Latest / Privycast / Ep. 35 Smell Bias: The Psychology of Why Everyone Else Stinks Worse than We Do.

Transcript

Ep. 35 Smell Bias: The Psychology of Why Everyone Else Stinks Worse than We Do. · Privycast

• 0:00
  And thus it catches your nose with its dunders at its ankles and your brain off guard and its full force methane stink blast right up the nose.
• 0:19
  Privy is a podcast about bathrooms recorded here presently from my home bathroom.
• 0:27
  I am your host Hunter Hoover.
• 0:29
  I'm very glad that you are listening.
• 0:31
  Thank you for doing so.
• 0:34
  We've got quite the bit of things to talk about this week.
• 0:39
  Couple of wild little bathroom things to get us started here at the top.
• 0:44
  ah
• 0:46
  I got a fun text from my wife this last, I don't know, probably about a week and a half ago now.
• 0:53
  And it's just saying like, so she went out to get some groceries.
• 0:57
  I was a young adult.
• 0:59
  And she shot me a text that said, hey, I just took our daughter into the men's room and I'm sitting here going, well, like why?
• 1:10
  And so it turns out that she just, you know,
• 1:14
  daughter said I have to go potty and in the rush to get the daughter to the potty just entered a bathroom and it turned out it was the men's room so she informed me that she did
• 1:27
  in fact leave and go use the women's restroom for them to wash their hands but ah yeah it's just funny it's funny to me I don't know also as I mentioned in the last episode the
• 1:39
  Oregon State Fair was here it has since come and gone
• 1:43
  but I had the astute pleasure to join one of my clients at the Oregon State Fair.
• 1:50
  And here's what I'll say.
• 1:52
  I generally didn't do too bad on the fair food.
• 1:54
  I had a corn dog.
• 1:56
  um And then on the way out, we decided to get an Oregon Dairy Women's Milkshake.
• 2:02
  They're delightful and it's one of the better deals at the fair.
• 2:06
  When you go to the fair, they're just nickel and diamond your food.
• 2:10
  It's hotter than sin and
• 2:13
  They know that people need drinks and they need things to eat and so they just upcharge those things because they know that people will pay that upcharge.
• 2:21
  But the Oregon Dairy Women, really is the most fair priced, fair food.
• 2:28
  Also, there was some scumbags selling fake Pokemon cards at the fair.
• 2:32
  They were so fake, it triggered me.
• 2:35
  It's just like, you didn't even try hard.
• 2:37
  Some of them didn't even have like skew barcodes on the packs.
• 2:42
  Very clearly fake.
• 2:43
  That dude, not cool, sucks.
• 2:46
  But yeah, we got Oregon Dairy Women milkshakes on our way out.
• 2:51
  We parked outside the fairgrounds because we're frugal.
• 2:55
  And as we're walking to our car, we slurped down, well, and by that I mean I slurped down my Oregon Dairy Women's milkshake.
• 3:02
  And I probably drank it too fast.
• 3:05
  And normally this wouldn't be a problem.
• 3:07
  But then I promptly traveled to the gym and
• 3:12
  Let's just say after drinking a 20 ounce milkshake and then hitting the elliptical, my tummy entered bathroom distress mode and I almost had a big accident on some of the weight
• 3:28
  machines at the gym.
• 3:31
  we made it crisis averted, but pro tip, if you want to drink 20 ounces of Oregon Dairy Women's milkshake and then run on the elliptical,
• 3:43
  You can do it, but you might not like it.
• 3:46
  And so I didn't have too much like, yeah, it was fine.
• 3:50
  Not a bad gas situation.
• 3:54
  you know, it's one of those things where like you'd think that would be wild, but it wasn't too bad.
• 4:02
  And so I wanted to take the moment now to just transition into this week's topic.
• 4:09
  And you've heard the saying that people will put forth where they're like, this, you know, they're upset and this person, you know, like, they don't think their poop stinks.
• 4:21
  It's a saying and we don't usually use this saying, they don't think their poop stinks.
• 4:27
  That's the saying.
• 4:28
  We don't usually use that in regards to a person's actual poop.
• 4:35
  Usually we use that to say that a person
• 4:39
  doesn't think that their problems are as awful as others or that other people need to deal with their garbage before they do or that their garbage should not take as much of a
• 4:51
  concern.
