Transcript of How the Moon Transformed Earth & Fun and Easy Housecleaning Hacks - SYSK Choice

Today on Something You Should Know, it's amazing how many people actually have different size feet. Then the moon. It's up there in the sky every night, and there's a lot about the moon you may not know.

One of my favorite things to tell people about the moon is that it's so far away. You can fit almost all the other planets between us and the moon. It's one reason why the moon looks pretty small in the sky, but it's actually huge. It's about as wide the United States.

Also, why losing weight is a terrible New Year's resolution, and a new approach to cleaning the house that is fun and different than a lot of the advice you've heard before.

I have a spray bottle of vodka in my kitchen, and that's how I clean just about everything. Vodka is very antibacterial. It's actually a great cleaner, but it's actually a really good degreaser. And when you only have one cleaner, it's just so much simpler.

All this today on Something You Should Know.

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Something You Should Know. Fascinating intel, the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Caruthers. Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. Hey, are you a Spotify listener? I've been using Spotify for a long time, and it's often the platform I use to listen to podcasts and certainly music. This This podcast, something you should know, has tens of thousands of followers on Spotify, and I invite you to become one of them. Try it, see if you don't like it. Just download the app if you don't have it already and start following this podcast. First up today, did you know that 60% of the population have different size feet? Out of those people, 80% of the time, it is the left foot that is larger. Why? Well, Eighty % of the population is right-hand dominant, and righties use their left foot for leverage. That foot gets more exercise, thus the slight variance in size, in length, or width. The most common variance is half a shoe size, so it may not be necessary to mix and match your shoes to get a good fit. In most cases, just adding a small insert can do the trick with feet differing up to a full shoe size.

If your left foot really big, you may need to be fitted with a mismatched pair of shoes, and hopefully the store would give you a deal on that second pair. And that is something you should know. How many times have you looked up at the moon and wondered, What the hell is that thing? Where did it come from? How come it just sits up there? What if it crashed into the Earth? What would it be like here if there was no moon up there? Well, if you've ever thought those things, you've come to the right place for some really solid answers. Because my guest is Rebecca Boyle. She is a columnist at Atlas Obscura and a contributor to Scientific American, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Popular Science, and many other publications. She is author of a book called Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are. Hey, Rebecca Well, welcome to something you should know.

Thanks so much for having me.

There it is up in the sky. We see it all the time. Big round circle. What is it? Where did it come from? How did it get there? Tell me the story.

The moon is a rock, basically. It's a very large planetary body. It's not a planet in that it doesn't orbit the sun directly, but it is a companion to our planet. It's part of our planet. It's a whole other world, another realm realm, but that's connected to this one. It's also a place for people to project ourselves, our ideas and our hopes and our dreams for what else might lie beyond Earth. It's also a place that we can be reflected. When the moon is in its crescent phases, sometimes you can see what's called EarthShine, which is the light of our planet reflecting onto the moon. It's this dark sector next to what you usually see as a crescent in the night sky. It's a place that we are both philosophically and optically reflected. The moon is home, I think. I think of it as part of Earth.

It's part of Earth, literally?

We're still learning a little bit more about exactly what happened when the moon formed, but we know that it happened on what was probably the worst day in the history of Earth, in which Earth was totally obliterated by some other planet, probably something the size of Mars, present day Mars, whacked into our planet, and both of these bodies were totally destroyed. The remains of that collision gave us the Earth and the moon. So they formed from the same material. They're geologically very similar, and literally, the moon is part of Earth.

So then shouldn't there be some big hole on Earth or some big chunk missing or some place where it's apparent the moon came from?

