L.O.G. 151 Smell You Later

Alright, well, good morning, Greg. We are recording this on the early morning of January 6th right now, so kind of a big date from last year. Yeah, that happened, but not really getting into that today. So, we're going to get into an area that we haven't specifically discussed yet on an episode, but is so incredibly important when we discuss humans as sort of a sensor, sensory, and sensor system, right? Meaning we sense our environment using our five senses. We pick up a lot of information. But you know, you wanted to share with me something this morning with a discussion or something you mentioned to Shelly.

Yeah, well, the discussion this morning over the breakfast table, which is a vast, amazing-sized thing you can imagine. And it's the John Goodman breakfast where Shelly's reaching for a roll and I stab her with the fork. But the idea is, it's January 6th. So, like any other important date, what you do is you have a discussion about the combat Rule of Threes or the cognitive Rule of Threes. "Hey listen, these things might come because it's a special day. So what are you going to be looking for?" Signatures and historical dates are important. You know, we don't always pay attention to them.

Yeah, so we never have a normal discussion, so it's not like, "Hey, remember to look for suspicious behavior."

So, we went down the list, going back and forth, of the things that would trigger us today to notify somebody to take action, to take cover. And one of the things Shelly says is, "Do you remember mercaptan (mercaptan)?" And I made a joke about Captain Mercaptan, you know, the Robin Williams film. And she goes, "No, mercaptan, the gas companies, they add it to the propane into the natural gas so it stinks. So it smells like rotten eggs." And so, you know, then comes the joke, "Hey, smell you later."

Well, the idea is that, Brian, that's profound. "Smell you later." There are certain things in our environment where our olfactory senses can trigger us to a potential danger before it happens. So, yes, mercaptan is a very simple, odiferous item that they add to things that might leak because natural gas and propane don't have a smell. And now, when you go out there, think about it, if you're sitting there right now listening to us, think about the last time you lit your grill and you smell that rotten eggs just before it goes on and you go, "Oh, okay, that's there, so I know that there's unburnt fuel." Right? How many people know that? And I punch Shelly because it's like, "How do you know that?" And she's like, "I know many things," you know, the Jedi, before she goes to work.

But the idea is that here on the 6th, what's Shelly thinking about? She's thinking about, "I'm going to expand not just my visual field, but I'm going to expand it to the rest of my senses." And you know, it's a good topic as any to start with.

No, it is. And it's hugely important to the survival of the human species. And it's actually really the one thing that kind of scares me about what COVID does actually to you right now, where you lose your sense of smell and taste. You know, if you go back, let's say that something happened like that a thousand or two thousand years ago, there would have been a lot more people dead, right? There would have been a lot more issues, right? Meaning we were far more dependent on our sense of smell than we really realize, right? And it's something we don't know it's not because humans, we so much rely on our vision, right? We, our whole visual field, it takes up, you know, a third, well, maybe not that much, a quarter of the whole back of our brain. Sure, right?

But we rely so much on vision, where if you compare that to animals, like I got my dog, Bailey. Her whole life is through her nose. She has to smell everything. And I hate taking her out after it's rained recently because that's like, "It's going to take a while. It's a blank slate now, and it's already new, so she has to take everything in." And they have, you know, twice as many smell receptors, I think, or more than humans, and that's how their world is. Like bears are the same way. I heard someone explain it like when a bear has a sense of time through smell. So it doesn't just smell, "Oh, there's a dead skunk." It smells, "Oh, there was a dead skunk. It died a day and a half ago," around. Like that's how its environment is.

So it's hugely important. And one of the reasons why it's so important is for memory recall. Meaning your sense of smell goes straight basically to your limbic system, right? So it bypasses your prefrontal cortex and it can go right there. So it's almost like an early warning sign. And you can smell something that reminds you of some past incident or exactly that you have to worry about and warn you immediately. So I know the big powerful...

That's crazy that you just said that. So, after Shelly's remarks this morning, I wrote down a couple of things from our notes from you and I traveling a lot. And one of them was, you know, the London Underground train bomb, and a U.S. Army officer that was on the scene, not unlike that they made a movie out of that, I think the Paris one, the train, oh yeah, during that time. But the London Underground one, the exact quote from the U.S. Army officer was, "I knew it was a bomb from the smell of explosives." Wow. They're one, you know, you're a subject matter expert because you've blown enough that you know what it looks like and smells like and feels like.

The other one in Bangkok, the explosion, and a guy on the ground said this, Brian, he said, "There was a real acrid smell in the air, and then I got a metal taste in my mouth when I saw the motorcycles explode." Well, think about that. Okay, so the motorcycle is exploding. Good cue. You're in the midst of something, get out of there, no matter what it is, natural or national disaster or terrorism.

