Laundry Done Right

SPEAKER_14: Pushkin. SPEAKER_12: From Pushkin Industries and Ruby Studio at iHeartMedia, Incubation is a new show about SPEAKER_04: humanity's struggle against the world's tiniest villains, viruses. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and on this show, you'll hear how viruses attack us, how we fight back, and what we've learned in the course of those fights. Listen to Incubation on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Malcolm Gladwell here. SPEAKER_14: Let's re-examine employee benefits. With the Hartford Insurance Group Benefits Insurance, you'll get it right the first time. Keep your business competitive by looking out for your employees' needs with quality benefits from the Hartford. The Hartford Group Benefits team makes managing benefits and absences a breeze while providing your employees with a streamlined, world-class customer experience that treats them like people, not policies. Keep your workforce moving forward with group benefits from the Hartford. The Bucks got you back. Learn more at theheartford.com slash benefits. SPEAKER_14: Are we all here? SPEAKER_00: So there's 35 people here now. We're 36, so we're getting close. SPEAKER_14: Okay. Thank you. Every Wednesday afternoon, Pushkin Industries, the company that brings you this and many other audio delights, has a staff meeting. Not long ago, I asked if I could take over the meeting for a frank discussion of a very delicate subject, laundry. Now I know there's been a lot of chatter around this podcast episode of mine, and there's two questions I keep hearing. One is, is there a right answer? And the answer is, of course there's a right answer. There's always a right answer with Revisionist History. We're on Zoom. I can see all these faces looking at me, wondering where on earth am I going with this? Is there going to be laundry shaming? And the answer is yes, but the person being shamed is me. The whole reason I'm doing this episode is I became aware that my laundry practices were solely deficient and I wanted to understand why. I'm going to pick on a couple of people who were generous enough to share their detergent preferences with me, and I'm going to ask them a few short questions. John Schnarz, maybe we should start with you. John. John Schnarz. Pushkin's Vice President of Business Development. Sensitive, highly evolved modern male, father to many small children. Do you have a top loading or front loading washing machine? Top. Oh, interesting. Do you have the piston that comes up? I thought it was what is called a agitator, I believe. By this point in my research, I knew a lot about washing machines and top loading machines are well, they're not good. I was embarrassed for John. A senior officer of Pushkin should know better. SPEAKER_14: Let's skip to Carrie. Carrie. I'm here. SPEAKER_05: Thank you. SPEAKER_14: Carrie Colon, one of our top people making audio books. Whip smart. If anyone could teach us something, it would be Carrie. Also, she's a mom, does a lot of laundry. What's your temperature use? Do you vary temperature? SPEAKER_05: I vary temperature based on instructions. SPEAKER_14: What are those? So tell me those particular protocols. SPEAKER_05: Well, actually I should, no, I'll back up. I go on normal wash and so my washer will tell me if I just say normal, it does its boop, boop, boop, boop, and then it comes out with whatever. You defer to the machine. I defer to the machine unless there's something that I think I'm supposed to pay special attention to in there. SPEAKER_14: Yes. Okay. Thank you. Very helpful. What was I thinking? Looking back, I don't know. I didn't really explain myself. I just crashed the staff meeting to ask people about their laundry habits in the hopes that the senior Pushkin leadership would teach the younger people on our team something about how to conduct themselves in the world. What it means to be mindful, purposeful, environmentally conscious, to lead with empathy, to lean in. And when I didn't hear that, I felt betrayed. I want to check in with Brendan. Are you out there? Yeah. You are a Ecos. I see. Yeah. Brendan Francis Newnham, another of our top people. If you Google the words, Brooklyn, natural wine, farmer's market, vinyl records, and whatever other affiliated terms show up automatically in the search field, you get Brendan. Ecos. Hmm. An eccentric choice. First of all, top loader, front loader? SPEAKER_04: Laundromat. SPEAKER_14: Nice. Oh, Oh, Oh. Old school. Thank you. Yeah. And do you separate? I do. Yeah. And what's your system for separation here? SPEAKER_04: I do darks and lights. Yeah. SPEAKER_14: Do you wash under different protocols? SPEAKER_03: Yes. I do my whites. I do hot water. Yeah. And then my darks, I do warm water. SPEAKER_14: You do your whites in hot water. Yeah. Okay, good. That's all. SPEAKER_04: I also add bleach into my whites with my Ecos. No, no, no. SPEAKER_14: That's all. That's all. No, no, no. Here I thought that Pushkin was in laundry terms, the shining laundromat on the Hill. And it's not, but that's okay. Actually it wasn't okay. