December 7, 2024 • 43 mins
When the birth control pill hit the market in 1960 it landed like a social bomb. Almost overnight, women gained the ability to separate sex from pregnancy and everything from feminism to patients’ rights centered on it. Find out all about its history in this classic episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, here's Chuck this week on a Saturday with
a pretty relevant topic these days. Who knew that it
would be relevant again? And this is from June nineteenth,
twenty eighteen, How the Pill changed the world. I think
you know what pill we're talking about. Welcome to Stuff
(00:21):
you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's
Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's the ghost of Jerry
Roland in the empty chair. Thanks again about this, Thanks
again to Ramsey.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
Yeah, thanks Ramsey.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
How do I feel about this? I feel great? The
pill is it has everything? This might be I just
love this episode already.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
I do too, But I kind of like when we
did the female puberty episode. I just feel nervous. This
can be fine explaining female reproduction. I just I don't know.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Hey, man, we're just we're just explaining stuff.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
I know, I know.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
It's not like we're We're just we're just explaining stuff.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
Just be cool, all right. So let's talk the pill.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Yeah, the opposite of having kids.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
The pharmaceutical so famous that it's called the pill.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
It is there. I read this New Yorker article about
a book on the birth of the pill, and now
I'm talking about it, so everything comes full circle. And
they were saying, like, there's like, you don't call anything
else the pill, Like viagra is not the pill. Antibiotics
isn't the pill. You don't call it the vacuum or
(01:46):
the meat grinder, right, Like, there's there's really nothing like that. Yeah,
nothing compares to it. And it's it's for good reason.
I mean, the pill is monumentally huge as far as
pharmaceuticals and medicine goes. I mean on the scale of
antibiotics easily.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Yeah, and it's it's the very first medication that was
designed for a non therapeutic purpose too. Yes, very interesting.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
And so it's really difficult to over to overstate how
much of an impact the pill had when they released
it in I think nineteen sixties, when.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
It came history first.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Yeah, let's right, let's do that. So let me set
the stage for you.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
Please, Oh, you're bringing a catch out.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Back in back in the day. I'm going to do
my Charles Nelson Riley one man Show impression. Back in
the day, if you were a woman and you didn't
want to get pregnant, you had to coordinate with your
husband that he wear a condom, okay, sure, or boyfriend, Well,
(02:57):
that's like a whole other kettle of fish at this time. Yeah, supposedly,
and socially that went on all the time. There's plenty
of premarital sex, but socially speaking, only single men were
allowed to have premarital sex, which is like, who are
they having premarital sex with? Then, right, if they're the
only ones allowed to have premarital sex, considering, considering everyone
(03:21):
refused to officially recognize homosexuality even existed.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Yeah, I know where you get.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
Okay, So there's a lot of double standards, a lot
of repression going on. But if you were if you
were a woman and you wanted to have sex, so
whether it was with the guy you were having sex
with or your husband, you you basically had to say
you got to wear a condom. And if you said no,
well you were sol one way or another, either you
weren't having sex or you're going to have sex without
a condom. And if that happened, there was a really
(03:48):
good chance that you were going to end up getting
pregnant just from having sex.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
Yeah, the ball was entirely in the man's court, and
women did not have much say in the matter.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
No, they didn't. There were a couple of things on
the market. So before the Industrial Revolution, there were like
folk remedies where you could use herbs and stuff like that.
Basically I think they're called herbal douches where you're just
like squeezing stuff in there and like hoping for the best.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
Right.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
And then by the depression there's something there's a whole
line of stuff called gynecological aids or feminine hygiene, I
think is what it's called. And some of them worked,
some of them kind of worked, some of them didn't work.
Some of them worked but would kill you or give
you chemical burns. There was a lot of problems, so
(04:41):
you didn't have a lot of options, right. And then
along with the fact that you actually didn't have that
many options socially, in nineteen fifty, thirty States and the
federal government said you can't have anything that can used
as a contraceptive and you can't even learn about it
(05:03):
from your doctor from school. Yeah, thirty states in the
federal government. This is nineteen fifty. Ten years later, the
pill comes out, and a couple of years after that,
five million American women are using it as a contraception,
and now it was in their hands. They had the
ability to decide for themselves whether sex late to pregnancy
(05:26):
or not.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
Well, and sort of even then, because not all states
allowed it and not all doctors would give it out,
so it wasn't like, oh, the FDA said it's good
to go, so we can all get it. It was
still a fight. Yeah, for years and years of decades,
it really was. So I guess we should start with
a woman named Margaret Sanger. She is a very controversial figure,
(05:50):
founder of Planned parenthood. She's a nurse, and she wrote
in nineteen twelve about a magic pill that could prevent conception.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
Yeah, just a theoretical hypothetical pill.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
Right, And she's controversial for many reasons, not the leastes
which is her she was anti abortion. Kind of when
she was most famous, she was anti abortion and kind
of went all in on the pill and was like,
this is the way to do it, is to prevent
the pregnancy once you're pregnant.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Sorry, wow, gotcha.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
And then you know there's the whole eugenics thing. We
should do a podcast on her, probably at some point
we should, because that's a rabbit hole right there.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
Yeah, so, but she was the early champion of it.
She was she coined the term birth control, and I
think nineteen twelve as well.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
Yeah, so in nineteen fourteen she started a newsletter called
The Woman Rebel. That's where birth control was first typed
out and distributed the words like you said. And then
in the nineteen twenties some breakthroughs happen in science where
they were able to identify a progesterone an estrogen and
(07:02):
realized kind of how it all worked.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
Yeah, so at first they were looking at this stuff
as our fertility drugs, and then they noticed that it
actually could suppress fertility. And as they were I think
this is in the forties when they were really starting
in earnest or is it the twenties.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
Well, I mean they were synthesizing it from animals, and
it was in early nineteen forty one.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
I don't think they were even synthesizing. I think they
were extracting it. And then that's what you got in
your pill, was animal hormones.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Well, it says synthesize for animals, so maybe it was
a process, gotcha. But eventually in nineteen forty one, doctor Marker,
doctor Russell Marker, I just said it. Like James Bond.
For some reason, he discovered how to synthesize the synthetic
form of progesterone, which is called progestin, and that really
this is from wild yams, believe it or not. So
(07:57):
he did that and that changed everything. It did.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
It made it cheaper, it made it easier to obtain.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
You could research all of a sudden, right, yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
But you still couldn't really research, right because there were
laws on even doing research on birth control. So the
people who were doing this, it started out as Margaret Sanger.
She hooked up with a doctor named Pinkus and Gregory Pinkis,
who was a biologist, and he was interested in coming
(08:26):
up with birth control as well. Mary McCormick was there
for Saint Mary Catherine Catherine McCormick.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
Of the McCormick I guesses.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
Okay, So she lent a tremendous amount of her wealth
to this research. And then a guy named John Rock
who was a doctor who was also working on a
birth control pill. They all joined forces in the nineteen
fifties and started working on this really hard. But they
had a lot of roadblocks up against them, and they
(08:59):
cut a lot of corn and getting this thing out
into market.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
Yeah, like going to Puerto Rico too, because they had
to for trials.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
Right, and so this is not like Puerto Rico was like,
we don't want this, but you're forcing it on us. Anyway,
Puerto Rico had the exact opposite attitudes toward birth control
that the United States did at the time. Yeah, so
it was a good place to do it. They just
didn't inform anybody what was going on with this, that
this was a clinical trial. They just gave them some
(09:27):
pills and said, do you take these, it'll keep you
from getting pregnant.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
Yeah, which they kind of came about by accident. Some
of the pills were contaminated with estrogen, and they used
that in scare quotes, I guess, just because what they
really mean is mixed by accident, and that reduced a
lot of the side effects, because that was one of
the big problems at first and continued to be for
a while, and eventually they landed on a drug company
(09:54):
called Cyril. There were two competing ones, and the other
one was Syntex and Cyril. So you pronounce it cerrel cerrel.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
That's what I'm going with s E A R L E. Cyril,
I want to hear you say zerol.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
They finally came up with they thought was the right formulation,
and in nineteen sixty two, Syntex came out with their
version and then pretty soon it was being marketed and
distributed after FDA approval in nineteen sixty one.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
So yeah, So Cyril was the one who hooked up
with Sangler and Rock. Yeah, and they were the ones
who provided the pills for the clinical trial in Puerto Rico.
There was also a clinical trial in at a women's
mental asylum in Massachusetts, and the patients there didn't have
any informed consent. And when they released this formula, first
(10:51):
it was for guid ecological disorders things like ovari insists.