And then, another one is Northern Ireland, another friend of our dear Martin Willie, I hope everything's going well with Martin today. "I've never heard a bomb before, and yesterday what I remember most was the whooshing afterwards when the air is responding obviously to the vacuum left by the thermobaric explosion pushing out, and then the smell." So, you know, you're talking about stuff, whether it's DetCord, dynamite or C4 or potassium chlorate, Brian, each one of those degrades, right? When they're at a normal barometric pressure and exposed to oxygen.

So, I guess the quote, "Smell you later," from The Simpsons is hugely important because now we could add that to, "Hey, you know, everybody's got it. Even DHS has it on their website now. If a person is acting suspiciously," and they give about 10 different items, by the way, DHS, huge stuff, because they're great followers of research. So they have all those quotes on there from other incidents. And they have like, "If a person's wearing a three-quarter length coat comes into your place and it's 90 degrees outside, you know, you Houston, you may have a problem."

Well, think about it, Brian, visual field, whole back of your head. Now we could add to that, "Wow, I smelled something out of the ordinary at that time." And it doesn't have to be explosives. It could be the person in front of you comes up and is acting suspiciously and we smell ethyl alcohol. Do you see what I'm trying to say? I mean, or on my kid or in my car. So, I would say that it doesn't matter exactly what it is, but a new odor in your environment should now take a spot on that list of environmental cues, right? Or societal cues that you're going to pay attention to.

Right. So, can you explain to me why, even, why is a human, why is my nose right here above?

No, no, that makes a lot of sense, and what a great question. So, I'll give it to you in context. We're antler hiking, and we're up in the middle of nowhere in the Colorado Rockies. And we're doing really good, Shelly and I love antler hiking, and we get us some antlers. And so, all of a sudden, we started finding remnants of animals in various stages of decomposition that were lightly buried. Okay, now we've seen a bear and we've seen what a bear does to an elk carcass, for example. And this was significantly different. And there were odiferous piles of poop around. It was almost like, you ever see that old, gosh, what was the name of the movie? Planet of the Apes with Charlton Heston? Yeah, okay. And Heston and his crew are moving inland from the crashed spaceship, and all of a sudden they find these "X"s that are crudely built dummies of warnings, you know, that "Hey listen, you're about to go into the ape kingdom." Brian, this is what it felt like when we were antler hiking, and it smelled horribly.

Then what we did is we came to the lair of the cougar, a mountain lion. Okay, so what was the mountain lion doing? The mountain lion had various stages of decomposition around because he could only eat so much of the food at one time. He didn't have any natural predators, but he made sure that he covered his food so other lions wouldn't come and eat his, you know, food and specifically his wife or children, right? And then he pooped around because the undigested food that was smelling highly of decomposition not only gave him a tummy ache, but acted as what? A distant early warning to other people. Now, they never expected a human to be in that environment, but think about what it did. First of all, I looked at the decaying flesh on the ground and I said, "Okay, I'm going to pick it up and eat it like the mountain lion." And because my nose is close to my mind, what did it do? It gave me this olfactory warning, danger warning. Well, Robin said that stuff is fetid. You don't want to put it in your mouth, you know? So visual field would help me because there would be what? Blow flies and maggots, and those things. I hate to talk about that early in the morning.

But say I couldn't see it and I'm just foraging around in the dark, at least I would know when I came to those odors, Brian, that's not something I want to try. And think about it, how do we, how do chefs fool us many times, right? They use an odor palette, don't they? I mean, they don't call it odor.

Right. And that's that's where most of our taste comes from, from the smell, right? That's why you're sick and you can't taste food very much, you know? It's not good. But that is where it comes from. And you know, what you're talking about is something that's sort of hardwired. Like you, you can't maybe describe what, you can't compare that smell of that rotting carcass to anything else, and you, you know, but every human knows that, right? Everyone smells that, and you get that immediate, that disgust, which we love that emotion, right? Of where, yeah, we're thinking of like right now, just think of like, you always give the example in class, like one of the psychological stances of all humans is disgust. So if you think about sticking your nose in like a really smelly shoe and smelling what would happen? On your face, curls back, and you really like that hardwired reaction is important to our survival. So, our sense of smell is so tight, so closely to our survival. It's a great early warning system.