Yeah, this is actually a theory people had for a long time. Before Apollo, we didn't really have any idea what the moon was or how to explain its presence. It just has been there as the light that nights the sky, just like the sun is the light that lights the day. People had a lot of theories for how it formed. One of my favorites is that it was sheared off somehow. Some people had different theories for how it was sheared off, including that the Earth was spinning very quickly, and part of it just flew apart and landed in space, and that's the moon. If that had happened, that would explain why the Pacific Ocean is so deep, which it is very deep, much deeper than the Atlantic. But that's not really why the moon is there. That's not what happened. The theory behind this formation story is still being hammered out. There's a lot of people working on this to figure out the particulars the energy and the size of the impact or the speed it was going and what actually happened. Probably what happened is that both Earth 1. 0 and whatever else hit Earth, which we've called Theia, which is the Greek goddess that was the mother of the moon.

Both of these things were just totally obliterated. So you're like, imagine a cloud of droplets, like buzz in space. There's no recognizable planetary structure after this collision. And eventually, over hundreds and then thousands and then millions and tens of millions of years, they both recombine and coalesce into these round bodies we have now. And that's why they look very similar because they were made at the same time from the same catastrophic collision.

And so when that collision happened and the moon basically, I guess, broke off, why did it stick around and orbit? Why didn't it just fly off into never, never land as you would expect it to? Why did it stay?

Well, the real answer is that it did, and it is, flying away forever. It's receding from Earth at about the rate at which your fingernails grow. I mean, think about how often you have to trim your nails. It's not a small amount for something the size of the moon, which is gigantic, and Earth is gigantic. I mean, it's hard for people to really visualize the scales of these things. These are entire planets. But yeah, the moon is flying away, and that has a lot of influence on our planet in terms of the tide, the strength of the tide, the length of our day. The day is getting longer because the moon is flying away from us. This has to do with some complicated tidal physics. But the upshot is that as the moon leaves, Earth's day is getting longer because our planet's rotation is slowing down because of the exchange of angular momentum between these worlds. Eventually, in millions of years, a long time from now, the day will be a lot longer, and we will no longer have total solar eclipses because the moon will be so far away that it will not be able to block out the sun.

I imagine people ponder this What would Earth be like if the moon wasn't there?

It would change our tides very fundamentally. The sun still plays a role in the tide on Earth, and this is just the rise rise and fall, what we experience as the rise and fall of water on a coastline in the ocean. The sun does play some role there, but the moon plays by far the primary role. You would see a much weaker ocean tide It's not a big deal, which seems like it wouldn't be that big of a deal, but it's actually a huge deal in terms of the exchange of nutrients, the environments where animals live. A lot of biodiversity, biodiversity happens in these tidal areas. That would change dramatically. You would have some major effects on life on Earth. I mean, lots of organisms use the moon to time their reproduction, to time their migration. They check when the moon is full, They check when the moon is a crescent, and they check this both the way that we do by looking up at it and by sensing it in the form of gravity and its light and how that impacts their visual systems. A lot Out of animals would have to change the way that they time their reproductive cycles or their migration patterns.

Probably the most catastrophic change would be the tilt of our planet. This would happen over a long time. If the moon was just picked up and taken away, you wouldn't notice this tomorrow, but over a few hundred, a few thousand years, it would become very dramatic. Our planet, as you know, if you've ever looked at a classroom globe, our planet is tilted, which is why we have seasons. The stability of that tilt is thanks to the moon. If we didn't have the moon's gravity to keep our planet still, it's not really still, but it doesn't wobble very much on its axis. If we didn't have the moon doing that for us, the Earth's axis would tilt at really extreme angles, which is what happens on Mars, actually. This is one reason why Mars has such a strange and variable climate. The upshot is that Earth's climate would have huge impacts if the moon wasn't here to protect the way that our planet spins on its axis and to keep that stable over millennia. You'd have very dramatic climate shifts.

If the moon is from the Earth and it's not that far away from the Earth, and yet you look at these two balls in the sky and our planet is very fertile and lots of water and all that, and the moon is fairly barren and not much there. Why is that?