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is about an odyssey I embarked upon in the darkest days of the pandemic. An odyssey which ended in me shaking my head at my fellow Pushkinites over their laundry room conduct, even though I knew deep down that I was no better than they were. Where do you go when you've become consumed with questions of clothes and laundry and detergent? The answer is obvious. You go to the north side of Cincinnati, about a 15-minute drive from downtown to an industrial zone with a cluster of 19th century granite buildings, the Procter & Gamble Fabric and Home Care Innovation Center, the research arm of Procter & Gamble, the consumer products giant which makes basically everything in your broom closet, your laundry room, and your medicine cabinet. I went there one snowy winter's day to meet a guy named Todd Klein. Are you a chemist by trade? SPEAKER_02: So I studied chemical engineering. So close to a chemist. SPEAKER_14: Todd is maybe my age, kind of intense, wiry, runners build. He and I actually ran eight miles the night before through downtown Cincinnati over the bridges along the riverfront up through Grant Park, which I realized later is a very Todd Klein thing to do, put the visitor through his paces. And have you been at P&G your whole life? SPEAKER_02: Your whole career? I have been and it feels like my whole life because I've been here 25 plus years now. So I started on Metamucil, which at that time was positioned as a supplement for laxative. So I was, you know, the 22-year-old single guy coming out of school and they said, you're working on Metamucil. Doing what? And it is still one of my favorite things I've ever worked on. SPEAKER_14: Klein worked on re-engineering the formulation to make it more palatable. Then he was assigned to the painkiller Aleve. Then Folger's Coffee, back when Proctor still owned those brands. At Proctor, they like to move people around. And after that, he was posted to Swiffer. SPEAKER_02: So my team was doing Swiffer Wet Jet, which I don't know if you've seen those. It's a mop that you push a button, solution sprays out and there's a pad that collects all the dirty solutions. So you've got the mop part, then you've got a separate solution on putting out something that will both help dissolve soils, break up soils, but not leave streaks on the floor and also leave a nice scent. SPEAKER_14: There are few greater pleasures in life than discovering that something once considered uninteresting is actually incredibly interesting. SPEAKER_02: You're trying to get both scrubbing on hard things, suck up solution and then hold it there because you're sucking up dirty solution and you don't want it going back down on the floor. So we actually use the same polymer inside the pad that we use in diapers to hold the urine. With mops, a lot of times when you're mopping floors, you're sloshing dirty water around a lot and with Swiffer you actually suck it up and it holds it there. SPEAKER_14: Metamucil, Aleve, Folgers, Swiffer. The Maslow's hierarchy of consumer products. I will warn you, about halfway through this episode you'll say to yourself, wow, Malcolm really fell hard for those Procter and Gamble people, didn't he? SPEAKER_14: Let me just address that issue now before things get out of hand. Yes, I did. SPEAKER_12: Thank you. People are excited about what AI will do for them. At IBM, we're excited about what AI will do for business, your business. Introducing Watson X, a platform designed to multiply output by training AI with your data. When you Watson X your business, you can build AI to help coders code faster. Customer service respond quicker and employees handle repetitive tasks in less time. Let's create AI that transforms business with Watson X. Learn more at ibm.com slash Watson X. IBM. Let's create. SPEAKER_14: Do you know that right now, as you listen to this, there's an astronaut named Frank Rubio in some tiny spacecraft way, way up there in space. He left for the International Space Station in September of last year, thought he was going for six months. And then once he was up there, NASA called him up and said, actually, Frank, we want you out there for a year. 371 days to be exact. My question is, if you're NASA and you pull that bait and switch once, how do you recruit the next crop of astronauts? I mean, you say to your recruits, I need you to leave your family and friends and everything you know and love dearly, eat food out of a tube, but only for six months. And they're like, wait, look at Frank. That's what you told him. And he's still up there. Recruiting for astronauts. If you're NASA is hard. If only there was some sophisticated job recruiting site capable of finding those