The Pits

Hey everyone, this is Alex.

So the other day I got an email from a very nice listener who basically said to me,

Hey, I like Hyperfixed, I want to support it. It is hard for me to justify spending $60 a year on a single show.

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And, you know, as the media landscape gets more and more inhospitable to creators, people are needing to choose what to support and when.

And the idea of spending, you know, $60 a year on a single show isn't for everyone.

So, right now we are in the middle of the fall Radiotopia fundraiser, and I just wanted to spotlight that as an alternative to people who want to support not just my show, but a number of shows with a one-time or recurring donation.

If you don't know what Radiotopia does for us, on top of selling our ads, they help us with promotion, they connect us with collaborators, they help us purchase ads for big stories, they help help me with submissions for award shows.

And, you know, Radiotopia is the home of some of my favorite podcasts of all time.

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Hey everyone, this is Alex. Very quickly before we start, I am going to try a very stupid stunt that I would love for you all to come participate in.

On Friday, December 19th at 12 p.m., we are going to have the first hyperfixed pledge drive. I will be going live on Twitch at twitch.tv slash hyperfixedpod for 24 hours.

I'll be sitting there with a guitar and my synthesizers. and during those 24 hours, anyone who signs up for yearly membership will be able to request that I perform a song.
Literally any song.

Now, I'm a mediocre musician at best. I'm not going to be able to play any Beethoven or anything, but I'll probably be able to get at least one verse and one chorus out of most songs.

And if not, won't it at least be entertaining to watch me flail? Especially if I'm super sleep deprived? Again, that's December 19th at 12 p.m. twitch.tv/slash hyperfixedpod.

24 hours of me performing songs poorly.

Hope to see you there.

Hi, I'm Alex Goldman, and this is HyperFixed. Each week on our show, listeners write in with their problems, big and small, and I solve them.
Or at least I try.

And if I don't, I at least give a good reason why I can't. This week, the pits.

You know, so much of this was just shoved in the back of my closet like a bad memory that I hadn't been dealing with. And now having talked about this, it's like, yeah, it is frustrating.

Sorry to reopen old traumas here, Heath. No, it's my fault.
I was the one that was like, what the hell's going on with this situation? This, as you just heard, is Heath.

He's a TV and film director based in Los Angeles, and if it sounds like we're at the end of an interview, that's because this is actually the second time I'm interviewing him about the problem he's been having.

The first time I interviewed him about it, we got a little carried away talking about other stuff, and I kind of forgot to ask him to explain what the problem was exactly.

According to Heath's wife, it kind of sounded like I forgot I was doing an interview at all.

And because Heath's wife happens to be Hyperfix producer Emma Cortland, we decided to take that note seriously and try doing the interview again. Only this time we promised not to talk about Fortnite.

Oh my God. Here we are again.

Here we are again. How do I sound okay? You sound fantastic.
You've never sounded better.

All right.

Did Emma send you instructions? She did. She did send me instructions.
She sent me a bunch of a bulleted list.

So without further ado, the first thing I need to ask you is if you could explain your problem in a couple sentences. My problem?

What is my problem? My problem is that most of

my- Can you believe that this is the better version of the interview? At this point, Emma cut in to make everyone's lives easier.

The problem is that Heath has a propensity for armpit stains.

Like, no matter what kind of deodorant he's wearing, no matter how we launder them, no matter how often he showers, or like what he's scrubbing his pits with, like, sooner or later, his shirts are going to get sweat stains.

And we cannot figure out why this is happening or what to do to prevent it. On the surface, this seems like a very simple problem.

And if you Google this question, you'll get a very simple answer from a very reliable source.

The New York Times, the paper of record, says in no uncertain terms that yellow pit stains are caused by a chemical reaction that occurs when the proteins in your sweat combine with the aluminum in your antiperspirant.

End of story. But according to Heath, there has got to be more to the story than that.
But I know they say use aluminum free. And I've used aluminum free.
I'm currently using aluminum free.

And admittedly, I've done a scientific test, but I haven't found any aluminum free or whatever that really.