Well, we're lucky to have an atmosphere that is the right pressure and the right temperature and the right thickness, which is related to both pressure and temperature for water to remain liquid. As far as We know this is the only place where that is true, at least in this solar system and potentially other places. The moon doesn't have as much to do with the presence of the atmosphere, but it does, as I was saying, stabilize our climate in the the way that the atmosphere changes over time. If it was gone, then you would have these big shifts in the pole. The poles of Earth would be tilted in different directions. In maybe 20,000 years of time, you'd have the North Pole, the magnetic North Pole of Earth would be tipped toward where the equator is now, facing the sun. You can imagine the effect that would have on the climate and melting the ice caps at both poles and how that would change the temperatures and the sea levels of the oceans and all these things. That's the way the moon affects the atmosphere. If it were to be gone, those would be very different things.

But we're very lucky to have this temperate, rocky, air-covered planet. The moon is probably more common, or things like the moon are more common in that it's a rocky body. It's big enough to make itself round through its own gravity, but it doesn't have an atmosphere. It doesn't have anything resembling what we consider plate tectonics, which Earth has. It doesn't have a geologic cycle in the way that Earth does. It doesn't really have a way to maintain any organisms that would live. By living, I mean would be like, re breathing or metabolizing or reproducing, all the things that define what we think of as life.

We're talking about just how fascinating Our Moon is. My guest is Rebecca Boyle, author of the book Our Moon, how Earth's celestial companion transformed the planet, guided evolution, and made us who we are.

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So, Rebecca, what do you think is the potential here? I mean, we've been to the moon. We're talking about going back to the moon. What is it about the moon that is so appealing?

I think we went there of politics the first time. We wanted to beat the Russians. We wanted to prove the power of capitalism and the American ingenuity to get us off this planet and onto another. And it happened. We did it. Apollo still is this unbelievable achievement that I think people still think about and still talk about. We're doing it again in part for the same reasons. The US wants to get up there again before China gets up there. China like to get up there for its own self. India would like to be up there. Russia would like to be up there. Japan. A lot of the spacefaring countries have moon exploration programs in one way or another. I think the future of the moon is probably If you want to think about economic reasons as a motivator, that's probably the future. The moon has a lot of resources that could be mined, and maybe it's better to do that on the moon than it is to do it on Earth. Maybe not. Moon. The moon also has a lot of water, and it's not water in the way that we think of on Earth.

It's not like liquid lakes, but there is a lot of hydrated mineral deposits on the moon, and those can be extracted and potentially refined into something like rocket fuel. If you're a spacefaring country or company, and that's increasingly who's going up there is these private companies looking at the Moon, it'd be really nice to go to the Moon, harvest some lunar our HO and make that into H2O and refine that into HO again that can be used as rocket fuel to go off further, maybe to Mars, maybe to an asteroid, and maybe to an asteroid that has lots of platinum group metals, for instance, or rare Earth metals that are used in things like our phones and computer chips. The moon is a resource base, I think, and that's how a lot of countries and private companies are thinking about it. I think it's important for us to think about what we want to happen before it just starts to happen. This time is an inflection point for that. I think there's a lot happening up there. I think people are probably not totally aware of how much is happening up there and how much is going to be happening in the next couple of years.

When you say we're not aware of what's happening, what's happening?

Well, NASA is funding a bunch of missions through its Artemis program, which Artemis is the sister of Apollo in Greek mythology. The mission is intended to land the first female astronaut on the Moon and the first person of color, and to go back and prove that the US has still got it. As part of Artemis, they're also funding a commercial lunar payload Services Program, which people call Clips. This is a really big deal, and it's a lot of money going to private companies that have spent years developing things like lunar landers, lunar rovers, lunar platforms, little lander devices that just sit there and have solar panels. These are happening right now. Some of them are carrying small instrument packages for NASA and other space agencies. Some of them are carrying things like small amounts of human cremated remains that are going to be on the moon forever. Some are carrying things like computer chips that contain all of the contents of Wikipedia or some poetry, some of the light of consciousness. Of humanity. These things are happening in real-time in the next coming year, especially. There's a high cadence of missions starting, and I think it's been underway for the last probably 10 years, almost.

But now is the time that this is really going to be happening, and I think people are going to wake up and realize, Wait, what? There's private companies on the moon, and they're landing human remains? Like, what?

