SMNTY Classics: How We Beat Polio But Not the Mythmaking Around Jonas Salk (Part 1)

In this episode of Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, Margaret Killjoy and Anney talk about vaccines and complicated historical characters. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, this is Annie and Samantha, and welcome to stuff
I've never told you Protective of iHeartRadio, and as we
are approaching the end of the year, we're bringing back
some of our favorite things that we've done.

Speaker 2 (00:25):
Honestly, listeners to be real. Samantha and I don't know
what time is anymore.

Speaker 3 (00:31):
It could have happened in the nineties.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
Samantha accidentally said it was the nineties more than once.

Speaker 4 (00:37):
More than once.

Speaker 2 (00:38):
I'm all over the place with the years, but I
believe this did happen this year for me. Oh, go
go get Yes, I got to guest on Cool People
Who Did Cool Stuff with Market Kiljoy. It was a
two part episode and it was on vaccines, which right
now feels like a pretty important topic. Yes, yes, and

(01:01):
it was really interesting because it was episodes about this
guy wasn't great in a lot of ways, but he
did do this thing that was really good. And also,
as people who know me, especially Samantha knows, I'm shy,

(01:23):
so in the first episode, I don't talk that much,
and then Sophie and Margaret were like, he really should
interject more so if I'm kind of absent in the
first bit, that's because I was like, oh, I can't
interrupt this amazing story. You had to warm up into
it too, Yeah, because I'd never been you'd been on

(01:45):
the show before. Yeah, but I wasn't quite sure that
when I should interject. Right, you did a great job.
I know you did. Always proud of you in advance
and after the fact. Thank you, Samantha. I forgiate that.
And Margaret was great. Margaret was very supportive. So please
enjoy this new episode and go check out Margaret's show

(02:09):
if you haven't already.

Speaker 5 (02:12):
Cool Zone Media, Hello.

Speaker 4 (02:16):
And welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff. You're a
weekly reminder that when there's bad things, there's people trying
to do good things. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and
this week I have a guest. I guess I usually
have a guest, but this week I have a guest
named Annie Reese.

Speaker 2 (02:29):
Hi, how are you? I'm good. I feel like that's
a loaded question these days, but yes, I'm good. How
are you?

Speaker 4 (02:36):
I'm also good with air quotes everywhere.

Speaker 2 (02:40):
Yes, I'm very excited to be here.

Speaker 4 (02:43):
Yeah, I'm excited to have you on. And if people
haven't heard of you, which is surprising, you are one
of the hosts of Stuff Mom Never Told You, and
you're also a host of Savor, which is a food podcast,
and I haven't actually heard that one yet, but I
am learning more and more about how I care about
food in terms of like culture and politics and history
and stuff. And I just really appreciate y'all's tagline, there's

(03:06):
no you in Savor.

Speaker 2 (03:11):
Thank you. We Actually the show is big on puns
and oh good bad jokes, if you'll allow me to say,
but yes, that is a huge part of Savors that
I feel like a lot of times people divorce food
from politics when they really shouldn't, and history when they
really shouldn't. And there's just so much to learn from

(03:31):
what you're eating every day. So that's my bitch for Saver.

Speaker 4 (03:38):
I want to hear it now. I like stuff Mom
Never Told You, and I think people will like these
things too. And if there's one thing you can say
about the current administration, this is not going to be
an episode about the current administration. Oh, I have to
do the rest of the introductions, including Sophie, who's our producer.

Speaker 6 (03:54):
Hi, Sophie, Damn, it's just gonna forget me. I got
a bright pink.

Speaker 4 (03:58):
Hat on I never forget you.

Speaker 2 (04:00):
I would never forget thank you, thank you.

Speaker 4 (04:03):
And good house plants always, good house plans, Thank you.

Speaker 6 (04:06):
Pretty bushy behind me today, I'm like, oh, I want
to touch it.

Speaker 4 (04:09):
We also have a new audio engineer who's Eva. Everyone's
to say hi to Eva.

Speaker 2 (04:14):
Hi Eva, Hi Eva, Hiva.

Speaker 6 (04:17):
Eva's great. He's gonna put that out there.

Speaker 4 (04:18):
Yeah, and actually Eva's been editing our book Club, one
of my other shows. They cools on Media book Club
for a while.

Speaker 6 (04:25):
Now, don't worry. We didn't get rid of Rory. Rory's
just working on a different project.

Speaker 4 (04:29):
Yeah, mining coal. Yeah, actually not doing the mining of
the coal. But if you hang out in a cage,
you can keep track of when there's bad chemicals in
the air.

Speaker 6 (04:39):
I feel like we should make people, at least, you know,
say how to Rory one more time? I think, Hello, Rory,
Hi Ri Hi riy if you want to say hi
Rory Morey. He's editing behind the Bastards now.

Speaker 4 (04:51):
So oh I am, well, okay, the current administration thing?

Speaker 6 (04:58):
Yeah, what's going on there? That was like, go really wild,
little teaser you did?

