Hey everybody, host Nora McAnerney is back for season 2 of the Head Start Embracing the Journey.
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So don't wait, join the Head Start Embracing the Journey and learn a little bit more about life with chronic migraine.
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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio.
Hey and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too.
So this is Stuff You Should Know.
Off to requested edition.
I knew someone had asked for this so I did a little Google or not Google but email search and seven people requested this over the last four years.
What are their names? Shannon Mendonka, Megan Delphino, Josh Kronin, come on down.
Michelle Roberts, Alicol Jonathan Markwan or Markven, Camp Remone Writing and then Micah Pee, Micah, I don't know how to pronounce your name, PEG, UES, PEG, I'm sure there's a pronunciation.
Pegus? I'm calling it Micah Pee, my old buddy.
I think Micah was the first one dating back to 2020 or at least as far as my email went back to search for Dr.
Bronner. Yeah, that's who we're talking about Dr.
Bronner and if you're like that name sounds familiar, you might be familiar with Dr.
Bronner's 18-in-1 magic soap which Dr.
Bronner, the company has been selling since at least the 1940s and if you just said what, I've only known that since the 60s or the 70s or the 80s or the 90s or two years ago, it's true.
This stuff has been around for a very long time and Dr.
Bronner himself is enough of a character to warrant an episode.
We're not really talking about the soap today.
No, but one thing you probably have, there's no way you could not notice it, is the iconic labels on the soap which have 2,729 words printed in 5.
font making up what we'll talk about later, the moral ABC and we'll get to why all that happened but it's a unique company in a couple of ways and many, many ways but one is they have never spent money on advertising.
That's amazing. Not a penny and it started out as well, we'll get to the origins but now it's one of the top selling organic soaps on the market with revenues approaching $200 million.
Yeah, and it went through quite a circuitous route to get there because not very long ago you bought that at like your local health food store that smelled like, you know, Valerian route everywhere.
Yeah, incense. Yeah, and they've just kind of blown up and what's neat is they've continued to grow under successive generations.
So I say we talk about Dr.
Bronner and where he came from in the first place.
All right, like you said, if you look at the label, it will say family soap makers since 1858 and that is when the Hyalbana family in Germany started making soap.
They were a Jewish family in Laupheim, Germany and they Dr.
Bronner himself would later drop the Hyal part of his name because of obvious reasons in World War II but in the 1890s the Hyalbana's were making tons of soap in three factories in Germany.
He came from a very well-heeled kind of legendary cast steel soap making company.
Yeah, I was going to say he was trained by his family to make cast steel soap which is kind of soap made or originated.
I guess around maybe the Mediterranean that uses vegetable oils instead of animal fats and it's softer and it does less drying on the skin and it's a true soap.
It undergoes subonification.
It's not a detergent like a lot of other soaps.
It's a genuine true soap and he learned to make that back in the early 1900s.
He was born in 1908. So sometime after that he learned how to make cast steel soap.
Yeah, he was born a meal, E.M.I.L.
Hyalbana, like we said, that's the less obnoxious way to say it.
I like how you've been saying I was going to compliment you on his side.
Hyalbana. In Germany and a lot of people or a lot of places that have the sort of apprentice model, that's what he did.
He was an apprentice and then a journeyman and then eventually was a master soap maker.
Only formal education he received was that the doctor was self-pastowed and completely made up.
And that totally fits him as we'll see.
Absolutely. But he and his parents were at odds.
His wealthy family were more just sort of old school, politically orthodox Jewish family.
They didn't want radical politics in their house.
And so Amel's belief in national homeland for the Jewish people and Zionism did not jive with what his family wanted to do.
So they basically said, hey, enough of that or get the heck out of here.
So in 1929 in December of that year Amel went to the United States.
Yeah, age 21. And he went essentially without a plan, without much money, he just showed up in New York City.
And he chose a particularly terrible time where I should say his father chose a particularly terrible time.
He showed up just after the stock market crash of 1929 that kicked off the Great Depression.
So he immediately found trouble or found getting work troublesome.
He did manage to kind of keep himself afloat by making soap or teaching others how to make soap.
And he's routinely considered a genius.