No, I guess I don't understand why are cremated human remains going to the moon? I mean, there's plenty of room here.

I mean, it's one of these... It's an interesting thing to think about. If space or the moon means a lot to you and your final plans, this is something that you can actually pay to do. And this is a tiny amount, like a capsule, maybe. I'm saying a capsule like you would imagine a capsule you would swallow Advil or some other pain killer, a little tiny pill-sized amount. It's not very much, but it's maybe something that people would find really fascinating or powerful or spiritually meaningful to place themselves off Earth forever.

What about this idea you hear from time to time of trying to colonize the moon, make it so people could live there? It seems far fetched, is it?

I think yes and no. I think it's far fetched in that it's still very, very difficult. It's time and resource-intensive. It's very dangerous. The moon does not want us there. It is not hospitable. It is not a safe place to go. I think in that sense, it's maybe further afield than people like to talk about. But that said, we do have rockets and landers and orbital trajectory determinations now that are really sophisticated, and it is very possible. I think it's going to happen, and it's a matter of time. I think it may take longer than people think it will or people who talk about this stuff would like it to. But I do think that at some point in the near term, there will be some permanent lunar settlement that includes science as its main goal, probably some science base, and potentially a jump jumping off point for other places in the solar system, and potentially a place for people to extract resources. I don't think that's far fetched. I think it's probably pretty likely. It just might take 20 years as opposed to five.

In case, and I have forgotten my science class information. How inhospitable is the moon? Like, what's the temperature? What would it be like if I were to just step off onto the moon?

It's It depends on the time of day as far as the temperature, and a lunar day lasts about two Earth weeks. It's pretty horrible. There's no atmosphere. There's no atmosphere to speak of. There's some very tenuous molecular exosphere that exists, but it would immediately be a vacuum. If you didn't have a spacesuit, you would be dead in a couple of really horrible minutes. There are huge temperature swings between the lunar day and the lunar night. During the day, it's boiling hot, 200 plus degrees Fahrenheit in direct sun. At night, it's freezing, freezing cold, absolute zero, not quite absolute zero, but much colder than anywhere on Earth. This is one reason why there is so much water on the moon, actually, because there's probably frozen water in permanently shadowed craters that never see the sun just because of where they're located on the poles. The angle of sunlight doesn't fall all the way to the floors of these craters. So there could be ice, even primordial ice, just sitting there that has never melted.

So when you look up at the moon at night, on a full moon, you see those craters, and one would assume that something smashed into the moon to create that crater. Is that a safe assumption?

Yeah, the moon has been battered to within an inch of its life since it formed, really. And so has Earth. And we don't see that here because Earth has plate tectonics, which transform and wrinkle and warp the surface of our planet. We have our atmosphere and we have water, and all those are very erosive forces. Earth has erased its history in the solar system. We can't see the scars of this primordial drubbing, but it happened everywhere.

Since you know all this stuff about the moon, what's one of your favorite things to tell people that we haven't discussed so far about the moon that they probably don't realize?

One of my favorite things to tell people about the moon is that it's so far away that you can fit almost all the other planets between us and the moon. I think that's mind-blowing. If you try to imagine how large Jupiter is and how large Saturn is, it's hard to fathom because we're tiny humans on this one little rock. But that's a very large distance. It's one reason why the moon looks pretty small in the sky, but it's actually huge. It's about a fourth of the width of Earth. It's about as wide as the United States or the entire continent of Europe, which is a big thing. It doesn't look like it's that big because it's so far away. I like that contrast between its really large size and its really great distance from us.

Well, anyone who has spent the last 20 minutes listening to us, myself included, has learned a lot about the moon, why it's there, what it does, and it's pretty fascinating. My guest has been Rebecca Boyle. She's a columnist at Atlas Obscura, a contributor to Scientific American, the New York Times, Popular Science, Smithsonian's Air and Space magazine, and others. She's author of a book called Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial companion, Transform the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are. There's a link to her book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks for spending the time with us, Rebecca.

Thanks, Mike. This has been such a great time.