They knew it could be used to treat that, and
Cyril at the time was like it. They had no
expectations for this whatsoever. Yeah, and then within a year
there were half a million women in America who were
suddenly using this for gynecological problems, and Cyrel figured out, well, no,
(11:13):
they're actually using it for contraception. And so when they
went and saw it FDA approval and got it, that
was when the floodgates opened, like there was now a
pill on the market that could prevent contraception that was
the woman's to take, and all of a sudden there
was the first year there was one point two million
American women on the pill, and Cyril at first thought,
(11:34):
they're not going to want this. Women aren't going to
want to take a pill every day to keep from
getting pregnant. But they couldn't even finish the name pregnant
for like the pills were being grabbed from their hands. Yes,
you know, it was a huge deal.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
It was. And then these pills were not very safe.
That's the upshot of this. The estrogen. There was way
too much estrogen. It was dangerous, it was causing cancer.
And in nineteen sixty nine very famous book came out
called The Doctor's Case Against the Pill, written by a
medical journalist named Barbara Seaman, and she got together with
(12:09):
a bunch of doctors and researchers and women and made
a case against the pill that it wasn't safe. There
was a senator named Gaylord Nelson who read the book,
took on birth control in Senate hearings, and in January
nineteen seventy in the Senate chamber. There was this testimony
about the pill going on, of course run only by men,
(12:31):
all the witnesses with only men testifying providing witness testimony.
But there was a woman there named Alice Wolfson and
her group, the DC Women's Liberation Group. They were sitting
there just getting more and more steamed.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
Yeah, in these hearings at this time, these series were
kind of under the radar right until Alice Wolfson, Like
the bluide.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
Span wasn't a thing yet, So they were just getting
more and more steamed watching all these men get up
there and talking about women's reproductive health.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
And but not only that, they were also these people
were talking about how how dangerous the side effects were
with the pill, sure hypertension, blood clots, heart attacks, high
blood pressure, stroke, all of these things. And these the
women in the DC Women's lib Movement and including Alice Wilson,
were like, We've never heard this before in our lives.
(13:22):
How did our doctors not tell us this?
Speaker 1 (13:23):
Well, that was the backstory, is that that none of
the doctors were sharing this information because they were getting
and it's you know, I think there's always been a
problem not across the board, but with doctors and pharmaceutical
companies right, pushing certain drugs over others.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
But even but at the time it was way worse
it is now, like there was an disclosure. Yeah, there was.
There was a mentality among doctors, male doctors who who
believed that if you a woman was better off not
knowing you didn't want to get her all upset giving
(14:00):
her all the information didn't have side effects listed, right,
and if you did tell her, you ran the risks.
Since women were so suggestible, she might develop a stroke
just by thinking about it so much, so it was
better off just not telling her about it. Yet that
was the entire medical establishment at the time, and so
the pill went from this feminist icon in the sixties
(14:22):
to buy nineteen seventy, becoming an icon for white male patriarchy.
Medical patriarchy and how patients informed consent was a paramount
issue now and it just took on this other.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
Role well, and informed consent was literally born. That day.
At that hearing, they finally heard an expert say estrogen
is to cancer, what fertilizer is deweed? And Alice Wolfson
stood up and started screaming. She was screaming, why are
you using women as guinea pigs. Why are you letting
drug companies murderers for profit and convenience? And it got
(15:02):
a lot of media attention, and really the aftermath of
those hearings is when this consumer health movement started and
they started in formed consent, they started having to list
side effects on bottles, and you know, it wasn't an
overnight thing, but it really changed the pharmaceutical industry forever.
Speaker 2 (15:21):
Right, So the pill managed to accept this I guess iconography, right,
It became a symbol for this other thing, but still
managed to keep on keeping on. Like I think, so
eighty seven percent of women between eighteen and forty nine
(15:44):
in the US followed those hearings. Once Alice Wolfson and
the DC Women's Lib Movement made it a national thing,
and I think eighteen percent of them stopped taking the
pill as a result. But the pill didn't fall out
of popularity. It stood in as the as the icon
for informed consent, and then just after that was established,
(16:09):
it just went back to being the pill. I think
that's amazing. It is because it was this huge thing
in nineteen sixty for one thing, huge thing in nineteen
seventy for another thing, and now it's it's it's part
of the cultural zeitgeist forever.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
Should we take a break, Yes, all right, we're going
to take a break. We're all excited about history, and
now we're going to get into science. Hey, let's talk
(16:52):
minstrel cycles. All right, let's man, because that's all that's
going on here is the pill manipulates the menstrual cycle
by tricking the body with synthetic hormones.
Speaker 2 (17:06):
Yes, it tricks the body into thinking it's already released
an egg.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
It's pretty brilliant, it is.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
It is, But it's also kind of low fi if
you think about it.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
It is very low it's neat.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
So we should kind of give you an idea of
what the menstrual cycle is. Right, it's twenty eight days generally, Yes,
that's the rule of thumb. But yes, it's certainly different
for everyone, right, And I think it's also down to
like hours and stuff like that too. It's not just days.
It's a human construct, you know. But have you stopped
(17:39):
and ever thought about like how interesting it is that
the cycle of the moon is like twenty eight days
as well. Yeah, I think it's fascinating.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
I know, I didn't say what fascinating. I never stopped it.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
I just just in researching this, I was like, that's
the cycle of the moon as well. Oh that's interesting.
So anyway, over the say roughly twenty eight day period,
the whole thing starts with the petuitary gland getting a
little froggy and saying, hey, I'm going to release some
follicle stimulating hormone at that sh and that stuff floods
(18:12):
the body and it makes its way down to the
ovaries and it stimulates follicles, hence the name.
Speaker 1 (18:19):
That's right. It makes these follicles and the ovaries grow,
and it just sets off a big series of events. Basically,
estrogen is triggers that peituitary gland again.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
Yeah, because the follicles then in turn release estrogen.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
Right, Yeah, And so the petutary gland is busy because
then it secretes what's called ganatotropin releasing hormone g little
N big R, big H.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
One of the better abbreviations ever.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
Yeah, because it looks sort of like guns n'.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
Roses a little bit. Yeah, Oh, that.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
GnRH, and that triggers a rise in lutinizing hormone l H.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
Right, and so hormone goes back down to the ovarian
follicles and it it gets one of the follicles. So
if you have a bunch of ovarian follicles growing, one
of them is going to clearly it's the lead horse, right, Yeah,
it's going to develop into an egg. And as the
(19:19):
lutinizing hormone stimulates it to develop into an egg, the
egg pops off. The rest of the other follicles wither
and die, and then the egg travels down the fallopian
tube where it may or may not be fertilized.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
Yeah, this is called the ovulation. And while this is
going on, in the background, the uterine lining the endometrium
is thickening up right, it's getting ready for business.
Speaker 2 (19:45):
And the reason that is is because the estrogen and
the lutinizing hormone are causing that to happen.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
Yeah, they're just rising and rising.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
So the mucus in the vagina I'm saying, like even
more than usual right now. But the mucus in the
in the vagina also does it thicken? Yeah, So it
thickens is that after the egg has been fertilized, because
(20:13):
I think it would make it, it would become okay,
So it d thickens. The uterine lining thickens. I think
the vaginal mucus makes it makes it easier for sperm
to make its way.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
Yeah, yeah, correct, Okay, sorry about that.
Speaker 2 (20:26):
So that's so, if all that goes according to the
genetic plan, then those sperm are going to make their
way to an egg. The egg is going to become fertilized,
it's going to come down the Filippian tube attached to
the uterus, and it's going to start to grow into
a child.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
Correct.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
It might also not happen either. The woman involved might
not have sex, so there might be no sperm. The
sperm might not make it. There might be some sort
of barrier method being made.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
Yeah, or being used. A dude may have bad sperm.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
Sure. Regardless of how this happens. If the egg is
not fertilized, the egg eventually weather's up itself and dissolves
and that thickened endometrium is shed.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
Basically, yeah, the uterine lining is shed.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
Yes, So when that haves like kind of iron rich
blood tissue, right, Okay, that is menstruation, that's menstruation. So
when you think of but that's your period, Yeah, the
whole thing's menstruation. Well yeah, Okay, it's like a twenty
eight day cycle is menstruation because I always think of like, yeah,
(21:33):
the period's menstruation, right, No, that's actually the end of menstruation, right,
and then the whole cycle begins again. Right after that time,
the pituitary glands like, oh, all right, I'll release some
follicle stimulating hormone. The whole thing begins again. The pill
interrupts this by making the body think it's already released
(21:53):
an egg. Like when the egg comes off of the
follicle and makes its way down out of the Philippian tube.