I feel like the only option is I got to wear the most baggy shirts that have like so much clearance between my armpit and the armpit of the shirt. Otherwise, if anything like hugs,

you're done for. You're done for.

Terrible. I'm so sorry.
I mean, this is the definition of a first world problem.

I mean, that's a lot of what we deal with here. The other issue with that New York Times answer is that Heath's stains aren't always yellow.
Sometimes they're just dark, oily-looking blotches.

Blotches that seem to grow deeper and darker with every wear. Heath showed me a couple of these shirts, and even though they've been freshly laundered, the armpits look wet.

The ones that are the worst now, I like only wear with a hoodie so that I know no one's going to see the armpit.

I have like probably a dozen shirts that are kind of in the this can't just be a t-shirt t-shirt. But that must be so frustrating.
So how have you been dealing with this problem?

Have you just been like letting it, it's just been letting it happen? I mean, there is no dealing with it. I avoid shirts that are too tight in the armpit because I know it's going to get ruined.

When I get a new shirt, I try to be on top of it. And like every time I do laundry, I'll spray the pits with like an OxyClean or what a shout kind of thing.
And that doesn't help?

A marginal improvement.

Heath has tried every type of cleaning product. He's tried homemade pastes.
He's tried scrubbing with a toothbrush. None of these techniques have solved the problem.

And then, oh, also with the white ones, after a while, the yellow turns gray, which is what makes me think it's like

organic material that has somehow bonded to the fabric because it seems like

this is gross. It seems like dead skin.
It seems like it's, you know, I don't know.

You could probably get like a DNA sample of me off of a 12-year-old shirt that's been washed hundreds of times.

I might give it a shot. Who knows? You know, this project, this story is young.
I'll send you one.

You know, I've got a producer that's pretty close to you that I could probably subcontract on this process. Look, whatever you need.

My armpits are an open book.

Okay, what would make this resolve for you? Would it just be the ability to remove these stains, or would it just be like knowing what causes them?

I mean, knowing what causes them, I guess, would be helpful because I could try to avoid what causes them.

But again, the New York Times are going to be like, it's aluminum. Use aluminum free.
Okay. I don't, I still don't think that's it, honestly.

If we could find something that actually would clean stuff out, so I could reclaim some of my shirts, the older shirts. But I don't, that I don't think is going to happen.

Because honestly, I think most of those shirts are so old,

whatever process that would get the stain off of it would like destroy the fabric. Yeah, I don't know that that would work for older shirts, but I'll be honest, I have no idea.

I don't know what I'm doing. I think these stains are probably at this point, they're like load-bearing, like they're holding the armpit of the shirt together.

So, if you didn't have the stain, it would, it's, it's like a patch on a, on a, on a jacket. I think so.
Yeah. Okay, then, yeah, that, yeah, that probably is right.

Well, you know, you've really set me up. Is there anything else that I missed that you're dying to let the world know?

Heath is more than willing to believe that antiperspirant plays some role in the staining of his shirts.

Like, maybe there's old antiperspirant embedded in the armpit fibers, and he's washing too delicately to get it out. But he's convinced that it can't be the only thing happening here.

Because tons of people use antiperspirants, and everybody sweats. But not everybody has the crazy pit stains that are plaguing Heath's wardrobe.

And it's hard for him to imagine that all of those people have some kind of laundry hack that he doesn't have.

So what's going on here? Why are Heath's shirts getting stained so frequently and so badly? And is there anything he can do to save his beloved old shirts?

Now, at this early stage of the investigation, usually what happens is that we divide our question into categories, in this case, biology and laundry, and then then we scour the internet for experts who seem best equipped to answer them.

And while we were able to find a laundry expert fairly quickly, finding a scientist who specialized in armpits but didn't work for some kind of cosmetic company, that turned out to be surprisingly challenging.

And I guess I understand why that would be. Because when I think about my armpits, I'm forced to confront the fact that I actually never think about my armpits.

They exist almost as an incidental part of my body, This fleshy, hairy cave where nothing interesting happens.

At least that's how I used to think about armpits. Until I interviewed this guy.

So your nickname is Dr. Armpit.
And I'm curious how one gets that nickname and if you like that nickname or not.