few Americans who are perfectly happy to float around in space for an undetermined length of time. Sadly for NASA, there's no such tool, but for the rest of us, oh yes, there is. ZipRecruiter, new hires cost an average $4,700 for all of us non-spaceflight companies. And with that kind of money at stake, you have to get it right. So what's the most effective way to find the right people for your roles? ZipRecruiter, see for yourself right now. You can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com slash Gladwell and experience the value ZipRecruiter brings to hiring. Once you post your job, ZipRecruiter's smart technology works quickly to identify people whose skills and experience line up with exactly what you want. It's simple. ZipRecruiter helps you get hiring right. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. See for yourself. Go to this exclusive web address to try ZipRecruiter for free before you commit. ZipRecruiter.com slash Gladwell. Again, that's ziprecruiter.com slash G-L-A-D-W-E-L-L. ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. Somewhere out there, believe it or not, there's someone who wants Frank Rubio's job. SPEAKER_04: And that's ZipRecruiter.com slash G-L-A-D-W-E-L-L. From Pushkin Industries and Ruby Studio at iHeartMedia, Incubation is a new podcast about the viruses that shape our lives. It's a show about how viruses attack us and how we fight back. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and on Incubation, we'll hear how scientists have pioneered new techniques in the fight against viruses. SPEAKER_08: There was just something about the way the virus was shaped. SPEAKER_09: It always felt like there was no hope for creating a vaccine. Until now. SPEAKER_04: Until now. We'll celebrate the victories, like the incredible story of how smallpox was wiped off the face of the earth. SPEAKER_11: Eradication means you have to get to whatever disease you're targeting everywhere, wherever it exists. SPEAKER_04: Listen to Incubation on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_03: I was raised in a household in the 1970s where my father used a handsaw to cut all SPEAKER_14: the wood for our wood stove because he refused to use a chainsaw. I think he considered chainsaws decadent. My mother, meanwhile, in the dead of winter, would bundle up in a parka like an Eskimo and hang the family's laundry outside on a clothesline because she disapproved of dryers. These are my people, my heritage, people who dwelt on the particulars of their domestic conduct. At some point, in the midst of the COVID lockdown, I reflected on my own domestic practice. What do I do? I go down to my basement and I throw my clothes heedlessly into my shiny red LG washing machine, grab whatever detergent I can from a row of random bottles on the shelf. Endless consumption of huge amounts of hot water, chemicals, and electricity without so much as a stray thought to my intentions. We like to think it doesn't matter, these little things, but there are 25 billion loads of laundry done every year in the United States and Canada. That's 25 billion. The little things add up. So there in my basement on laundry day one evening, I resolved to do better. And off I went in a blinding snowstorm to Cincinnati to see Todd Klein, P&G's North American Fabricare section head for research and development. In Hindi, there is a word for an opportunity or occasion of seeing a holy person, darshan. I requested a darshan with the guru of American laundry. We began our tour in a long room full of washing machines, what looked like at least a hundred of them. Front loaders, top loaders, big industrial strength Maytag machines, Japanese washing machines, which I'd never seen before, and which are so wonderfully and perfectly Japanese that I felt like grabbing my laundry and jumping on a plane to Tokyo. SPEAKER_13: I think it was the Japanese machine would be like more complex. Very cool. Yeah. Looks like a, this thing looks like it could fly to the moon. SPEAKER_14: Each of the hundred plus machines in that long room was linked to a network of black pipes, which allowed the Proctor people to mimic the typical temperature, water hardness, chlorine concentration of every major water system where Proctor and Gamble detergents are sold. You want to simulate how a Tide Pob washes whites in Reykjavik in a late model LG front loader? They can do that. How many people work in the, just in this facility in R&D for detergents? SPEAKER_02: Oh wow. At least a couple of hundred. SPEAKER_14: All those people for the past decade or more have been focused on the question of how we could do our 25 billion loads of laundry in a more environmentally friendly way. They begin with a comprehensive statistical analysis of the carbon footprint of every input in the laundry process. SPEAKER_14: Raw materials in the detergents. Do they have a big carbon footprint? Actually