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Here we are At the beginning of the year, new beginnings, fresh start.

Perhaps one idea for the coming year might be to clean your house up, really clean it, and then keep it tidy. I have just the person to explain how to do that and actually make it fun, easy, and not the chore you think it is. Meet Patrick Richardson. Patrick is a cleaning expert, star of The Laundry Guy on HGTV and Discovery+, and author of the book House Love. A Joyful Guide to Cleaning, Organizing, and Loving the Home You're In. Hi, Patrick. Welcome to Something You Should Know.

Hi. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

I imagine that few people listening find as much joy in housework as you do. Maybe part of the problem is that we approach it wrong. What do you see as the big issue? What makes this job of cleaning the house this dreaded task?

Honestly, I think the biggest thing is everybody makes these projects into too big of a chore. If people would just stop and realize doing something is better than doing nothing, ultimately, your whole house is clean. Or if you just do one load of laundry, ultimately, all of your laundry is done. People turn it into this gigantic thing when it's really just a series of little things. And if you break it down, it's really simple and it's fun because you can get that sense of satisfaction of knowing that today I cleaned off the dining room table. Sometimes that's the victory.

I've talked to cleaning experts over the years, interviewed them, and I find that every one of them, and you do, too, probably, has one thing that nobody has probably heard of before that would make cleaning easier. What's your thing? What's the magic thing that you do that other people don't do?

I clean my kitchen with vodka. I have a spray bottle I have vodka in my kitchen, and that's how I clean just about everything. When you only have one cleaner, it's just so much simpler.

You use vodka because vodka does what?

Well, vodka is very antibacterial. It's actually It's a great cleaner. But the reason I use vodka is I have stone countertops, and you cannot use vinegar on them. So I didn't want to have to use more than one thing. And vodka is great to clean your stone countertops, but it's actually a really good degreaser. I mean, vodka will do lots of things. It's really funny that we drink it and that it's also great to clean your cutting boards. But it's a really good degreaser. And in the kitchen, usually, the grime or whatever that's in the kitchen is because you've cooked and that greasy steam has settled. And you just clean it off. And it's really nice because it is antibacterial. So you don't have to worry about anything being germy. Then finally, it's food-grade, so you don't have to spray it on and then worry about making sure that you got it off.

You can also make cocktails with that.

Well, my theory is I clean with college vodka, I drink adult vodka.

Good Good plan. That's a good plan. What other little tricks like that? Because I don't think most people... I had not heard the Clean with Vodka, but as you describe it, it makes perfect sense. I like the fact that, yeah, it's food-grade, so you don't have to worry about chemically cleaners that are still lingering on your countertop or wherever. But what other little things have you developed or found or invented that maybe like that that people could try?

Well, another one, sticking with the kitchen, something that vexes so many people is everybody bought stainless steel appliances as soon as they became fashionable, and nobody thought about the fact that they show fingerprints. If you wipe down your stainless steel appliances with vodka, you completely wipe them down. You can put a few drops of olive oil on a towel and buff it into your stainless, and it will never show fingerprints again. And you only have to repeat it when you have have to clean it. So if once a week, you spray the vodka on your refrigerator, you wipe it down and then you buff in some olive oil, your refrigerator looks great all week. That's really a fun one because that's something that so many people have challenges with. The other thing, which is a little more spendy, is to buy a cordless vacuum cleaner. A cordless vacuum cleaner, if you can only buy one appliance, that's the one to buy. Because when you can just grab it and sweep up the cereal, you'll find yourself just doing it so often that it doesn't become this big project that once a week you drag out this behemoth and carry it through your house.

You'll just find that you just start reaching for it and do it, and it becomes really pretty simple. If you buy one... At first, I wouldn't have given this tip a few years ago because there was only one company that made them, and they were about $800. But now, I saw them everywhere for $100 or less. So they've become pretty affordable. But if you buy one, you'll find that you just grab it. It just becomes like, Oh, I need to vacuum that up. And it will completely change the way that you take care of your house because you'll just start. There again, it's having the right tool. You just grab it and use it, and then things don't really build up.