I love it. I love it.
No, it's it's uh my colleagues gave me that. I was pursuing a PhD to become a doctor and I was the guy swapping everybody's underarms, stopping them in the corner.

Like, hey, I'll take a swap of your underarms. So yeah, the Dr.
Armpit. So And I quickly embraced it.
And I mean, yeah, it really says a lot of what I do.

This is Dr. Chris Calivart.
He's a microbiologist based in Belgium.

And as his nickname suggests, he is one of a small cohort of scientists who have devoted their careers to studying what's happening inside your armpit.

But by his own admission, this is not a career that Chris set out to have.

In fact, like me, Chris didn't really have armpits on his radar until something happened that opened his mind and changed the course of his career.

Long story short, I was studying a bioengineer in chemistry. I was basically ending my studies and then I had a one-night stand that really changed my whole life.

What happened was essentially this. On his way home, From that one-night stand, Chris noticed that there was something different about his body.
A smell that was emanating from his armpits.

My underarms smelled sour, musty, unpleasant, just completely different. And this was super alarming for Chris, because until that day, his pits had never really been smelly.

I never had any body odor. Then I had body odor suddenly from one day to the other.
It's like, what the hell is this? I don't like it. So Chris went home and tried to shower it off.

He lathered his body in soap, scrubbed his pits like crazy, but the stink persisted. So he tried other things, antibacterial soaps, deodorants, and a perspirants.
The smell always returned.

And that got me into investigating the problem.

Chris pumped the brakes on his PhD, which he was just two years away from completing, by the way, and redirected all of his energy into solving the mystery of why he had suddenly become so smelly.

And the first thing he learned is that, contrary to popular belief, body odor has nothing to do with the smell of your sweat.

What is causing the smell? It's the bacteria.

Okay, so everyone's armpits are full of bacteria. This part shouldn't be surprising.
Your whole body is covered in them. But bacteria really love your armpits.

They're warm, they're moist, and most importantly, they're one of the only parts of your body that produce this kind of fatty, protein-rich sweat that bacteria love to eat.

And when they metabolize that fatty, protein-rich sweat, it produces a scent. And that scent can be good or bad or neutral or sour, depending on which types of bacteria are living in your armpit.

So the question for Chris was: How did I suddenly colonize a whole new set of these bad smell bacteria?

And the answer, of course, was that they'd hitched a ride over during his one-night stand. So body odor is contagious?

Yes, absolutely. Oh my God.

That mind-blowing realization led Chris to an even more mind-blowing theory, that if you could transplant the bad-smelling bacteria, then maybe the good-smelling ones can be transplanted too.

And if you could do that, at scale, then maybe you could cure body odor. Chris presented this idea to his professors and they thought it sounded great.

So they set him up with a new PhD track and gave him a lab.

And in 2013, Chris completed the first successful armpit bacteria transplant on a pair of identical twins, effectively curing one twin's body odor using the bacteria from his non-stinky brother.

Chris has since performed this transplant on himself as well. But what does any of this have to do with Heath?

Well, that's a great question. I'm glad I asked it.
So, you remember that I was talking about this fatty, protein-rich sweat that bacteria loves to eat?

It turns out that is what's causing Heath's pit stains. It also turns out that is not your everyday type of sweat, or at least it shouldn't be.

You see, there are two different types of sweat glands in your armpits, ecrine and apocrine, and each of them gets triggered by different things.

When it's hot outside or you're exercising really hard, ecrine sweat glands get triggered to lower your body temperature.

they produce a watery kind of sweat that's filled with electrolytes and when it dries on your skin it cools your body down which is actually what i thought all sweat was supposed to do but that is not the case because this other kind of sweat this apocrine sweat it gets triggered by cortisol otherwise known as your stress hormone and it seems to do nothing but make you greasy So if you have more stress, you will also produce more apocrine sweat.

And that is related to the animal kingdom. An animal that is hunted upon and is under stress will produce, you know, with adrenaline and cortisol, will produce apocryphine sweat.

And if you produce that lipid greasy stuff on your fur, you'll have a higher chance of slipping away to the bushes, through the, you know, away from your predator.

Again, nobody really knows what purpose this sweat is serving in humans.