The ovum makes his way down the Philippian tube, that's
when the estrogen and the progesterone levels are high. Okay,
So the pill introduces progesterone and estrogen levels and keeps
(22:15):
them high at all times, and therefore the body stops
releasing eggs because it thinks it's already released an egg.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
Yeah, it just hijacks that whole process right. Synthetically, Yep.
The woman's body is amazing. It is when you think
about all that's going on.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
Yeah, our body is not doing anything even remotely like that.
It's making like farts.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
That's what I thought when I was researching this, I
was like, man, I've never felt less important. Yeah, and
like the insides of my body are just I got
some lungs doing some things. I got a heart, and
then like, I guess I'm still making sperm. I don't
even know.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
I've got like a wheezy old donkey running the show
in there kind of dirty.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
Oh goodness. So the endometrium still builds up in the
uterus and is released, but it's known as a withdrawal period.
So this is if you're on the pill. But that's
why your period while on the pill is going to
be generally lighter and shorter.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
Yeah. And so technically this the pill mimics the structure
called the corpus luteum, yes, which is the thing that
releases progesterone and estrogen once an egg is released. So
the bodies like, oh, the corpus luteum's got it going on.
I don't need to release another egg. I also am
not going to have a period because during this time
after the pill, those hormone levels start to become like
(23:37):
a normal baseline in the woman's body. There's no endometrium
that builds up, and therefore there's no endometrium to shed.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
Right, and I don't think we mentioned this yet. Progestin,
which is the synthetic progesterone, it's going to make that
vaginal mucus thicker, so you're right earlier. It is thinner
to make this sperm, make it excess the eggs easy.
It will thicken it up that mucus to make it
harder for the sperm. So it's and I think it's
(24:07):
just sort of like a one two punch to make
it even harder to get pregnant, although you can still
get pregnant, usually due to misuse of the pill, because
what you do is you take the pill at the
same time every day. It's all very synchronous and depends
on that timing, and if you don't time it out right,
(24:29):
your chances are getting pregnant are a little bit more.
But apparently if you're taking it exactly right at the
same time, then your failure rate is going to be
point three percent, So it's still technically possible.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Yes, it is point three percent possible.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
Which offers up the question like why, Like when they
were developing the pill, they had it completely in their
control as to what they wanted to do with the
menstrual cycle, and they decided and I never knew this
very interesting. They decided to keep it on that twenty
eight day cycle because for a lot of reasons, they
(25:06):
thought the Rock thought the Catholic Church, because he was
a Catholic, they might be more willing to approve it
if it seemed more natural.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
I guess right. He was way off there.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
They thought, way off. He thought that women would be
more apt to take it if it didn't seem like
it was disrupting things too much. Yeah, like, it's still
in my regular cycle, right.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
Because you do have that withdrawal period. It's not an
actual real period, but it does come at that at
the end of that the pill cycle.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
Yeah, but they could have gotten rid of the period altogether.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
Right, And a lot of people are like, well, go
do that. And there are pills on the market that
we'll talk about that do take away women's period. Yeah,
there's others that put them at different like spaces of
them out like like four times a year or something
like that. And people started looking into this and they're like, well,
wait a minute, like should shouldn't women be having periods?
(25:56):
And the answer is not necessarily right.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
Yeah, I mean it's controversial, like you're not.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
If you're not ovulating, you technically don't have to have
a period. And this Molly Edmunds wrote this really interesting pill,
that old Molly article. Yeah, like is a period necessary?
I think is what it's called.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
And because women today have many more periods than our ancestors.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
Right, something on the order of like four hundred and
fifty periods over the average woman's lifetime.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
Yeah, about three times as many as our ancestors. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:28):
So like back in like hunter gatherer, pre pre agricultural
women had about one hundred and sixty or something, right,
And that was because they had more kids, they breastfed longer,
they didn't live as long. Yeah, And so some people
make the point like, well, women are having more more
periods than ever before, and the body wasn't meant for this.
(26:50):
It's actually kind of rough on the body to have
a period. Like when the ovum pops off of the
fallopian tube, it leaves a scar on the ovary. Yeah,
and that scar has to be repaired, and to repair
the cells in the ovary have to divide, and as
long as they divide correctly, that damage will be repaired.
If they divide incorrectly. That damage can turn into ovarian cancer,
(27:12):
so that's a problem with it. There's also scarring with
the shedding of the endometrium, like actually having your period
itself can leave scarring the same deal, right.
Speaker 1 (27:25):
Yeah, and I think does an iron deficiency come into play.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
So that's actually a benefit of having a period. You
get rid of excess iron, which can lead to cardiovascular disease.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
Well, and there are a couple of weeks during the
menstrual cycle where women have a lot a significant reduction
in blood pressure. So during the years you know, their
reproductive years, at least they are at I guess a
slightly lower risk of stroke and heart attacked.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
I think like ten percent lower.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
Yeah, well it's not bad, no, not at all.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
So there's pros and there's cons to having a period.
The thing is, this is what Molly ultimately points out,
is we actually don't know if a period is necessary.
Like the pill is still relatively new, and I think
she quoted a doctor in their Doctor Susan roth Coo,
(28:16):
I think or Roco And she called the pill that
does away with periods entirely the greatest unregulated medical experiment
of all time. Yeah, and she makes a chilling point,
like we don't really know what the side effects are yet,
(28:37):
because all of this is too new, especially the pill
that does away with the period altogether.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
Well, yeah, and they haven't done there are no long
term studies of menstrual suppression from oral contraceptives. At least,
they don't know about what that means for a woman.
They don't know because most of this testing is done
for women over eighteen, so they don't know what it
meant for women under eighteen right at all, because they're
(29:03):
just not involved in the research, even though they do
have research that shows about two thirds of women would
get rid of their period if they could do so safely.
Because I mean, we haven't even mentioned PMS or PPMD,
which is just isn't that like a really really severe
yeah form of PMS?
Speaker 2 (29:24):
Yes, it's like much worse. Yeah yeah, But whereas like
PMS is is not a picnic to begin with, this
is this is like go to the hospital bad?
Speaker 1 (29:34):
Right? Yeah, it can be at least yeah, so yeah,
that's really interesting to think about.
Speaker 2 (29:39):
It also treats ovarian sists. There's other uses for birth
control pills too. Yeah, you want to take another break
and get back to it, I think. So Okay, okay, Chuck,
(30:11):
where are we? Oh we were talking.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
About I'm over here hanging but on this cliff by
my fingernails.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
I think you're doing great. Isn't they doing great? Everybody?
Speaker 1 (30:20):
Yes? No?
Speaker 2 (30:21):
So remember, so there are side effects both positive and
negative to taking the pill. There's some very common negative
side effects like nausea is a big one, weight gain
spotting which is called breakthrough menstruation, which is where you
have bleeding during the actual pill cycle, not the prescribed
(30:45):
period cycle of the pill.
Speaker 1 (30:47):
Yeah. And I don't think we mentioned yet either that
in the pill prescription, in that monthly dose there are
seven not always, but the way they designed it was
there are seven placebo pills, right, that are in there
because you only take the pill for twenty one days
a month. But they put those extra seven pills in
there to keep women on that. I guess the thinking was,
(31:08):
if they're used to taking this pill every day, they
need to.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
Keep doing it, right, it is a habit.
Speaker 1 (31:13):
Yeah, if they don't for seven days, they might forget
on the eighth day, and that's bad news.
Speaker 2 (31:17):
Yeah, So that's the most common way to do it,
and those that's a very easy type of pill to take,
right because all of them are the same level of hormone,
and the seven inert ones are usually a different color
and they come at the end of the month. It's
supposed to be easy. There's actually a recall right now
(31:40):
of Tatula. Did you see that? No Tatula has made
it by Alergan I think, And they recalled a lot
of their pills because they put the inert ones at
the beginning of the cycle accidentally, just bad packaging.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
Yes, oh my gosh.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
And if you look, you can clearly see that the
first like seven or different color, but where they're supposed
to be at the end, at the beginning, and that
is bad news if you're taking that pill. So if
you have Tatula, go check it right now and go
get some more.
Speaker 1 (32:12):
Yeah, but I think I interrupted you. On the side
effects nausea, headaches, breast soreness, acne, depression, moodiness, weight gain,
decreased libido, and sometimes these can be like if if
you start out on the pill can be worse. A
few cycles in it might get better, and if it doesn't,
you can There are different pills out.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
There, there are, there's so the the when those pills
originally came out that first formula I think it was called.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
Like a novid that was the first one on the market, first.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
One by Cyril Cerel, and they had ten milligrams of
progesterone or progestin and zero point one five milligrams of estrogen,
and that is like a nuclear bomb pill. Women had
the side effects from it, like all these side effects,
(33:03):
like each of them a mac truck, and they were
still willing to go through it to have control of
their body as far as pregnancy went. But they very
quickly figured out through further research, you can do the same.