• 4:52
  But in other words, deal with your own baggage and concerns first.
• 4:58
  Like your poop don't stink.
• 5:02
  Nobody thinks that their problems are worse than others.
• 5:04
  That's the idea.
• 5:05
  But what if people
• 5:10
  actually didn't think that their poop stank.
• 5:14
  Or, if you will, what if they didn't think that their poop stank as bad as others?
• 5:21
  And so, to figure this out and to puzzle this out a little bit, we're going to dive into the psychology of our own bad smells.
• 5:35
  This week on Privy, we're talking about scent bias.
• 5:39
  and our farts.
• 5:42
  Yep.
• 5:45
  Preparation can do a lot for us and preparation, not preparation H.
• 5:50
  Preparation H can do a lot for a lot of people, but preparation regular can do a lot for most people.
• 5:58
  We've all been there.
• 5:59
  You have the presentation in the morning.
• 6:02
  I remember college and this moment where, yeah, it was like, yeah, we had this group presentation and we definitely,
• 6:13
  put this uh group presentation together pretty last minute, like night before.
• 6:21
  That's not my bent.
• 6:22
  I like to have stuff done ahead of time.
• 6:25
  But you could tell that other groups in the class had been prepping for some time, probably the week or more.
• 6:33
  And you could definitely tell the difference between theirs and ours.
• 6:37
  And if we weren't so proficient at just
• 6:42
  pulling stuff out of thin air and other places, we could have done much worse.
• 6:48
  But we were not prepared for this presentation.
• 6:51
  I remember at one point I pulled out some like stuffed Angry Birds I think and threw them to people in the room.
• 6:58
  I think that happened.
• 6:59
  That's how I remember it.
• 7:01
  I also remember a different college speech thing where I was told that I had to just say woof right in the middle and I actually lost points for doing that.
• 7:09
  uh
• 7:10
  I thought I was being brave.
• 7:12
  Apparently my professor thought I was being an idiot.
• 7:14
  He was right.
• 7:15
  But when we are prepared, it can make a shock into a surprise.
• 7:23
  And the same goes for bathrooming.
• 7:27
  I had a surprise bathroom moment.
• 7:29
  This is completely unrelated to the Oregon Dairy Women's Milkshake situation.
• 7:34
  But I had a surprise bathroom moment at the gym last week.
• 7:38
  uh
• 7:40
  I'm on the back extender, you know, doing the back extender things and I defo almost squeaked a leaky one out to the point where I promptly hopped off the machine, wiped the
• 7:54
  machine down because I'm a good citizen and went to the bathroom to check and make sure that I hadn't done myself dirty.
• 8:05
  I didn't do myself dirty and then I just did the dirty in
• 8:09
  the bathroom.
• 8:10
  But it was scary for a second.
• 8:13
  There was definitely in my brain this like, no, is it back there and I'm walking to the bathroom and people are gonna see like just a little bit of something, something.
• 8:23
  I was definitely scared.
• 8:25
  But if you're prepared, I wasn't prepared for that.
• 8:29
  It was terrifying and I was like, oh no.
• 8:32
  But if you're prepared for the things that could happen in the bathroom, it's a game changer.
• 8:38
  You can get
• 8:38
  in position, if you will, and you can make sure that you're not caught unawares ah with, with, yeah, you don't, want to be prepared when you go to the bathroom.
• 8:48
  And there is this assumption where people, that's us, think that other people's farts smell worse than our own.
• 8:59
  When we, when we encounter a fart in the wild, there's a couple of questions at play.
• 9:07
  And, and to
• 9:08
  understand why people think their farts don't smell as bad as others, we have to look at these two questions.
• 9:16
  The first is, do people like the smell of their own farts?
• 9:24
  And I'm not saying they tolerate it.
• 9:26
  I'm saying, do people somehow in their brains like the smell of their farts?
• 9:33
  Second, is there something keeping people from smelling their farts?
• 9:38
  Like if it's not a matter of like it, but they just are biased against other people's there something going on in our brains that makes us not smell our own farts and the
• 9:53
  answer to both of these questions is Well, yes.
• 9:57
  Um Yeah, it's it's complicated Had to get a drink out of my um What I like to call my big white mom Starbucks
• 10:07
  Tumblr.