My theory is that if you're going to be good at anything, you need a plan. You need a plan of attack here. What's the plan of attack if you're going to clean your house?

The first thing is put together a kit. Get yourself a spray bottle of vinegar and water, some really absorbent cloths, a feather dust, or just a very simple, basic kit so that you have your tools next to you. Part of what makes cleaning a house or taking care of things so hard is you have to go looking for everything. If you just gather everything up and carry it with you, that makes it simpler. If you go into the den and the kids' toys are everywhere, and there's glasses, and there's bowls from cereal and whatever, you don't have to put everything away. You just have to gather everything together. Don't keep running back and forth. Gather everything together, get your toolkit, and go to it. And it's really not that big of a challenge. And if you want to make it fun, play some music, turn on a movie. And it really is an enjoyable way to spend a couple of hours.

Okay. And so when you say go to it, tell me how to go to it.

Well, start at the ceiling and start dusting and dust your way down the walls and dust off the knickknacks. If you have time, pick them all up, clean the furniture and put them back. That's really the best way to do it. Gather everything that doesn't go in the room and put it somewhere that you can take it out when you leave, and then vacuum.

Well, you said get a feather duster, but I thought I had heard someone say once that that's not a great tool because it just spreads the the dust around.

It knocks the dust off is what it does. So the trick to making a feather duster work is you start at the top and you work your way down. And the feather duster keeps knocking the dust off and it keeps dropping lower and lower and lower. Then once it gets to the floor and you vacuum, it's gone.

I also remember hearing, because this stuck with me, too, is that we spend a lot of time cleaning clutter, that if we got the clutter out, we would our cleaning time down because we spend a lot of time cleaning junk.

That's 100% true. I am a maximalist. I mean, I am the maximalist maximalist. I can find room for another thing everywhere. But even that being said, sometimes people set things down. I remember a friend of mine telling me they had a candle on their entryway table. Neither of them liked, but no one just decided to get rid of it. So they kept picking it up and dusting under it, picking it up and dusting under it, dusting off the candle. And it just sat there. And that really is clutter if you don't love it. If you love it and you have 40 candles That's fine because that's what you love. And then it's not clutter. But when you don't like it, you're right. It just needs to be donated or thrown away or whatever needs to happen to it or used up and you make room. It's amazing how many people have seven bottles of hair gel. And that becomes clutter because they're just everywhere and they're in the way and you have to clean them and you have to clean the table under them. It's just a huge project for nothing.

Something else that I remember that I found really interesting is that we have, and I think it runs in families, and it just is in the culture of we have certain things in the bathroom, we have certain things in the kitchen because that's what people do, but maybe nobody likes it. The The best example I remember hearing was everybody has in their bathroom those little tiny waste baskets, and they fill up in no time, and you have to go empty. Why? Why do we have little tiny waste baskets in the bathroom? Why not put a real waste basket in the bathroom that you don't have to empty out every two days? But it's because nobody thinks, I don't like that.

That's a great example. It's funny. I actually have a very large one in my bathroom. But what's funny about it is, But it's also because when you go buy a waste basket for the bathroom, that's what the store sells you. And you have to stop and think, I don't have to buy that for my bathroom. I have a VIP. It's the original garbage can that has the foot pedal. And they're really good looking, and you can get them in lots of colors. But that's what I have in my bathroom, and it's actually quite tall. And I have the exact same one in my kitchen, which is really funny. But they weren't sold for that. They were actually sold to go in the garage. And they're really sharp. They're really good looking. And so that's what I bought. I think part of the problem is you have to think of the use that you need, not just what the store wants to sell you.

So nobody likes cleaning the bathroom, and nobody likes really cleaning the kitchen. Well, maybe you do, but I don't. I don't think most people love it. I love it, actually. Well, come on over. Yeah. But probably there's a way to tackle those rooms, the bathroom, the kitchen, that makes it a little less horrible.