Speaker 4 (05:03):
So I went and did a Have you all ever
heard of lavender graduations?

Speaker 2 (05:07):
No? No, I have not.

Speaker 4 (05:09):
I hadn't, and I'm kind of embarrassed that I hadn't.
It's LGBT groups on college campuses to have a graduation ceremony,
and I went and did a talk at one yesterday.
As we record this, and I was very like, how
is this gonna go? They hired a kind of fiery

(05:29):
anarchist to come give them their LGBT speech. I'm going
to tell them about gay people who had burned down
Nazi records, and then it kind of helped realizing that
everyone is really aware that things aren't okay right now.
So that was kind of actually promising. So in a
weird way, the one nice thing you can say about

(05:50):
the current situation is that no one has their head
in the sands in the same degree anymore.

Speaker 2 (05:55):
That's fair. Did it go well?

Speaker 4 (05:58):
Oh yeah, the event went great. It was really heartwarming. Actually,
it was a very like, oh, the kids are all
right kind of moment, which is condescending to say because
they're not kids. There are like twenty two. I don't
know how people are when they graduate college twenty two,
who knows twenty two? Yeah, So if there is one

(06:20):
thing this does actually relate to what we're gonna talk
about this week and a lot in the near future.
If there's one thing I can say about the current
administration of the United States, it's that it has made
us realize that there's an awful lot of stuff we
take for granted.

Speaker 2 (06:32):
Right.

Speaker 4 (06:33):
Like, I've never been a big like government person, this
is just true about me, right, But I'm a big
like social services person. But I'm like, Oh, there's all
of these things that are really really good that we
try to do as a society, and we like stuff
that society tends to do for us, and a lot

(06:54):
of that stuff is being taken away. So I've decided
to spend some time focusing on these every miracles that
we take for granted, things that our parents or grandparents
might not have taken for granted, things that we can
no longer take for granted. So this week I want
to talk about vaccines. Ooh, yes, I like vaccines. Vaccines

(07:19):
are cool as hell, easily in the top five best
things humans have come up with. I don't know the
other four in that list are, but probably burritos. Specifically,
I want to talk about the polio vaccines, and I'm
going to use the plural here on purpose, because people
talk about the polio vaccine as if there's one vaccine,

(07:40):
and there is a whole wild history behind polio vaccines,
and they have functionally, but not literally, eradicated polio. Have
you heard much of this story?

Speaker 5 (07:51):
No?

Speaker 2 (07:51):
But I do have a friend who works at the CDC.
She has not been fired yet, oh shit, yes, And
she is the biggest proponent of vaccines. She like, if
you catch her at a party, somehow vaccines will come up.
And polio vaccine is one of her favorite stories to tell.

(08:13):
So I know it's got a history behind it.

Speaker 4 (08:17):
And a different history than I thought it did. Because
this week's story is going to follow an arc that
is familiar to regular listeners of the show, and that
Sophie and I spend a lot of our time complaining
about in signal chats, which is that I start off researching,
usually a guy who is famous for having to accomplished
something right, and then I spend a week researching. I

(08:37):
read most of a biography, I'd read a whole bunch
of other stuff. I get about ninety percent through my research.
When I find out something that makes me have to
change everything about the story.

Speaker 2 (08:49):
It happens all too often.

Speaker 4 (08:52):
It's so annoying. It has happened when I've researched women before,
but it happens all the time with men, where you're like, oh,
and you're gonna like research this person, and they're like, oh,
they I'm a We're a horrible monster to the people
closest to them, or actually all of this is myth
making and they're a con artist, or just like whatever it.

Speaker 2 (09:08):
Is, you know, Yeah, taking credit a lot of times.

Speaker 4 (09:11):
Yeah, speaking of taking credit, you ever heard of a
guy named Jonas Salk?

Speaker 2 (09:17):
Have? Yes, this is.

Speaker 4 (09:21):
The man, Sophia. You heard of this guy?

Speaker 5 (09:23):
No?

Speaker 4 (09:24):
I hadn't. And I think that, like you and I
live under a specific rock because like at least everything
I've read has been like, ah, yes, the most household
name medicine person in the world.

Speaker 6 (09:34):
And I'm like, I've never heard of this man.

Speaker 4 (09:37):
Yeah, what have you heard of Jonas Sock? Before I
tell you about Jonahs Sock.

Speaker 2 (09:42):
I just knew he was involved in like medicine. I
just have heard his name from my elementary school days.
Perhaps that makes sense.

Speaker 4 (09:53):
Yeah, Jonas Sock, the man who defeated polio. He was
a Jewish race poor in New York City from a
family of Eastern European immigrants. He worked his entire life
to fight disease and make the world a better place,
and along the way he became a sort of medical
rock star for his work developing a polio vaccine. He

(10:14):
is famous for saying he refused to patent this vaccine
because the world needed it. He said in an interview quote,
how can you patent the sun? And that what I
just read you is true? Ish, It is so close
to true that it is a massive fuck off.

Speaker 2 (10:34):
Lie.