not really. Manufacturing. Every Tide plant now runs on wind power. Carbon and packaging. Pretty insignificant. Particularly if you're talking pods in a recyclable tub which are highly concentrated and easy to ship. The environmental impact of a load of laundry turns out to be driven by what we, the people at home, do. Klein showed me a chart with all the calculations. SPEAKER_02: And when you look at the carbon footprint, you can see that the product use phase is by far... SPEAKER_14: It's everything. Product use is industry jargon for your laundry ritual. So it's what percent is that? SPEAKER_02: Two thirds. Two thirds. Yeah, it's close to 70 percent. And what that is, is the energy to heat the water when people do laundry. If someone chooses to use cold instead of warm, it's a 70 percent reduction in energy in the use phase. So you have a huge shrinking here. If they choose cold versus hot, it's a 90 percent reduction in energy. SPEAKER_14: Cold water washing is the holy grail of the laundry business. Washing your clothes in cold water means colors don't run. Your clothes last longer. You save a lot of money. And you shrink your carbon footprint massively. But it's a lot harder to get your clothes clean in cold water. The chemical reactions between detergent and stain slow down dramatically as the temperature drops. This is what the detergent experts at the Innovation Center do. They try to solve this problem. SPEAKER_02: So surfactants, we use a blend of surfactants. What is a surfactant? A surfactant, they're really the workhorse of the detergency. And they're a material that goes in and it basically helps roll the stains off of the clothing. So they penetrate into the clothing and under and lift up and capture the stain, almost encapsulate it and help bring it out into the water. SPEAKER_14: Then there are enzymes to break down the stain into smaller pieces. SPEAKER_02: So we have specific enzymes for, we have protease that goes after protein-based stains. Amylase goes after starch-based stains. Mananase goes after more gelatin, manna-type stains. And we develop enzymes that are formulated specifically for cold water. He went on. SPEAKER_14: He talked about special antioxidants, something called chelants. The challenge of removing body odor from t-shirts. Klein made the point over and over that the only way for a detergent to be environmentally friendly was if it's effective in cold water. And the only way it could be effective in cold water is if it's designed to the most exacting of specifications. SPEAKER_02: When you're washing your clothes, surfactants and polymers and enzymes are there to get the soil off of your clothes. But when they come off, your clothes are swashing around in this water. So you pull everything off and then your clothes are circulating in the dirty water. Exactly. So the other polymer we use is there to prevent the dirt from redepositing back onto your clothes. SPEAKER_14: The most environmentally sustainable detergent is by definition the most sophisticated detergent. You can't limit your carbon footprint without putting an army of engineers and bench scientists on the job. SPEAKER_14: But just spend a few minutes online reading detergent rankings on environmental websites. The importance of water temperature almost never comes up. Instead, it's all about simplicity. I mean, just listen to this, picked at random from the mountain of laundry advice on the internet. SPEAKER_14: The eight best green laundry detergents of 2021 from something called the Spruce. Ready? Best budget, Ecos Liquid Laundry Detergent, the kind that Brendan uses. Remember him? Brooklyn Brendan. Ecos boasts that their liquid detergent is made from plant-based ingredients, as if they're telling us it's safe enough to drink. Meanwhile, the site EarthFriendlyTips.com writes glowingly of something called Molly's Suds. SPEAKER_01: Molly's Suds is one of the best eco-friendly laundry detergents because it was developed to be earth-safe and people-safe. It contains no chemical-based sudsing ingredients. Instead, it's formulated with only five earth-derived ingredients. SPEAKER_14: Only five earth-derived ingredients. What does that even mean? Even the name makes no sense. Molly's Suds. As it happens, suds are the problem in laundry. SPEAKER_02: High-efficiency machines have sensors that at the end of the rinse cycle sense, are there any suds left or not? And if there are, they'll do an extra rinse cycle. So you'll use extra water. SPEAKER_14: If you're a detergent company that wants to be seen as green, you don't call out suds in your name. You boast about all the sophisticated engineering advances you've made to suppress your suds. The biggest question the environmentally conscious consumer should be asking is, which detergent will allow me to do as many as possible of my laundry loads in cold water? Todd Klein has devoted years of his life to