There's a I think either a police report or a mental institution report on them that says he very clearly seems to have a wealth of scientific knowledge in his head.
So he knew what he was doing with chemistry even though like you said his only formal education was in soap making.
He understood the chemistry of the whole thing and what adding this to it or that to it would what changes that would have.
So he was able to kind of keep himself going through soap making for essentially his whole life starting about now.
Yeah. He got married 1930 to another German immigrant named Paula Volfaut.
She has an interesting backstory in that in tragic in that she was born to from an affair between a Catholic priest and a nun.
And that nun very sadly took her life and put I don't know if it was she put her up for adoption before or if that de facto put her up for adoption.
But either way the the nun took her life.
Paula was adopted. Obviously wasn't Jewish which would not endear herself to Emil's family as you know as well as Emil himself.
And in 1935 Emil made his first batch of peppermint oil soap which today is their their biggest cell or still as a diaper cleaner when they had cloth diapers.
It was a diaper sanitizer and hey my god can you make this smell and he better kind of product.
So in 1936 he became a naturalized citizen and this is when he changed his name from Emil Heilbronner to a manual Theodore Bronner.
And most people call him Dr.
EH Bronner. Again he's not a doctor.
He just decided to call himself a doctor.
Although people cite his master chemist status as a soap maker to at least you know kind of justify it all but there's no getting around the fact that he bestowed the doctor on himself.
And they think that the H and EH is kind of a nod to the Heil from Heilbronner that he dropped.
Okay that's not me I'm not making that up.
Previous to World War II he was doing okay he was he was making soap doing pretty well.
He had his wife, he had his family.
What do you have three kids?
Is that right? Mm-hmm two boys and a girl.
After the war everything had fallen apart for him and his life basically.
Hitler of course came into power.
He and his siblings were begging his parents to leave Germany which they would not do and you know the worst thing happened that they were afraid of.
They were forced to hand over their business.
They were sent to concentration camps and they were both killed.
Yeah and I was reading a blog post from Lisa Bronner whose doctor Bronner's grand daughter and she was explaining that they they they there there was a forced sale of their soap making business to the third Reich to the German state because they were Jewish they were not allowed to own businesses like that.
And that would be obviously like a clear signal everybody like probably should leave the country now.
But the Germans also at this time had a law that well-healed Jewish people could not leave Germany with capital.
You could leave but you could not take a penny of German money outside of the country with you.
And so if you were wealthy and Jewish it would be kind of tough to just be like you know what forget it my entire family fortune I'm just going to forget about it just to get out of Germany because I still don't think like the German people are so crazy that they're going to let this guy just keep going.
And it got to the point where it became too late and there's a part of family lore is that Dr.
Bronner got a last postcard from his father after his detention in the concentration camp and it says like everything else is redacted but at the very end it says you were right you were loving father which is that's about as heartbreaking as it gets.
But that was a big big deal to Dr.
Bronner as his sister would later attest.
Oh of course another tragedy and big deal in his life is when his wife suffered a fall after they had their third kid and that was kind of it for her she she became depressed she stopped eating.
She had suicidal ideation eventually died in a state mental hospital outside of Chicago and I tried to find out more and more about maybe what happened with her and there's just not a lot out there.
I suspected that maybe there was some sort of head injury it just sort of tracks along those lines maybe in that fall but either way he was left a widower with three young children and as we'll see it was not much of a dad he was not around much and did not dad much.
Uh no no there's one thing that everybody agrees is that he was a terrible father in almost every way not always but almost every way especially on paper like when you just read about how what kind of father he was it's it's crazy that his kids ever you know embrace him or just to stuck around with him you know.
Yeah well I mean we might as well go ahead and talk about it I believe that they were at various times in orphanages and placed with other families and he kind of straight up said and you know as we'll see he he becomes a bit of a zealot for his ideas and kind of a kind of a manic street preacher type and he would literally say like who has time to parent kids when I have to like
spread spread my word around right and he made no bones about it you know that just he he wasn't gonna parent these kids.
