So... Alright - Smell you later... or before?

Episode Date: July 23, 2024

Geoff ponders a question of olfactory time travel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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bam bam, bam bam, bam bam, bam bam, bam bam, bam bam, bam bam, bam bam, bam bam, bam bam, bam bam, bam bam, so over the weekend, Emily asked me a question that's been kind of itching at my brain, and I decided to address it in today's episode. She asked me if I would rather have the opportunity to travel into the distant future and speak to a relative, you know, a distant future relative, just a conversation or travel in the distant past and do the same thing, speak to a relative,

a distant relative from the past. Just have a conversation about their life and their world. And I immediately jumped at, I would talk to the person in the future. She seemed surprised by that. I have no interest. First off, I would like to talk to the person from the future for a myriad of reasons,

not the least of which is I can find out how Millie's life and her kids and their kids turned out. Maybe I'd be talking to one of my great, great, great grandkids. That would be fucking wild to learn like the future of my family up to that point. Secondly, and I think a big thing is that I think people from the past smelt, right?

Wasn't the past very, very stinky? And so I would be in a situation where I'd have to talk to somebody who I'm related to from a long time ago, and I have to be polite. You don't wanna be like, listen, in the future, your odor is so offensive, it's hard to have this conversation with you. You know what I mean?

Like that sets you off on a really bad foot. So instead you've just gotta stomach it. And what's completely and totally normal to them is gonna be like an olfactory assault to you. And so the whole time you're probably distracted and then they look at you and they're like, why is he so squeamish? Why is he acting so weird? Why are people so weird in the future? Why does he look disgruntled, you know?

Why isn't he paying attention to what I'm saying? And then also they're just gonna ask you a bunch of dumb questions You're gonna like it you're not gonna get to talk to them much because you're gonna say like what was it like living back in Your time and they're gonna go I mean, it's fine It's the best time ever to be alive, according to me, because I live, you know, this is my present. This is the most technologically advanced the world has ever been.

So like, let's say I'm talking to Jebediah Ramsey from 1835, you know, 1815. Jebediah Ramsey from 1815. And like, you know, what's it like to live in 1815? And he's like, it's fucking great. We've got horses, there's food. I got a roof over my head, clean drinking water, I got a family, you know, like cards and dominoes.

Like what more could you ask for? And you're like, yeah, but what about, you know, the modern conveniences? And they'll be like, you're a fucking lunatic. And so what are they gonna be like? Ah, it sucks. There's cholera and plagues and wolves and people could just come and shoot me

and there's no phone to call the cops. Like they don't even have a concept of the way the world is going to be. So that's probably a pretty, I would think, unsatisfying conversation you could have. I will say, if you could, you know, if you could do the back to the future thing and you could impart some sort of important information to a past relative, you could hope that they pass it down

from generation to generation correctly, you know, to help some distant, distant relative. But what are the chances that that works out? First off, you have to get every family member in on this. Like you're talking to Jebediah Ramsey, you can have the conversation with him and explain to him and sell him on it pretty immediately, I'm sure. But Jebediah has then got to sell it to his two sons. And then they have to sell it to their kids. And by the time you get to like 1935,

it's just an old, I think it's over a hundred years ago, this dumb Jebediah Ramsey thing. With Jebediah, he lived in 1815, so he lived to the ripe old age of 32. So it's not like he was even around very long. And so it probably gets, your family at some point just drops it and it's like, this is fucking nonsense. This is the ravings and the rantings of an old man

in the early 1800s who says he got a vision of a family member from the future who came to the past to tell him, buy Apple, invest in Starbucks. What does that even mean? tell him, buy Apple, invest in Starbucks. What does that even mean? You know what I mean? And then it has to get into my hands at a time when I can use it. Let's say I'm eight years old,

and my mom sits me down and she goes, now I need to tell you something. There's a family legacy. Okay, there's a prophecy that a future Ramsey, and you know, Ramsey's not my birth name. We're just using this for the story. A future Ramsey someday will be, will understand this message and be able to use it

to rise all of the Ramses up to prominence so that we can take our rightful place you know in high society or You know whatever I Have to then hold on to that my whole life just like my mom or my dad or my grandparents and their grandparents did And just be reading the tea leaves my entire life and then someday I'm like, well, I'm 19. And the family prophecy said by Starbucks. Starbucks is a company like this part makes sense to me.

And because, you know, over a hundred years ago, 200 years ago now, one of my great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandparents told his kids to tell their kids to tell their kids to tell their kids to tell their kids to buy Starbucks. I should probably go get a nice coffee, you know, like how am I even going to know when the time is right? And if I get the information and I have it, how am I going to know that I'm using it in the right way? How do I know, you know, am I going to assume that over 150 years the word stocks stays intact or does Starbucks itself just end up

in my, and then I don't know, do they want me to buy Starbucks stock? Do they want me to buy a franchise? Do I need to sell everything I own and buy a local Starbucks and then run a coffee shop? Is that what it's telling me to do? Should I just start drinking Starbucks and be highly caffeinated to help increase my I don't know my ability to Make money or find success What do I do with buy apples Do I buy apples? Do I buy apple stock? When do I sell the apple stock? How do I know it's time to sell the apple stock?