• 10:08
  To approach this, this idea of why we have some scent bias in the context is specifically we want to talk about this idea of being surprised because when you have to fart or when
• 10:24
  you poop, you are doing that.
• 10:27
  Your brain is not going to be surprised unless you're not uh prepared for it.
• 10:35
  But when you feel that
• 10:38
  urge or that build up of air or what have you, your brain has a chance to get prepared for what is going to follow.
• 10:47
  And it's just regular conditioning.
• 10:49
  Your body knows that when you feel the sensation of a poop or a toot, you are getting ready to smell something real wild.
• 11:00
  And as a result, your brain has learned to adjust itself.
• 11:08
  sensation, receptor adjusts accordingly.
• 11:10
  So you feel this sensation and then the receptors in your brain, sometimes in your nostrils, adjust accordingly and voila, your crap doesn't stink as bad.
• 11:21
  It could also be a case of traditional conditioning.
• 11:25
  This is kind of like in the office when Jim conditions Dwight with the Altoid and he's got the little beeper and he's kading and
• 11:36
  He offers Dwight a mint and Dwight scoffs and then takes the mint.
• 11:41
  And eventually he does this so many times that when he kiddings his computer, Dwight is sitting there with his, oh, you know, it's a good gag, hand open, he doesn't give him the
• 11:51
  mint and he's got the weird taste in his mouth.
• 11:53
  It's kind of the same as that.
• 11:56
  This happens with our farts and our turds.
• 11:59
  When you leave rank, your brain grows accustomed to your rank.
• 12:03
  It says, okay,
• 12:05
  I've we've been here before our body felt this way it began to feel this urge to purge poop or toot and then that was followed by the act of poop or toot and that was followed
• 12:20
  by bad smell so if when we feel urge to poop or toot if our brain gets ahead of the ball and says hey you know what we should do we should actually just maybe
• 12:34
  Diminish some of those scent receptors real quick because we don't want to go through that unpleasantness.
• 12:39
  Voila!
• 12:40
  We and our own bodies have conditioned our brains to smell our farts less.
• 12:47
  You literally build up a tolerance.
• 12:52
  You get met with it in the future and it's over and over and over time your brain and your receptors in your nose have built up a tolerance.
• 13:01
  Your brain is a wild thing.
• 13:03
  And so this surprise of big stink is also why other people's stuff and their big stink is so much more invasive to us than our own because their big stink can catch us off guard.
• 13:17
  It can surprise us because we are not feeling that pressure, that push.
• 13:22
  And then all of a sudden there's just a cloud of disaster going right up our nose holes and our brain didn't have time to go red alert.
• 13:33
  brown town coming in.
• 13:35
  If you didn't know, poop releases odor.
• 13:38
  It's one of the things it does.
• 13:40
  And our brains actually react with that odor to help us out.
• 13:46
  Here's what's up.
• 13:48
  There is a chemical component to the things that go on in our tummy bacteria that the way that our poop and the psychological conditioning components
• 14:02
  of our brain coupled with the expectation of a fart to where your poop, not just your fart, your poop actually will smell less stinky to you because of the chemical makeup of
• 14:16
  your tummy, your brain is able to kind of possibly predict this.
• 14:21
  Now, in many times in the past, I have given a disclaimer, both about not being a doctor and about not being a psychologist.
• 14:30
  I would just like to get right up in there and say, I am not either a doctor or a psychologist.
• 14:37
  I am simply reading some research about farting.
• 14:42
  So that's how some of my internet time is spent.
• 14:47
  The way our toots and poops interact with our brain, it interacts in such a way where our brain does some work to diminish the smell to us.
• 14:59
  But what about when someone else poops or toots, toots or dudes, dudes.
• 15:04
  Why do we smell our own poops or farts and we don't think those are as bad as other people's?
• 15:09
  Because again,
• 15:10
  You can't surprise yourself.
• 15:12
  You're not gonna catch yourself off guard.
• 15:15
  Your body prepares for it.
• 15:17
  In short, you don't know that the other person is gonna do it.
• 15:22
  And thus it catches your nose with its dundas at its ankles and your brain off guard and its full force methane stink blast right up the nose.
• 15:34
  The special combination of hydrogen CO2, methane and hydrogen sulfide pneumonia
• 15:41
  that another person's tum tum produces is much different than your own.