Yeah no and he would come back once or twice a year and visit them but yeah he was like I have to go out and do this I have a I have a much bigger mission than raising you kids and yeah that's a really tough thing to swallow I'm sure as you're a kid and then even as an adult when you're looking back but again astoundingly his kids stuck with him and learned to just kind of deal
with the fact that their father had abandoned them and about the most overt way a father can abandon a child and and spent the rest of their lives with them once they grew up and were able to basically get out of the the foster and orphanage systems.
Yeah absolutely so I mentioned him being you know having these big ideas I mentioned the moral ABC and kind of like the manic street preacher shout out to the band.
This all came from this idea of post-World War II he had sort of either a breakthrough or a breakdown in his mind about that this could be it we're on the brink of destruction as a as a people mankind needs a big shift in our perspectives how we think about politics how we think about the our time on earth and the afterlife he basically was like the only way forward for us
if we're gonna survive as a species is to become the United States of the world and to be all together as one people and not and you know it wasn't the most radical idea there have been plenty of people that talked about stuff like this but he's like we are all children of the same God and the only thing that can save us from that is if we all get together and come together
as one yeah I'm glad you said that he either had a breakthrough or breakdown because his sister Louise who will play a big role in a minute she traces the origin of his zealousness in this that has need to like spread this message to the time when both of his parents were killed murdered and his wife died like all within basically a year yeah and that he changed after that and depending
on who you talk to and how you look at it he changed either for the better and like became the person who was supposed to be or his ideas were just super cookie and he managed to support himself just by the grace of making soap yeah so I mentioned the moral ABC this is basically the in result of his sort of in result meaning it was still a work in progress to the day he died he
was always tinkering with this moral ABC which is the thing printed on that soap label all one is the big rallying cry which is what I was kind of alluding to earlier with his thoughts but that is what he I mean to secondary to selling soap he was worried about this label and the words on it it's seemingly his entire life until he died yeah he figured out that he could use
the soap as a way to get the word out there which is pretty genius actually and that's where the label came from yeah let's all right hey everybody summer is the best time to run the way you want to you can dial it up with new challenges and programs he can bring your workouts with you to make the most of those beautiful outside sunny days that's right because summer is the best
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of a website or domain hey everyone host Nora McInerney is back for season two of the head start embracing the journey a podcast from ruby studio and ab v in each episode Nora has real conversations with real people living with chronic migraine to see how they take action to understand the disease that's right recognizing how a migraine attack can change the course
of your day she unpacks each guest journey and how they talk to their doctors to find the treatment plans that are right for them yep along with headache specialist doctor Christopher Ryan and other special guests Nora speaks to these incredible people who've channeled their feelings of isolation in their chronic migraine journey into advocacy and art plus
there are also eight episodes of their first season available for you to binge so jump into the conversation for season two show that creates a little more space for empathy and understanding in such a complicated world there shouldn't be so much hesitation around asking questions and asking for help so don't wait join the head start embracing the journey as they
learn a little bit more about life with chronic migraine okay Chuck so after at some period of time he ended up in Chicago and like you said he became a manic street preacher in Chicago and he attracted an inherent this is this is kind of like a little side story but it's worth telling because I think it really kind of gets the point across about Bronner and who he was and the people
he hung out with at the time because he came out as like the the reasonable one out of this one but one of his dayboatays was named Fred Walker who would he had attracted and Fred Walker who turned out to be a Nazi sympathizer but before that was clear he was an Austrian immigrant who had created his own universal brotherhood movement called American industrial democracy
and he really was vibing on what Bronner was saying and at some point I guess either he or they it's not clear got the idea of creating a publicity stunt to get their ideas out there to more people and apparently Fred Walker submitted or suggested that he be crucified to get this message out as a publicity stunt and he was crucified yeah this is in outside of L station a train station in Chicago
March 9th 1945 a cops were called down there and like dude on a cross with nails the whole nine yards it wasn't like a show and he was tied up there it was a real crucifixion they do survived he at some point mentioned Bronner's name and the cops went and talked to Bronner and said hey do you have I think he mentioned the the peace plan or something like that Walker did to
the cops right and they said are you a Bronner and they said yeah and he said do you have this peace plan he went sure I do and he even have a pamphlet they're like a bunch come talk to us then about what happened to your friend nothing ever happened I guess everyone just claimed up about how he was actually literally crucified but in the hospital room with like reporters
and everything in there with this guy Bronner was in there with with his peace pamphlets like passing them out to people yeah but apparently people were like this is not the kind of thing I want to associate with crucifixion you know I like I now think that your ideas are related to this man being crucified right in Chicago so it wasn't the best publicity stunt of all
time but it does kind of get across the kind of stuff and the kind of people that dr.