answering that question. SPEAKER_02: We do a lot of technical testing. Maybe you can step over here. SPEAKER_14: He led me over to a counter where he had a series of Hanes t-shirts in both 100% cotton and cotton poly blend. On each shirt, there was a grid of little circular stains. And where you've got Nescafe coffee, grape juice and blueberries, and then gravy, blood and U.S. clay, and then barbecue, Hershey's. What's that? What's GCS? Chocolate. Oh, just chocolate. And French's mustard. A grid of nine stains. SPEAKER_02: And here's rice, starch, and soy milk, as well as these two that say sebum. Those are body soils. So we will use stain sets like this. They're technical stains, so they're designed not to be fully removed when we do it. And we use spectrophotometry to measure what percent of each stain is removed. What you can see here is this is Tide on cold relative to the competitor. SPEAKER_14: The Tide in question was Tide Hygienic Clean pods. The competitor was one of the other best selling detergents on the market. Klein wouldn't tell me what it was. The competitor washed the stain grid on warm. The Tide Hygienic Clean washed the stain grid on cold. He held up the results. SPEAKER_02: You can see particularly with gravy blood. SPEAKER_14: Gravy blood, barbecue, and Hershey's, Tide totally wins. It looks like it's even on blueberries, clay, and French's mustard. SPEAKER_02: It's closer. On mustard, they actually... It's either a tie or they may actually win on the mustard. It's a pH-driven stain. The rest of them, when you look at the statistics and the spectrophotometer results, we actually have significant wins there as well. SPEAKER_14: The laundry wizards have given us a way to save money, save our clothes, and save the environment. But is that what we do? No, we do not. In America, less than half of all laundry loads are cold water. When it comes to our laundry, we are a nation divided. And who is in the hot and warm half, the dumb half, the laundry basket of deplorables? Malcolm Gladwell, who likes to wag his finger at other people over their ethical lapses and fancies himself the paragon of science-based, open-minded rationality. Physician, heal thyself. SPEAKER_12: The one thing we can never get more of is time. Or can we? This is Watson X Orchestrate, AI designed to multiply productivity by automating tasks. When you Watson X your business, you can build digital skills to help human resources spend less time generating offer letters, writing job recs, and managing schedules, and spend more time on humans. Let's create more time for your business with Watson X Orchestrate. Learn more at ibm.com slash orchestrate. IBM. Let's create. SPEAKER_04: From Pushkin Industries and Ruby Studio at iHeartMedia, Incubation is a new podcast about the viruses that shape our lives. It's a show about how viruses attack us and how we fight back. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and on Incubation, we'll hear how scientists have pioneered new techniques in the fight against viruses. SPEAKER_08: There was just something about the way the virus was shaped. SPEAKER_09: It always felt like there was no hope for creating a vaccine. Until now. Until now. SPEAKER_04: We'll celebrate the victories, like the incredible story of how smallpox was wiped off the face of the earth. SPEAKER_11: Eradication means you have to get to whatever disease you're targeting everywhere, wherever it exists. SPEAKER_04: Listen to Incubation on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_14: Let's talk about Pandora's box. According to Greek mythology, Pandora was given a box from the gods that contained special gifts, but they forbade her from opening it. In the end, Pandora's curiosity got the best of her. She opened the box, thereby unleashing curses upon mankind. Cut to 3,000 years later, and we could very well be talking about the story of those mattresses in a box. You know what I'm talking about. They promised something special inside, but in the end, many would say it's a curse. After all, they're just glorified slabs of foam that are crushed, crammed into a box, and then left on your doorstep. If you want a mattress that feels like a true gift from the gods, consider a Saatva luxury mattress. Saatvas don't come in a box. That kind of quality simply can't be crammed into a cardboard container. What's more, Saatva will set up your new mattress for you. Take your old one at no extra charge. If history has taught us anything, it's do not open Pandora's box. By now, you'll save $200 on $1,000 or more at saatva.com slash Gladwell. That's S double A, TVA.com slash Gladwell. SPEAKER_14: When I got back from Cincinnati, I called up my old friend, Dee Dee Gordon. We ride again. SPEAKER_06: We ride again as always. SPEAKER_14: Some of you may remember Dee Dee. She appeared in the Revisionist History episode, Free Brown Williams from season three. I've known