There are some theories about it being used for nonverbal communication and other theories about it being very tangentially involved in thermoregulation.

But for the time being, it just seems to be fucking with our lives, feeding our armpit bacteria and staining our t-shirts, or Heath's t-shirts.

And because Heath's shirts are getting stained more often than most, Chris suspects that he is probably producing more cortisol than most people, which could be a genetic thing or a lifestyle thing or a diet thing.

And unfortunately, Without a thorough biological investigation, which is too expensive for this independent podcast to undertake, there's really no way to know.

Thanks so much, Chris. This has been super informative.
Thanks, Alex. It was a great

after the break. We take our extreme laundry problem to an extreme launderer.

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Welcome back to the show. So, before the break, Heath came to us with a pile of ruined shirts and questions about why, eventually, every shirt he owns has become sodden with pit stains.

And we found out that his pit stains aren't caused by normal everyday exercise sweat, but another kind of super sweat produced by his stress hormones.

But there was still one way we thought we might be able to help him. If we could figure out how to treat his old pit stains, we might be able to save his old shirts.

Now, as you probably remember, these stains aren't just old, they're deep and wet looking, and so layered that Heath suspected certain spots contained more oil than actual fabric.

So we knew we needed a laundry expert with extreme expertise.

The first question I wanted to ask is if you could tell us your name and what you do professionally. My name is Joe Cuomo.
I am the Director of Equipment and Travel for the Brooklyn Nets.

Joe Cuomo has been with the the Nets for the last 15 years.

He started out as an intern and worked his way up, managing the team's uniforms and apparel, and now he's also in charge of the team's travel and logistics.

It's the kind of job that only 30 people in the world are tasked with doing. And when you listen to him talk about it, you can tell he really loves it.

Like it gives him an acute sense of purpose that feels special and rare.

I'm someone who's very motivated by achievement. And like my ultimate goal is just to be a part of a championship team.
Like I, at the end of the day, that's what it's all about.

Like I've been on some really good teams and on some really bad teams, but you know, you kind of bond with everybody that you work with, not only the players, but like the coaches and the staff and everyone else along the way.

So, you know, it's really like working as a team to accomplish that ultimate goal. Like that's what you want.

That's what motivates me every morning to, you know, to eventually get to the promised land and get that NBA championship ring. See what I mean? This guy just loves his job.
It's beautiful.

So one of the things you're in charge of, and the reason we're talking to you today, is maintaining the cleanliness of team jerseys. Can you tell me about what that requires?

Like what that process is?

Yeah, I mean, it's,

you know, I would like to say it's the same for most teams, but everyone kind of does it a little differently.

And it really depends on like the fabric of garment or the, you know, the temperature in which you watch stuff at. I'm someone who I really avoid at all costs using the dryer, right?

I mean, now at times, like if you're doing a huge load of towels, like you have to throw it in the dryer. But when if it's a very important garment, we almost will never throw it in the dryer.

Like the dryer is just, you know, it helps you with your time, but it does wreak havoc on garments. And I'm sure we'll get into that a little bit when we talk in terms of stains and sweat.

But, you know,

it's a very intricate process. People probably think, oh, no, I just throw the, you know, the clothes in there, throw the detergent in there, and let the washing machine do the work.

Well, there's a lot going on in that washing machine that a lot of people don't know about, and it's very easy to make mistakes.

For the next 35 minutes, Joe schooled me on a lifetime's worth of extreme stain removal and laundry magic.

Things he'd learned growing up from his mother, things he'd learned on the job, and things he'd learned as a new dad who was constantly having to clean up various baby body fluids.

But because that stuff doesn't directly answer Heath's questions, we're going to save it for our next bonus feed episode.

And the other reason we're saving it for the bonus feed is because as Joe was talking, I was feeling more and more hopeless about the fate of Heath's shirts.

Because the thing I kept hearing Joe say is that he basically never uses the dryer.

And one of the reasons he doesn't use it is that in addition to all these other kinds of bad things, the dryer will set the stains in your clothes.

And in the Google Doc with all of my questions that Emma and I used to communicate during the interview, she was writing, I definitely run our clothes through the dryer.