Bronner was hanging out with in Chicago in the mid 40s and he developed a reputation pretty quickly because within a year he was arrested by the Chicago police and his life completely changed at this point he was known for not taking no as an answer he was known for not knowing the meaning of the word can't again Lisa Bronner described him and there is a the international
center a college at the University of Chicago they would have like seminars or presentations or lectures and dr.
Bronner is like I've got a perfect lecture for you guys let me get up there and talk and tell everybody my all one sermon and the moral ABC and they said no we don't want you to do that thanks for offering and the University of Chicago thought that was that yeah so in March of 46 he comes back pretty hotheaded he's yelling out his philosophy he's kind of yelling out his a moral
ABC and a couple of cops come out and say hey your cars parked illegally out there once you come out with us and we'll get it moved and I guess this was just the old cop thing to not cause a big scene inside because they get him outside immediately arrest him hit him with the blackjack yeah he's in jail for about a week and his sister Louise eventually came from Rhode Island to
sign a committee papers to have him sent to Elgin State in Sanus Island where he says and you know we don't we've talked before about how hard it is to get any hard facts about what happens and what happened in those places back then but Bronner himself said that he was he had to sleep on a concrete slab that he was chained to every night he was forced us into solitary confinement
and electro shock therapy we don't know which parts of that if all of it or none of it is true but that's what he said happened and in fact if you see pictures of the older dr.
Bronner he's always got on these these dark glasses and that's because he lost his eyesight very slowly over the years and he credits that or blames it rather on the shock treatments that he got in at Elgin.
Yeah he would later on say he would call Elgin a concentration camp and say that he was put to hard labor mixing concrete and he probably was put to put to work because they did use inmates for labor back then but they like he would say like in the concentration camps I did what he was talking about was the the mental institution that he was committed to by a sister and he
wasn't very happy there as you can guess so he escaped he escaped three times and the third time was the charm he finally got away it's always the last escape attempt you know well didn't he just kind of get up and leave when his sister visited he she was allowed to take him out to lunch she went to the bathroom he stole five bucks out of her person took off and made it to he
made it all the way to Vegas he hitchhiked to Los Angeles and apparently he had a ride all the way there and he made the mistake of mentioning to the driver that he had just escaped from a mental hospital and the driver was like I'm gonna let you off in Las Vegas how about that and he took that five dollars or whatever was left of it and I want to say it was a roulette spin and managed
to make enough money to get him the rest of the way out to Los Angeles and run a room while winning out there quite a story yeah so what we're saying is his big successful attempt was he was taking out to lunch and he got up and left yeah yeah I guess so for sure uh amazing yeah I mean there was no like barbed wire climbing over stuff or search like anything there was probably
a hot beef right so he ends up in Los Angeles the company the the real company that we know is Dr.
Bronner's you know soap company was founded then in 1948 that's when the the the company started in earnest he would go to Pershing Square in downtown LA where people would Manic Street preach and he would literally stand on a soap box and preach his moral ABC to people I keep wanting to say ABCs but it's ABC yeah just like scorpions yeah exactly uh and he would preach
and then sell bottles of this liquid soap and people loved the soap so much they would go back and just buy the soap so that's where he was like no one's even listening to preach anymore and that's where the idea hatched was to actually put the message on the soap Bing-Bang-BOOM didn't even have to stand around on that soap box anymore right so um uh get again like this I'm
trying to figure out how to get him across if it's not coming through maybe this will do it throughout the 1950s he became obsessed with the idea that communists were secretly running the United States and ruining it and he used to call the Los Angeles Field Office of the FBI every day to tell them how to root out communists or suggest ways of finding communists and getting
rid of them and they eventually created a file on them because he called so much it's a good way to get on the FBI's list is to call them every day yeah just call directly you want an FBI um an FBI file just start calling them every day and then he also was really concerned that fluoride that was in the water had actually been put there to poison us uh and that's a pretty interesting
idea that um the whole I guess theory that fluoride is detrimental to us came from Dr.