And the reason they selected that is like they knew
that there was not going to be any ovulation with
ten milligrams of progesterone, and so they figured out that
(33:27):
you could formulate with a much lower amount of both
progestin and estrogen and still get the job done. And
they still do that today. I think the estrogen gets
down into the micrograms and you can get like two
point five milligrams of progesterone in some forms of the pill.
And then if so, if the pill is mistreating you,
(33:49):
what you're saying is there are options, right, Well.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
Yeah, there are three main types of oral did I
say kypes? I think I did?
Speaker 2 (33:58):
You also said zero?
Speaker 1 (34:00):
There are three main types of the oral contraceptive pills
now combination pills, progestin only, and extended release, which are
the newest ones out there. The combination pill is the
most common pill that you will get. The Mini pill
is the progestin only and for some women that's better.
(34:22):
Like if you're breastfeeding and you can't have the estrogen
because it's going to affect your milk, you will probably
be on the mini pill and the mini piel peel.
It works in a couple of different ways. It makes
the endometrium too thin to accept that egg and it
won't allow it to attach. And again with the vaginal mucus,
it makes it too thick to allow the sperm to
(34:44):
reach the egg. But it is a little less effective,
but still effective, but a little less than the combination.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
Pill because it's almost like a different they're different mechanisms.
Speaker 1 (34:54):
Yeah, Like it's twenty eight active pills for the mini pill.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
Right, But rather than tricking the body into thinking it's
released an egg, this is just making it hard to
get pregnant, yes, right, exactly. It's almost like a different
kind of pill, and then there's what's the.
Speaker 1 (35:09):
Other kind, well, the combination pill the most common. There's
a few subtypes of that pill as well.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
Right, So there's monophasic, which is what I was talking about,
where you've got twenty one pills and all of them
are the same dose of progestin and estrogen. And then
you've got the seven inert pills. And some women say
I'm not gonna have a period this month, and then
you just rather than taking those seven inert pills, you
just move on to the next month's twenty one pills.
Speaker 1 (35:36):
Yes, and I believe with the monophasic, if you miss
a day, you can double up the next day.
Speaker 2 (35:40):
Because it's the same amount of pills or the same
level of hormones. Right, So yeah, and that's far and
away the most common. There's bi phasic, which has two
different levels of hormones, and then triphasic has three different levels.
And the point of by phasic and triphasic is it
they're designed to give you the absolute minimum amount of
(36:02):
synthetic hormones that your body requires to keep from ovulating. Yes,
because the point is is the lower the amount of
hormones you have in there probably the better off you are,
whether it's cancer risk, moodiness, who knows, you're you're just
better off with the least amount that does the trick.
Speaker 1 (36:25):
Yeah, And the kind of progestin in each of these
is going to vary. But the type of synthetic estrogen
is the same, right, It's called ethanyl estradiol eric estrata estradiol.
That's it ethanyl estradiole.
Speaker 2 (36:41):
Yeah, but the progestin is the thing that differs sometimes right, correct.
And depending if like you're on a pill that uses
woing type of progestine, you can say, oh, I want
to try a different type of progestine. Then they'll say
here you go.
Speaker 1 (36:54):
And then the extended cycle, which we talked about, this
is the newest, the newest one on the market, and
I believe isn't this the one that is can reduce
your period to like a few four times a year.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
Yeah. So there's there's a couple of different there's seasonal
and season eke and they're called that because that four
time a year period you'll just be like, op, it's
fall up, it's summer, right, not in that order, but
you know what I'm saying. And then there's libral and
I'm sure there's other ones on the market too. We
don't mean to buzz market or anything like that. So
(37:29):
there's there's there's one that's like three hundred and sixty
five days, and then there's others that are eighty four days,
so that you have for either no periods at all
or four periods a year. Right, So there you go.
So there's a couple of other things I want to
hit on the pill is it's so much larger than
just birth control. Sure, I mean, just the fact that
(37:52):
it's birth control is an enormous thing. Like, like you said,
John Rock thought he was going to be able to
convince the Catholic Church that that this is okay thing.
That was not the case. In the late sixties, the
Black power movement really zeroed in on the pill, especially
the men of the Black Power movement, and said like
(38:13):
this is this is tantamount to black genocide. And they
definitely had like a case like there were plenty of
cases of black women who went into hospitals and gave
birth and then came out unknowingly sterilized, like the doctor
had just taken it upon himself to sterilize her after
delivering her baby. So they're like they had this, they
(38:36):
had this evidence to back this up, and it was
never shown. Like, yes, there was a conspiracy to to
wipe out black power in America through the pill, but
you like, there were plenty of black women at the
time who said, like, yeah, I can get birth control
pills easier than anything that you know down on the
(38:58):
corner clinic or something like that. And even even with
the early trials from John Rock and Gregory Pinkus, Like
one of the things that they zeroed in on Puerto
Rico for was because they thought that if they could
show that backwards Puerto Ricans of color could could learn
(39:19):
how to take the pill regularly, it would demonstrate that
women in the inner cities could, or women in developing
countries could. So there was definitely like a mentality toward
the white establishment being on board with the idea of
at least providing the tools for other for minorities to
(39:44):
control their rate of birth. That was just pure and simple.
That was a thought of it. Yeah, it was, and
it's had a tremendous amount of benefits too, But there
were some there was some darkness in the place that
it originally came from. As well.
Speaker 1 (39:58):
Well, yeah, and of course anti abortion groups think that
the pill still to this day is an abortion causing
agent what they call in.
Speaker 2 (40:07):
Do you know how to pronounce that a border fashion?
Speaker 1 (40:09):
A border fashion? I think so, yeah, I think that's right.
Which you know, that's that's long been their argument.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
Well, they their argument is that it makes the the
uterus hostile to a fertilized egg, like prolonged use would
prevent a fertilized egg that would otherwise attach from attaching.
And so that's for all intents and purposes, abortion in
their position, right, And yeah, that is I don't think
(40:38):
that one's settled by any stretch of the imagination.
Speaker 1 (40:41):
So you got anything else, I got nothing else.
Speaker 2 (40:45):
As I predicted belief, this is a good one.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
Yeah. I think it was good.
Speaker 2 (40:48):
I think it was great.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
I hope we did all right.
Speaker 2 (40:50):
Yeah, because we're not like patronizing. We've never been patronizing. No,
that might be like white dudes, but we're very much
aware that we're white dudes. And let me leave you
with this, white dude. If you're a white dude, whether
it's in America or the West or anywhere, your one
job is to have some perspective. That's your first and
foremost job. Take yourself out of your own shoes once
(41:13):
in a while, look around, put yourself in other people's shoes.
Your eyes will open widely in agog.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
Some say walk a mile.
Speaker 2 (41:22):
Sure, why not get a little weight off right.
Speaker 1 (41:25):
At least go check the mail.
Speaker 2 (41:28):
If you want to know more about the pill, just
type in the pill. It'll bring up some cool stuff
on how stuff Works dot com. And there's also a
really great American Experience site on PBS that had a.
Speaker 1 (41:39):
Bat Man that was good. Yeah, so good.
Speaker 2 (41:42):
And since I said American Experience and Chuck said, so good,
it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (41:47):
Oh no, it's not no listener mail today because we've
had some milestones here lately, and as we sit here
today in real time, we as a company are celebrating
the ten year anniversary of Stuff You Should Know again again,
but we're actually having the party today. And on the
same day, Apple announced at their.
Speaker 2 (42:12):
WDCC, Yeah, their.
Speaker 1 (42:14):
Developers conference, got up on stage and this one kind
of hit me, Like we had the thousand episodes that
was good. The ten years kind of hit me in
a big way. But they got up on stage today
and they said that Stuff You Should Know is now
the first podcast in history, first and only to reach
five hundred million downloads and streams on their platform, which
(42:39):
is I didn't know, No, it hit me too somehow.
Adam Carolla is in againness book of world's records. But
here we are as the only one. And that's because
of you all out there. Yes you said a gazillion times,
but without you, there is no us. We would have
been long gone if not for your support, So we
(42:59):
canntinue to give thanks.
Speaker 2 (43:01):
Thank you again. Yeah, we and will continue to give thanks.
Speaker 1 (43:05):
And we will continue to podcast.
Speaker 2 (43:07):
Yes we will chuck, Yes we will.
Speaker 1 (43:09):
And that's all I got.
Speaker 2 (43:10):
If you want to get in touch with us, you
can send us all an email the Stuff podcast at
houstuffworks dot com and as always, joined us at our
extraordinarily grateful home on the web, Stuff youshould Know dot com.