Speaker 4 (10:35):
Is such a lie?

Speaker 6 (10:37):
Fascinating?

Speaker 4 (10:39):
And I like, I learned that about seven hours ago.
He learned something every day, I know, like the fact
that the thing you've been researching for five days nonstuff,
isn't it true?

Speaker 6 (10:52):
It's not even like true kind of it is.

Speaker 4 (10:55):
It's so true that it becomes a lie.

Speaker 2 (10:58):
Oh Okay.

Speaker 4 (10:59):
He did develop a polio vaccine. He developed the first
polio vaccine, the first functional one was we'll talk about it.
He didn't, Actually, we'll get to it, okay. The first
polio vaccine that was widely tested is often called the
Salk vaccine, and he worked to do that with a
private anti communist foundation, one that claimed that public investment

(11:21):
in research was how communism would win in America, so
it couldn't be publicly funded. This is not reflecting the
politics of Jonah Sauk himself, but this is the organization
funded him. His vaccine saved uncountable lives, mostly white, middle
and upper class lives in the United States of America.

(11:43):
Then another Eastern European Jewish man who also came up
in New York City, developed a polio vaccine in partnership
between American and Soviet scientists. This vaccine was cheap, more
easily administered, and really slightly more dangerous by one context
and less dangerous by another context. That vaccine ended polio.

(12:10):
After polio is effectively destroyed, the US went back to
Salks vaccine because when you have plenty of time and
medical facilities and can do booster shots and all that stuff,
Salks vaccine edges out a little bit. So it was
not Jonas Salko beat polio. It wasn't even Albert Sabin,
who was this direct competitor, the one who I just said,

(12:34):
Because no one person beat polio. It was an enormous
undertaking by thousands of researchers from across the world that
beat polio, and the Great Man. Theory of history is
once again a bunch of fucking garbage. And I didn't
know most of that when I wrote this fucking episode.
So consider it a story about how myths are built.

(12:56):
But first we're gonna talk about polio. I don't know
anyone who's had polio to my knowledge, and that is
because I was born after these vaccines. Poliomyelitis is a
viral infection. Most infections are either bacterial or viral, and
this one's viral. It has been around for kind of forever,

(13:17):
at least thousands of years. He was first given a
name in eighteenth century, and then it started really fucking
people up in the nineteenth century. It actually the places
that first really hit was Europe and then the United
States in the nineteenth century. In nineteen oh eight or
nineteen oh nine, I have read both. A guy actually
looked really close and was like, I have seen the

(13:38):
actual virus that does this. And that has got to
be a strange time to be a scientist where you're like, ah,
I am looking through a microscope and seeing the actual object.

Speaker 2 (13:48):
Yes, I can't imagine back in those days where you
were just this looks different. I'm not sure why. Let
me try to come up with some reason. Just the
way we've understood viruses throughout time and how that's changed
is fascinating to me, honestly.

Speaker 4 (14:07):
Yeah, totally, And I'm kind of excited about all the
things that people are going to look back one hundred
years from now if they're still alive in the world's
and been cooked to death. But otherwise I'm like excited
about all the things. I'll be like, remember when people
thought the following you know, right, Polio was absolutely terrifying
to people. It barely causes any symptoms in most people,

(14:30):
so it's easily transmitted. So like adults get it and
transmit it, but they don't they're not affected by it,
basically not. Most of the time, it is transmitted through
the fecal oral route, which is there's just like different
ways that you know, is the following thing airborn. This
is the kind of fun thing that's fun to talk
about at parties. Actually, well with your friend, it probably
is fun to talk about a parties.

Speaker 2 (14:50):
She does love talking about it.

Speaker 4 (14:52):
Yeah, My favorite thing I like bringing up is that
hand sanitizer doesn't do anything for fecal oral routes, diseases,
and so you actually need to wash your hands after
you go to the bathroom. You can't just like use
hand sanitizer. Yeah, makes me real popular.

Speaker 2 (15:07):
Yeah, these are the fun things in life. You know.

Speaker 4 (15:10):
This is why I go to so many parties and
I'm invited everywhere.

Speaker 6 (15:13):
That sounds like you, Yeah, totally.

Speaker 4 (15:16):
It is my goal to be invited to all the parties.
It is not my goal to go to all the parties.

Speaker 6 (15:21):
Oh yeah, co one hundred percent. I want to be invited,
but I'm not coming, Like, please keep inviting me, because
if you don't, I'll be really sad about it.

Speaker 3 (15:29):
But I'm not coming, I know, but if you're not reinvited,
which is fair but still not okay, no, okay, oh okay.

Speaker 4 (15:40):
The best is when you have a friend where you
can invite each other to things and you know it's
safe because you know that both of you are gonna
be like, eh, I gotta hang out with my dog today.

Speaker 2 (15:48):
Sorry, gotta have that like dog back burner. Excuse, Yeah, totally,
I am good.

Speaker 6 (15:56):
My favorite the.