Bronner possibly because he seems to be one of those pop culture influencers that you just have no idea that that something you thought or think can be traced directly back to him and his ideas but there's a few examples of that and this could be one of them yeah um for sure you mentioned early at the very beginning um like oh I just heard about that soap uh in the 1960s
or maybe my parents did uh that's because in the 1960s uh things were going bad and then they started going really well uh he was in trouble with the IRS um he had registered the company as a nonprofit uh the feds were like no it's not a nonprofit so he said all right um I'm gonna stop selling soap all together uh I'm gonna concentrate just on my preaching on the fluoride
issue and as it seems you know these stories are all I think taken a little bit with the grain assault as far as the timing sure um but supposedly that's when a couple of hippies walked up to the door with a bunch of money and said hey we want um a couple of 50 gallon drums of your soap and this idea was like wait a minute these hippies in San Francisco summer of love one of those
years they loved this soap um and all of a sudden they had like a like a a willing audience who I think the hippies were perfect in that they they liked the soap of course but they also liked it being unnatural and they liked this kind of a wacky guy had all this stuff on the label it is really fit with that whole 60s thing and that turned the company around yeah I saw that um
I saw described as the world was finally ready for dr.
Bronner and his ideas because it sounds about right yeah yeah he'd been like espousing eco consciousness and brotherly love and uh a lot of the stuff the hippies were into since the forties probably a little earlier but definitely since the mid forties yeah um yeah so they kind of became followers of dr.
Bronner they would hang out at his house which was also the factory in escondito california and um he would also he put his phone number on the label his home phone number and he had a bunch of different phones I guess the same phone number went to a bunch of different lines and would answer calls from customers like all day and all night and just start talking to them
about the moral abc and um talking to them about how how to use this product and um just basically anything that was on his mind because he'd love to talk um I saw it didn't matter whether it was a tape recorder a reporter a customer calling in or a uh child one of one of his kids like he just he just went off constantly on his on his thoughts and his tangents and his moral abc
and what it meant and how to live and the hippies definitely vibed on that for sure yeah I think the word narcissist has probably been used more than once with dr.
Bronner it's entirely possible but if you watch him interact with the his family he's in his old age uh he's he's very kind of tender tender and um relaxed and calm and doesn't seem like he's manipulating them or anything like that it's it's strange I think he has his own condition a unique condition he has dr dr.
Bronnerism yeah yeah um but he was not a good business person like we mentioned quite a few times um he would not sell uh his soaps because he was working on that label he would not deliver his soaps uh in in orders uh he owed a lot to the IRS in back taxes like millions of dollars and even though they did pretty well in the 60s by the 80s he had kind of run the the company back
into the ground you know in the brink of bankruptcy and that's when his son his oldest son Jim um turn the company around he it turns out Jim was a great business person um he was great at making the manufacturing process more efficient he balanced the books um he even took the moral abc and was like hey we've got a thing here but maybe we should craft it into uh into something
that makes a little more sense like just sort of shape it and give it more of a story so it doesn't sound like the manic street preacher just babbling things in the corner right um I say we take a break and come back and talk about what they did with that let's do it hey everyone host Nora McInerney is back for season two of the head start embracing the journey a podcast from ruby studio
and ab v in each episode Nora has real conversations with real people living with chronic migraine to see how they take action to understand the disease that's right recognizing how a migraine attack can change the course of your day she unpacks each guest journey and how they talk to their doctors to find the treatment plans that are right for them yep along with headache
specialist dr. Christopher Ryan and other special guests Nora speaks to these incredible people who've channeled their feelings of isolation in their chronic migraine journey into advocacy and art plus there are also eight episodes of their first season available for you to binge so jump into the conversation for season two show that creates a little more
space for empathy and understanding in such a complicated world there shouldn't be so much hesitation around asking questions and asking for help so don't wait join the head start embracing the journey as they learn a little bit more about life with chronic migraine stuff you should know is brought to you by our friends at seer and avada brewing company where trailblazing