Speaker 1 (43:26):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, everybody, here's Chuck this week on a Saturday with
a pretty relevant topic these days. Who knew that it
would be relevant again? And this is from June nineteenth,
twenty eighteen, How the Pill changed the world. I think
you know what pill we're talking about. Welcome to Stuff
(00:21):
you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's
Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's the ghost of Jerry
Roland in the empty chair. Thanks again about this, Thanks
again to Ramsey.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
Yeah, thanks Ramsey.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
How do I feel about this? I feel great? The
pill is it has everything? This might be I just
love this episode already.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
I do too, But I kind of like when we
did the female puberty episode. I just feel nervous. This
can be fine explaining female reproduction. I just I don't know.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Hey, man, we're just we're just explaining stuff.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
I know, I know.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
It's not like we're We're just we're just explaining stuff.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
Just be cool, all right. So let's talk the pill.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Yeah, the opposite of having kids.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
The pharmaceutical so famous that it's called the pill.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
It is there. I read this New Yorker article about
a book on the birth of the pill, and now
I'm talking about it, so everything comes full circle. And
they were saying, like, there's like, you don't call anything
else the pill, Like viagra is not the pill. Antibiotics
isn't the pill. You don't call it the vacuum or
(01:46):
the meat grinder, right, Like, there's there's really nothing like that. Yeah,
nothing compares to it. And it's it's for good reason.
I mean, the pill is monumentally huge as far as
pharmaceuticals and medicine goes. I mean on the scale of
antibiotics easily.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Yeah, and it's it's the very first medication that was
designed for a non therapeutic purpose too. Yes, very interesting.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
And so it's really difficult to over to overstate how
much of an impact the pill had when they released
it in I think nineteen sixties, when.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
It came history first.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Yeah, let's right, let's do that. So let me set
the stage for you.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
Please, Oh, you're bringing a catch out.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Back in back in the day. I'm going to do
my Charles Nelson Riley one man Show impression. Back in
the day, if you were a woman and you didn't
want to get pregnant, you had to coordinate with your
husband that he wear a condom, okay, sure, or boyfriend, Well,
(02:57):
that's like a whole other kettle of fish at this time. Yeah, supposedly,
and socially that went on all the time. There's plenty
of premarital sex, but socially speaking, only single men were
allowed to have premarital sex, which is like, who are
they having premarital sex with? Then, right, if they're the
only ones allowed to have premarital sex, considering, considering everyone
(03:21):
refused to officially recognize homosexuality even existed.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Yeah, I know where you get.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
Okay, So there's a lot of double standards, a lot
of repression going on. But if you were if you
were a woman and you wanted to have sex, so
whether it was with the guy you were having sex
with or your husband, you you basically had to say
you got to wear a condom. And if you said no,
well you were sol one way or another, either you
weren't having sex or you're going to have sex without
a condom. And if that happened, there was a really
(03:48):
good chance that you were going to end up getting
pregnant just from having sex.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
Yeah, the ball was entirely in the man's court, and
women did not have much say in the matter.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
No, they didn't. There were a couple of things on
the market. So before the Industrial Revolution, there were like
folk remedies where you could use herbs and stuff like that.
Basically I think they're called herbal douches where you're just
like squeezing stuff in there and like hoping for the best.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
Right.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
And then by the depression there's something there's a whole
line of stuff called gynecological aids or feminine hygiene, I
think is what it's called. And some of them worked,
some of them kind of worked, some of them didn't work.
Some of them worked but would kill you or give
you chemical burns. There was a lot of problems, so
(04:41):
you didn't have a lot of options, right. And then
along with the fact that you actually didn't have that
many options socially, in nineteen fifty, thirty States and the
federal government said you can't have anything that can used
as a contraceptive and you can't even learn about it
(05:03):
from your doctor from school. Yeah, thirty states in the
federal government. This is nineteen fifty. Ten years later, the
pill comes out, and a couple of years after that,
five million American women are using it as a contraception,
and now it was in their hands. They had the
ability to decide for themselves whether sex late to pregnancy
(05:26):
or not.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
Well, and sort of even then, because not all states
allowed it and not all doctors would give it out,
so it wasn't like, oh, the FDA said it's good
to go, so we can all get it. It was
still a fight. Yeah, for years and years of decades,
it really was. So I guess we should start with
a woman named Margaret Sanger. She is a very controversial figure,
(05:50):
founder of Planned parenthood. She's a nurse, and she wrote
in nineteen twelve about a magic pill that could prevent conception.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
Yeah, just a theoretical hypothetical pill.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
Right, And she's controversial for many reasons, not the leastes
which is her she was anti abortion. Kind of when
she was most famous, she was anti abortion and kind
of went all in on the pill and was like,
this is the way to do it, is to prevent
the pregnancy once you're pregnant.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Sorry, wow, gotcha.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
And then you know there's the whole eugenics thing. We
should do a podcast on her, probably at some point
we should, because that's a rabbit hole right there.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
Yeah, so, but she was the early champion of it.
She was she coined the term birth control, and I
think nineteen twelve as well.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
Yeah, so in nineteen fourteen she started a newsletter called
The Woman Rebel. That's where birth control was first typed
out and distributed the words like you said. And then
in the nineteen twenties some breakthroughs happen in science where
they were able to identify a progesterone an estrogen and
(07:02):
realized kind of how it all worked.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
Yeah, so at first they were looking at this stuff
as our fertility drugs, and then they noticed that it
actually could suppress fertility. And as they were I think
this is in the forties when they were really starting
in earnest or is it the twenties.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
Well, I mean they were synthesizing it from animals, and
it was in early nineteen forty one.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
I don't think they were even synthesizing. I think they
were extracting it. And then that's what you got in
your pill, was animal hormones.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Well, it says synthesize for animals, so maybe it was
a process, gotcha. But eventually in nineteen forty one, doctor Marker,
doctor Russell Marker, I just said it. Like James Bond.
For some reason, he discovered how to synthesize the synthetic
form of progesterone, which is called progestin, and that really
this is from wild yams, believe it or not. So
(07:57):
he did that and that changed everything. It did.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
It made it cheaper, it made it easier to obtain.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
You could research all of a sudden, right, yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
But you still couldn't really research, right because there were
laws on even doing research on birth control. So the
people who were doing this, it started out as Margaret Sanger.
She hooked up with a doctor named Pinkus and Gregory Pinkis,
who was a biologist, and he was interested in coming
(08:26):
up with birth control as well. Mary McCormick was there
for Saint Mary Catherine Catherine McCormick.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
Of the McCormick I guesses.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
Okay, So she lent a tremendous amount of her wealth
to this research. And then a guy named John Rock
who was a doctor who was also working on a
birth control pill. They all joined forces in the nineteen
fifties and started working on this really hard. But they
had a lot of roadblocks up against them, and they
(08:59):
cut a lot of corn and getting this thing out
into market.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
Yeah, like going to Puerto Rico too, because they had
to for trials.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
Right, and so this is not like Puerto Rico was like,
we don't want this, but you're forcing it on us. Anyway,
Puerto Rico had the exact opposite attitudes toward birth control
that the United States did at the time. Yeah, so
it was a good place to do it. They just
didn't inform anybody what was going on with this, that
this was a clinical trial. They just gave them some
(09:27):
pills and said, do you take these, it'll keep you
from getting pregnant.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
Yeah, which they kind of came about by accident. Some
of the pills were contaminated with estrogen, and they used
that in scare quotes, I guess, just because what they
really mean is mixed by accident, and that reduced a
lot of the side effects, because that was one of
the big problems at first and continued to be for
a while, and eventually they landed on a drug company
(09:54):
called Cyril. There were two competing ones, and the other
one was Syntex and Cyril. So you pronounce it cerrel cerrel.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
That's what I'm going with s E A R L E. Cyril,
I want to hear you say zerol.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
They finally came up with they thought was the right formulation,
and in nineteen sixty two, Syntex came out with their
version and then pretty soon it was being marketed and
distributed after FDA approval in nineteen sixty one.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
So yeah, So Cyril was the one who hooked up
with Sangler and Rock. Yeah, and they were the ones
who provided the pills for the clinical trial in Puerto Rico.
There was also a clinical trial in at a women's
mental asylum in Massachusetts, and the patients there didn't have
any informed consent. And when they released this formula, first
(10:51):
it was for guid ecological disorders things like ovari insists.