And so it really is. So, add this, yeah, because you're spot on to something, and we've already broken the gross barrier for today's broadcast. That's not our intent, folks. We're trying to tell you that acetone, ammonium nitrate, when they degrade, you smell them. So, there's a reason that your butt is so far from your nose, right? In your mouth, there's no reason that you're exactly. Well, it's, it depends, but it doesn't. There's no correlation, for example, between the hair on your head and your feet, unless you're a hobbit. Okay, but if you start moving it in from the top, then you start getting your vision and your smell, your senses. And then you move it in from the bottom, you get it where your system is purging unnecessary stuff, right?

And so you have to think about that for a minute. Why would that be so important? Why does your mouth and your throat and your stomach have the ability to purge items that are not in your best interest, right? So, if we figure that, why don't we become more in tune with it? And you said something earlier, and I'm going to jump on it, only because nowadays people have Google and whatnot that they can look things up. With a dog's sense of smell, first of all, folks know dogs have a really hard time with certain explosives, so they have to be trained how to prioritize that smell. They might not ever associate that smell with an explosive, Brian, but they know that that smell or the smell of decaying flesh from a 55-gallon drum under, you know, 30,000 gallons of water. The reason is because their olfactory senses have tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands more sense receptors than we do.

And so that's why when they meet, and when, for example, Eric Collier meets somebody, the first place he starts smelling is around their groin and their butt. But a dog, a dog does that specifically. Why? Because there's so many cues and bits of information that the dog is gleaning about the other dog. Did you eat recently? Are you healthy? You know, are you ready to breed?

Right, right.

Things that we don't immediately think of. But, Brian, if we walk it back, those are survival cues, aren't they? Aren't they? That you know, not just procreation.

Right, the dog one's a great one for, you know, when people say, you know, "Dogs can sense fear" or "smell fear," like, right? In a sense, kind of, right? Meaning, if I'm afraid of dogs, and you come walking into the restaurant with your dog, right? I'm going to get, alright, so what's going to happen to me is I'm going to get electrochemical neurotransmitters to start kicking. I'm going to start getting a little nervous. My body's going to start kicking out a little bit, maybe a little bit of adrenal, a little bit of cortisol. I'm going to heat up a little bit, right? My hypothalamus is going to start kicking. I'm going to get nervous.

Well, all of a sudden, that dog, everyone else in that restaurant is what? Getting fat and happy, and we're having a good time. Well, that dog is going to smell all that kicking off you and go, "Hey, wait a minute, what's going on here? This person is nervous. I'm alerting to it. Does this person know something that I don't? I need to." It's a great explanation of why the dog will sit there and go, "Now, now the dog's on to you and maybe start barking or going around you." And it's like, "Yeah, it senses that you're getting scared and everything else in the environment is fine. Why are you getting scared?" And so it's just a good story.

That's a great line. And so, let's look back at it. Wolves become dogs, we get it. You know, they're the canine gene extrapolates over time. My mine is very, very far away from that wolf location. And now they are right, and sleeping at your feet, I'm sure. But take a look at the dog relationship with man, which means human, which means all humanity, which means females and males and kids and everything else. Sorry, this wire is just bugging the crap out of me this morning.

So, if you take a look at the dog, why did it follow humans? Because humans were out at that time hunting and gathering, not just gathering, but hunting. And so the stuff that we left behind on the battle space, Brian, the animal, the wild animal would eat. And then after a while, it became a symbiotic relationship of them hanging around with us. So now let's take that to your example. Now what we have is we have one of those animals in an environment with humans and a human is alerting on something, and that animal needs to know, is that dangerous?

Now let's take it one step further. You have a grandparent that because of COVID is staying alone at home. And you think a perfect New Year's gift is going to be an animal. Well, 27 years a cop, Brian, I had to go on a bunch of unattended deaths. And many times, if you have a dog in the house with you, a dog is responding to pheromones, and the dog will know when you've died and when you're decomposing and the dog hasn't eaten. And so the dog will eat you. If you right now are being revolted by this broadcast, stop for a minute and see what we're talking about. We're talking about the science of how an animal is only an animal. Animals don't have a sense of time. Your bear has a sense of time through decomposition, right? So, it's a rudimentary form of time, right? But Brian, when you leave in the morning, that dog when you come back, thinks you just left and wants to play and wants to poop and wants to eat.

So, as long as you're serving that dog's needs through being a really nice person, or around the holidays, we see the commercials about people abusing animals. There's a relationship that's formed. If I constantly beat you until you do something, there's a relationship. And just like Pavlovian, yeah, that's our relationship. Yeah, you and I. Of course, I, you, you're mean to me all the time. No, but so those are pheromones, right? So what's a pheromone? A pheromone is a scent trigger to your brain that something's about to happen. Now, certain parts of procreation and reproduction are not fun and good-looking and happy. So your brain is overcome with oxytocin and other drugs, other pheromones to mask those so you can get the job done. Now that's going to sound really, really hard for some of the listeners. Again, back up. It's science. It's science. So you know who your baby is, it's science so you know to eat right after you've given birth to a child. I'm not going to go into depth there, but there's certain constants in life that you have to take a look at. You go, "Okay, it wouldn't be important unless I take a look at it and see that there's an electrochemical neurotransmitter, a part of the brain, a part of how your human behavior and performance occur."

