negative health impacts because you're wiping out all the bacteria, potentially creating super bugs, good microbes that you need, and like, let's tone it down here with the antibacterial stuff. Yeah, I knew about the superbugs problem. What I didn't know is that there's possibility that the two main ingredients,

triclosane and triclocarbane, are also hormonal disruptors too. So there's a lot of reasons not to use antibacterial soaps. And chief among them is, you don't need it. It doesn't do anything more than regular soap and it's probably harmful.

They also kill bacteria indiscriminately and as we're slowly realizing here in the 21st century, the microbiome in our body and on our body is really vital to our health. So you don't want to just kill off everything if you don't have to. And it can irritate skin in all sorts of places. Yeah, you know, that's even, and again, like hair, everyone's skin is different. So some people

skin does better if it's a little oily, some skin gets way too oily and you know, acne can happen. I did what I'm not going to. But I remember, and I might have told the story in the acne when when I was little, I wanted to, I don't in the acne when when I was little I wanted to I don't know a little I was probably like 12, you know my sister and other teenagers were using the like buff puffs and Nutrogena soap and I thought you know that made you like, you know how you pretend to do older things and so one time I got a buff puff and a Nutrogena and like scrub my face good, just like my sister did. And I had never had pimples until I did that and I had pimples after that a little, I mean just for like that week. And then I luckily never really had pimples again. But yeah, it's because I disrupted my natural skin oils and dried myself out really bad.

I did the same exact thing and with Neutrogena too. And I used it almost every day. Oh, you kept using it. I did and I'm quite sure I changed the chemistry of my face for a very long time as well. I had a really oily T-zone afterward. What's a T-zone? It's the part across the top of your eyebrows and down your nose.

Yeah. Oily T-zone. That's a pretty good... Maybe that's the record for the album title for Sebum Pocket. It is. Yeah, it is. It'd be a concept album too. What else do we have anything else?

No, I think that's it. Yeah, check out the hygiene hypothesis. It's interesting. Oh, very. I think everyone kind of gets that. We don't need to recap that. No. If you want to know about it, just go listen to our episode on the hygiene hypothesis. Yeah Yeah, this one was chalk full of interesting stuff and references to interesting episodes we've done

So hopefully you'll be like oh perfume didn't know about that. Oh soap didn't know about that And you'll just go enjoy a bunch of grooming and hygiene episodes. Okay? Total. Chucks are totally, that means it's time for listener mail. Did we do listener mail on another episode? Everyone, almost. Starting back in, man, a long time ago, when you had that idea. That's right. I said, I've got a really good idea.

All right, here we go. We're going gonna call this. Jogging. I might need your help because there's a little bit of fringing here. Okay. Hey guys, it was delighted to learn about the history of exercise in America and surprised of how recent it was. Something in the discussions of jogging reminded me of a wonderful story I heard from a friend. We'll call him Paul.

Paul is his name. Sometimes, I go Paul helped Shaper in a high school exchange trip to France and he quite enjoyed the family that he stayed with. They were kind and the father would invite him to join him on a run. The way this invite was expressed was, how would you say, F-A-I-T-D-U jogging? Fade-Due. Fade-Due jogging? Yeah, I'm not sure what that means though, but I've seen it before.

I guess do you want to jog with me maybe? I guess. Or guess? Like to jog, do you want a jog? I don't know. I don't know what Fade-Due means. No, look at it. Yeah, look at up while I'm reading.

So anyway, the printumen would say, Fade-Due jogging and said an acute Fringe accent, even the jogging, and it just was amazingly adorable. You guys should give it a try, which I just did. Paul though, every time would agree, thinking it would be a nice little gentle jog around the neighborhood, but every time he was reminded, this was not the case, before they'd even left the driveway.

The Frinchman set off at a dead sprint, because he was training for a race that was a long distance sprinting event. He was also clearly an athlete. Paul would quickly give up and revert back to just regular jogging. And it sounds like the father did a few laps around the city like this and Paul

lapsed him as it got back to the house. I think most, I think about this story almost every time I hear the word jogging and I usually mutter that in a French accent under my breath for a good chuckle. Thanks for joining me in my breakfast wanders before work. Stay well and that is from James. Okay, so I think what he was saying is, shall we go jog or would you like to go jog, but what he was saying is, shall we go jog, or would you like to go jog,

but what he was saying is, makes the jog. So he's saying, do you want to go make the jog? That's very cute. It is, it's even cuter when you know it. That's good reason to learn other languages, everybody. Agreed. Who was that from? James. Thanks a lot, James.

And also Paul indirectly too. And also Paul's exchange family. That was very nice of you to accept them into your lives. If you want to send this an email just like James did, you can send it off to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. So there is a ton of stuff they don't want you to know. Yeah, like does the US government really have alien technology?

Or what about the future of AI? What happens when computers actually learn to think? Could there be a serial killer in your town? From UFOs to psychic powers and government cover-ups, from unsolved crimes to the bleeding edge of science, history is riddled with unexplained events. Listen to stuff they don't want you to know on the iHeart app, Apple podcasts,

or wherever you find your favorite shows. Get ready for season four of The Restless Ones, an original podcast presented by T-Mobile for Business and I Heart Radio. Join me as I sit down for in-depth discussions with the people at the intersection of technology and business. You'll learn how each of these leaders is building a bridge to what's next and leveraging transformative technologies like 5G

to create a more connected and meaningful future today. Listen to the restless ones available on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, guys, it's Angie Martinez. Check out my podcast, Angie Martinez, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey guys, it's Edge of Martinez. Check out my podcast, Edge of Martinez, IRL, where we have beautiful conversations with all types of people from Kelly Rowland to Mike Tyson, to Kim Kardashian, to JT from the city girls. These are conversations about real life.

We talk about love and death and our mental health and how we navigate all the ups and downs of life. And I promise every episode, there'll be a takeaway for you to use in your own real life. Check out Edge Martinez, IRL on the I Heart Radio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast.