Disgustology (REPULSION TO GROSS STUFF) with Paul Rozin

Oh, just content warning up top. We talked about all kinds of things in this sex of course. Things may not want to eat things you might.

It gets gross, it's discussed. What can I tell you enjoy? Oh hey, so it's your friend who offered you a mint, and now you're overthinking?

Why Ali Ward? Here we are.

We're about to experience something together. It guess wild friends come along. This is one that's been sitting in.

The stacks for a bit.

It's kind of been fermenting because it was recorded over the summer, right before I got really sick, and getting into it this week I realized I had forgotten how absolutely unhinged this one is in terms of subject matter, like you're in for a treat, you'in.

For a treat. But first, thank you to Patreon.

You've submitted thoughtful questions for this revolting romp, and to join you could submit your questions before our interviews to stop over to patreon dot com slash ologies, where it costs one hot dollar a.

Month to join.

Thank you also to everyone wearing ologies merch from ologies merch dot also said note thanks for all the really really really sweet supportive messages after last week's field trip episode of my getting surgery. It ran more to me than you know. And I even got some notes in our reviews. And to prove that I read every review, I pick a fresh, non rotting one each week, such as this one from r n rg LSLC, who said, love the theme song, love the tangents and secrets, love

Oh what a great building.

Should I take my shoes off?

What a bed? Oh my gosh.

His windows were a panoramic vista cast in blue gray as this afternoon summer thunderstorm churned over the city.

What's cozy for you?

Anything you like?

So I got settled in a deep chair next to the couch and we had a lovely, just casual kind of chit chat about spit, body training, fork sharing, spoiled meat, senophobia, sex, kinks, funereal experiments, perfume that you may or may not want to buy food you may not want to eat, the

My first name is pretty Easy's Paul. Her last name is Rosen, my Russian name. My father came from from Bellow Goose. When he came to Ellis Island, my father said, I want my Russian name.

Oh so I.

Don't have the same name as many of my.

Relatives, but you can call him doctor disgusted.

Several news outlets have so in.

Setting emotion, disgust turns out to be very convenient toilet training, which is a very interesting things essential issue of Freud, but it's disgusting. There's two things. People don't want to set anything Freud was interested in, because you know, we've gotten past him. He wasn't really a scientist and we're a real science now. I mean, it's a fascinating area where he takes something that kids love.

They love poop.

Do you get them to hate it? We're really upset by it. And that's an amazing transformation. Yeah, and nobody's really seriously looked at that.

Do you think that in psychology people think of Freud as a contaminant and they don't want that contagion of being a sci Well.

I'm not quite sure he's a contaminant, but certainly they don't want to be associated with Freud because Freud was not a scientist. He had a lot of interesting ideas, he didn't pursue them as a scientific well, he thought of himself as a scientist. By the way, the psychology has been fighting to be called a science ever since. I've been in the field since the middle of the twentieth century, and they wanted to be with biology and chemistry,

For more on this, you can see doctor Rosin's two thousand and seven address exploring the Landscape of Modern Academic Psychology, Finding and Filling the Holes, in which he explains, in the presence of holes, the clear demarcation between self and others is blurred, and each bodily hole offers both vulnerability and promise. Which is so true for what is our bodily self without access to that which surrounds us, without a hole for snacks, our bodies really hungry and probably dead.

I did one study showing that medical students that sus sect the cadaver. Oh okay, So after they dissect the cadaver, they're much less disgusted by cadavers, huh okay, But they're not less disgusted.

By fresh dead bodies. Really, it's very specific.

Shall we enjoy reading from the book of Cambridge University Press twenty twenty three titled Hedonic adaptation is specific habituation to discuss slash death elicitors as a result of dissecting a cadaver, so In this, Paul writes that by using the discussed scale as a metric, they find a significant reduction in discuss responses to death and quote body envelope violation elicitors don't know what that means, but I can imagine.

So try the pants, do it? You got this?

Have you ever had to interview anyone that works at a morgue and see why they're able to eat their lunch around dead bodies, whereas well another person would.

Yeah, first of all, some people can't do that, Okay, but they're not like you to become workers in morgues, of course.

Good point.

So you have a lot of selection. But people get used to almost everything, that's the story. You get used to it all kinds of getting old. Yeah, and you get used to the environment you're in. I had a case where I we were doing a discuss study one of my favorite studies, and we were looking at actual exposure to real discuss things with people. Our instructions were we had thirty two tasks I think, yeah them to do. One of them was take a glass and spit in it, and then would you drink the glass?

Even though that's it was just in my mouth. I don't want to do that, that's right.

Isn't that interesting? But yeah, it was just in your mouth? Okay.

And we got a freshly cut pig's head with a butcher and we said, we have a pighead in the refrigerator. Would you be willing to pull it out and look at it?

Yeah?

Would you be willing to touch it? Would you be willing to stick a pin in its eye? And we asked that people listen.

People didn't. Some people didn't. Then we said, no problem, you don't do it. Fine.

More on human relationships with animals in terms of food not other stuff in a bit.

And we had them do all these crazy things.

We also had a starter's pistol, but we showed them what it was and there's no bullets in it.

Would you hold it to your head and pull the trigger? No?

No, So we had all these dead tasks. We had a Nazi, a true Nazi hat from World War Two, and we said would you look at it, would you touch it?

Would you put it on your head? Oh? Boy? Okay. So we went through this whole thing and one thing we wanted to do was get ashes, cremated ashes. Okay, everything we gave them was absolutely true. We said, everything was what the Nazi at was a real Nazi at. And we decided we couldn't really do cremated ashes.

People donate their bodies.

But we did want to get something that looked just like it. So we went through a crematorium a student.

That I field trip.

And we visited the guy who does this and we explained what we wanted and he said, oh, he said, you want to see cremated ashes.

And he said yeah.

He said oh, come here, and he had this boom full of you know, like shoe boxes filled with creamade. He says, here's one, here's another one, and he started showing us if like he was selling them to us. Okay, and he was so thrilled. No one had ever come to him and said, I want to see what you do.

So instead of someone's abandoned cremaines, they opted for mashed up beef bones from a pet food store. And maybe they got creative with like some fireplace ash or some corn starch or something. But it was a convincing craft project, and we got an urn.

We bought an urn from him, so we have this thing which we said with cremated ashes. It's the only lie we told. And we asked people where they look at the urn, where they open the urn, where they touched the ashes with their hands.

So we had people doing all these things, and we measured how willing they were to do it. And we had previously they had already taken the discussed.

Scale months before, so we had measures of an indirect measure, and now we had a direct measure about disgust, and so we could compare them.

And the interesting thing.

About the study is after the study was over, there they've been do all these things.

People said this was terrific.

They would say, I want to get my friends to do this because you know, the sort of playing.

With disgust that's safe. Yeah, sort of actually sort of fun.

Well, it's like Halloween is a hunted house to them, but with real disgusting.

Yeah, that's right.

So that's one of the interesting things about Discuss that it's always interested me is how central it is in humor. Oh, for sure, all these discussed jokes. I mean there's loads of them.

Toilet humor got its name for a reason. Toilet humor schatological.

That's right, and people can laugh at it as long as it isn't in their face. That is, they're not facing the discuss, right, somebody else is.