Right? So, generally, when people come to me and they go, "Oh, you have an aura on your body. The Kirlian photography will show me, give me a hundred thousand dollars, and I'll show you, you know, cure your pancreatitis." And I look at that, I go, "Okay, there's no scientific foundation whatsoever. You found some, you know, flash photography method to do some neat thing, and now you're attributing some sort of importance to it." We look at life, though, Brian, and life has a way of telling us the nose is in front by my eyes, so olfactory must be damn near as important as my vision. Do you get what I'm saying?

Extremely. And that's another great point. It's literally right here in front of your eyes, in front of your mouth. It sticks, your nose extends past your mouth to ensure it's not caved in. It's not in the back of your head. It's not up on your forehead or something. Right?

And your vision is adjusted so you lose your nose. Do you understand that? That slow, subtle changes over time. Yeah, you do not notice your nose. Now, if you close one eye right now, you'll see yourself. Don't be driving to work! No. And then the rest of the day, you're going to be playing with it like a kid, but because you found it again. Right? But you started on the penis. [Laughter] For every time I said that, which can be tied to smell in some cases. So, this is Jen, by the way.

So, one, I want to get into the next really important part of smell is, you know, it's really tied to emotion and memory, right? So, we've all had that experience where you smell something and it reminds you of being a kid back at home. Like there's a certain smell like that, that cinnamon and pumpkin and oatmeal around the holidays for a cake or cookies that brings me right back to my mom used to make these. Literally, these oatmeal pumpkin chocolate chip cookies that are like, they're like crack. I mean, she makes them now every once in a while and we eat them like by the handful because they're so good. But when I smell that, it takes me right back.

And the idea is, you know, your smell, it, that happens because the, you know, the thalamus basically sends smell information to the hippocampus and the amygdala, right? Which are key to learning and memory, but also part of your limbic system, part of that survival system. So, it goes right there. So, that's why you can smell something and immediately have a reaction to the situation or immediately recall an event with seemingly great clarity because you're recalling, you know, your memory blows and it's not very good, but you get...

Well, your survival memory doesn't exactly. Survival memory is chunked, so it doesn't matter about the finite, you know, it doesn't necessarily, it just has big picture. Look, a great example of how your brain and body are interconnected, think of the East Coast of the United States. Think of from Canada to Florida. You could literally take a canoe and travel the Intercoastals and get from Canada to Florida without ever getting to the ocean. Okay? So what does that mean? There's certain paths that are immediate paths, and there's certain paths that are like rudimentary or secondary or tertiary paths. Your vision, your sense of smell, is important. How important? Well, your mouth, you gotta feed. Why is sleep important? You know, look at all the great people that we listen to, Eric Cole and that bunch. A third of your life is spent asleep. Those are all survival hardwired stuff that says, "You must have this, you must have food, you must have energy, you must have." Okay, so ears are on the side, but they're at equal length with your nose and your eyes. So why aren't they up in front of your face? Because then we wouldn't have the audition, the auditory ability to hear things peripherally. Do you see what I'm trying to say? Yeah, we have to be able.

And look at the increase you can have. I'm taking my hand and I'm cupping it behind my ear. Try that just for a few minutes in your environment, not here where I'm alone and scared and lonely. But try it in an environment where you're at a mall. Do they even have malls nowadays? When you're shopping or something else, and that increases the ability to hear. So, let's look in our environment. Can we prove that scientifically? Well, take a look at the ears of a bat. Take a look at the ears of something like a wolf or a horse. A horse has articulatable ears because they're predated all the time. Do you see what I'm trying to say? An elephant has huge ears because it's a big, slow-moving beast and it has to be able to hear at quite a distance away.

So everything that's on board for us, you know, I see the same guy on LinkedIn all the time. I don't want to say what his name is, and I still don't understand LinkedIn, but it's entertaining. And on LinkedIn, every single day, he's posting a thing about stabbing people in the neck and kneeing them in the groin and gouging out their effing eyes and chewing on their jugular. And it's quoted something survival. Okay, you know what? Your brain, body do more about survival to avoid the opportunities. How many times do you think about a vicious attack like rage, Brian? Let's take a look at that. It's so rare, it's remarkable. Why? Because you don't do that. We're not feral beasts. Do you see what I'm trying to say? Our thing is we also have a mouth and words and a larynx. They can vibrate when, and we talk because we're supposed to try to negotiate, we're supposed to become tribes. Do you see what I'm trying to say?