• 15:47
  And as a result, that coupled with this ability to surprise you, it's going to stand out.
• 15:54
  The scent profile is different and thus it stands out more.
• 15:58
  They found this with people who wear just like terribly, terribly rank perfumes.
• 16:04
  If they continue to wear that Pepe Le Pew stank,
• 16:09
  more and more and they spend more and more time with it.
• 16:15
  their brain actually becomes less aware that they are wearing such strong perfume because their brain learns to shut down that ability to smell.
• 16:26
  This is also why when you walk into like, if you walk into somebody's house or restaurant and it's just got a freaking randy smell, they probably don't realize that and don't know
• 16:38
  and that's fine because they live there.
• 16:41
  They spend all their time there.
• 16:44
  And so their nose has adjusted because here's the reality.
• 16:50
  Everybody's room smells somehow.
• 16:58
  And sometimes the room is a stand in for your poop and your toots.
• 17:04
  So just remember, just because your poop don't stink to you doesn't mean it doesn't actually stink
• 17:13
  real bad.
• 17:16
  And some of y'all are thinking, I don't know about this.
• 17:20
  Like, I can't stress enough, this is baseline.
• 17:24
  If you eat something wild, like if you go full Oregon Dairy Women's milkshake and chug that noise like some of us, it's gonna change the makeup of your stank.
• 17:34
  Jerky toots are real bad, and consequently, they smell a lot like jerky.
• 17:39
  That's all I'm saying.
• 17:41
  So it's not a perfect science.
• 17:43
  It's not like...
• 17:44
  Oh, every toot I have, my brain is perfectly going to filter out the smell profile so the entire experience is just peaches and rainbows to me.
• 17:56
  No!
• 17:57
  It's a general idea.
• 17:59
  Generally speaking, you cannot surprise yourself with a poop or a toot and thus your brain does a significant amount of work to diminish the poops and toots that it
• 18:13
  it can help you with.
• 18:16
  It's not a perfect science.
• 18:18
  And the other thing is your buddies are going to smell way worse to you, especially, especially when you don't see your buddies farts coming.
• 18:30
  And this brings us to a very, very special installment of Hunter's Anecdotes to keep you afloats.
• 18:51
  Let me set the scene.
• 18:53
  When you grow up within Christianity and you attend youth functions, one of the highlights of the year for us growing up was getting to go to conventions.
• 19:06
  And one of the conventions we went to, I feel like just about yearly, was a choir of the fire, ATF for those in the know.
• 19:16
  And essentially because it's Montana and we lived in
• 19:20
  pretty much the middle of nowhere.
• 19:21
  ATF was about four and a half hours away in Billings, the biggest town in Montana.
• 19:26
  And so we drove all down there.
• 19:30
  And the way I remembered it, we stayed at this like church's youth house.
• 19:35
  So we all just like piled into this youth house and hunkered down.
• 19:39
  And it was a blast.
• 19:40
  And you know, we're doing the ATF thing and you go to the first night and you have your big pizza situation.
• 19:45
  But then we went back to the place we were staying and
• 19:50
  I just remember man, was the weirdest night.
• 19:53
  I remember we got super into watching a whole bunch of balloon shop YouTube videos and we played QWELF.
• 20:00
  I played QWELF for the first time.
• 20:01
  QWELF, shout out to those who played QWELF.
• 20:03
  It's wonderful board game.
• 20:05
  Kind of crazy, great for youths.
• 20:09
  you know, I think we had Gnarneah playing and at one point my buddy is like, it's Gnarneah with a G.
• 20:15
  I don't know.
• 20:16
  We were teens.
• 20:17
  um
• 20:19
  And we have this guy, we're gonna call him Chester, ah just for the sake of this.
• 20:24
  And Chester is one of those people who is just a, he's a good guy, but when he was younger, he was definitely particular about things and he liked to sleep.
• 20:38
  And so, you know, we're all just shenanigans and I'm pretty sure most of us just stayed up the entire night as teenagers do.
• 20:47
  And I'm sure my parents would love to have heard that, sorry.
• 20:50
  But, so you know, we stayed up most of the night just lollygagging and dinking around, not getting enough sleep to be productive the following day.
• 21:00
  And I remember on this trip, we were messing around and we had made mention of like, hey, you know, like y'all cannot be first to sleep.