There's a couple of things. I mean, number One, I don't want to sound like a broken record, but it's the right tools. I don't even like scrubbing the bathtub. But I found a brush that attaches to the end of a cordless drill that will scrub the bathtub in the shower for me. So all I have to do is put on some cleaning solution, let it sit, and then scrub. And so that's a funny tool, but it works great. Another great tool in the bathroom is a steamer because then it's It's sterile and it's clean, and it's just water. So you're not spraying on a chemical that you then have to rinse off. I love that.

So there is probably no one on the planet who knows more about laundry than you do. So when you do a load of laundry, what do you use?

I use laundry soap, which is not something you can buy at the grocery store. Most people have laundry detergent. I actually use laundry soap. It's actually soap, and it rinses completely clean. And I like it just because it rinses so clean. But if I was going to use detergent from the grocery, the key there is to use a tiny bit, only use about two tablespoons, at which point you're probably only going to buy one junk a year. And what's fun is when you use less, your clothes are cleaner, so that's awesome. And you use less, so you save a lot of money, but you also don't spill it. So you don't really have those drips running down the side of your washing machine, machine either.

A lot of people, though, use those pods now. It's either use it or you don't, but you don't get to measure it out.

Yeah, I'm not a big fan of those for a couple of reasons. Number one, they're way too much detergent for your clothes. But I find that they're very expensive, and then you also have to keep them, and they're bulky. I like things that are a little more minimal, I guess, in that regard.

Talk about, since we're in the laundry room here, in fact, we just had this problem with our Dining room tablecloth. Stains. How do you get those stains that won't come out? How do you get them out?

Most stains will come out with either a spray of 50 vinegar, 50 water, or a horse hair brush on a bar of laundry soap. That is 90 % of all stains will come out with one of those two things. With the brush, you wet the brush and you rub it on the bar, and then you apply the brush to the stain. The reason you don't rub the bar directly on the stain as it pushes it in. If neither of those things work, what you use is oxygen bleach. Oxygen bleach is the answer for wine, cranberries, strawberries, blood. I don't know what was on your dining table, but it's for those organic or natural stains. You put the oxygen bleach in a bowl, dip the stain in it, and toss it in the washing machine, and that will take it out. And oxygen But the oxygen bleach, unlike chlorine bleach, is completely color-safe. So if your dining room tablecloth had an broadered edge, you're still totally fine.

And oxygen bleach is in the supermarket, though. Is that OxyClean or something?

Yes, like that. There's a lot of them out there.

Let's talk about the bedroom. I don't know what big challenge is in there, but there must be something that people complain about. So what is it?

The biggest one is oily sheets from somebody's oily head or from the dog. Oxygen bleach takes that out. The other thing that comes up in the bedroom a lot, this is the perfect example of clutter. We throw things on our bedside table, and the bedside table just tends to accumulate more books, more glasses of water, three pairs of eye glasses, those sorts of things. And a great trick for that is to put a chest by your bedside and use one of the drawers as a table. So in the morning, when you're ready to leave, you just push the drawer shut and everything's out of sight, out of mind.

Perfect.

Those are the big things about the bedroom. The other thing, of course, to the bedroom, if you're only going to dust and vacuum one room in your house, make it the bedroom because you don't want to breathe that in while you sleep.

In the last few moments here, let's maybe mentally run through the house and some of your favorite suggestions.

A great one in the entryway is to get a flat tray. It can even be a cookie sheet and fill it with pebbles. So then it looks good and you can throw shoes on it, and the snow will melt and the water will go into the pebbles. And So then your shoes are dry when you're ready to leave again. Another one that's with the entryway is what I would tell you to use everywhere in your house is to set a basket there and throw everything in the basket and then once a week, go through it So things don't just accumulate throughout your house. My biggest one for your living room or your den is inside a cabinet or something, stash a roll of paper towels or stash a couple of cloths. So when you get a spill, you can attack it right then, and it doesn't become something that you have to come back to later, because most spills and that thing, if you can get them in the moment, they're really easy to deal with. And then my other one for the bathroom is to clean your bathtub and your sink with dish soap.