Speaker 4 (15:57):
Like, Oh, my dog is just kind of needs to
get home soon. My dog is training. It gets socially exhausted.
My dog has to record some podcasts in the morning.

Speaker 2 (16:09):
Here you go.

Speaker 4 (16:11):
So polio almost exclusively affects children, and I'm going to
get into it because polio might come back because of
the motherfucker in charge of the fucking anyway, whatever, we'll
get to that. When you first get polio, you get
a runny nose and a sore throat. Then you get
a fever, then horrible pain throughout all your muscles or

(16:32):
some of your muscles, depending leaving you thrashing and misery
in your bed. Then when the fever breaks, it's not over.
It means the virus is moved from the blood to
the nervous system. Within a few days, your muscles become paralyzed,
but your body doesn't go numb. You can still feel
all your muscles, you just can't use them. Among people

(16:53):
catch it symptomatically like this. I have read a ten
percent mortality rate and I have read a twenty five
percent mortality rate. I believe the lower number. It kills
you by paralyzing essential functions. If it goes up in
your brain, you will stop being able to swallow, You'll
foam at the mouth and drown.

Speaker 2 (17:10):
It's bad it's really Yeah, that sounds terrible.

Speaker 4 (17:15):
You the listener have probably seen if you all seen
the pictures of iron lungs. Yes, yes, so they have
been used for other things. It's like, if your lungs
are paralyzed, this is the object that would help you.
Back in the day. Now we use intubation and other
things more often, although iron lungs have come back thanks
to COVID. Iron lungs are huge metal tubes that you

(17:36):
go into with only your head sticking out, and the
machine varies the air pressure, so it sort of breathes
for you. Your head's not in it, but basically it's
a like forces your chest to expand. It brings airs,
and it's like manually working a bellows. If your lungs
are paralyzed, you need this thing. Most people only spent
about two weeks or a couple of months in the
iron lung while recovering. But plenty of people, and every

(17:57):
time I say people, when I'm talking about polio, I'm
talking about children. Plenty of children. Well, I guess in
this case people lived their entire lives in iron lungs.
There is one woman, Martha Lillard, who got polio nineteen
fifty three when she was five years old, who was
still alive as of when I looked, and still lives
in one, and she's having trouble finding parts to keep

(18:20):
her iron lung in good repair because she's the only
person living in one. Long term left people often regained
some use of their muscles, but generally people were disabled
for life, and polio scared the piss out of everyone.
It was killing and paralyzing children. The most famous polio
survivor is Franklin Roosevelt, the progressively served as president of

(18:41):
this country for the longest and could scarcely walk and
relied on leg bracesm wheelchairs. So in nineteen sixteen there
was this massive polio outbreak in New York City. Basically
summertime in major cities was polio's time to shine. Babies
were dying of polio at a fantastic and terrible rate,
one every two and a half hours. Jesus Christ, Yeah,

(19:06):
that's too often. There's I've read so many stories about
doctors who were like, I don't know, just like walking
through these wards and just being like watching children dying constantly.
And there's a lot of emotional stuff I didn't put
in this part of it. It's transmission wasn't yet understood.
People assumed it was airborne basically, and they tried everything
to stop it. Families were quarantined, windows were screened to

(19:29):
keep flies away. The trash got picked up extra well.
Those two things actually probably helped them. Playgrounds were shut down.
Kids had their noses and throats rinsed with salt water daily,
which has got to be one of the worst things
that I can imagine happening on a daily basis. Most tragically,
seventy two thousand stray cats were killed by the city

(19:51):
because people thought they spread it and none of it worked.
But you know, it did work to save everyone who
has polio, and so I think we can promise that
all of the following people are capable of curing polio.

Speaker 6 (20:07):
Yeah, why not.

Speaker 4 (20:10):
It's our sponsors. They're all legally capable of understanding what
parody is and not getting mad about this ad transition.
That's what they're capable of doing. Here's a bunch of ads,
and we're back. But unfortunately they didn't have the products

(20:33):
that support this podcast yet, or they might. I don't
know what we got advertised. Some of that stuff has
been around for a while, but they didn't have enough
of it. They didn't even have podcasts back then. They
had to listen to people on soapboxes and radio, and
actually we've been doing basically the equivalent of podcasts forever.

Speaker 2 (20:51):
Yeah, I mean, honestly, like, if you're thinking about a
lot of this sounds like COVID to me, And I
feel like the y whole manisphere thing that happened during
COVID where people were isolated and they didn't have real
information and they were just like, I don't know, I
don't understand that. A lot of negative things around health

(21:17):
came out out of that and it's still impacting us
to this day, which I'm sure we'll talk about.

Speaker 4 (21:23):
Yeah, there's a lot of overlaps between this and like
we will talk about some like really early anti vaxxers
during this, but there was actually this thing where like
it seems like from the reading that more people were
willing to trust experts than like currently.

Speaker 2 (21:38):
That's fun. Yeah, I love that.