And if you'd like more on everything from chuckles to hysterics to roast comedy and slapstick. Early in ologies, I interviewed doctor Lieberg, who's a renowned professor and a gelatologist who studies laughter's effect on the body. And he says he's the guy who's serious about studying comedy, and he's not wrong, and he's a darling. Going back a little bit in terms of defining disgust, is discussed an emotion? Is it a reaction? Where does disgust fall in the

Well, it's classified as an emotion, and it's even classified as one of the big six emotions in psychology along with fear, anger, said, happy, surprise. I don't like that when I discussed and there are there are the taxonomies as an Indian taxonomy which has ten emotions, but discussed as one of those two.

Let's explore a few extra emotions via the turn of the century two thousand paper exploring Hindu Indian emotional expressions Evidence for accurate recognition by Americans and Indians, which list the culturally recognized emotions. This is via a rough translation from the Sanskrit as get ready for this anger, disgust, fear, heroism, humor or, amusement, love, peace, sadness, shame or embarrassment, and wonder. I love that range, and I also love that wonder

It's this thing. It's like a color wheel.

But it has Western psychologies recognized six emotions, which are fear, anger, discusst surprise, happiness, and sadness. With these subsets and variations under each of them, like underhappy, there's peaceful, or remorse is undersad and discussed emotions can vary from judgmental to hesitant or disappointed. And if you must know, I have a laminated copy of this wheel up in my office, and I also purchased a throw pillow for the couch.

Or even overwhelmed. How about that?

And surprise emotions can include amazed or awestruck, startled or shocked or dismayed. Now, so what if you hate surprises? What if you hate I'm not one of those people, but some personality psychologists say that this is in line with higher prefrontal cortex activity in a part of the brain called the anterior cingulate gyrus, which handles thinky tasks like decision making and attention to deal and avoiding mistakes.

So it's got most of the properties of an emotion. It's got a facial expression, and that's clear. It's an acute feeling. You don't feel disgusted for a month, you feel disgusted. It's almost always tied to some events.

And where does that facial expression come from.

I think discussed is originally about rejecting offensive foods. That's where it starts, and that's how I think where we see it first and children, and it's closing of the nose, opening in the mouth, gaping sometimes thinking your tongue out. That's all getting rid of things. It's expelling it.

And you're closing off your palette really right to not let anything down there.

You're basically spitting out or closing it off. That's right.

So that's what it looks like, and that's that is functionally what it is. Now when you say, when you show that there's something else, like I say Adolf Hitler, people, well, that's of course an extension of that same discussion.

It's not about eating Hitler, but it's the same system that's applied to moral things.

Now, how can you tell that that is discussed and not anger, say, for example, well.

Okay, so first of all, anger is an approach emotion.

Oh what's an approach emotion?

The emotion that.

When you experience it, you want to engage with whatever stimulated you're angry at it, whereas discussed is a withdrawal emotion. So it's very different. It's the opposite. They're both negative, but one is a negative approach, the other is a negative withdrawal. Now there is some overlap and the facial because this disgust thing also bears your teeth.

Oh yeah, you're right.

One anger face is also a disgust space, and this a disgust space is not at.

All aga and that's just you're not bearing your teeth, you're just tongue out let's turn our attention briefly to the varieties of disgust faces and the structure of disgust, which was co authored by Yes doctor Paul Rowson. In it, you're going to learn that the nose wrinkle is associated with either irritating or offensive smells and to some extent, bad tastes and gape and tongue excrusion like are associated

Up raised upper lip is part of both anger and discussed. When discussed is a moral reaction to like Adolf Hitler. It's sometimes difficult to distinguish from anger because psychologically you're disgusted by Hitler, but you also want.

To hit them, right.

Ah, that's an interesting notion. Is it discussed? Is it a lot about threat abatement? Is it really your Yeah, it's a threat.

You could say it's a threat, but it's not a threat that's that's direct it at you. So it's one that you can withdraw up up. Here's an example. If you're watching someone on the street, the dressed in a formal wear, a man and a woman, and the man steps in dog do on the street, that's really funny. But if you step in dog dough.

That's a funny funny Oh not funny.

I will say that it matters profoundly who steps in it, and if I hate them, And if it's like a sweet couple that celebrated their anniversary because it might be the last one before one of them dies because they have cancer, and like the nice man wants to take his beautiful wife out to this special dinner as she feels like herself in a wig and a fancy dress, and then he steps and dog to you, left by some jerk who doesn't clean up after his expensive purebred

And then there's this.

Theory of disposition where we can enjoy when good things happen to people we like, but then when bad things happen to assholes. So in this example, though, it's best to see it and not to smell it.

A lot of discussed humor, it requires that you be away from it.

It's not really threatening you.

That's true of a lot of things that I have a concept of coll benign masochism, which is that people all around the world seem to enjoy the arousal of negative emotions fear discussed as long as they're not really threatened by them. And that includes a roller coaster where you're not really falling to your death, but you think you are, and the fear becomes part of the pleasure and discussed that someone else's disgusting situation is you feel it, but it's not about you.

You didn't step in the dog thell.

Yeah, so that's part of why they discussed humor works. It's a third party who dropped his lunch in the outhouse and has to go down and pull it out.

You know it's not you again, that's your ex who cheated on you. So that's hilarious and the most tension and release I feel isn't in like a three dollars airport massage share, but it's probably watching the television sketch comedy program called I Think You Should leave every episode. Every sketch hurts my soul, and I love it. I

It hurts to watch, but the hert is.

Pleasant, right right?

You initiated, right, because that's the same thing. So benign masochism is the idea that we enjoy these innately negative things because when we're secure that we're not threatened by not even includes jumping out of a plane for you know, on a possure, it includes the taking cold showers.

There are a lot of things where your body is not really threatened, but your body thinks it's me.

But when we're disgusted or when we evade the threat that discuss us, do we get any pleasure from surviving it?

We might get pleasure from surviving it. So the pleasure, for example, of pain from running a mile or ten miles, there may be some feeling of overcoming. But it's also that the actual pain can become pleasant, not just the success but the experience of the bab.

And if you need scholarly justification from remaining EMO, you can see the twenty twenty three study Glad to Be Sad and Other Examples of Benign Masochism, co authored by one Paul Rowson, which explains that hedonic reversals can be a major source of pleasure, and they can range from liking sad experiences like music or novels, or tear jerker movies or like my entire college CD collection, to enjoying food that's spicy or the strong taste of coffee or alcohol.

Now, how bad is good? That's the question.

So this study concludes that the favored level of initially negative experiences is something that's just below the level that can be tolerated. So I guess it's kind of like edging, but with a bummer. Speaking of does this include kinks? We're going to get to that later. But back to his history and what about when when your family came over. I was wondering, because you've done studies with Nazi EFEMERI, did you have members of your family who were Jewish?

Or who were my families and both sides are Jewish.

No one in my family was in Europe during the Nazi period.

I've done studies on that.

I know two people who are victims of the Holocaust who were in camps. They were anti Nazi, but they had no problem going to Germany. And I know lots of American Jewish who never had anything to do with Holocausts, who wouldn't ride in the Folkswagen and I wouldn't you know, I wouldn't eat saurbat all sort of stuff. And I

Germanists in Jewish people.

So we found that quite a few people who are you know, in the Holocaust were not anti German.

That's interesting. Yeah, And there's a lot of reasons.