her forever. When I first met her, she lived in a fabulous mid-century house right by the Hollywood sign in Beecher Canyon. I used to house sit there whenever Dee Dee went off on her annual trips to Japan. I got to take care of her dog, Sage. I miss Sage. Dee Dee now runs a boutique consumer research outfit called the Gordon Company. You go to Dee Dee when your brand has a problem and you've run out of answers. I think Dee Dee's a genius. Just to be clear, the reason we're doing this is that I was astonished and ashamed to learn that I had been washing my clothes on warm and hot all these years when I could have had better results for on every dimension if I washed them on cold. So I wanted to understand not just why I, where I went wrong, but I wanted to understand who are these people who I should be emulating who saw the truth before I did. SPEAKER_06: You always start your conversations that way. I'm obsessed. I need to understand what is it about these cold water people that I'm not getting? Why am I not like these people? Tell me. You need to tell me. I was disturbed. I was like, okay. I was disturbed. You were so disturbed. SPEAKER_06: You were. You were disturbed. SPEAKER_14: I'd given Dee Dee a job, the kind her company does all the time, consumer interviews and analysis. I asked her to find me some dedicated cold water laundry people, figure them out, report back. Dee Dee's team did hours and hours of interviews with scores of people. And now I was getting the report. SPEAKER_06: And we asked them all different types of questions about their attitudes and beliefs around laundry. And detergent and brands and their process. We asked them about, you know, what makes them tick. And we also watched some of them do their laundry. And they walked us through their process of doing laundry. And then we had a post interview with them as well. It was really interesting. Really interesting. I mean, these people that we talked to really love doing laundry. I mean, they love it. SPEAKER_14: There was one interviewee in particular that Dee Dee wanted me to listen to. I'll call her Janet. SPEAKER_06: She's a laundry master. She hires a nanny to watch her kids so that she can go do the laundry. I love that so much. SPEAKER_14: It's fantastic. Okay. SPEAKER_06: I mean, like, let's get real here. I mean, that's that's some serious laundry love. SPEAKER_14: Janet was maybe in her 40s or early 50s. Single mom of three. Successful entrepreneur. God knows how Dee Dee found her. She played me tape of Janet talking with one of the Gordon company analysts, Tom. SPEAKER_03: Let's see if one of your best friends was going to describe you to me who doesn't know you at all. How would they describe your personality and sort of what your interests are? SPEAKER_15: Okay, so I've been called an angel and a heart of gold. I will help pretty much anyone who needs help. I would also think they would say energetic, all over the place, world traveler pre-pandemic and just a very nice person and a good mom with good values. Very nice. SPEAKER_13: Very nice. SPEAKER_15: And then some would say, yeah, she's a little crazy. SPEAKER_14: Janet talks about the television shows she watches, the car she drives, how much she loves to garden. Then we get to the good stuff. SPEAKER_15: I'm a little neurotic about the laundry. I'm not too neurotic about too many things. But when it comes to laundry, I like to buy good things. I dress my children from the time they were tiny in, you know, beautiful things. I would never use like a bargain brand of detergent. For sure there's a difference. I would send sometimes the girls to the supermarket and a number of times they bought the store brand and I tried it and it wasn't really garbage. SPEAKER_14: Janet's the kind of consumer that Diddy lives for. SPEAKER_06: I just loved her. I loved the attention to detail. There was just so every word, there was just, you know, so much. She just delivered so much. SPEAKER_14: But the truth is all the cold water users were like that. All the people Diddy interviewed, detail oriented and driven. SPEAKER_06: These people are disciplined. So like when we asked them about their washing machines, they could rattle off the year they purchased it, the cubic foot capacity, the number of settings, all of that without ever having to look at anything. There was like no manual sitting on the side there. They were just able to rattle all of that off. Really impressive. No, I know they're super human is really what they are. The cold water users are super humans. Diddy, why is it a question? SPEAKER_14: If we're interviewing someone to work at Pushkin or the Gordon, why aren't we asking the question, how do you do your laundry? And if they say, I've been doing cold water for five years, why don't we just say, well, we don't need to ask any other thing or anything else. I mean, honestly, it's got, honestly, it's gotta