Speaker 4 (21:44):
People started fleeing the city. And to be clear, there's
outbreaks everywhere, but New York City is like particularly bad.
Twelve hundred kids a day escaped the city with their
families for a little while, but then other cities soon
stopped letting them come in. Kids and babies were taken
to Kingston Avenue Hospital and quarantined for two months away

(22:05):
from their families, and then cops would go around and
steal children from their families to take them to the hospital.
I only got one sentence of that, and I want
to know more about what happened there. Was it like
you got a runny nose, Now you got to go
to the you know, quarantine, the death land.

Speaker 2 (22:22):
I don't know the police are coming, you know. I
have had a couple of instances where I have had
something like swine flu, and basically they've been like, you're
going to this quarantine zone and I didn't know what
was happening, and they just told me where to go.

Speaker 4 (22:42):
Wait, you've been quarantined by who? What happened?

Speaker 2 (22:45):
I was quarantined just multiple times. One time when I
was flying into the US. That was when I had
bird flu. One time at college when I had swine flu,
uh huh, and they didn't want to report it because
if they had to report it, they would have shut
down the university. And then another time where a doctor

(23:10):
was just like, please go home and quarantine.

Speaker 6 (23:12):
I feel really great about that.

Speaker 2 (23:14):
That made me really confident. Yeah, they basically were like,
just don't tell Anyboddy, go back to your door.

Speaker 6 (23:22):
I feel really confident about the American education system. I
feel like we're really setting the priority straight.

Speaker 2 (23:29):
They did give me a mask and some clothes and
the instructions to stay in my room away from people
for a couple of days.

Speaker 4 (23:38):
So college kids are notoriously good at following instruction, definitely socializing.

Speaker 2 (23:43):
It was also Halloween. I remember very specifically Jesus Christ.

Speaker 4 (23:47):
My Halloween costume is the person with mask and gloves.

Speaker 2 (23:53):
I did stay in my room.

Speaker 4 (23:54):
That's good.

Speaker 2 (23:55):
I did.

Speaker 4 (23:56):
Yes, that's good. So if there's ever like a new
anim mole named Flu, are you just personally convinced that
you are going to get it? Kind of like once
there's like a snake flu, I'm like staying away from
you for a while.

Speaker 2 (24:09):
Yeah. I think that's fair. I think that's a really
fair response. Honestly.

Speaker 4 (24:13):
Well, just like the thing that saved you, the epidemic stopped.
Because summer stopped. Two four hundred people, mostly kids under five,
died in New York City that summer, and around nine
thousand were paralyzed. Nationwide, twenty seven thousand kids died or paralyzed,
and I don't know which because it was confusingly written

(24:35):
and I tried across reference, but it doesn't always work.
It was a bad summer. Every summer across the world,
polio came back, and it mostly slowly got worse. Fifteen
thousand kids a year were disabled by polio in the
United States, and is peaked in nineteen fifty two. In

(24:56):
the early nineteen fifties, the thing that most Americans were
afraid of was nuclear war, which makes sense. The second
thing after that that they were the most afraid of
was polio. And it's like one of those things where
it's like Polio's is like an old timey disease. You're like, oh,
that could have been like that bad. We're still around
as a species, and I've never met anyone in polio,

(25:17):
you know, right, Maybe most people are better at thinking
things through than I would have been.

Speaker 2 (25:22):
But yeah, it had a huge impact though. I know
we've talked about it, but in terms of like the
ada and all those kind of things.

Speaker 4 (25:31):
Yeah, yeah, one of the things that we're not going
to get into too much, but the start of the
disability rights movement, and also the start of the concept
of physical therapy. Yeah, comes out of polio, and of
course that was done by a woman and isn't as
written about as much. And then I'm as guilty as
anyone else because instead I'm going to complain about a man.
That's the main thing I'm gonna do this episode.

Speaker 2 (25:52):
Yeah, I mean, you know, sometimes you've just got to
complain about a man. Yeah, understantally, totally.

Speaker 4 (26:00):
In nineteen fifty five, the polio vaccine, the first one,
was administered, and the way it's usually presented is that
basically overnight polio dropped from disabling fifteen thousand kids a
year to about one hundred cases a year. This isn't true.
It did start turning the tide dramatically, but it wasn't

(26:23):
until nineteen sixty two, I think, when the other vaccine
that we'll talk about later came in that it started
dropping to one hundred cases a year.

Speaker 2 (26:34):
So was it a kind of marketing thing.

Speaker 4 (26:37):
It's that people want a simple history with a hero,
and Jonas Salk, the guy that we're going to talk about,
mostly was a hero. He stopped polio, you know, by
nineteen seventy nine, Polio is effectively eliminated in the United
States until the modern anti vax movement, which is basically

(27:00):
a death cult.

Speaker 6 (27:02):
Uh huh.

