Pods work great for me, and I love not having crumbs of powder under the sink, or a bottle of liquid detergent with encrusted drips down the side. It's just gross.

They are more expensive, but I buy them on sale at Costco for about $16/100, so at $0.16 per load I really don't care if powdered detergent is only $0.03 per load or whatever.

There is clearly a revealed preference for pods among consumers for these things, and "proving" that everyone is wrong for liking them is just not a very interesting exercise imo.

The issue of letting consumers choose the worse product is that the good products get pushed out of the market.

Grocery floorspace that was once primarily staples and whole foods is mostly now junkfood.

Proper razors have been replaced with disposables.

Skincare & toothpaste products contain sodium laureth sulfate , which lathers well, but causes mouth sores and skin irritation.

Letting consumers choose usually ends up optimizing superficial and sometimes harmful traits.

His specific thesis is that pods fundamentally clean worse than powder because they're inherently single-stage releases of detergent in machines designed for two-stage releases. Despite this, he still explicitly says that pods have their uses. So I'm unclear on how his goal is "proving that everyone is wrong." Did we watch different videos?

I'm 1.5 minutes in and I already learned to purge cold water from the pipes before running the dishwasher. Assuming this is evidence based and true, I mean come on! Is it really so alarming to see someone deep dive hard and do the work to mass educate the public?

if you have powder crumbs under your sink you might need to improve your technique.

This reminds me of how some of my house guests will accidentally splash water all over the bathroom counter and even the mirror when they wash up in the morning. I don’t say anything, to be polite, but they clearly lack technique lol.

This works for me:

0. store the dishwasher powder (box) under sink.

1. Open dishwasher door

2. grab box, place OVER the opened door.

3. dispense powder into cartridge in door (with spoon, tilting box, etc)

4. put spoon back in box OR fully tilt box back upright. “Crumbs” will drop onto the door, that’s OK.

5. move box back under sink.

Even if I was messy, I personally couldn’t make myself spend 5x on pods to avoid cleaning crumbs under the sink once a month. When i think of convenience i think of a dishwasher saving me hours every month. Not saving 10 seconds a month to wipe crumbs under the sink. :-)

We clearly all have different preferences and ideas of “convenience”. I respect that.

With pods you can’t add some detergent to the prewash while adding the rest to the main wash cycle. That’s the thing that makes one of the biggest differences.

I used an old container with a 3" lid and a handle, and fill it regularly with the cheap dishwasher powder that I buy in bulk. I put a whole in the screw on lid so I can just pour out the powder. 98% clean and much much cheaper than any pods and much better for the environment because the packaging is all paper.