For one reason, very simple one is that the German ones were had experienced nice Germans before the Holocaust. Germany was not the most anti Semitic country in Europe actually, and there were lots of successful Jewish and Germany, so they knew nice Germans. And then they met in the pants in the Nazis, and so we got interested in that.

We studied about forty survivors.

Wow, and we got them to tell us would they go in a Folkswagen, could they listen to the German language spoken?

You know?

Would they be upset about living in an apartment house which had a grandson of a Nazi living in that house and some of them all that's terrible, and other people.

That's no problem.

Yeah, oh that's interesting.

But anyway, yeah, I mean they're about puzzling things about people go to terrible drama and come out opposite, you know, and we don't underst.

Yeah, but it's great to be asking the questions and what about you? What drove you to this particular niche? How did you find yourself as the godfather of disgusted a discussion.

It's actually a very simple story.

Okay.

I was studying what people eat and why they eat it. Perhaps the favorite food of humans around the world is meat.

Oh okay, so yes, this is true, and we discussed hunter gatherer diets in the Metabolism episode in January, and our lead editor, Mercedes Maitland, also has an anthropology background and chimed in letting me know that meat and honey not to say that's what people actually manage to eat the most, she says, but that's what are historically the

From plant foods.

Now, how does this translate to you wandering indecisively at the mall food court as your lunch to break minutes dwindle away. Well, according to the United States Food and Agriculture Organization, globally, pork is the most consumed meat and it makes up over a third of the world's meat consumption.

I wouldn't have guessed that.

Next is birds, and yes we have a whole episode about chickens, and yes it's called Chickenology. I didn't make that up. It is what it is. Do not call me a fool. However, if you listen to the Hydrochoreology episode recently, about Cafe Barras, you'd know that those big mammalian rodents are actually fish happy Easter.

But then it turns out that meat is also the most tabooed food. You don't get vegetable taboos very often, right now, Why is this food that is so desirable often prohibited? Sometimes they're tabooed for everybody. And if you think of say Americans, there are four thousand species of mammals. We three pigs, cows, maybe.

Sheep, right right, Wow, yeah, that's a good point. I kept thinking of birds.

What about the other three thousand and nine? We are meat eaters that we love our meat, but we are discussed not.

Only by almost every species of mammal and all the other kind of species, but we're also discussed by most parts of them.

We don't need eyeballs, we don't eat skin. We don't need fat, oh, your.

Masses of fat. We don't need a lot of things. We eat basically muscle. We don't need brain. In the United States, we don't eat most visor. Yeah, we just eat muscle.

Again, this is in Western or US culture and fun fact, so the way that I met my spouse, Jarrett, was by walking into this organic nose to tail butcher shop, and he was behind the counter because wearing a chain mail apron. Oh but that's smile. And I remember he used to tell these tales of all these upscale Hollywood clients that just wanted either pork belly or a skinless

So we're eating one kind of thing from only a few animals, and the rest of them are all disgusting.

Yeah, why is that? Why? Culturally are Americans rus Well?

I would say that the story is, first of all, almost all food discuss our animal products, almost.

All, huh except for Durian maybe, yeah, but yes.

And Durian because smells like it's rotting meat. Yes, that's right.

So the question is why do we find most meat disgusting? And that includes earthworms and you know, all the other rats and all the things that we find disgusting. But another way to ask the question is why do we eat any meat?

Right?

So we eat this tiny percentage of all the animal food we could eat, and because is how we made an exception to that.

You could ask the question either way. Yeah, but the import.

One point is that there's all this great animal protein out there and we don't want to go have anything to do with anybody. And even traditional cultures, which is much more meat than we do and more parts of the animal, still find many animals disgusting.

And he says in different parts of the world, different cultures eat different types of protein sources.

They still don't eat at all, and they tend to not like decayed meat, which is generally disgusting. Now there are exceptions to that, but they're very special. You know, there are cultures that he brotten meat, but only certain cases, and it's generally not consumed. So that's what got me going, was here is this most favorite food of.

Humans again talking meat, and people.

Are rejecting almost all instances of it, and then not just saying I won't eat it like you might say about paper.

They're actually offended by eating. So that SI what's going on there, And that's how I got going.

And what do you think about types of meat that we'll readily eat, such as a hot dog even though we know there's buttholes in it? But we wouldn't eat just buttholes. We know that it's full of venuses. A hot dog is full of well, well sure it's fair trails. I mean I love hot dogs, don't get me wrong, but I know that hot dogs are full of things that if they weren't like macerated and emulsified, I probably.

Got an actual fact I never looked at this year. It's a good question, what's in a hot dog?

Do we want to know? Should we learn this? You know what, some wieners, you gotta look straight in the face. So I googled the sentence what's in a hot dog?

Just level with me? And I got to say.

The image search returns had had a lot of appetizing photos of like crusty buns, taught meat ling and mustard squiggles and the like. But let's give it up for people for the other gold treatment of animals just busted out the disgust with photos of a vat containing what looked like giant ribbons of milk, chocolate, frozen yogurt, but what actually contained whipped an emulsified muscle. And I found myself knee deep in a clip on the YouTube channel for how It's.

Made Traditional hot dogs are made from a mix of pork, beef, and chicken. The cuts they start with are called trimmings, pieces of meat left over from cutting steaks or pork chops.

And I realized, this is an you're working with an audio only format, and you're welcome for that right now. But I'm going to have you visualize this because I just see it.

Just think of like.

An industrial stainless steel tub about the size of a mini van, and in it is a churning, fluffy, grayish brown substance. And it stared at it.

And I was like, what does it look like? And I realized.

It it resembled a job of the hut, just rolling over in a sleep, just over and over that in a vat.

But it's liquid ish, I.

Mean, and some of the things like that sausages are actually encased in and testine skin, you know, right, Yeah, So there's all sorts of ways that we work around a lot of these things. I mean, after all, people are breathing everyone else's air and when they walk around, and they don't seem to be upset by that. Right you go to a theater, you're sitting right next to someone. They're breathing you're breathing their air, and unless you're worried

It's just exponential contact.

Yes, and eating is the worst thing.

And no one, by the way, I don't think anyone's ever done discussed sensitivity of the vagina. Well, I assume it's somewhat like the mouth. I mean the idea of being of touching a piece of raw.

Meat to the I mean, it doesn't appeal, but then again, it depends on if the raw meat is alive and a person you know.

Yeah, Well, I mean, if you look at what you don't want to put in your mouth, it's probably not unrelated to.

It which you don't want to put you for sure.

Wellas I mean a lot of people wouldn't mind touching it to their ear. I mean they don't want to touch it to anything, but the ear is not it's a hole, but you know, it's a neutral hole sort of.

So would I touch a piece of raw pork to my mouth?

No?

No, would I touch it to my newly surgically altered vagina.

Hell no, brother, And if.

You're like, excuse me, what do you get done to war? You can see last week's episode Field Trip, Ali's mystery surgery.

I'm going to leave you hanging. Just got to go listen.

Now, would I let raw pork touch my ear? Which is a neutral hole?

I think I would.

I think I would because an ear canal is totally different in terms of consistency. It's not a blank canvas for contamination like a mouth, a butt, or a couter. Is it epithelial tissue that makes a squeamish?

Is its epithelial tissue in the ear too?

Is there epithet I didn't know that.