Speaker 4 (27:02):
In twenty twenty two, the US got some cases of
polio for the first time since nineteen seventy nine. Great, yeah,
with RFK Junior in charge, moving forward, Well, let's let's
talk about that real quick. RFK Junior soon to be
remembered as one of history's greatest monsters. Yes, he has

(27:23):
gone on record to say that the polio vaccine has
quote killed many, many, many, many many more people than
polio ever did. Such an idiot uh huh wow, because
he was like, oh, he like gives people cancer or something.
And also he claims that the vaccine didn't actually reduce

(27:43):
polio cases, that it is quote a mythology and quote
just not true. Studies have shown, of course, that the
polio vaccine does not cause cancer and that polio has
been pretty much completely eliminated worldwide because of these vaccines.
Everyone of every political party who allowed RFK Junior to

(28:05):
come to power has fucking blood on their hands. Yeah,
polio is bad and it was real bad. And this
is the story about people developing the vaccine, but it
actually starts in its way with people fighting against the flu.
So we're gonna talk about the flu real quick too.
The flu is way harder to vaccinate against, although we

(28:26):
do it fairly well. Regardless, people should get their flu shots.
I never bothered because I was like, I'm young and
can do whatever. And then I like have a doctor
friend and he's like, that's not the point. The point
is that if you don't get it, old people die.
I'm also like closer and closer to an honorary old
person myself, but yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:47):
I had the same thing where it's like I don't
need it. It just kind of makes me feel a little
off for a couple days. Why should I get it?
And then somebody sat me down and was like, it's
not just about you. Yeah, kind of the point totally.

Speaker 4 (29:03):
And there's like some people who can't get the shot
at all because they're immunocompromised. I think there's seventeen million
people living in the US who have actual medical reasons
that they can't get vaccinated do an immunocompromisation.

Speaker 2 (29:15):
Whatever.

Speaker 4 (29:16):
We still successfully vaccinate against the flu, even though mutates
all the time, which is why it's like less effective.

Speaker 2 (29:23):
Right.

Speaker 4 (29:23):
The polio vaccine was like good bye polio, right, and
we haven't been able to say good bye flu. Polio
doesn't like to mutate all that much, but the flu
mutates like it's its full time job. You have the
polio outbreak of nineteen sixteen, and then you have the
Spanish flu, which is the closest covid parallel, especially because
they wore masks and stuff. And this is a global

(29:45):
pandemic from nineteen eighteen to nineteen twenty and this fucking
thing killed like twenty five to fifty million people and
a lot of people. Yeah, this was during World War One,
and the Spanish flu was as good at killing soldiers
as a masked charge against machine guns was like World
War One was like when we were really bad at

(30:05):
understanding that you can't charge a machine gun, you know,
And so they'd be like, Oh, I'll just send more young,
poor people in front of that machine gun.

Speaker 2 (30:14):
That'll work.

Speaker 4 (30:16):
I think for actual soldiers, combat deaths edges out. I
didn't write down the numbers, but they're in the running
with each other. The thing that really scared people about
the Spanish flu is that it was affecting healthier people
than the flu usually did, and we didn't have the
flu shot yet, but public health departments did their best.

(30:36):
I think there's kind of this interesting thing where it's
like people do try, you know, and you're like, oh,
they did things wrong, and you're like, yeah, yeah, but
they did things they Yeah, they did what was what
they thought they could, you know.

Speaker 2 (30:51):
Yeah, going back to my friends who works in the
health industry, they were trying to learn as much as
they could about in this case, COVID, but it was
constantly changing. They were getting new data. It was moving
so quickly. I can only imagine back in nineteen seventeen, yeah,
or nineteen thirteen. But yeah, yeah, in that area in.

Speaker 4 (31:14):
Front of me, Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (31:17):
I memorized you know that, Yeah, that wasn't you didn't
have ready access. Actually, that's kind of an interesting juxtaposition
of like, in some cases, I think that boone is
having more access than maybe in other cases it's kind
of a detriment, which is what we're seeing today in

(31:37):
terms of you know, misinformation disformation. But oh yeah, totally,
but not that that didn't exist before. But yeah, but
she was saying that we were always trying to figure
it out as quickly as we could to get solutions,
because there are also people who don't want their loved
ones to die, I know.

Speaker 4 (31:56):
And it's like, oh, you said last week it was this,
and you're like, hey, you were aware that, Like the
whole point of science is to change your mind as
new information comes in, but then act on the best
available information the entire time. Like that doesn't feel like
a hard concept from my point of view.

Speaker 2 (32:12):
You know, yeah, no, that makes total sense that you
would get new information, take that in and then make
your informed opinion. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (32:23):
And so in New York City, when the Spanish flu came,
they basically built a social distancing infrastructure. They staggered business
hours so that not everyone was on public transit at once.
They got rid of rush hour in order to fight
the flu. Oh wow, I wish they would just do
that anyway, What.

Speaker 2 (32:42):
Am I saying?

Speaker 4 (32:42):
I live in the mountains. I haven't had to deal
with rush hour, and like, I don't remember how many
years they got. Well it's painful, yeah, yeah, there's no
one around. Yeah, like you like we have to like
wait for a tractor. That's the most annoying thing that
I have to put up with, you know, hilarious but
then when you finally pass them, they're just like, oh, hey,
how's it going, you know, give the wave.