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owned operated and argued over visit seer and avada dot com today to taste the difference it was very important for me to have a therapist who could understand relationships traumas the lgbtq community and someone who was also a person of color i tend to deal with things in life with a sense of humor my therapist on better help and i we share this trait and so we connect
on a deeper level and i'm more comfortable sharing things with him i am just so much more like in tune with myself being able to talk to my therapist if you're thinking of giving therapy a try visit better help dot com slash stuff today to get 10% off your first month that's better help h-e-l-p dot com slash stuff all right so when we left we talked about eldest son jim
runner sort of um shaping informing the moral abc into what we see today on the label and he did that through um and it got way they really leaned into the hippie stuff too um because a it seems like i don't know as much about jim but ralf uh the his brother was a total hippie still is and they uh started saying things like all right the the moral abc are now the six cosmic principles
stuff like that yeah because they they went through they rooted through his philosophy which they'd been heranged by and probably knew by heart since they were little kids that when he came to visit them and they they basically mined it for the best ideas and they they boiled it down to those six cosmic principles the first is ourselves work hard grow our customers
do right by customers it's a good one our employees treat employees like family and as we'll see they definitely live up to that one our suppliers be fair to suppliers our earth treat the earth like home our community fund and fight for what's right and this is like their company their corporate ethos and uh it's it they legitimately stick to it this is in no way shape
reform a gimmick greenwashing marketing it's it's exactly what this family company lives by yeah yeah it's pretty remarkable um they i mean we'll just list off some of the things they do as a company and you can decide for yourself whether you feel good about supporting them um but during jim's tenure um he he passed away not long after his father which you know we'll
get to uh but they introduced a basically a 100% coverage uh for health insurance zero deductible health plan uh a 15% profit sharing plan ten years after that they said all right as a company we're going to have a five to one compensation cap uh so that means at no point in our company's history or future history i guess will the highest played uh highest paid employee
uh be more than five times um compensated what the lowest paid employee is which is remarkable to do yeah so that means that like the the people leading the company are making about i saw about 300 grand a year um and i mean they could be making so much more than that because the company pulls in tens of millions of dollars now but rather than funnel it out of the company
the kids and grandkids decided to invest it back into the company by paying the workers really well by um funding um political causes and essentially just making their product better and better that's that's i mean you just don't you don't see that anymore it was a remarkable back in the day now it's like mind boggling you know oh absolutely um if you you know get like
fair trade coffee or any kind of fair trade product or or a cosmetic or sop or something that it says is made with fair trade ingredients um he was way or the company was way ahead of that um i mean they've kind of done that since the start their raw materials have always come from fair trade partnerships back when people didn't even know what that meant um they donated
uh and this is a few years ago in 2022 they donated close to nine million bucks which was about a third of their net profits uh to 300 more than 300 non-profits um and like you said they you know they're heavily involved in progressive politics they publish an election guide that basically say here's who these candidates are here's what causes they support uh and how
it aligns with the causes we support or not um and i believe over the past two decades as a company they've donated more than a hundred million dollars uh to their various charities and uh activism or activist organizations yeah i want to say typically progressive but i think it's a hundred percent progressive yeah one of the things they fought for for years was um
legalizing hemp industrial hemp this stuff you can't get high off of but you can use a million different ways and they help get that pushed forward just from agitating um i think it was David brawner the grandson i don't remember if he's Jim or Ralph's kid but he's the cosmic engagement officer CEO he's actually the vice president um but he's in charge of activism
and he did a lot of i guess publicity since to draw attention to industrial hemp like he was arrested in 2009 for planting hemp seeds outside the DEA headquarters um he locked himself in a cage with a bunch of hemp outside the white house he had to be cut out i think with the jaws of life and finally when hemp farming was legalized in 2018 they sent out this celebratory
press release about how like what a great day this was it's kind of cute to read yeah and by the way that's who i was uh thinking of when i talked about kind of what a hippie he was uh not Ralph it was David the grandson oh yeah he's super hippie there's a gq profile of the company and the the i guess they call it the hero image is David brawner with his tongue stuck out and there's