Well, there's an internal epithelium, okay, which is a little different. Which is the moist one that you have in the vagina in the mouth.

I fact check this and yeah, it checks out. If you still don't believe me, you can skip over to the twenty nineteen paper single origin of the epithelium of the human middle ear, like I did. But epithelial tissue, it's all over the body, okay. It comes in a variety of cellular shapes like scale or squay mass or tube shaped cells and even cubic shaped cells, and this type of epithelial tissue, it's all over our organs, our blood vessels, It lines cavities. And if you're like, what

So this is news to me.

I'm all yours, Yeah, a little bit in the nose, so it could be the moisture that's moisture sort of makes things more conductive.

Right, what do you think of the word moist?

What do I think of the word?

People hate the word moist? How do you feel about.

That moist is?

Well, you know a lot of disgusting things are damp, ye wet, and the and viscera are wet. Well, moist in English has a certain negative. If you ask people, this's moist the positive or negative word?

Right or damp?

They would say negative. So mois is a feature of solids that's often associated with decay. And there are plenty of foods that are moist. So moist is fascinating. It has a negative overtone. I think you're right.

In English, Oh, I wish.

We had a language expert to explain why we hate the word moist among others. But I stumbled upon an article type a language expert explains why you hate the word moist among others in vice, and that pointed me to a twenty sixteen scholarly article called I moist crevice for a word aversion in semantics, not sounds, and they concluded that around ten to twenty percent of the population

I don't like it.

But anyway, back to that twenty sixteen study, which continued that word aversion is more prevalent among younger and more neurotic people, and it's more commonly reported by females than males, which personally.

It tracks. That's making sense for me. But this is all just when it comes to words. At least, what about culturally?

Do certain cultures tend to be quicker to discuss than others?

We do know that women are more sensitive to discuss than men, at least in Japan and the United States.

Okay, at least two places.

I know, maybe more than that, because there are discussed scales measuring sensitivity. There's an enormous range of discuss sensitivity. There are people who are almost almost shown no disgust.

Who are those people?

Regular people?

Regular people?

But are there certain like neurodivergences, like are people with ADHD less likely to be disgusted?

Or I have no idea about ADHD. But in our normal population you find people who are hyper sensitive to discuss.

Yeah.

So for example, one thing we criteria used, would you blow your nose and a brand new piece of toilet paper coming right out of the sure package?

Yeah, but there are people that won't do that.

Okay, oh, okay, oh because it's toilet Oh yeah, I wouldn't care about that.

Well, you see, but you're probably somewhere in.

The somewhere in the middle.

Yeah, And there are.

Other people who can't believe that anybody would be like that. And I really don't fight Fece's disgusting.

Well thing, I mean, it also depends on whose dog it is. I don't want to pick up my friend's dogs poop, but i'll pick up my own.

Well, that's an interesting issue there too. Why, I mean, relatively insensitive to our own poop. Yeah, and of course you better be, because otherwise you're carrying.

Around with you all the time, is it.

Yeah, So the people are definitely much less sensitive to their own pom. Sometimes it extends to your lover's poop. Sometimes it doesn't. Your baby's poop. Yes, mother's typically fine. Their baby's poop much less disgusting than some other babies.

Then you said it with the.

Dog, right, Yeah, I'll pick up my dog's poop all day, but do not ask me to pick up another person's dog poop.

Oh man.

I just had the cringiest feeling because I remember during that soare I had with my girlfriends before surgery. I talked about it in the field trip episode. My friend Daylyn was over early and she's like, anything I can do, And I was like, can you take Grammy for a walk? My hands are so full right now. And I had completely forgotten until right now that Daylan cannot stand picking up other dogs poop.

And she did it.

She didn't say a word about it, but I just remembered it, and now I want to die. Also that night, I suggested my friend Sarah. I was like, you got to try one of these grapes. These are such good grapes. And she reminded me that to eat a grape is incredibly difficult for her because if it were squishy, it would signify a little bit of rot and she would gag.

Now.

You could say about yourself your own poop, that that's, of course you're not threatened by your own poop biologically because you already have all.

Those organisms in you.

Yeah, that's true, where someone else's might have something that you don't have. But everyone agrees that discuss that's something to do. With infection and avoiding infection. So there's no question about that. So you could say that your own poop is less threatening and that's why you are less disgusted. I don't think that's the reason myself, but your dog's example, which I think is not atypical. There's no way that you're less threatened by your dog spoop than by someone else other dogs.

Yeah, it's maybe it's the devil, you know, you know what I mean, Like.

Well, it's it's a familiarity. But you love your dog, that is correct. So you could try to show, for example, the more you love your dog, the less you're upset about it spoop.

Now.

I once tried to do a study like that. It was about looking at how intimate people are with their dog as in relation to disgust, so that they sleep in bed with it, so on things like that. We wanted to look at that, so we went to the vets school here, we have a great vet school at PET and we went into the clinic waiting here and

A human being, iply guilty.

And so we didn't get these people where dogs are kept mostly for protection or something, and they're not really cuddled with.

Caddle those pups.

Because according to the twenty twenty Frontiers paper household pet ownership and the microbial Diversity of the human gut, microbiotic pets do increase the diversity of our microbiome, with dogs contributing more types of bacteria than kiddies. And a twenty seventeen New York Times article, are Pets the New Probiotic reports that epidemiological studies show that children who grow up in households with dogs have a lower risk for developing

Ever?

Again? Maybe not.

However, cockroaches are fastidious groomers, and according to our Lepidopterology episode with Filterus, butterflies love to slurp shit and they're often off rotting fruit. So you would think that studying butterflies would be this hazy rainbow of bliss, just set to like an Enny soundtrack. But Phil explains in that episode that in order to lure butterflies, sometimes scientists have to pee on cans of rotting tuna in the rainforest, So butterfly expertise necessitates a pretty strong stomach.

Now there are people occasional cases neurological bases of people who have no disgust.

Where what part of their brain is not firing.

It mostly involves.

The insula okay, at the base of the brain, but related to the olfactory system, which is not surprising Ray. It's disgust is about basically smell and taste.

Again see our gastology episode about taste, which is linked in the show notes. And right now, take inventory. If you're snacking on a chocolate cover banana or a sausage or chocolate covered sausage, just set it down for a sec.

It's gonna get rough.

By the way, we've worked with chocolate dog does of course we use Oh.

We've made chalklate dog does that look just like Oh, they know, and they even We've made it with stinky cheese, oh, sneaky cheese and chocolate, so it smells like shit and we and we'd ask people if they would eat it.

Now we no.

Just the thought of it is closing my throat out.

But a simple thing to do is just take smelted chocolate and make it into a dog terry.

It's solid chocolate, per right.

Right, Just a reminder, this is a job. Once again, this is a job that pays money and you need a PhD for it.

Amazing, And you ask people, you show them that what it's made of is it's solid chocolate. Would you eat it? And a lot of people won't bite it.

I know, I just the thought of it as making my throat clothes. What's happening. My brain is just thinking about it and saying, do not put that in your stomach.

Don't put it in your.

Stomach's And the thing about it is that we are built in a way that says that if it looks like an ex, it's an ex. Because in the real world that's true. In the old days, if it looked like a tiger, it was a tiger. So you have something in your head that said, looks like dog do, it is dog do? Now you know, and you bring it. That's not dog do, that's chocolate. But that piece of your head is saying that it looks like dog doo is dog do And you know you don't want to touch it.