They knew it could be used to treat that, and
Cyril at the time was like it. They had no
expectations for this whatsoever. Yeah, and then within a year
there were half a million women in America who were
suddenly using this for gynecological problems, and Cyrel figured out, well, no,
(11:13):
they're actually using it for contraception. And so when they
went and saw it FDA approval and got it, that
was when the floodgates opened, like there was now a
pill on the market that could prevent contraception that was
the woman's to take, and all of a sudden there
was the first year there was one point two million
American women on the pill, and Cyril at first thought,
(11:34):
they're not going to want this. Women aren't going to
want to take a pill every day to keep from
getting pregnant. But they couldn't even finish the name pregnant
for like the pills were being grabbed from their hands. Yes,
you know, it was a huge deal.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
It was. And then these pills were not very safe.
That's the upshot of this. The estrogen. There was way
too much estrogen. It was dangerous, it was causing cancer.
And in nineteen sixty nine very famous book came out
called The Doctor's Case Against the Pill, written by a
medical journalist named Barbara Seaman, and she got together with
(12:09):
a bunch of doctors and researchers and women and made
a case against the pill that it wasn't safe. There
was a senator named Gaylord Nelson who read the book,
took on birth control in Senate hearings, and in January
nineteen seventy in the Senate chamber. There was this testimony
about the pill going on, of course run only by men,
(12:31):
all the witnesses with only men testifying providing witness testimony.
But there was a woman there named Alice Wolfson and
her group, the DC Women's Liberation Group. They were sitting
there just getting more and more steamed.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
Yeah, in these hearings at this time, these series were
kind of under the radar right until Alice Wolfson, Like
the bluide.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
Span wasn't a thing yet, So they were just getting
more and more steamed watching all these men get up
there and talking about women's reproductive health.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
And but not only that, they were also these people
were talking about how how dangerous the side effects were
with the pill, sure hypertension, blood clots, heart attacks, high
blood pressure, stroke, all of these things. And these the
women in the DC Women's lib Movement and including Alice Wilson,
were like, We've never heard this before in our lives.
(13:22):
How did our doctors not tell us this?
Speaker 1 (13:23):
Well, that was the backstory, is that that none of
the doctors were sharing this information because they were getting
and it's you know, I think there's always been a
problem not across the board, but with doctors and pharmaceutical
companies right, pushing certain drugs over others.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
But even but at the time it was way worse
it is now, like there was an disclosure. Yeah, there was.
There was a mentality among doctors, male doctors who who
believed that if you a woman was better off not
knowing you didn't want to get her all upset giving
(14:00):
her all the information didn't have side effects listed, right,
and if you did tell her, you ran the risks.
Since women were so suggestible, she might develop a stroke
just by thinking about it so much, so it was
better off just not telling her about it. Yet that
was the entire medical establishment at the time, and so
the pill went from this feminist icon in the sixties
(14:22):
to buy nineteen seventy, becoming an icon for white male patriarchy.
Medical patriarchy and how patients informed consent was a paramount
issue now and it just took on this other.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
Role well, and informed consent was literally born. That day.
At that hearing, they finally heard an expert say estrogen
is to cancer, what fertilizer is deweed? And Alice Wolfson
stood up and started screaming. She was screaming, why are
you using women as guinea pigs. Why are you letting
drug companies murderers for profit and convenience? And it got
(15:02):
a lot of media attention, and really the aftermath of
those hearings is when this consumer health movement started and
they started in formed consent, they started having to list
side effects on bottles, and you know, it wasn't an
overnight thing, but it really changed the pharmaceutical industry forever.
Speaker 2 (15:21):
Right, So the pill managed to accept this I guess iconography, right,
It became a symbol for this other thing, but still
managed to keep on keeping on. Like I think, so
eighty seven percent of women between eighteen and forty nine
(15:44):
in the US followed those hearings. Once Alice Wolfson and
the DC Women's Lib Movement made it a national thing,
and I think eighteen percent of them stopped taking the
pill as a result. But the pill didn't fall out
of popularity. It stood in as the as the icon
for informed consent, and then just after that was established,
(16:09):
it just went back to being the pill. I think
that's amazing. It is because it was this huge thing
in nineteen sixty for one thing, huge thing in nineteen
seventy for another thing, and now it's it's it's part
of the cultural zeitgeist forever.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
Should we take a break, Yes, all right, we're going
to take a break. We're all excited about history, and
now we're going to get into science. Hey, let's talk
(16:52):
minstrel cycles. All right, let's man, because that's all that's
going on here is the pill manipulates the menstrual cycle
by tricking the body with synthetic hormones.
Speaker 2 (17:06):
Yes, it tricks the body into thinking it's already released
an egg.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
It's pretty brilliant, it is.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
It is, But it's also kind of low fi if
you think about it.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
It is very low it's neat.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
So we should kind of give you an idea of
what the menstrual cycle is. Right, it's twenty eight days generally, Yes,
that's the rule of thumb. But yes, it's certainly different
for everyone, right, And I think it's also down to
like hours and stuff like that too. It's not just days.
It's a human construct, you know. But have you stopped
(17:39):
and ever thought about like how interesting it is that
the cycle of the moon is like twenty eight days
as well. Yeah, I think it's fascinating.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
I know, I didn't say what fascinating. I never stopped it.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
I just just in researching this, I was like, that's
the cycle of the moon as well. Oh that's interesting.
So anyway, over the say roughly twenty eight day period,
the whole thing starts with the petuitary gland getting a
little froggy and saying, hey, I'm going to release some
follicle stimulating hormone at that sh and that stuff floods
(18:12):
the body and it makes its way down to the
ovaries and it stimulates follicles, hence the name.
Speaker 1 (18:19):
That's right. It makes these follicles and the ovaries grow,
and it just sets off a big series of events. Basically,
estrogen is triggers that peituitary gland again.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
Yeah, because the follicles then in turn release estrogen.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
Right, Yeah, And so the petutary gland is busy because
then it secretes what's called ganatotropin releasing hormone g little
N big R, big H.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
One of the better abbreviations ever.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
Yeah, because it looks sort of like guns n'.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
Roses a little bit. Yeah, Oh, that.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
GnRH, and that triggers a rise in lutinizing hormone l H.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
Right, and so hormone goes back down to the ovarian
follicles and it it gets one of the follicles. So
if you have a bunch of ovarian follicles growing, one
of them is going to clearly it's the lead horse, right, Yeah,
it's going to develop into an egg. And as the
(19:19):
lutinizing hormone stimulates it to develop into an egg, the
egg pops off. The rest of the other follicles wither
and die, and then the egg travels down the fallopian
tube where it may or may not be fertilized.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
Yeah, this is called the ovulation. And while this is
going on, in the background, the uterine lining the endometrium
is thickening up right, it's getting ready for business.
Speaker 2 (19:45):
And the reason that is is because the estrogen and
the lutinizing hormone are causing that to happen.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
Yeah, they're just rising and rising.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
So the mucus in the vagina I'm saying, like even
more than usual right now. But the mucus in the
in the vagina also does it thicken? Yeah, So it
thickens is that after the egg has been fertilized, because
(20:13):
I think it would make it, it would become okay,
So it d thickens. The uterine lining thickens. I think
the vaginal mucus makes it makes it easier for sperm
to make its way.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
Yeah, yeah, correct, Okay, sorry about that.
Speaker 2 (20:26):
So that's so, if all that goes according to the
genetic plan, then those sperm are going to make their
way to an egg. The egg is going to become fertilized,
it's going to come down the Filippian tube attached to
the uterus, and it's going to start to grow into
a child.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
Correct.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
It might also not happen either. The woman involved might
not have sex, so there might be no sperm. The
sperm might not make it. There might be some sort
of barrier method being made.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
Yeah, or being used. A dude may have bad sperm.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
Sure. Regardless of how this happens. If the egg is
not fertilized, the egg eventually weather's up itself and dissolves
and that thickened endometrium is shed.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
Basically, yeah, the uterine lining is shed.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
Yes, So when that haves like kind of iron rich
blood tissue, right, Okay, that is menstruation, that's menstruation. So
when you think of but that's your period, Yeah, the
whole thing's menstruation. Well yeah, Okay, it's like a twenty
eight day cycle is menstruation because I always think of like, yeah,
(21:33):
the period's menstruation, right, No, that's actually the end of menstruation, right,
and then the whole cycle begins again. Right after that time,
the pituitary glands like, oh, all right, I'll release some
follicle stimulating hormone. The whole thing begins again. The pill
interrupts this by making the body think it's already released
(21:53):
an egg. Like when the egg comes off of the
follicle and makes its way down out of the Philippian tube.
The ovum makes his way down the Philippian tube, that's
when the estrogen and the progesterone levels are high. Okay,
So the pill introduces progesterone and estrogen levels and keeps
(22:15):
them high at all times, and therefore the body stops
releasing eggs because it thinks it's already released an egg.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
Yeah, it just hijacks that whole process right. Synthetically, Yep.
