Alex Wiltschko

I got really into perfume and perfume collecting when I was about 12.

I was already a big computer nerd and computer programmer.

So adding like perfume collecting in like a very small Texas town does not like make you the most popular person.

Boy, that's fair.

But you don't choose your obsessions.

They choose you.

And then I watched a TED talk by a guy named Luca Turin when I was in I think I was in college.

And the TED talk said two things.

One is, you know, we really don't actually know why things smell the way that they do.

And then number two is he had a solution for it.

Turns out, I think that it's mostly wrong, the solution, but oh my gosh, is there value in asking the right question?

And this idea that like, you can tell me RGB and I can figure out what color that is.

It seems trivial.

We can't do that for smell.

Like we can't talk about why something smells the way that it does.

It's just random.

And then I ended up going completely down that rabbit hole.

And I ended up, you know, I did my undergraduate in neuroscience.

I got my PhD in olfactory neuroscience.

And I learned that actually nobody knows the answer.