How disgusted are you?

Because your home is immaculate, and so I wouldn't go that far. Your home is beautiful and it's so well decorated. Everything is in place, there's not a speck of dust anywhere. You're well dressed.

You seem like a my home, doesn't You're resonate with me?

Immaculated, It's not immaculate, It's okay, yeah.

But are you do you fall on like the cleaner side the more meticulous.

Generally speaking, you expect that most of the people who are work in this area are relatively insensitive. Otherwise they would be disgusted by their work and not do it. I had a colleague who worked with me was very discussed sensitive, But generally speaking, I'm not particularly discussed sensive. There are some things that I don't like that are a little bit disgusting, But no, I'm not discussing.

What's the most reliable test a lay person could take to find out where they fall on the scale.

Well, we can start with I'm just making this up now, Okay, brand new toilet paper at one end, Would you be upset about blowing your.

Nose and that?

No? No, but that's one way in the extreme. Are you willing to use a public toilet?

Sure?

Yeah, but there are people who are really very upset about that.

Yeah.

How about used clothing?

Oh sure, well I'm just wash it. Yeah, I'm just thinking for myself.

Yeah, yeah, I don't mind any of those things.

But then you can get to more difficult things, some things that almost everybody's disgusted by, like a fresh piece of dog shit.

On the one hand, and the other one the other end, you have.

This brand new toilet paper mm hm. And you could just see where you stand. But there's a very wide range. This is something that people are all over the place on just.

This morning, the same morning this will air. Because we hustle, our bustles here, Jarrett and I went to a park and we decided to spend some special married romantic time sipping coffee and taking this discussed scale quiz, which was co authored by this week's guest in nineteen ninety four.

So we sat down at a park table. We got to work.

All right, are you ready?

Yes, let's gree r. Are you recording this?

Yeah? You are you recording?

Okay? You guys sign up? Great?

Okay.

Please indicate how much you agree with each of the following statements, or how true it is about you. Right, a number zero four zero strongly disagreed for strongly agreeing.

Okay, So the higher the number, the more you agree.

I might be willing to eating monkey meat under some circumstances.

M I would I would say, I guess three. I'm really opposed to eating monkey meat.

But I can Oh. That squirrel just did a backward summersault while he was trying to eat a stick. It was really cute.

Sorry, I can imagine circumstances.

Don't say that.

Because I'm adhd and I can't find my pills this morning. Squirrel, Oh my god, dude.

Okay, I can't imagine a circumstance. Or someone would be like, we're eating this monkey. It's, you know, a thing that we do. And I go, I guess when? And round?

Okay, I had a three too, all right, we can't go through all.

Of these bothers me.

To hear someone clear throat full of mucus, strongly strongly agree weird.

I would go out of my way to avoid walking through a great m.

Two.

Oh yeah, I used to have panic attacks when I was a kid going through graveyards driving eye one because I used to have nightmares with bodies coming out of the ground.

Anyway, watch culture.

Seeing a cockroach in someone else's house doesn't bother me. Mildly disagree, strongly.

Disagree It would bother me tremendously to touch a dead body too.

Strongly disagree.

If you have been raised Catholic, you have touched I've touched so many dead bodies because you you know, kiss their cheek or put your.

Hand on them. Really an open casket thing. Yeah, I've touched at least three or four dead bodies.

I probably would not go to my favorite restaurant if I found out that the cook had a cold.

A cold or COVID.

Because that's real different.

It would not upset me at all to watch a person with a glass eye take the eye out of the socket.

It would not upset me. It would bother me to see a rat run across my path and apart.

Strongly disagree, don't give a shirt.

Mildly disagree. I would rather eat a piece of fruit that a piece paper.

I strongly agree with that.

At the end, it's gonna be like, please eat the piece of paper. Okay, even if I was hungry, I would not drink a bowl of my favorite soup if it had been stirred by a used but thoroughly washed fly swater.

I strongly I would do it. If it was washed, I would not drink it.

It would bother me to sleep in a night hotel if I knew that a man had died of a heart attack in that room the night before.

Wildly agree, mildly agree.

Yeah, you see maggots on a piece of meat in an outdoor garbage pail.

Moderately that's very disgusting. It's still very disgusting.

It just dands.

I would say moderately disgusting because I like bugs.

While you're walking through a tunnel under a railroad track, you smell urine.

That's just living in the city, babe. But it's still moderately.

Discussing your friend's pet cat dies and you have to pick up the dead body with your bare hands.

Slightly disgusting. Well, how recently dead is it?

I would say, not disgusting at all, because it's my friend's cat, and so it's an act of love.

That's fine.

I'm do zero too. I think I'm gonna go with a resently dead cat.

Look at this next one. You see someone put ketchup on vanilla ice cream and eat it. That, to me is one of the most disgusting things that I've seen here.

That's a funny.

That's a four.

A four for you because I appreciate how weird it is, but I'd be like, I ve a lot of weird stuff.

It's jam. It's jam because it's fruit, sugar and spices.

It's like strawberry syrup.

It's disgusting to me.

You discover that a friend of yours changes underwear only once a week, that's a three.

That's very disgusting.

Yeah, I hope that it's I hope it's circumstantial and not habitual or philosophical.

You're walking barefoot on concrete and you step on an earthworm.

I do find that extremely disgusting.

Okay, so here we go. Finally add up all your responses to all twenty five, and the total will be a number between zero in one. Ah, I'm so curious.

Okay, what's yours?

I got forty one.

Oh, I got forty eight, pretty.

Close, pretty close. Thus we're in the lower end of disgusted people.

Those sirens are not coming from the road if you're driving that was in the.

Park's Yeah, they're coming for us for being gross.

So forty eight to forty one. Perhaps we're gonna make it in this big disgusting adventure we call life.

And it's important to know this because, for example, if you marry someone.

Right, are you married?

I am, and I'm married to an absolutely gorgeous, wonderful slob. I'm an. I would say I'm normal. I've got normal to net and my beautiful, amazing husband. It looks like

Well, that's right, Messiness is not really disgusting, Okay. I mean to most people who are not that sensitive that you see that as disorder, but it's not the same thing.

Like he changes into inside slippers when he gets in the house. He will not wear outside things into the house. And as soon as he gets home from the gym, he washes his clothes and takes a shower.

Yeah, okay, but you see so there are lots of people who are disordered in their possessions but very.

Clean m hm.

I prefer everything orderly.

But my office shed is home to at least seven a live spiders live in their best lives, just in these dusty webs full of dead bug husks. And my husband he does a much better job of scrubbing dishes and floors and vacuuming. Yet he does not mind at all if his desk looks like it was rated by vikings who are looking for a pen.

If you're married to somebody who's very different from you and discuss, you'll have great problems with sharing a bathroom, right. For example, that's the you are not discussed that you'll use is now sure, and he would never use yours, right and gets really.

Upset when you do that.

And there's a lot of areas where you could have difficulty with people. It's all having to do with washing dishes and all kinds of stuff. Where I mean, if the extreme, you'd want your own silverware, hm, not to have anyone else's mouth, that's sure.

It's interesting that We go out to eat all the time and don't even think about the fact that this fork was in someone else's mouth an hour ago.

We don't even think about it.