The woman's body is amazing. It is when you think
about all that's going on.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
Yeah, our body is not doing anything even remotely like that.
It's making like farts.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
That's what I thought when I was researching this, I
was like, man, I've never felt less important. Yeah, and
like the insides of my body are just I got
some lungs doing some things. I got a heart, and
then like, I guess I'm still making sperm. I don't
even know.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
I've got like a wheezy old donkey running the show
in there kind of dirty.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
Oh goodness. So the endometrium still builds up in the
uterus and is released, but it's known as a withdrawal period.
So this is if you're on the pill. But that's
why your period while on the pill is going to
be generally lighter and shorter.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
Yeah. And so technically this the pill mimics the structure
called the corpus luteum, yes, which is the thing that
releases progesterone and estrogen once an egg is released. So
the bodies like, oh, the corpus luteum's got it going on.
I don't need to release another egg. I also am
not going to have a period because during this time
after the pill, those hormone levels start to become like
(23:37):
a normal baseline in the woman's body. There's no endometrium
that builds up, and therefore there's no endometrium to shed.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
Right, and I don't think we mentioned this yet. Progestin,
which is the synthetic progesterone, it's going to make that
vaginal mucus thicker, so you're right earlier. It is thinner
to make this sperm, make it excess the eggs easy.
It will thicken it up that mucus to make it
harder for the sperm. So it's and I think it's
(24:07):
just sort of like a one two punch to make
it even harder to get pregnant, although you can still
get pregnant, usually due to misuse of the pill, because
what you do is you take the pill at the
same time every day. It's all very synchronous and depends
on that timing, and if you don't time it out right,
(24:29):
your chances are getting pregnant are a little bit more.
But apparently if you're taking it exactly right at the
same time, then your failure rate is going to be
point three percent, So it's still technically possible.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Yes, it is point three percent possible.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
Which offers up the question like why, Like when they
were developing the pill, they had it completely in their
control as to what they wanted to do with the
menstrual cycle, and they decided and I never knew this
very interesting. They decided to keep it on that twenty
eight day cycle because for a lot of reasons, they
(25:06):
thought the Rock thought the Catholic Church, because he was
a Catholic, they might be more willing to approve it
if it seemed more natural.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
I guess right. He was way off there.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
They thought, way off. He thought that women would be
more apt to take it if it didn't seem like
it was disrupting things too much. Yeah, like, it's still
in my regular cycle, right.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
Because you do have that withdrawal period. It's not an
actual real period, but it does come at that at
the end of that the pill cycle.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
Yeah, but they could have gotten rid of the period altogether.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
Right, And a lot of people are like, well, go
do that. And there are pills on the market that
we'll talk about that do take away women's period. Yeah,
there's others that put them at different like spaces of
them out like like four times a year or something
like that. And people started looking into this and they're like, well,
wait a minute, like should shouldn't women be having periods?
(25:56):
And the answer is not necessarily right.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
Yeah, I mean it's controversial, like you're not.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
If you're not ovulating, you technically don't have to have
a period. And this Molly Edmunds wrote this really interesting pill,
that old Molly article. Yeah, like is a period necessary?
I think is what it's called.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
And because women today have many more periods than our ancestors.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
Right, something on the order of like four hundred and
fifty periods over the average woman's lifetime.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
Yeah, about three times as many as our ancestors. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:28):
So like back in like hunter gatherer, pre pre agricultural
women had about one hundred and sixty or something, right,
And that was because they had more kids, they breastfed longer,
they didn't live as long. Yeah, And so some people
make the point like, well, women are having more more
periods than ever before, and the body wasn't meant for this.
(26:50):
It's actually kind of rough on the body to have
a period. Like when the ovum pops off of the
fallopian tube, it leaves a scar on the ovary. Yeah,
and that scar has to be repaired, and to repair
the cells in the ovary have to divide, and as
long as they divide correctly, that damage will be repaired.
If they divide incorrectly. That damage can turn into ovarian cancer,
(27:12):
so that's a problem with it. There's also scarring with
the shedding of the endometrium, like actually having your period
itself can leave scarring the same deal, right.
Speaker 1 (27:25):
Yeah, and I think does an iron deficiency come into play.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
So that's actually a benefit of having a period. You
get rid of excess iron, which can lead to cardiovascular disease.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
Well, and there are a couple of weeks during the
menstrual cycle where women have a lot a significant reduction
in blood pressure. So during the years you know, their
reproductive years, at least they are at I guess a
slightly lower risk of stroke and heart attacked.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
I think like ten percent lower.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
Yeah, well it's not bad, no, not at all.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
So there's pros and there's cons to having a period.
The thing is, this is what Molly ultimately points out,
is we actually don't know if a period is necessary.
Like the pill is still relatively new, and I think
she quoted a doctor in their Doctor Susan roth Coo,
(28:16):
I think or Roco And she called the pill that
does away with periods entirely the greatest unregulated medical experiment
of all time. Yeah, and she makes a chilling point,
like we don't really know what the side effects are yet,
(28:37):
because all of this is too new, especially the pill
that does away with the period altogether.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
Well, yeah, and they haven't done there are no long
term studies of menstrual suppression from oral contraceptives. At least,
they don't know about what that means for a woman.
They don't know because most of this testing is done
for women over eighteen, so they don't know what it
meant for women under eighteen right at all, because they're
(29:03):
just not involved in the research, even though they do
have research that shows about two thirds of women would
get rid of their period if they could do so safely.
Because I mean, we haven't even mentioned PMS or PPMD,
which is just isn't that like a really really severe
yeah form of PMS?
Speaker 2 (29:24):
Yes, it's like much worse. Yeah yeah, But whereas like
PMS is is not a picnic to begin with, this
is this is like go to the hospital bad?
Speaker 1 (29:34):
Right? Yeah, it can be at least yeah, so yeah,
that's really interesting to think about.
Speaker 2 (29:39):
It also treats ovarian sists. There's other uses for birth
control pills too. Yeah, you want to take another break
and get back to it, I think. So Okay, okay, Chuck,
(30:11):
where are we? Oh we were talking.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
About I'm over here hanging but on this cliff by
my fingernails.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
I think you're doing great. Isn't they doing great? Everybody?
Speaker 1 (30:20):
Yes? No?
Speaker 2 (30:21):
So remember, so there are side effects both positive and
negative to taking the pill. There's some very common negative
side effects like nausea is a big one, weight gain
spotting which is called breakthrough menstruation, which is where you
have bleeding during the actual pill cycle, not the prescribed
(30:45):
period cycle of the pill.
Speaker 1 (30:47):
Yeah. And I don't think we mentioned yet either that
in the pill prescription, in that monthly dose there are
seven not always, but the way they designed it was
there are seven placebo pills, right, that are in there
because you only take the pill for twenty one days
a month. But they put those extra seven pills in
there to keep women on that. I guess the thinking was,
(31:08):
if they're used to taking this pill every day, they
need to.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
Keep doing it, right, it is a habit.
Speaker 1 (31:13):
Yeah, if they don't for seven days, they might forget
on the eighth day, and that's bad news.
Speaker 2 (31:17):
Yeah, So that's the most common way to do it,
and those that's a very easy type of pill to take,
right because all of them are the same level of hormone,
and the seven inert ones are usually a different color
and they come at the end of the month. It's
supposed to be easy. There's actually a recall right now
(31:40):
of Tatula. Did you see that? No Tatula has made
it by Alergan I think, And they recalled a lot
of their pills because they put the inert ones at
the beginning of the cycle accidentally, just bad packaging.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
Yes, oh my gosh.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
And if you look, you can clearly see that the
first like seven or different color, but where they're supposed
to be at the end, at the beginning, and that
is bad news if you're taking that pill. So if
you have Tatula, go check it right now and go
get some more.
Speaker 1 (32:12):
Yeah, but I think I interrupted you. On the side
effects nausea, headaches, breast soreness, acne, depression, moodiness, weight gain,
decreased libido, and sometimes these can be like if if
you start out on the pill can be worse. A
few cycles in it might get better, and if it doesn't,
you can There are different pills out.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
There, there are, there's so the the when those pills
originally came out that first formula I think it was called.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
Like a novid that was the first one on the market, first.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
One by Cyril Cerel, and they had ten milligrams of
progesterone or progestin and zero point one five milligrams of estrogen,
and that is like a nuclear bomb pill. Women had
the side effects from it, like all these side effects,
(33:03):
like each of them a mac truck, and they were
still willing to go through it to have control of
their body as far as pregnancy went. But they very
quickly figured out through further research, you can do the same.