I can mimic your behavior and your emotions. You build communication. It's all hardwired. Why would that be there?

Yeah, why would that be on board if it wasn't for you to use before balling up your fist and beating somebody like a dummy? I don't know. I think when you start teaching those things, what you're trying to tell the people around you is, "It's so dangerous in your environment that there's, it's binary again. You either co-opt your environment or you have to fight." That's ridiculous. That's a ridiculous standard.

Yeah, and you know, you kind of brought up because, I mean, those are kind of like a training sort of example, and you can actually, you, you can train yourself to get better at smelling. Like noticing, like you literally doing not just like breathing exercises, but, you know, when you're wandering around like one of the things people don't look everything is like, "I want to look at everything. I want to see over there." Like you can train your eyes to look into areas that are dark that you typically don't think you can see, but you actually can. You just haven't trained your eye to do that. You can do that kind of stuff. You can look into windows and even if there's a little bit of light in that room, you'll see in, but that burning technique that we've talked about.

But the idea is, is you can do the same thing with your smell. You can start really focusing on your environment and what you're smelling. And then you can close your eyes, so you're shutting off, you know, one of your sensors, a very, very powerful one, and forcing yourself to experience it, so you can get better actually at smelling. So, you can, you can train that. And the other thing is, is adding that in. So, meaning, if I want to create a memory-emotion link, or like I want to show the insurgent something, like I'll burn a piece of toast, and, you know, you smell that, "This is what that happens. This is what fire smells like. This is what it smells like from a great distance." Or you can do that in the, I mean, something like that so they recognize that when she opens the door and goes, "Yep, there's a fire." And, "What's going on here?" So, now, instead of just walking blindly in, going, "I wonder what that is?" That danger cue is immediate and impressive.

So, what would you do? We'll just ingrain that into our mind. And listen, if you're listening to this broadcast, pull over for a second and understand what Brian just told you. Brian said that he's taking his daughter and he took her from the realm of, "This is a loaf of bread on the counter. This bread now goes into the toaster. This is what the toaster smells like warming up. This is what the bread smells like warming up. If it goes past normal, if it's now incongruent, the bread is burning and now this is what it smells like." These calories are being wasted. That's a whole another discussion. Right? But your nose is picking up on the waste of food, which is also a trigger to a danger signal that something's on fire in the house. Okay, so why is that different?

I'll give you one. I'll give you a Jaegerism. So, I'm hiking around with Jaeger back in the day, and Jaeger picks up, Jaeger would pick up various pieces of deer and elk poop and he would break them, and he would show me the contents, and he would explain to me how old they are. And it was a great lesson, and every once in a while, we'd pop one into his mouth and he would chew it down and he would say, "The great thing about these is because they're vegetarians and because they're herbivores and because they don't eat meat, there's no byproducts, no bad things that are associated whatsoever. And that's why," and he would crush one and say, "They don't smell."

Well, when I was taking the hikes out and I was taking horse rides, the Jeep turns out I do the same thing. But what I did is I stopped before and I got some malted milk balls and some Sno-Caps and Raisinets, and I would keep them in the pocket, and I would pick up and do the old, you know, one pocket, two pocket thing, and throw a couple in my mouth and say, "Oh, that's about 3.7 days old." And everybody would laugh. But the idea there is that listen to what Jaeger really was telling me. Cougar and bear poop, bear being an omnivore, cougar being a meat-eater, their poop smells horrible because it's impacted with digesting and decomposing fetid flesh. Well, that's an important thing, Brian. In my environment, I can smell what that smells like because I want to avoid it. Now, a deer and an elk aren't going to cause me harm, so even their poop doesn't cause me harm.

And I know that's a hard sell because somebody right now is like one of the webinars that we had and a person saying, "I'm just not catching the correlation." If you're not catching the correlation of what we're laying down today, go home and lay down in your bed and take three or four bottles of NyQuil, because you're not going to ever get it. The idea—don't do that, by the way—but you're not going to ever get it. What we're talking about is life has a way of teaching you what's important, and the world, your environment, has a way of teaching life what's important, and they're all related. And if you understand the relationship between smell, so, acetone. Okay, acetone is a very specific smell. Many times men have to get schooled on it by going to a place to get a mani and a pedi and you smell it for nail salons, right? Well, it's also a key component in a lot of explosives. And again, when it degrades, it creates an odor that we can go, "Wow, nail polish remover!" Well, if you walk into the wrong environment and smell nail polish remover, you got a kid that's huffing, you know, the acetone, or you got a bomb maker. Those things, Brian, are in my environment and just like a visual cue, a gun, okay? They can be an auditory or an olfactory cue that can give me the gift of time and distance in a dangerous situation. And if you don't get that, you need to rewind tape and go over it a couple of times.