That's right, Well, that's the way we get around this. Yeah, we don't think about it. We don't think about the chair that we're sitting in in the restaurant at a butt of someone else's stuff against it. We don't think of the people in the kitchen, right and what they're doing with the food, you know, are they sweating into it? Who knows what they're doing unless something it hits us in the face, we don't think about it too much.

Well, what about disorders like obsessive compulsive disorder And I know we people throw around OCD like I'm so OCD, but it's an actual, real disorder that doesn't.

Absolutely but a lot right discuss sensitivity.

There's a wide range of sensitivity and a lot of people are OCD.

Ish, but they're not really.

They don't meet clinical criteria, but they have some of the features, one of the features being cleanliness. It's not the only thing. One form of OCD has to do with hyper cleanliness.

And fun fact, that's not the only type of OCD. This is a giant misconception. So there are other subtypes that involve symmetry and relationship questioning and sexuality questioning or intrusive or distressing thoughts like imagining violen scenarios or strict adherence to a moral code, and a distressing level of perfectionism is under that OCD umbrella as an obsession and compulsions are the behaviors repeated to try to feel better or to mitigate the anxiety, and those can range from

I don't know, yeah, And I don't know if you could separate clean versus I mean, there are people who are OCD about nothing to do with discussed about the door being.

Locked, you know, six times to make sure.

That's very different in its manifestation from a discussed kind of OCD, but I both have the property of being repetitive overwhelming concern.

I was looking at some brand new research from June twenty twenty three out of the University of Cambridge which found that OCD sufferers had higher levels of glutamate and lower levels of GABBA in the interior singular cortex part of the brain compared to people without OCD, and the severity of symptoms correlated to the amount of glutamate in the brain.

And they also found that.

Those with OCD like behaviors but not clinical OCD, have increased glutamate levels in one of the brain regions. Now, exposure and response prevention and more general cognitive behavioral therapy as well as SSRIs have shown to be effective treatments, but some psychiatrists are starting to use limchdahl or its generic form lamotrogen, which is an anti seizure medication, as an off label OCD therapy because it inhibits the release of glutamate in the brain, which is interesting stuff either way.

Doctors are probably and nurses are probably less discussed sensitive because they wouldn't have gone.

Into that right.

We want to deal with bodies. Yeah, so you get a lot of preselection. Extensive experience can make you more tolerance or more sensitized.

Because you overcame it, your sensitivity could go down.

And that's one of the issues in treating phobias. One treatment is to desensitize you to keep exposure to very weak forms of your phobia graduated. You know, there is exposure to a maximum form which could be dramatic in it, but in some cases at least it makes you, you know, you overcome the wobia, so you know you can go into a room full of spiders if you're spiderphobic.

I would love a room full of spiders. I have put myself in a room full of spiders.

See my office.

You like to love it?

I love them.

I volunteered at a spider pavilion at the museum, free range spiders everywhere.

We spiders run by the way. Because spiders and snakes are a mixture of fear and disgust.

Oh that's a lot of point people.

Yeah, an earthworm is sort of discussed.

Yeah, it's not threatening, but a spider and snakes are dry sort of you know, they don't have that moist quality that goes along with disgusted.

Anyway, are we discussing what you want?

Yeah? Can I ask you questions from listeners?

Sure?

They know that you're coming on, and they submitted questions for me to ask you.

Oh sure, gods it's just spun on doing.

Okay, good, okay.

But before we get to questions, a quick break and a donation to a cause of the ologists choosing, and doctor Rosin would like it to go to Philadelphia's Interact Theater Company, which is dedicated to commissioning, developing, and processing new and contemporary plays that explore the social, political, and cultural issues of our time. So they're doing great work,

McKenna and Nicole climb In.

Okay, several wanted to know if you've seen the movie Inside Out by Pixar, which has a character named disgust.

No, you gotta see it.

It's inside Out.

This is discussed, whether advising on your social life or on life little messes discussed?

Is there too?

Well, yeah, it's a Pixar movie, and they represent emotions and one of the I think one of the emotions is discussed. Sorry everyone, okay, but I did look up that Pixar artists wanted really strong colors to represent those six core emotions, and that red seemed like a winner for anger.

Sadness was blue, of.

Course, and then discussed, which was voiced by Mindy Kayling, was a green color because, as the designers put it, when you see green food, it kind of indicates that it's gone bad. So let this be a reminder right now to just go grab your leftovers from the office for before it starts to smell like Satan's out house in there. Do it for everyone. But of course, not all disgusted is food related, and not all things trigger disgust in everyone. And then I raise my eyebrows at you.

Jadine Lannon wants to know what's the deal with things that are normatively disgusting or taboo, like you're in blood feces becoming sexual fetishes.

Okay, Well, first of all, we have the phenomenon, which really hasn't been studied much of disgusting features of a person becoming attractive in romantic relationships. Now, when you kiss, things exchanged saliva. But that's not salient. I mean, if you think about it, it's happening, but that's not what makes it, m M a pleasure generally speak. Well, okay, so let's just take something imagineal odor Okay, is appealing to some people, sure, disgusting to others.

There are people who will not do kind of lingus males feel bad and.

There are others who love it. And similarly, I think of females with falatio. Not only it's more interesting discust wise, because it's voice. Yeah, so that's a big difference right off.

In response to this.

Question, Listen, you can do whatever you're comfortable with. It's your body. But if you're very famous and you talk about it on a morning Zoo radio program, don't expect people to hold their opinions.

DJ Collin, I don't.

Do that I don't do that.

I don't not even like for her birthday. Now, if she told you she don't do that, is that okay?

I'm not It's not okay.

So either silence is golden, or you can go by the golden rule of doing unto others what you would like done to you, Or maybe what's golden the most is showers.

Now you get more into the kinky side with people who are interested in being urinated on or maybe defecated on. That's not that common in the area where something becomes that unusual fetish, certainly that includes body products. Why that's true, we don't know, and how it happens we don't know.

And echoing doctor Rosen's thoughts is the opening statement of the twenty twenty one study the Psychology of Kink, a cross sectional survey study investigating the roles of sensation seeking and coping style in BDSM related interests, which size upon opening. Empirical research on the motives and underlying psychological mechanisms driving BDSM practitioners is scarce.

Not a lot out there, But.

Then I found this twenty twenty two study titled Current Biopsychosocial Science on Understanding Kink which off the bat answers

Well, because I'm the great example of that.

Mm hmm.

Species, Right, little kids one year olds like agree and something about toilet training. Contagion is a major feature of discussed when something touches something else something discussed and touches something else that renders it in edible. Right, you would need your favorite food of a cockroach across it or species. Now,

You know, you show them PC, they say, ooh, but if it touches something that they like, they'll still eat it. Really, so that that comes in at about.

Four maybe they're establishing their microbiome.

Still, well, then that's a that's a different kind of account. Okay, you're trying to show what's how it might serve you a function that doesn't explain how it actually happens. But yes, you could make a statement like that. But you know, there are people who are much less concerned about this sort of thing, sharing food all and stuff like that, which many people find disgusting at a dinner table.

Some people don't want to share other people's food. Right, If you bite something no one or someone else doesn't want other people, that's fine.

Yeah, never mind if they love you, that's yet another thing. But even if they don't love you, or you know, if somebody at the next table in a restaurant is eating something you think it's what I'm looking But you would you mind them out piece?