a hit of blotter on his tongue but it's the doctor brawner's logo on the on the blotter and like they're super into legalizing psychedelics especially for use in mental health um yeah and that health plan that they came up with they're the first company to subsidize ketamine assisted therapy yeah using psychedelics like they they're that's part of the health plan you
can go get that and the company covers it with their 100% coverage health plan pretty amazing so i mentioned that uh Jim brawner passed away uh around the same time as his father uh a manual brawner died in 1997 from uh complications from Parkinson's disease and his son his eldest son that turned the company around uh passed a year later from cancer they were making
you know like you said it's really taking off taking off lately in the late 90s they were doing pretty well they were making you know four or five million bucks a year as a company which is awesome but um like you said it was sort of hippie-dippy health food stores is where you'd find it it really exploded uh in the in the teens in the 20 teens that is um and especially after 2020
with um covid when people were washing their hands a lot i think they they almost reached the two hundred million dollar level during covid um and you know considering where they started and then all the ups and downs in between that's quite an accomplishment yeah for sure um they also sell a bunch of other stuff too including chocolate toothpaste pretty good toothpaste
but the thing is the irony of all this stuff is that you can use the the castel soap for for most of this not the chocolate but you can brush your teeth with it you can wash your hair with it you can um gargle with it apparently it helps clear up congestion it does all sorts of stuff and i believe it says all 18 uses on the label and um you can go read the labels and get you know
the moral abc out of them and each one's a little different it has some other stuff that the other labels don't have so you have to buy them all i guess yeah and now i mean i don't have any but i you know now that Emily is it making our own castel soap from her company um you know it's all bets are off i watched my hair with it this very morning no we still actually have a big stash
of Emily soap and she just made some for the family the other day so i don't think it will be switching over anytime soon but dr bronners is uh it's good stuff we can come to my house if you if you want to use some dr bronners get away oh good i stink um i could use some Emily soap though just you know hint hint i bet we could find a a squeezy bottle or two a misshapen bar sure uh
if you want more about dr bronner uh wait was she we should tell them should we tell them the marks bits thing oh yeah i forgot about that what what was the deal he was on the label yeah he was held up along with um jesus tomasaz the psychiatrist l l zamenhof the guy who created esparanto as a great example of uh jewish person who helped change the world because he had set
the record for the most gold metals in a single um event her sport i guess and um in 2008 he finally was like get me off of this label and sued dr bronners and i guess they settled for some undisclosed amount he's like stop venerating me give me some money instead yeah and give me off of that weedies box if you want to know more about dr bronners you can go read some dr bronners
labels and read a bunch of good articles on them too and in the meantime while you do that it's time for this in your mail well my friend it is not because today we send a message out that is all a plea to the fine people of Atlanta Georgia we have a live show and all the other cities are doing great and we're we're selling we sold out in Indianapolis and uh we're selling great all
in Chicago and Minneapolis and almost sold out in Durham but for some reason our hometown show is lagging because these are the people who know us like really know us yeah so like whatever you're here you live here we see you at the library like every week i see chuck at the car watch all the time it's a shifty so we're just uh asking the uh for some support uh this will be
the last show the tour it's a great show uh Josh put this one together and it's just it's a really good one and uh we'd love to see everyone in symphony hall on uh what is it the the seventh or eighth of september to seventh this out of seventh it's a Friday it's a Friday night show everybody those are the good ones yeah so come see us because we want to see you and no it's just
it's a seventh it's a Saturday it's a Saturday at the seven on the seventh yeah we're we're Durham on uh the fifth that's a Thursday and then the six we got the night off right Josh is gonna wash my hair and then the seventh of september at Atlanta symphony hall tickets are still available just go to our website and go to symphony hall website and buy some tickets and come
see us because who knows we may never do another live show again it's possible actually that's not true but come out and that's yes yeah if you if you want to go to buy tickets you can go to link tree slash sysk live or our website stuff you should know and dot com and click on the tour button uh and yeah and if you want to get in touch with us like normal you can send us an email
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 you know summer is for you and how you choose to move the best time to tap in work in workouts for life and enhance your fitness routine with classes
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