No, and it's, and it's so extremely powerful. And to add that stuff in, that's why I bring it in as it's like a training component too, right? For the insurgent here at home, you know, you got to understand, you got to smell your environment. We, we actually, you know, that's why I'm glad you reached out and said, "Hey, we haven't talked about this before." It's like, "Yeah, we really haven't." Because, you know, you have your different senses, right? You have your sight, sound, feel, touch, taste, all that stuff. But like that's what leads to what people kind of call intuition. And, "I felt something." This, it's all of those sensory inputs working together to create and figure out sense-making, problem-solving, right? Figure out what's going on in the situation. And scent is just, smell is so powerful.

And like, like I always hate being at like an indoor shooting range because it's closed and I don't like it. And there's always, well, there's always shootings at them. People commit suicide. People do stupid at them. But it's very important to really understand and ingrain that, that smell of that cordite. You know what that actually smells like versus being outside because, you know, you can smell that stuff in a place where all of a sudden you're going, "Wait a minute, what the hell? I'm walking, I can smell this. It doesn't belong in this context." It's those early warning signals. And it's tied to that memory emotion link so much that you can, you can recall it immediately.

So, so, add to what you just said for the people that are listening. What you just said is so important. So, I know the difference between smelling what a gunfire incident smells like from being at the range. Now all of a sudden, I'm at the 7-Eleven and I can't find the counter person and I smell it. Well, the correlation may be that you walked in on a robbery where there was a shooting and there might have been a homicide. The idea is that the nanoseconds that that gives you may be all you get to respond to it and get the hell out of there, Brian, because it's so, it's so triggering.

I mean, that was, that was what would had it for me a long time ago. I had a really, really hard problem because with smelling corn dogs, right? And I've told you that story before. But the idea was I had a friend who I was literally blown up and killed, bled to death all over me. But before going to the Marine Corps, he worked at Wienerschnitzel, and he had these hand and arm signals for the drive-through because, you know, you couldn't, you couldn't order. They had this whole little process down in Texas and this was hilarious. So when we were on, in the field training, we had little breaks, we'd be like, "Hey, you know, Jason, give me, I want two chili dogs." This, you know, we'd give him an order and he'd do a sign out for us. It's hilarious, it's always entertaining. Well, because, you know, he went through the horrible, horrible situation where we were blown up and he was killed. And, and, you know, after that, any time I saw a Wienerschnitzel or I smelled a corn dog, then it just, it brought me right back to those moments and I could feel it as if that was there. So it was so great, I couldn't see it now. Yeah, I haven't told the story in a while, but I've had two over the years, so I've gotten better and I understand it, right? It doesn't, doesn't affect me now. It's just, "Oh, yeah, that's the one that gets me." But it doesn't hit as hard anymore because, but the idea is it was so, so triggering that smell that literally all of the emotions and feelings you felt at that time come flooding back, which is no different than the cookie example I gave at the beginning of the show, right? You feel that like, "Oh man, that was the best time when we got to eat all this food." And I'm smelling it now. Now you're experienced, you're reliving that moment right then and there. So it's, it, smell is so incredibly powerful.

Shelly and I were lucky enough to have the ranch for 13 years, and one of the things is that we did a thousand applications to have 35 people come and work at the ranch. It was a great process even though it was arduous. And one of the things that you had to teach the ranch hands was that the lawnmower wasn't a rock shaper and crusher. Yeah, you know, things like string trimmer wasn't intended for the gravel driveway. You had to teach stuff, and you had to teach that when a lawnmower was hot and you were going to refuel it, one, you always use the funnel and two, you always let the engine cool because unburnt fuel, the vapors would ignite and create an explosion, right? BLEVE of sorts, a boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion.

And the idea is that that smell of fuel from me doing the training lessons, and I would have them smell a tennis shoe. I would set up a situation where we had the lawnmower and we had a pair of shoes and we had the funnel, we had, you know, me, I mean, I can't go half-assed into anything. And what I do is spill a little bit of that fuel from that, that, you know, process onto the gloves and onto the shoes and I said, "Okay, now we're going to ask somebody to come over because we've been here for 10 minutes conducting the exercise. Hey, Jimmy," you know, one of the wranglers would come over and say, "Hey, do me a favor, we're going to sit on a pool deck for a minute. What do you smell?" And they would smell fuel. And you'd say, "Wait a minute, the fueling station is way down there. Why do you smell it? Oh, it's on my shoes and on my glove." Brian, you lose the ability if you're exposed to it over time. So that tells me that the moment that you do smell it is hugely important. Do you get what I'm trying to say? So if I lose the ability to smell it over time like sulfur, okay, what does that mean? That means that it's, it's no longer a danger in my environment because it hasn't cooked off by that. But at the beginning of it, if it's a very powerful smell, that means it's hugely significant to your personal safety.