The prophecy didn't tell me when to sell the stock. It just said to buy the stock. Do I hold onto it forever? Do, am I a part of, am I like a middle man in this prophecy? Is my job to buy the stock and now I have to hold onto it for future generations until it's time for one of them to sell it?

Or do I get to say, hey, I'm the important one in the story now. This is all about me because, you know, any single person in the past in my family could have thought the same thing, could have found themselves in an opportunity to buy apples or apple stock or deer like bucks. And who knows what Starbucks could have meant in 1932 to a dude. You know what I mean? The privacy could have privacy could have been handed down and then,

quote unquote, fulfilled many, many, many years ago and then end it. You know, I just. I just ultimately think the best bet is to talk to the future version of you, and then you can find out how you impacted the family and the future and how the Ramses are getting along. And you can be, and this is where it kind of falls apart for me, unfortunately, you can be that dumb yokel who asks a bunch of stupid questions

and doesn't understand how the world works. So the future you is just as inconvenienced by the conversation is as current you was talking to past you, right? He's just looking at you like you're a simpleton. How do you not understand the basic principles of vision and time travel or teleportation or things that, you know. What do you mean you don't understand how to move things with your mind?

You know, it's like light travel, light travel, a theory to you, you idiots. They teach that in kindergarten in the future, you know, then. And throwing this out there, we don't smell in 2022, 2024. Why would I say 2022? We don't smell in 2024. Or if we do smell, we don't smell in 2022, 2024. Why would I say 2022? We don't smell in 2024. Or if we do smell, we smell good. I put on cologne and deodorant this morning. The shit I put in my hair smells good.

You know what I mean? Everything smells good. We're past smelling bad. We're over that as a society. So we smell good to us. But how do I know that a Ramsey 200 years into the future doesn't think I smell like absolute utter dog shit? So now I got to watch the future distant family member and I got to try to read their face to determine are they trying to be polite

and hide the fact that I smell off putting to them in are they now distracted and are they having trouble following along with the questions? Is it because my questions are so stupid and inane and boring that they don't wanna answer them? Or is it because I smell so fucking bad because I don't know, toothpaste to these guys is, is, uh, disgusting because they've, they've solved teeth or because deodorant, it just smells like a poison to them because they determined, you know,

that it is poisoned somehow. And they have a totally different idea of, of what smells good in the future. You know what I mean? I just don't want to smell bad. And I don't want to smell people that smell bad. It's a real dilemma. What would you do? Canada for a limited time. It's time for Tim's. You just need a nice place to settle in. Enjoy your room upgrade. Wherever you go, we'll go together. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash ymx. Benefits vary by card, terms apply.

So that got me thinking about how bad the past smelled. You know, and I've heard this many times throughout my life that the past smelled like utter absolute shit. I remember I did a ghost tour in Edinburgh, Scotland one time and it was a fucking, if you ever get a chance to do the ghost tour or any of the ghost tours in Edinburgh, I'm sure there's more than one, or I'm sorry,

Edenborough as they like to pronounce, as they like you to pronounce it. I can't vouch for all of them, but the one that I went on, you know, 15 years ago was fucking awesome. And they actually take you underground to all these tunnels and places, which I guess is where I'm going with this. What they were saying in this ghost tour

is that way back in the, you know, we're talking like the 17, 1800s, like mid 1700s, early 1800s, they, you know, the ideas of cleanliness have evolved. And they used to just take their trash, you know, because they're living in these tall houses, multiple stories up, castles and shit, they would just take their trash

and they would just dump it out the window onto the street below, because streets were for fucking walking and moving, not for hanging out and partying, right? So they would just dump you know sewage poop old food rotten tomatoes and cabbage like whatever they had they would just dump it out the fucking window onto the ground and then it would just sit there and fester and rot in the sun and smell and get gross and just get ground into the ground and into the bottom of your shoe and shit and

Then eventually it would you know fucking it's it would rain and all well not all of it But a lot of stuff would wash You know underground into those tunnels where a lot of poor people and criminals lived and it was even worse down there apparently and that's Did you think about it there was like sewage in the streets, horses were the main form of travel, so there was horse shit everywhere. Like imagine, like think about today, and I guess as an American, because we're so car dependent,

so think about if you are in any kind of American city, think about a Walmart, go to a Walmart and see how many cars are in the parking lot. Now think, what if I replaced all of those cars with three piles of horse shit every day? It really started to add up as we, as a people started to add up population wise. They didn't know what to do about garbage.