• 21:09
  you don't, nobody's falling asleep tonight.
• 21:11
  We're staying up all night.
• 21:13
  And we look over and Chester is out cold.
• 21:17
  and he's sleeping on the couch and he's just zonked.
• 21:21
  And this dude who, you know, he didn't go to our youth group but he went on this trip with our youth group because he's a cool guy hanging out with us.
• 21:29
  He gets just, we're like, dude, we gotta mess with Chester, we gotta get this guy.
• 21:35
  ah What are we gonna do, what are we gonna do?
• 21:37
  And I just remember this dude goes, I got you, I got you.
• 21:41
  And he goes over to Chester and he stands next to him.
• 21:44
  And then he just,
• 21:46
  bears his full beat, just releases the hams, brings out the cheek, and just sits his butt about one, maybe two inches above Chester's nose as he is sleeping.
• 22:03
  And he just hangs beef right in front of Chester's nose, and we just hear...
• 22:14
  as this dude rips bare cheek stanker right into Chester's nose hole.
• 22:20
  uh And Chester is asleep again.
• 22:24
  in his sleep, he gags, he goes like that while he is asleep, gags himself awake and then opens his eyes to see this guy's just beefy bee
• 22:43
  hanging right in front of his nose hole.
• 22:46
  Obviously Chester was furious.
• 22:48
  He raged against the machine.
• 22:50
  And I remember our youth pastor being like, y'all are out of control.
• 22:53
  You cannot be doing that.
• 22:54
  That's inappropriate, which it was, but it was also very funny.
• 22:59
  Yeah.
• 22:59
  And so Chester just had like, you've ever seen bench warmers where Clark just gets beef stew laid right up in his nose.
• 23:10
  That was, that's real.
• 23:13
  That is a thing that I had the astute privilege of watching someone get full beef stew laid straight into their nose hole in high school.
• 23:25
  Chester was peeved.
• 23:27
  And here's the thing, you know it stank because he wretched in his sleep and there was it was a surprise for sure.
• 23:36
  And if we've learned anything from this episode of privy, a surprise toot is going to smell far worse.
• 23:44
  than a prepared fortuit.
• 23:48
  And so I can't imagine being any less prepared than being full slumber and awoken to just two inches of space between your nose and their bung holio as it just fires off hot stink
• 24:10
  air into your nose hole.
• 24:13
  Wretch indeed, Chester, wretch indeed.
• 24:20
  This has been another Hunter's Anecdotes.
• 24:25
  To keep you afloat.
• 24:31
  And this has been another episode of Privy.
• 24:35
  Thank you so much for joining us.
• 24:37
  We appreciate you listening.
• 24:39
  We love that you're listening.
• 24:41
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• 24:44
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• 24:46
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• 24:47
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• 24:48
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• 24:50
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• 24:54
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• 24:55
  Trying to post some new things and some good stuff.
• 24:58
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• 25:00
  privycast at gmail.com.
• 25:03
  We'd love to hear from you.
• 25:04
  Share your stories.
• 25:06
  Everybody's got a good fart story.
• 25:08
  I'm convinced of that.
• 25:10
  At some point everybody has farted and if you say you don't, you are not telling the truth.
• 25:15
  Yeah, so everybody's got a good fart story.
• 25:18
  Yes.
• 25:19
  Leave us a review if your pod catcher is one that allows you to leave a review.
• 25:24
  The five star is our option.
• 25:26
  And that just helps people find the show.
• 25:29
  who might not necessarily know about the name of the show, can go and find it via other means.
• 25:36
  As always, we want to thank Kevin MacLeod for the use of Barroom Ballet as our intro and outro music.
• 25:44
  You can find Kevin's music at Incompetech.org.
• 25:49
  His music is licensed under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0.
• 25:55
  Thanks, Kevin.
• 25:57
  We'd also like to thank
• 25:58
  Pottington bear for the use of all the colors in the world as the hunters anecdotes intro and outro music You can find pottington bears music at pottington bear calm Thanks,
• 26:11
  Pottington This has been another episode of privy.
• 26:16
  Thank you so much for joining us.
• 26:18
  I hope you enjoyed the show make sure you prepare yourself for those big rippers and now as always
• 26:28
  Don't forget to flush.
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