Well, that, and that goes back to your, your acetone, exactly, the nail polish remover that was in in Belgium, right? The Brussels airport attack where the Uber driver who picked those guys up was like, "Man, I kept smelling this, I kept smelling the smell. It was so powerful." That he dropped them off and went to the police, right? Was like, "Hey, what's going on here?" But it's just, it's that smell out of, out of the context, right? If my wife is doing her nails, like, I understand that. But, call the FBI!

Yeah, yeah, but if I don't ever attribute some sort of value to that, right? And that's the idea of integrating scent, right? And smell into any learning or training process, right? You can use anything as a teachable moment, right? So, going in the military, starting in Michigan and working my way all the way down to the deep South in America during my exposure to different training courses, I had to learn, coming from where I grew up, what a grit was. I didn't know it then. As I moved a little bit South, the grits were served with stuff like milk, Carnation instant milk, sugar. Do you get what I'm trying to say? Brown sugar, those type of thing. Then when you move down to the deep South where I finished my training, grits were a thing that you ate at dinner and you had them with salt and pepper and sometimes with gravy. So, what does that tell you? Could you by the smell and the look and the feel and the taste determine an area of the country that you were likely in? Of course. Okay.

Magnolia trees smell very different than ponderosa pine trees. Different things in your environment were intended to help you navigate that environment psychologically, sociologically, or physiologically. And if you pay attention to them, if you attend to them, then you'll be stronger and smarter. You don't have to gank somebody in the jugular every time that you meet them. You know what I'm saying? You can take a look and rewind the tape and go, "That's a very aggressive person. He's likely to want to rob me, so I'm going to go to the next exit and not stop here." You, you can tell when you get to the fueling pump that a lot of people have oversprayed the fuel. I better not be on my cell phone. I'm just telling you, Brian, you could put a correlation together. We're not going to do it for you. Your brain will help and add it to your training, right? And now you have an additional component.

No, it can keep you safe in a dangerous environment, and smell is a great...

Well, remember that, that, the, the immersive trainer on Camp Pendleton years ago?

Yeah, and all that money getting actual the smell generators. Like the idea was, which I, I get the point of that, but rather than just making it...

And then Dircklines had its own smell generator, Brian, I don't know if you want to talk about that.

One step behind them. Most of the time, you don't necessarily need to do that to replicate, "Oh, where you're going, it's going to smell really bad." I would rather it be something a key indicator, right? So, the acetone, this, like if I get you used to smelling that in those contexts, you're going to pick up on that and go, "Oh my God, that's danger. Wait a minute, what's that smell right there?" Versus like, "Let's just eat." So, scent is huge, right? That's why, you know, the perfume industry has been around forever and is so, you know, it's a huge industry. But the idea is, you know, you can, you can tie that into what you were doing. Absolutely. The more senses I engage in a process, and especially in a learning process, the stickier that information is going to be. Right? So, I don't want to get too much into the details of that stuff to, to talk about that on on the podcast. But just, it's another thought process. What did you smell like? What did you, not just what did you see, what did you hear, what did you smell? Because, and then what did you feel? Because all of those, each one of those come in on their own, so to speak. But then when it hits your brain, it's going to, it's got to mix it all together and give you, "Alright, this is what the experience is." So, I, I don't want to rely on just one of my senses. I don't really want to be able to...

But we do, don't we? Don't we tend to rely on that? Look, so, very briefly, all great burger joints are going to have the colors red and yellow in their advertising because human digestion and the human brain responds to those things. The placement of a product on a store shelf. Look, you don't need to look any further than the advertising industry. Cinnabon in an airport. Okay, they want to be by the food court because they want you to separate their smell from other things. Back to lens. But the idea is that if you think about that, Brian, these are profound statements. Okay? Folks, we're just trying to lay out the trail of breadcrumbs. It's up to you to pick them up and go a piece of candy. You have to in your own environment say, "What would this smell like to trigger a warning? Where would I be that I would smell this?" If you practice that, those are great "what if" games, Brian, and zero calories. And you're driving or walking or hiking or doing something anyway, why not?