Also, we eat animals like crazy as humans. And so there were slaughterhouses that were not sanitary, but also smelled hideous. Just talk about like Chicago and the stockyards there, and just like this heinous, I've read stories about how these heinous smells just from the stockyards alone and the slaughterhouses alone. So you have all of that going on and people were just walking around in it in the middle of

the street. And so I like they say I've been doing a lot of reading. Here's something from a website called Big Think, they talked about America's smell history and they say most cities reeked of death, defecation and industrial waste I forgot about industry. I mean, yeah, it's like it's just fucking Everything we do as a human Creates trash as a byproduct if you think about it everything we ingest Everything we touch everything we wear like pretty much everything we do everything we burn

everything we touch, everything we wear, like pretty much everything we do, everything we burn, everything we make, like it all creates trash as a byproduct. And I know that they used to use like, you know, France and the Romans are both famous for using a ton of perfume, like the Romans famously perfumed the dead. I think I was reading somewhere not too long ago

that they uncovered some Roman burial grounds and were kind of blown away at how intense the smells of frankincense and all that shit were still that were used in the ceremonies and when they closed up the bodies. And it's still noticeable to this day, all the oils and smells, which is kind of wild. So when did we stop being okay with being gross?

Did we finally just say like we deserve better than these smells? The answer is kinda, from what I can tell, is a little bit two-fold. And unfortunately, it has nothing to do with, very little to do with our noses. It honestly is, it's a little bit of fear and it's a little bit of ego.

The fear comes from the fact that it became a very popular idea in the 1800s that bad smells transferred disease. So like you could, like a smell could kill you. Like odors could carry disease or miasmas, I think they call them. And so like the smell could collect adherence from the plague or whatever illness

and transfer it to you through your nose. And so people, when they started to fear bad smells, and so over time, they started to fear people who smelled bad. In addition to that, trash in the streets, it really was horse manure. Horse manure in the streets became such an issue, not because people smelled horse manure in the streets

and they thought that was gross, but because they had to wear big cumbersome ugly boots so that they didn't get their good shoes covered in horse shit. And it was an ego thing. People thought they looked funny and silly and dumb and out of fashion. And so they didn't want to wear ugly cumbersome boots anymore because they didn't fit with their dresses and their suits and shit.

So they started cleaning up the streets to clear the way so that people could look, you know, cool in their new shoes. So the reality is we mostly have misplaced fear in how disease transmits and fashion ego to thank for our streets being cleaned up. But we also have, funny enough, I was reading about this, we also have one of our founding fathers to thank as well. Because in the late 1700s, the Benjamin Franklin

started the very first garbage collection service and street cleaning service. And from then on, it didn't really take hold until the late 1800s, around the 19thth century when, like I said, cities were becoming choked with manure. But Benjamin Franklin laid the building blocks, I guess, for trash collection in America, which I think is pretty fucking cool. I guess it used to be, I was through all the reading too, just as an aside, I guess it used to be incredibly common to just leave dead animals on the side of the road, which, you know, I grew up in Alabama in the 80s

and it was pretty common there too, but I mean like horses and stuff, like you just beat your horse would keel over outside of the general store or outside of like the stock exchange and you just like, you know, take your keys out and walk away, I guess. You know, I don't think Ben Franklin gets enough credit

for some of the, sure, We all talk about the key. Everybody knows about Ben Franklin's more famous inventions, but did you know he spearheaded garbage collection? Did you know that he invented swim fins? Did you know that he invented the bendable catheter that until Ben Franklin, people would stick straight rods up their dick to catheter, catheterize, catheter, whatever, and his brother had to do it and it hurt and was miserable and he felt so bad for him

that he created the plans and he took it to, I guess a silversmith and had him make, invent a segmented bendable catheter that he then mailed to his brother. So every man in America should thank Ben Franklin for that Did you know that before it was common before trash collection was common? It was common to just dig a hole in your backyard and bury trash which explains

What the fuck was going on in my backyard at the old house? the one that every time I every every time I try to dig a bean hole, I dug up like 15 years of somebody else's garbage. If I should have carbon dated it, it could have been hundreds of years old. It wasn't. So garbage collection was kind of invented in the 1700s, but then it wasn't popularized until New York City

in the 1900s and in London around the same time as well. When did we start wearing deodorant? Because I know perfume has always been a big thing. Let's see. The first deodorant that killed odor causing bacteria was called mum and it was trademarked in 1888. It was a waxy cream that came in a metal tin and used zinc oxide to fight odor

Back then this is from a website called oars and Alps Back then deodorant was a fairly novel idea and most women simply use perfume to smell fresh. Yeah The first roll-on deodorant was developed in the 1950s. Yeah interesting What did we do before? Oh, interesting. So it wasn't just, cause you know, dudes weren't using perfume. I guess before deodorant talcum powder was the thing.

It was the main personal care product advertised to alleviate odorous feet, armpits, and general body perspiration. It was sold as a general body refreshener and deodorant as it absorbed perspiration and It was sold as a general body refreshener and deodorant as it absorbed perspiration and moisture from skin. So up, I guess we would just like douse ourselves and we'd walk around chalky covered in talcum powder until until deodorant in 1888. And this is what I'm talking about. To go

back in time and to do this, this time travel experiment properly, you'd you'd want to go back before 1888. That means there's no fucking chance your descendants are actually wearing deodorant. If you're lucky, they're covered in talcum powder, which is going to be weird to look at. I think it's got to be the future. But the problem is you're the yokel in the future and I don't want to be a yokel.

That's a tough one. All right. This is the end of the show.