And the reason dish soap works so great is because it's meant to cut oil. And your bathtub has the oil from your skin and the oil from lotion and body oils or bath oils and those sorts of things. Dish soap will cut it immediately. It works much better than those foamy tub cleaners.

Let me ask you real quick, because we've talked about some really interesting things that will work. Look, do you find that people do things that are pretty common that really they shouldn't, that don't work, or that are counterproductive?

I think so many things that people do are counterproductive and don't work. Having all the specialty cleaners, I think it makes it hard because then you reach for something and there's 20 things in your way. The other thing, our grandparents and our great-grandparents had the right idea. Just a few simple things work everywhere. And when we started buying all of these specialty cleaners, to use countertops as an example, first everybody had granite, then they had marble, then they had quartz. And there really were different cleaners for each of those. Now there's soapstone. There's so many different things just for countertops. And if you start trying to buy all of those cleaners for all of them, it becomes really hard. If you go to something like vodka that's universal, it's easy and it works. Because a lot of times, If you use the wrong cleaner, you actually make the stain worse or you make it harder to clean. If you put wax on your laminate floors, it's almost impossible to take off, and you've wrecked the finish. But if you use something simple, vinegar and water, it's completely reversible. I think we have an idea that we need all of these really special things when the truth is, simple things will work.

And if they don't work, at At least they don't do any damage.

And when you use vodka straight up or with a twist?

It's just straight up. It's funny. What's really funny, and I tried it because I wanted it to work so bad, I wanted to infuse the vodka with lemon so that I would get the lemon scent, and I thought it was really funny that it was vodka with twist. The reality is there's so much citric acid in lemon peel that you can't use it because it will etch the countertops. It was too bad. I wanted it to work. I wanted it to work so bad just because I thought it was funny.

Well, I've never heard anybody tout the cleaning benefits of vodka like you do. You're the poster boy for vodka as a cleaner.

It's a great cleaner. As I said, it is food-grade. I wouldn't serve you a martini with the vodka that I clean with. But you'll just be amazed. It'll clean your stove top. It's just fantastic. And it's just so easy. And it's pretty affordable. It's cheaper than a cleaner, for sure. And it's just so easy. And vodka also removes odor. So here's another fun fact. If your dog lays on your sofa and your sofa smells like the dog, you can spray the sofa with vodka and the odor is completely gone. You can spray it in sneakers, you can spray it in your winter coat in January. Vodka removes odors. And the unique thing about vodka is it's completely odorless and colorless. So when it dries, it's completely gone.

Well, you're the miracle vodka cleaning guy. I don't know that I'll ever enjoy house cleaning as much as you do, but I have enjoyed the tips. I've been speaking with Patrick Richardson. He is author of the book House Love, A Joyful Guide to Cleaning, Organizing, and Loving the Home You're In. There's a link to that book in the show notes, and a couple of other links I put in the show notes about some of the products that he talked about. Thanks for being here, Patrick.

Oh, thanks. Have a great day.

If your New Year's resolution is to lose weight, you'll probably fail. You see, experts say a resolution to lose weight is just too vague to work. For a New Year's resolution to have any chance, you need to understand a few things, according to Dr. Kent Sassie, author of the book Doctor's Orders. A resolution has to be specific. Lose weight is too vague, but lose 2 pounds a week for 10 weeks, that's specific. Be reasonable. If you resolve to lose 15 pounds by next Tuesday, you will fail. In terms of weight loss, 2 pounds a week is it are doable. You have to want it. A New Year's resolution that you make because someone else wants you to, usually doesn't work. And support really helps, and it's not always easy to get. Your friends and family have an investment investment in you to stay the way you are. For instance, if you stop smoking, who's your smoking buddy going to smoke with? But asking people to support you and telling them that you're counting on them to do so can help. And that is something you should know. As I've said before, the best way to support this podcast, to show your support, is to recruit some other listeners for us.

Tell people you know about it. Help us grow our audience. That's really how this podcast So your help would be greatly appreciated. I'm Michael Brothers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.