You know, I think it's important to say that the girl that sold the "fart in a jar" and made $200,000 is now in a hospital emergency room with gastric indigestion. That's horrible.

But you know, there's another thing. Well, I mean, "Smell you later." Play with fire, you're eventually going to get burned, right? Well, you don't want to play with fire around that hole, do you get what I'm trying to say? You're going to have a blue flame like the hotel room on fire.

This sounds, sounds like there's another story in there from, from...

There's a lot of stories in there. Okay, so that's, I'm not very proud of any of them.

I'll, I'll put the link to an article specifically kind of talking about some of the marketing industry really right now trying to crack the code more on smell and getting that into certain products. Nike does that. They do that with different shoes and like their basketball stuff like that.

And as old as we are, what about the new car smell? That used to be a huge thing back in the '60s and '70s.

Well, it's a big thing. It still is. Like, you get into a car and you go, "Oh man, this has got that new car smell. Man, this is brand new." You have that experience, you feel like, "Wow, like, even if it doesn't matter what type of car it is, it's still like, 'Oh, like this is nice and new. It's clean.'"

That's folks, that's because Marren's always in a new car. You can tell when I'm stealing them. Maybe I've been in a car since 1970. No, that's a great thing. And Brian, please post that article about that poor girl too, that's selling the farts. Yeah, I don't, that's an interesting way to make money, but you know, I'm all...

You might post it better, but yeah, it's more powerful too. Or if that's what exactly they do, stay away from a lit candle. What else do you want to add in about about smell here?

Yeah, I mean, Brian, anytime I can use something in my environment, manage opportunity or a danger, man, that, that's the key, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah, no, and we, we, we hit a lot on it, and we haven't talked specifically about this on other podcast episodes. So, I, I could call on uncovering stuff like this.

Yeah, we just covered that the 30,000-foot view. I think folks get the point. I mean, we could dive deeper into it. If you have a specific question, reach out to Brian and we'll talk about it.

We can. Just important things is like that, that instant hit to your limbic system, recall memory, emotion, is huge with smell. So use it. I mean, use it to your advantage. I mean, absolutely. You really can, especially in a training environment. But that's, you know, we kind of covered everything I, I wanted to at least on this. And I don't want to go too much farther into some of the smells and small receptors and how it works. You can read up all about that. I'm going to put some links in the episode details.

And don't forget everyone listening to like check out our Patreon site. We got all kinds of extra stuff on there. We're always adding more. We go in depth on some of the things we talk about. We answer all the listener questions. So, yep, if you've had questions, we probably answered them on there on previous podcasts. So, you can find the listener Q&A on that site. And it's only a couple, few bucks a month. It's really not a whole lot. So it helps support the show and and helps get get the stuff out there.

And oh, shout out to to Columbus, Ohio, and that area is now the ranking city in terms of listeners. So, so New York, Chicago, and Dallas, where have you been at? Dallas is like, was way up there for a long time, but it gives you a little...

What about Madagascar, East Timor? We're not getting that? Northern Macedonia?

No, no, we still got our folks from from North Macedonia that we would love to get there eventually. Columbus, Ohio, you got to be kidding me. Yeah, no, and a lot of the Ohio area. So, yeah, so Columbus, and we love Ohio areas.

Yeah, yeah, no. I, it's good. I'm, we're both Midwesterners. So, yeah, absolutely. Well, Sandusky. My, my dad, the big thing each year we'd go to Cedar Point in Sandusky. So the night before he would, you know, get the wild hair and and say, "Hey, we're going to Cedar Point tomorrow." And it's like, "Oh," but we were like idiots. We couldn't sleep. We slept in the car all the way there. We got horribly sunburned and ate a bunch of sugar. Do you get what I'm trying to say? All the way back, slept in the car. But, but so many things about Ohio. Wonderful.

Well, who's going to compete with them? That's the next thing. Cool. New York and Chicago were up there as well, and I think New York's been gaining traction recently, but, but let's, let's, let's see who, who pulls ahead. But that was for the last year. That was overall the last year, that was a leading...

New Yorkers know about smells, Marren, so they should be coming out of the woodwork on that.

They definitely do. So, well, thank, thanks everyone for tuning in. Don't forget, check us out on the Patreon site. Follow us on social media. Reach out to us at TheHumanBehaviorPodcast@gmail.com. We'd love to get your questions and ideas for the show. It lets us know what you're interested in listening to. And, and, you know, if you enjoy it, hit the like button. You know, get, rate us on, on, you know, the podcast platform that you're listening to. It actually helps get the podcast out there. And then share it with your friends. And we appreciate everyone tuning in and don't forget that training changes behavior.