be part of the vetting from now on. SPEAKER_06: Like this is a vetting question across the board. I mean, they should be doing the same thing with our politicians. Like I want to know if these people are washing in cold water. I bet you Kamala Harris is a cold water user. You better believe she's a cold water user. Wait, let's think about that. SPEAKER_14: She probably, you know, she probably is. I'm serious actually because I'm serious too. She's half Indian, half Jamaican. Those are two cold water laundry cultures, right? SPEAKER_14: You know, when my mom was growing up in Jamaica, they weren't washing their clothes in hot water, washing in cold water. So they start with the presumption of cold. In what other area of life can you level up so easily? I could just set the default settings on my washer to cold and get to be a better version of myself. Like Kamala or Janet, focused, passionate Janet. SPEAKER_15: I'm going to say a year or two ago, I was reading an article about, you know, what you can do for the planet and saving energy and bringing down your bills and stuff like that. And they talked about cold water washing. And I said, well, that's like the simplest change I can make. SPEAKER_14: At the end of my day in Cincinnati, I met up with Amy Crabiel, brand vice president at Procter & Gamble for North American Laundry. We talked about laundry, but very quickly, our conversation turned to dishwashing, laundry's domestic cousin. Somewhere at Procter & Gamble, there is a parallel universe of dishes and dish powders and rooms full of dishwashing machines undergoing the same scrutiny given to our laundry. SPEAKER_07: Our friends over at Cascade found that people think that it wastes water and energy when you run your dishwasher. And so they'll wait to run a load because they think it's wasteful. But actually, as long as you have eight dishes, running the dishwasher every night uses less energy and water resources than running the sink for two minutes, which I know I would do normally. SPEAKER_14: Wait, running? Run the bomb again. As long as you have eight, did you say eight dishes? Yes. Using it, the dishwasher takes less energy and less water than running the sink for... Sink for two minutes. SPEAKER_14: Yet another entry on the list of things I didn't bother to care about. Two minutes? Yes. SPEAKER_07: Really? SPEAKER_14: Yes. That is super interesting. SPEAKER_07: Yes, and counterintuitive because you would think a big machine has a lot of energy and water. But, you know, many of these manufacturers are also making those dishwashers more energy efficient too. SPEAKER_14: Can you settle for me the age-old question of whether you have to rinse your dishes before you put them in the dishwasher? This is to me the central issue because you can spend as much water on the pre-rinse as you do on the actual washing. SPEAKER_07: Now settled, you do not need to rinse your dishes before you put them in the dishwasher if you use Cascade. SPEAKER_14: Cascade, the product of many, many millions of dollars of cutting-edge research designed to remove tomato sauce and butter and gravy from your plates. Not some budget eco-brand with three ingredients that does such a lousy job you end up running the dishwasher twice or giving up on the dishwasher entirely and freelancing with hot water on max while the planet burns up outside. SPEAKER_07: Really? Really. That's huge. SPEAKER_14: That's huge. That changes everything. It changed my life. SPEAKER_14: The Vision's History is brought to you by Procter & Gamble. No, I'm kidding. Procter & Gamble did not pay for this episode. I fell for them all by myself. The Vision's History is produced by Mia Labelle, Lee Mingestu, and Jacob Smith, with Eloise Linton and Anand Nain. Our editor is Julia Barton. Original scoring by Luis Guerra, mastering by Flon Williams, and engineering by Martine Gonzalez. Fact-checking by Amy Gaines. Special thanks to the Pushkin crew, Heather Fain, Carly Migliori, Maya Koenig, Daniella Lacan, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Nicole Morano, Jason Gambrell, and of course, Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. If you love this show and others from Pushkin Industries, consider becoming a Pushnik. Pushnik is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and uninterrupted listening for $4.99 a month. Look for Pushnik exclusively on Apple Podcasts subscriptions. Monday is laundry day in the Gladwell household. As we speak, clothes are circulating in cold water and hygienic clean pods. As we speak. SPEAKER_06: We already know Kamala's using it, no doubt. We are convinced that Kamala Harris is using Tide cold water clean. I know she is. SPEAKER_14: I know she is. Malcolm Gladwell here. Let's reexamine employee benefits. With the Hartford Insurance Group Benefits Insurance, you'll get it right the first time. 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