You wouldn't know it. I know people have done it. At the point is you don't want their cutting a piece of it.

Given right, it might make a big difference to some people whether they cut it off with a knife, so they cut them a piece that they've just never touched their lips right, well, they used therefore, which would be contaminating. So there's some people who be very sensitive to that and other people who wouldn't even pay attention.

As we've evolved as a species, do you think that our discuss tolerance has changed? And a lot of people wanted to know how much of it is learned versus extinctive, how much is nature versus nurture, which was on the minds of Justiny, Richie Brook Hicks, Anthony Willis, Alliameyer's, Brit Klein, Mariah Walser, Patricia Evans, Heather Horton, Whedon, Samantha and Earl of gramblcan Oh and Marie Strombum Johnson for stop question, Jaska and Nico Price.

There's a sense in which it's all nurtured, a sense in which in the sense that little babies don't show any distuff.

Discussed as universal.

Probably the original discuss is something to be avoided, you know, for health reasons.

My guess is we're predisposed, yeah.

Biologically to avoid things that for example, smell bad, spoil it smell is the smell of disgust.

And is that why bodies smell like inherently so disgusting to people like I always read that once you smell a dead body, you never forget the odor.

Well, it depends when the body died, right the king? Human flesh? Does it smell different from de kaying other animals flesh?

I don't know, but.

I'm quite ready to believe that there's a tendency where it's predisposed to learn that that kind of smell is bad.

Oh shoot, I had long notes here for a hole acide, but I'll cut to the chase. So there are these two compounds that are notable in dead flesh smell, and they are wonderfully named cadaverine and putresine. And then there's another compound benzaldehyde, and that also comes off a core.

Well, then you think of all these people you know, many of them who like stinky cheese.

Now they like that smell, but only.

If it's coming from cheese. If you say to them, here's something sniff and they smells, it's cheese.

That's say. They don't know that.

If you say this is a piece of limburger, Oh smells great, you say, oh, I'm sorry, that's catchit.

You said, oh my god, that's the same smell.

So s I know.

If you wonder why some feet smell like cheese, you can think the teeny tiny tiny brevibacteria, which both lives on our skin to gobble up dead skin cells like its own charcuterie board, and it also ripens many cheeses, such as munster and limburger. So it's not that your feet smell cheesy. It's probably that your cheese smells footy. Have you ever seen those sketches where someone says, oh this smells awful, smell this, hey, Kevin.

Kevin, you've got to try this, milk man. It's so far gone.

It's on real. Oh stop the music.

That is bad. Why do you think we do that?

Yes, that's a very very common thing. People like this is what I was talking about before about an audion masochism. People like to experience negative things in a safe context.

Now that's a very safe context. They're saying your smell it. They're not going to kid you with doctson or anything.

Yeah, people are very complicated, so they're enjoying what's negative. Some people probably enjoy defecating, other people don't.

If you said to some everyone, No.

One's asked this question as far as I know, would you rather have be a person who didn't.

Have to have the deficate?

Oh?

Some people would say no, and some people would say.

Yes they might some people might say, don't take that away from me.

Yeah, there's a pleasure of expelling stuff. So we differ on all these things. Yes, I assume it's the less discussion instead of people who are more likely to enjoy deification, well even urination.

Right, Sometimes being feels great, You're like, but maybe that's the relief thing of being like, ah, I'm no longer in danger.

Well, first of all, you're getting rid of heated stuff, so that that could be a positive thing.

And in addition, there's a there is a pleasure.

I mean, you know, the actual actentification producers and put to your brain from your ainus, and that could be positive. And there are people who you know, sit on the pod for half an hour reading the newspaper and they love it, and other people who just want to do it and get it over with it. I wish I didn't have to do it. These are fascinating issues. They're discussed on a day to day basis.

I have two more listener questions. Now, there's something called and I'm not sure if you've heard of this. You don't strike me as someone who spends a lot of time on TikTok.

No, I've never been on tico exactly, or by the way, I've never been on face face Facebook.

On Facebook, don't bother garbage.

It's all garbage. Your life is so much better. But there is something on TikTok that is called the ick.

Have you heard of this?

It is the ick is when you're attracted to someone or maybe you like them, and then suddenly they do something.

That just just the ick like.

It might be the way they eat a sandwich. It might be the way that they ride a bike.

So it's not always disgusting, it's the way they ride a bike.

There's something in Laurel's words and also from Naomi Jane and Migile's, Isabel Brooks, Hannah Michael, and Yes, Laurel asked, when it comes to dating and relationships, why is there such a sudden irreversible trigger that's sometimes so arbitrary, And I'm wondering where is discussed and contempt. You said, anger draws you close because you want to maybe hurt or engage with someone. But what is it that you just say no with a the person or a situation.

Okay, so you.

Could ask people, here's this person you like, m you it turns out he drinks is your.

Now does that kill it? I'm just asking you. You see that could be that could contaminate the person.

Sure, yeah, No, that makes me say the guy's got to do a lot of toothbrushing and a lot of liistering for me to be drawn in.

Yeah, but suppose you're even not even in a romantic friend your friend gives animates the people in the.

Hospital or something that doesn't bother me as much as someone who like over pronounces something in a language in which they're not fluent. You know, someone who does cringey behaviors that are just like like.

Well, there's there's cringey behavior. There's a lot of cringey things that have nothing to do with discuss Okay.

So the ITGG has been described by some psychologists as a shame anger disgust and embarrassment. And some people say it is a gut reaction that that person is not right for you, and others say that's not true. It's a manifestation of avoidant attachment issues that you should work through. So your mileage may vary, but don't talk yourself into something you don't want. But also keep in mind we all have x I ick myself daily and I just have to deal with it. I'm never going to break up with myself.

By the way, you get used to everything, right, But you know, when you make a decision right now, might I wouldn't deal with that person, and then it might turn out that if you after you get.

Used to it.

Well, you know, we talked a lot in the beginning about Hitler being a disgusting figure, but where does xenophobia come into play when it comes into disgust and people who might have racist or xenophobic tendencies. This was also asked by listener Gemma, who wanted to know about decolonizing disgust. Are they finding disgusted in things that they're at.

It might be finding this For example, if someone from the despised group could be a race, could be anything, touch something, would they not want to hold it? Would they would be unwilling to weigh use blowing that was worn by an X, where an X is.

Someone that group to take Yeah, really too right.

And we can use that as a criterion for discuss then certainly, I'm sure some xenophobia manifests.

That way that you don't want anything.

To do with their bodies or lightning that's exciting, Yeah, that's good lightning. And there is some research to be had, like the twenty twenty three paper Body Odor discuss sensitivity is associated with xenophobia, evidence from nine countries across five continents, and the twenty nineteen address how and why discussed responses underlie prejudice, which notes that people treat an atypical appearance as a stronger sign of unfamiliar pathogens.

And then there's also this paper that came out.

Discussed is a factor in Extreme prejudice, which notes that bigotry may be distinguished by high levels of disgust.

So we've learned.

That disgust crops up in situations where things won't actually harm us, but bigotry is harmful. Hence, bigotry is worthy of disgust much more so than discussed over touching an earthworm. What about Julia Taylor and me want to know what's the most disgusting thing you've ever encountered, and was it smelly or gory or psychologically upsetting? What is the grossest thing about your work or the thing that you like the least.