Speaker 2 (33:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (33:08):
They also got theaters to sell only half their seats
to people, so you have an empty seat next to you,
and people started covering their mouths when coughing, which was
a new technology at the time.

Speaker 2 (33:21):
Wow, I love this. See I do the vampire cough.

Speaker 1 (33:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (33:25):
No, yeah, we've moved from hands to the yeah.

Speaker 2 (33:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (33:31):
Bodies piled up unburied, and in nineteen eighteen, twenty one
thousand New York City children were orphaned. And that is
the New York city that our main character of the
week was born into, the one that his competitor would
move to. Jonas Salk was called a hero, and he
seemed to kind of revel in that identity. There's a

(33:53):
lot of like arguments this is a man that there
are hagiography is about This is a man where they're like,
either he's just a complete piece of garbage, or like
almost everything you read about it is like he's just
basically the best. This is Jesus walking amongst us. You know,
much like Jesus. He was Jewish, he was hard working
as fuck, and he tirelessly worked to make the world better.

(34:16):
He also wasn't the only person doing this work.

Speaker 5 (34:19):
Oh.

Speaker 4 (34:20):
Also, we'll get to this at the end. He was
like a eugenicist and had really wild ideas and it
was a real sketchy.

Speaker 2 (34:27):
Oh that's fun, said his wife to horsed.

Speaker 4 (34:30):
Him and for pretty solid reasons, and anyway, we'll get
to that.

Speaker 2 (34:34):
There it go, girl, Yeah, you're a eugenicist. I think
I should get out of it.

Speaker 4 (34:40):
I was like, yeah, yeah, And I think there were
a lot of breakups around Trump's election, you know. I
think that there was a lot of people who are like, oh,
I could put up with my boyfriend until this is
just the step too far. This is too real now.

Speaker 2 (34:54):
Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure I.

Speaker 4 (34:58):
Met someone who would that basically have up into and
I don't feel bad for him at all, but I'm like, oh,
I'm so sorry that you wait, no, never mind. Anyway,
Jonahsolk wasn't the only person doing this work around vaccines,
and people have complained about him taking credit for more
than his own work. And he started off his life

(35:20):
as a leftist. He was actually investigated by the FBI
for communist sympathies. Then he moved to a political and
he wound up writing mystical eugenesis shit about how scientists
should control the human race genetically by introducing viruses into
people's embryos. That's the big medical hero the twentieth century,
Jonas Salk. But one thing that Jonas Salk had access to, No,

(35:48):
he didn't. Actually he raised very poor. Well, I bet
some of our products and services were actually affordable. So
probably because some of them are just losing your life
to Anyway, here's some ads of all of them, and
have no complicated feelings about the nature of my work.
Here they are. We're back, and we're talking about Jonas Salk.

(36:12):
Born with no middle name, but he's going to get
one in an interesting way.

Speaker 2 (36:16):
Can't wait.

Speaker 4 (36:17):
That's my teaser. And it's not like me just adding
a eugenicist in quotes. It's the middle name or whatever. No,
he actually gets an actual middle name. Jonah Salk was
born on October twenty eighth, nineteen fourteen, in East Harlem
in a tenement building. He was the first son of
Dora and Daniel Sulk. His mother was a Russian Jew
from what's now Belarus. Her own parents had owned a

(36:41):
tavern in Minsk. Dora came over to Manhattan with her
family when she was thirteen, where she lived with others
in the wildly overcrowded tenements of the Lower East Side
and worked in the garment industry, which was not known
for good working conditions. And people who've listened to this
show and order have much of a grasp know that
the reason that Jews were leaving the Russian Empires that
the programs were real not nice. The family did fairly

(37:07):
well for themselves, and Dora became a foreman at the
tenement the sewing garment industry whatever, I don't know the
name of the place she worked, and the family moved
to East Harlem, where like more people had like actual
homes but were still kind of crowded into them. This
is a like move from like poverty to lower middle class.

(37:29):
That's the best I can tell. Okay Jonas's dad, Daniel,
was a Lithuanian Jews born in the US and a
lace maker who designed women's neck where he was quiet
and humble. His mom was driven in loud. I have
read so many biographies for this work where they just
like really want to complain about overbearing moms to the
point where I actually just question everything about the way

(37:51):
the history is presented.

Speaker 2 (37:53):
Yeah. I think the history of the overbearing mom, I
always question it every time I see it.

Speaker 4 (38:01):
I'm like, yeah, In this case, Jonas likes his mom
and appreciates that she was a taskmaster.

Speaker 2 (38:14):
Okay, okay.

Speaker 4 (38:16):
When they wound up with Jonas their eldest kid, mom
was very active in directing his education and making sure
he started reading right away. And shit, she became a
stay at home mom and was apparently kind of domineering
our boy. Jonas skipped a bunch of grades, was very quiet,
ignored sports, and read books. He wasn't a very happy kid.