And the reason they selected that is like they knew
that there was not going to be any ovulation with
ten milligrams of progesterone, and so they figured out that
(33:27):
you could formulate with a much lower amount of both
progestin and estrogen and still get the job done. And
they still do that today. I think the estrogen gets
down into the micrograms and you can get like two
point five milligrams of progesterone in some forms of the pill.
And then if so, if the pill is mistreating you,
(33:49):
what you're saying is there are options, right, Well.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
Yeah, there are three main types of oral did I
say kypes? I think I did?
Speaker 2 (33:58):
You also said zero?
Speaker 1 (34:00):
There are three main types of the oral contraceptive pills
now combination pills, progestin only, and extended release, which are
the newest ones out there. The combination pill is the
most common pill that you will get. The Mini pill
is the progestin only and for some women that's better.
(34:22):
Like if you're breastfeeding and you can't have the estrogen
because it's going to affect your milk, you will probably
be on the mini pill and the mini piel peel.
It works in a couple of different ways. It makes
the endometrium too thin to accept that egg and it
won't allow it to attach. And again with the vaginal mucus,
it makes it too thick to allow the sperm to
(34:44):
reach the egg. But it is a little less effective,
but still effective, but a little less than the combination.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
Pill because it's almost like a different they're different mechanisms.
Speaker 1 (34:54):
Yeah, Like it's twenty eight active pills for the mini pill.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
Right, But rather than tricking the body into thinking it's
released an egg, this is just making it hard to
get pregnant, yes, right, exactly. It's almost like a different
kind of pill, and then there's what's the.
Speaker 1 (35:09):
Other kind, well, the combination pill the most common. There's
a few subtypes of that pill as well.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
Right, So there's monophasic, which is what I was talking about,
where you've got twenty one pills and all of them
are the same dose of progestin and estrogen. And then
you've got the seven inert pills. And some women say
I'm not gonna have a period this month, and then
you just rather than taking those seven inert pills, you
just move on to the next month's twenty one pills.
Speaker 1 (35:36):
Yes, and I believe with the monophasic, if you miss
a day, you can double up the next day.
Speaker 2 (35:40):
Because it's the same amount of pills or the same
level of hormones. Right, So yeah, and that's far and
away the most common. There's bi phasic, which has two
different levels of hormones, and then triphasic has three different levels.
And the point of by phasic and triphasic is it
they're designed to give you the absolute minimum amount of
(36:02):
synthetic hormones that your body requires to keep from ovulating. Yes,
because the point is is the lower the amount of
hormones you have in there probably the better off you are,
whether it's cancer risk, moodiness, who knows, you're you're just
better off with the least amount that does the trick.
Speaker 1 (36:25):
Yeah, And the kind of progestin in each of these
is going to vary. But the type of synthetic estrogen
is the same, right, It's called ethanyl estradiol eric estrata estradiol.
That's it ethanyl estradiole.
Speaker 2 (36:41):
Yeah, but the progestin is the thing that differs sometimes right, correct.
And depending if like you're on a pill that uses
woing type of progestine, you can say, oh, I want
to try a different type of progestine. Then they'll say
here you go.
Speaker 1 (36:54):
And then the extended cycle, which we talked about, this
is the newest, the newest one on the market, and
I believe isn't this the one that is can reduce
your period to like a few four times a year.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
Yeah. So there's there's a couple of different there's seasonal
and season eke and they're called that because that four
time a year period you'll just be like, op, it's
fall up, it's summer, right, not in that order, but
you know what I'm saying. And then there's libral and
I'm sure there's other ones on the market too. We
don't mean to buzz market or anything like that. So
(37:29):
there's there's there's one that's like three hundred and sixty
five days, and then there's others that are eighty four days,
so that you have for either no periods at all
or four periods a year. Right, So there you go.
So there's a couple of other things I want to
hit on the pill is it's so much larger than
just birth control. Sure, I mean, just the fact that
(37:52):
it's birth control is an enormous thing. Like, like you said,
John Rock thought he was going to be able to
convince the Catholic Church that that this is okay thing.
That was not the case. In the late sixties, the
Black power movement really zeroed in on the pill, especially
the men of the Black Power movement, and said like
(38:13):
this is this is tantamount to black genocide. And they
definitely had like a case like there were plenty of
cases of black women who went into hospitals and gave
birth and then came out unknowingly sterilized, like the doctor
had just taken it upon himself to sterilize her after
delivering her baby. So they're like they had this, they
(38:36):
had this evidence to back this up, and it was
never shown. Like, yes, there was a conspiracy to to
wipe out black power in America through the pill, but
you like, there were plenty of black women at the
time who said, like, yeah, I can get birth control
pills easier than anything that you know down on the
(38:58):
corner clinic or something like that. And even even with
the early trials from John Rock and Gregory Pinkus, Like
one of the things that they zeroed in on Puerto
Rico for was because they thought that if they could
show that backwards Puerto Ricans of color could could learn
(39:19):
how to take the pill regularly, it would demonstrate that
women in the inner cities could, or women in developing
countries could. So there was definitely like a mentality toward
the white establishment being on board with the idea of
at least providing the tools for other for minorities to
(39:44):
control their rate of birth. That was just pure and simple.
That was a thought of it. Yeah, it was, and
it's had a tremendous amount of benefits too, But there
were some there was some darkness in the place that
it originally came from. As well.
Speaker 1 (39:58):
Well, yeah, and of course anti abortion groups think that
the pill still to this day is an abortion causing
agent what they call in.
Speaker 2 (40:07):
Do you know how to pronounce that a border fashion?
Speaker 1 (40:09):
A border fashion? I think so, yeah, I think that's right.
Which you know, that's that's long been their argument.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
Well, they their argument is that it makes the the
uterus hostile to a fertilized egg, like prolonged use would
prevent a fertilized egg that would otherwise attach from attaching.
And so that's for all intents and purposes, abortion in
their position, right, And yeah, that is I don't think
(40:38):
that one's settled by any stretch of the imagination.
Speaker 1 (40:41):
So you got anything else, I got nothing else.
Speaker 2 (40:45):
As I predicted belief, this is a good one.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
Yeah. I think it was good.
Speaker 2 (40:48):
I think it was great.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
I hope we did all right.
Speaker 2 (40:50):
Yeah, because we're not like patronizing. We've never been patronizing. No,
that might be like white dudes, but we're very much
aware that we're white dudes. And let me leave you
with this, white dude. If you're a white dude, whether
it's in America or the West or anywhere, your one
job is to have some perspective. That's your first and
foremost job. Take yourself out of your own shoes once
(41:13):
in a while, look around, put yourself in other people's shoes.
Your eyes will open widely in agog.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
Some say walk a mile.
Speaker 2 (41:22):
Sure, why not get a little weight off right.
Speaker 1 (41:25):
At least go check the mail.
Speaker 2 (41:28):
If you want to know more about the pill, just
type in the pill. It'll bring up some cool stuff
on how stuff Works dot com. And there's also a
really great American Experience site on PBS that had a.
Speaker 1 (41:39):
Bat Man that was good. Yeah, so good.
Speaker 2 (41:42):
And since I said American Experience and Chuck said, so good,
it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (41:47):
Oh no, it's not no listener mail today because we've
had some milestones here lately, and as we sit here
today in real time, we as a company are celebrating
the ten year anniversary of Stuff You Should Know again again,
but we're actually having the party today. And on the
same day, Apple announced at their.
Speaker 2 (42:12):
WDCC, Yeah, their.
Speaker 1 (42:14):
Developers conference, got up on stage and this one kind
of hit me, Like we had the thousand episodes that
was good. The ten years kind of hit me in
a big way. But they got up on stage today
and they said that Stuff You Should Know is now
the first podcast in history, first and only to reach
five hundred million downloads and streams on their platform, which
(42:39):
is I didn't know, No, it hit me too somehow.
Adam Carolla is in againness book of world's records. But
here we are as the only one. And that's because
of you all out there. Yes you said a gazillion times,
but without you, there is no us. We would have
been long gone if not for your support, So we
(42:59):
canntinue to give thanks.
Speaker 2 (43:01):
Thank you again. Yeah, we and will continue to give thanks.
Speaker 1 (43:05):
And we will continue to podcast.
Speaker 2 (43:07):
Yes we will chuck, Yes we will.
Speaker 1 (43:09):
And that's all I got.
Speaker 2 (43:10):
If you want to get in touch with us, you
can send us all an email the Stuff podcast at
houstuffworks dot com and as always, joined us at our
extraordinarily grateful home on the web, Stuff youshould Know dot com.
Speaker 1 (43:26):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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