I have not experienced this, but a rotting human body would probably be about his disgusting, as I've fortunately not experience that. Knock on wood on the battlefield, you might run into it. At a hospital, you might run into it, but not normally because your body isn't rotten when you first died. It's put into the freezer, whether figureat.

It right away.

But of course the police run into this buried bodies and stuff. I would suspect that that would be the the most and you might expect that it should be. I mean, because it's it's about meat, and it's about decay, and there's nothing more sensitive than human meats.

And just buckle up.

We got a casual revelation coming here.

I'm not terribly disgusted personally by the prospect of eating human flesh.

If I knew that someone wasn't killed for this.

Oh, if someone say donated their body to like a barbecue.

Yeah, if a person died and right after that some of their muscle was harvested, I would be interested in just tasting it. By the way, I'm saying that, when I actually faste it.

I might not be right.

But I think that I'm curious about that, and I don't feel widely disgusted by that.

And you know, it's interesting.

I do feel like a lot of say, campaigns towards having a plant based diet and eliminating meter campaign's pro vegetarianism use disgusted as a factor in maybe discouraging meat consumption.

Yes, and and showing people pictures of the way animals are treated that can be a form of disgust. Absolutely, And since going toward a plant based diet is agreed by most people who are worried about the environment to be a very good idea, I do it will work on sustainability, Oh yes, psychology of sustainability. So yeah, I think that discust is working in the favor of sustainability because it's animal foods that are disgusting, and so we

Yeah, I mean, I like their taste.

But we don't feel is anything deeply wrong with eating a piece of asparagus, right, We're not upset about pain that it might produce.

Right, as someone who may have gotten salmonella from a cantelope a month or so ago, I should be forever disgusted by melons, we should have not a good relationship. But no, I had some honeydew yesterday. No ancestors warned or forbade me from diner fruit cup salmonella outbreaks. So thanks for nothing. And the Bible doesn't have any passages about like definitely don't eat broccoli on a Sunday, you know what I mean.

I feel like you almost all prohibitions, as I said, are about meat.

Mm hmm, yeah that's right.

So discuss this working in favor of sustainability. Yeah, a favorite vegetarian.

You know, I'm not mad at that.

I feel like if you asked me to go kill a hog, I would say, O, absolutely not. But if you asked me to have a piece of bacon, I'd say sure or not. So I think it's maybe coming to terms with exactly what we're willing to do based on what we see or smell or you know what I mean, Like I think it's a.

Yeah, I'm a partial vegetarian. Yeah, I become that in the last ten years.

Yeah.

There are three kinds of vegetarians sort of. I mean some people are all three. There's health vegetarians, which I am not. Then there is there are environmental vegetarians. There are sustainability vegetaria. I'm sympathetic with that, but that's not my hormotive. My chrmotive is compassionate. I don't like the idea of killing animals.

Yeah, I feel you.

I don't want to be a party to that by eating meat. Now, I do eat fish, and I do eat the shellfish, and so I'm a little bit hypocritical and I'm sensitive to that. I don't like that either. But a lobster or shrimp that's a moving animal.

No, they can live forever.

In terms of sustainability, if you cut your meat and take fifty percent, you're doing a good job.

Yeah.

That's great to know and it's great to hear it. It's something that I'm moving toward as well. But last question I always have to ask is what's your favorite thing about your work?

What do you love the most well.

I love teaching.

I love exposed not so much about discuss but I do teach you a little about that. But I like to open student size to the wonders of the world and to how we can actually find out things like what's going on in the head without looking without looking in the head indirectly, I'd love to show them that. So I care a lot about teaching preparing people to be good thinkers in the modern world.

I like to find things out.

I enjoy being puzzled by something and then saying I wonder what's going on there, and being able to say, well, here, I have some idea, Now what what's going on? I love to look at the world and see something that doesn't make sense to me. My first study on food was why would people eat hot pepper when it tastes so bad?

Oh, that's a great question.

Have you ever seen You probably haven't seen this on YouTube, but it's called hot Ones. It's celebrity interviews with people who are you know, great actors and serious Oscar winning actors. And they're in a room with a bunch of hot wings. Then they go from mild to call an ambulance, and they see how far can get and it's people like Kate Blanchett and Paul Rudd and you. They're in so much pain. But it's something that once again we hate to have it after us. We don't mind watching it then, but.

No, but we like it until it gets to paint.

Yeah.

Yeah, that was what got me onto Benign Massive. It was eating hot chili pepper and I worked. I did some work in a Mexican village on it, and everyone in the village over four or five eats hot pepper and likes it. And none of the animals in the village though, even though they eat it because they eat the garbage. Yeah, so they eat hot pepper, but they don't get to like it. So that was to me saying, there's something about humans here, and it turns out it is about humans.

We have too much brains for our own good. Huh.

Yeah, well these are these are sort of side effects of having a big brain.

There are many side effects of having a big brain.

I mean, you know, once once you've got this brain that can do all sorts of things and imaginations, all kinds of things.

Happen and they're fascinating.

Just to heads up, there's a new Mexico chili pepper scientist very much on my list. I'm coming for you. I'm coming in hot, but that is in the future and right now, let's shutt up our discust.

What a great time. Thank you so much for talking to me.

So ask delightful people disgusting questions because you might find yourself chatting about hot peppers and hopefully consensual cannibalism just in the middle of a thunderstorm. Now we have linked more about doctor Rosin in the show notes. Thank you doctor Rosin so much for doing this along with the Charities of Choice. And no, you will not find his handle on TikTok anytime soon if you want to be online friends. But we are at Ologies on Twitter and Instagram.

So, during this.

Trip to Philly, I overscheduled myself in a way that could have actually killed me. I'm surprised it. I did ten interviews in like three or four days. I did a keynote to five thousand people, I had a ton of meetings, and then I had an immediate flight to Catalina Island to teach this symposium.

Stress was high, sleep was little. I was not doing well.

So when I got home, I started to come down with pneumonia, as you may remember I had in July. Now, at the same time, flies started appearing in our house, like not tiny fruit flies, not cute fruit flies, like big, hairy, gross flies. No idea where they came from. First there's just one or two and we're like, ohh. And then over the course of a week we were killing like

This thing is deadly and effective against bugs. I'm it's not humane. I'm sorry.

I couldn't deal with them inside. Does it aerosolize flyguts and then you breathe them in. We're not going to think about it. But my anxiety was through the roof, being so sick of with these disgusting, iridescent bottle flies everywhere. We kept all the door shut, we sealed up all the cracks, and they kept finding their way in, and we eventually we killed them all and about a week later, I took out our swiffer from the broom closet and I saw fly egg cases in the back corner.

And what had happened was this one.

Bitch fly laid eggs in a swiffer wet Jet maxi pad thing, and I hadn't taken off the dirty one before shoving in the closet, so they just nested in there. That's where they were coming from. They were hatching out of a swiff wet Jet maxipad. And anyway, it was truly a blight on my mental health. I think about it and I start choking with anxiety. Anyway, remove the old swiffer thing before storing it, because I didn't know

I took that too far. I took it too Pull it back, okay for.

By hacadermatology, homiology or doo zoology, lithology, technology, meteorology, pole of metatology, nathology, seriology, selenology.

That's gross.

I love it.