So it was time to just rip off the bandaid and ask this question.

Once a shirt is stained, is there anything that anyone can do to save them? Like if they've been through the dryer, is there anything you can do or are they kind of washed? Yeah, it's tough.

What I've done before, and it has mixed success based on the garment, based on the stain, based on the color, is to do, get like a

almost like water to a boil and put it in a bucket with your solution, right?

And let it soak for like hours. Mix it every 30 minutes, just to let it have that, like mimic the washer, washing machine function,

then throw it back in the wash. I mean, I had a guy once broke his nose, came out of the game, and blood is just gushing on his jersey while on the bench.

Now, granted, it didn't go through the dryer, but I mean, it was a white jersey, and it was this jersey was soaked in blood. We tried the soak method, and it was like it never happened.

Like, you would have never thought blood was on that jersey.

Now, this isn't a perfect solution, and it does seem like a lot of work, but at least it's something.

With some time and patience and a little bit of elbow grease, Heath might be able to break down some of that armpit grease.

And this was the first time in all of our searching that someone told us, you might be able to fix this.

It was like Joe was a font of secret protected knowledge about stain removal that that was passed down from one expert to another.

And so we wanted to know, like, has anyone thought about writing all this down?

So do you have like a, like a sort of stain Bible?

That is Emma's term. She wrote that in the document we're working from.
Do you ever stain? I'm so sorry. I was just like, as you were like, as you were like, so then I learned, then I learned.

I can't do this on this other thing. And I'm like, that sounds like some wisdom somebody needs to be writing down.
Like, are you keeping all of this stuff anywhere? Or is it all in your hand?

I mean, I would say, okay, if I had to give you like the first commandments of washing, right? I'd say wash promptly, right?

You never want your garments to sit, you know, stained for a long period of time. Like, that's when you're going to, you know, anything that's on the garment, oils, whatnot,

you know, those blood stains, they're going to get harder the longer you wait to wash, right? Don't take that sweaty shirt and throw it in the hamper and like let it sit for a week.

Like you want to wash it, you know, within a few, like I would say the same day, especially if if it has bad stains on it. So first commandment of washing, wash promptly.

Number two, avoid the dryer when possible.

You know, that'll only make things worse. Really, the only things I ever throw in the dryer are socks, underwear, and towels.
Really, that's it. Like I try to air dry everything.

Number three, try different solutions to get out those tough stains. I've already mentioned the baking soda and water paste, right, with a toothbrush and, you know, just gently scrubbing.

You could try white vinegar right I've tried white vinegar at times and that seems to help some tough stains hydrogen peroxide to pre-treat

even dish detergent like a dawn like I went with a bad baby blowout from time to time you know I'll take that onesie off of him dunk it in some hot water with some dish detergent and it gets it out right away and then it'll go through the watch and then another thing that I've heard some people use is more of like an oxygen-based bleach that tends to help with some of those pesky stains.

So those are my commandments I would say to follow. You know, just my two cents.
I didn't mean to make this super biblical. It's just, that's Emma's fault.

We got full salvation.

After all of these conversations and a ton of research, we had a diagnosis and something resembling a prescription for Heath in his shirts.

So Emma and I got together and wrote up everything we'd learned and wanted to share with him, and we set up a follow-up follow-up interview.

And then over the week of Thanksgiving, I got the worst flu of my life, which has since transformed into a bronchial infection, which you might be able to hear in the fact that my voice is a half octave lower than usual right now.

So eventually we just decided to have Emma sub in for me for this last part, which, you know, isn't an ideal interview setup because it's harder to edit two people in the same room.

And yeah, Emma might not have perfected the pronunciation of apocrine sweat, but we make do, you know?

So at the very last possible minute, Emma grabbed Heath and performed her very best Alex Goldman impression. All right.

This is so ridiculous.

You ready?

Okay.

So Heath,

we've got some good news and some bad news. Emma told Heath that unfortunately his old pit stain shirts were likely done for.
Not only had they been stewing for years, they'd been in the dryer.

And according to our friend Joe, that was what really sealed their fate.

She reiterated what Joe said about having to treat pit stains the same way you treat any other stains, which is to say, as quickly as possible, and definitely never let them sit for more than three days.

And although she conceded that the idea of doing laundry every three days seemed completely unrealistic and environmentally questionable for a household of just two people, she also told him that based on what we learned, that probably wasn't going to be necessary anyway.

The good news is that the sweat that's causing your pit stains is probably not the sweat that you're releasing on a daily basis. What?

Emma told Heath about the two different types of sweat glands, and she explained that the one that's causing his stains is triggered by cortisol, by stress, and how even though he may not feel like he has a particularly stressful life, his body may just be a bit trigger happy with its cortisol.

And upon hearing this, Heath's face lit up with recognition. Do you remember this from biology?

Well, and I'm just, I just feel like when I play Fortnite and I'm in like end game and I'm nervous, I notice after the game's over, my pits are sweaty, but I'm like, I haven't been

moving and the sweat is kind of, I feel like more oily.

Yes, dude. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And it's not just Fortnite, obviously. It is also like when I think back to your shirts, like the one you're wearing right now, which is a gym shirt,

no pit stains. Because you wear that shirt to do the watery sweat activities.
There's no pit stains on the shirt you're wearing right now. It's fairly new, but also, yeah.
But

so is your Apocalypse Now shirt. The shirt is a nod to the movie Apocalypse Now and the football player Puka Nakua, who plays wide receiver for the LA Rams, which is Heath's favorite team.

The shirt that you wear to Rams game, which is an all-nervous sweat. It's all nervous sweat.
So all of the shirts that you wear to Rams games, destroyed.

Yeah, because I'm so invested in them and so worried for them and nervous. Anyway, so

what can you do? What can we do? Meditate.

Become more Zan. No, that's not, I'm not going to suggest that because you're still going to play Fortnite.
You're still going to go to Rams games and you're going to feel passionately about stuff.

And it is not just anxiety. It is also just like strong emotions can trigger this, right?

Exciting things, good things trigger this kind of sweat.

So what we're going to do with our laundry is we are going to try to prioritize it based on strong emotional days.

So we're just going to pay attention to like, is today a big sweat day? Is it not? And maybe we should have you wear tank tops to play Fortnite. But anyway, If that fails,

there are two other things you can possibly do. Inject my armpits with botulism.
Botox my armpits. How did you know?

I've heard about this somewhere, but there's no way I'm going to Botox my armpits.

My God. People do that.

People do a lot of things that I'm not going to do. One of which is jab a needle into my armpit, which is like one of the most sensitive parts of your body.

Okay, so anyway, so that is one potential thing that you can do. And potentially you can get insurance to cover it.

The other thing is that there's surgery that you can have to remove the sweat glands from you're shaking your you're shaking your this is not a surgical procedure level problem i i i think or thirdly i'll buy more shirts

now i'm sweating now i have nervous sweat just thinking about surgery um so anyway that's all that we found out and so the thing that i have to ask you now is uh did we answer your question to your satisfaction yeah yeah for sure you did i mean i didn't anticipate it being a simple answer because if it was, like, this wouldn't be, you know, two-thirds of the internet filled with this one question.

And there's actionable things to do for sure.

Also, gonna start meditating again.

Good on you. All right, Eve.

No must.

All right, bye.

Hyperfixed is produced and edited by Emma Cortland, Amore Yates, and Sarisafer Sukenek. The music is by the Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder and me.
The show is engineered by Tony Williams.

You can get bonus episodes, join our Discord, and much more at hyperfixedpod.com slash join. Again, that's hyperfixedpod.com slash join.

And one more reminder, on Friday, December 19th at 12 p.m., we are going to have the first HyperFixed pledge drive. You can find me at twitch.tv slash hyperfixedpod.

And for every person who buys a year of Hyperfixed membership, I will perform a song of your choice.

HyperFixed is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, creator-owned, listener-supported podcasts. Discover audio with vision at radiotopia.fm.
Thanks so much for listening.

This show is supported by Odoo. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing.
Odoo solves this.

It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way.

You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out Odoo at odoo.com.
That's odoo.com.

Radiotopia

from PRX.