(38:36):
His mother treated him like an adult pretty much right away.
But he never blamed anything on his mother and said
that he inherited her work ethic and is very grateful
for it. And it is important to this story that
he is a Jewish kid, the child of an immigrant.
His Judaism is important to his work. He's not necessarily
like super observant near the end of his life as
a kid, he is, but the likeultural and sort of

(39:00):
theological underpinions remain important to him. I believe his entire
life he consciously accepts the Jewish obligation of takunalum, which
is repairing the world. You have an obligation to make
the world a better place, which is I think cool
as hell, although obviously people can interpret that to me
and I want to inject viruses and the children to

(39:21):
make them have different, you know, genetic structures. But first
he just saves millions of lives.

Speaker 2 (39:29):
Right, you know, at this level.

Speaker 4 (39:31):
Yeah, and he doesn't do any of the philosophical stuff
he dreams of later, so the thing he practically does.

Speaker 2 (39:36):
It just seems a dream he has in his head.

Speaker 4 (39:40):
I like went back and forth like four times already.
I had a moment where I was like, do I
have to just scrap this and styling, and I'm like,
he's just actually complicated and overall not looking great, but
he's still interesting. Early on, he decides that he wants
to work relieving the suffering of the sick and the injured.
And there's so much myth making about this guy, and

(40:02):
like there's like things you'll read where he's like he
saw the nineteen sixteen and nineteen eighteen pandemics, and I'm like, no,
he didn't. He was like three years old. He did, though,
grow up in the wake of those crises, and he
absolutely grew up knowing people who were paralyzed and dealing
with a lot of disability as a result of polio.

(40:23):
When he was twelve, he went to an all boys
prep school for City College. This school is free, but
it's incredibly hard to get into, which means that it's
mostly the children of immigrants who go there, and especially
Jewish immigrants based on the demographics of New York at
the time. I like grew up so outside of this concept.
This place is like preppy. I like didn't understand what

(40:45):
a prep school was. This place is as preppy as
a prep school can prep. Their school newspaper is in Latin.

Speaker 2 (40:53):
Oh okay, Yeah.

Speaker 4 (40:59):
It is more of a humanities school than a stem school.
And once he was there, he did not stand out.
He was class secretary, but not class president. The only
thing that stood out about him was that he was
a sharp dresser. He was quiet and dedicated and figured
he'd become a lawyer or a politician to make the
world better. Once again, politicians famously always making the world better.

Speaker 2 (41:22):
Definitely, Also just like, I guess I'll just be a lawyer, yeah,
or a politician.

Speaker 4 (41:30):
Yeah, whatever, ever makes the world better one of those
things I don't know. Yes, he was a prep school nerd.
He was in the Current History Society, and he was
in the Law and Debate Society. Oh wow, the Law
and Debate Society is one society. So that sounds extra miserable.

Speaker 2 (41:48):
That sounds really intense. Yeah, the law and debate. Yeah,
not just debate. Yeah, we must have the law.

Speaker 4 (41:56):
Whoever wins the debate gets to tell everyone who lives
and dies, so it's going to be totally normal.

Speaker 2 (42:00):
Yeah, definitely.

Speaker 4 (42:02):
He was the advertising manager for the yearbook and assistant
business manager of the school paper.

Speaker 6 (42:08):
They get a.

Speaker 4 (42:08):
Picture of this guy, you're just like, he doesn't have
a lot of friends, Like, no one hates him. He's
just there, you know.

Speaker 2 (42:13):
Yeah, he was doing a lot, we must say it was.

Speaker 4 (42:16):
You want to guess what year he started college.

Speaker 2 (42:19):
No, heleas, don't make me.

Speaker 4 (42:22):
He was fifteen years old when he started college, because
of course he fucking was.

Speaker 2 (42:26):
Oh gosh.

Speaker 4 (42:27):
He went to City College, which is what it was
a prep school for that he went to. And City
College was prestigious and free, and it was also eighty
percent Jewish because it was the place that immigrant kids
can go to. He barely made any friends. He was
going to do pre law, but then his mom was like, Na,
you'd be terrible as a lawyer. You can't even beat

(42:48):
me in an argument ow because he's not very like assertive,
you know.

Speaker 2 (42:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (42:53):
Yeah, So he went into pre med and then his
mom was like, now you're too weak to be a doctor.

Speaker 6 (42:58):
You should be a Teacher's fun and he.

Speaker 4 (43:01):
Stood up for himself. Again he's myth making against his
overbearon mom, who he actually loved. He was like, no,
I like medicine.

Speaker 6 (43:09):
He doesn't have a wife to blame at this point.

Speaker 4 (43:11):
I know, but he will have a wife to blame soon,
don't worry. Yeah, yeah, give it to that.

Speaker 6 (43:16):
Men like this always have some woman where like it
was her.

Speaker 4 (43:19):
Yeah. Absolutely. He was like, I'm going to do medicine,
but I don't want to be a doctor. I want
to do medical science. He had read a book about
Louis Pasteur, the guy who did want a vaccine or whatever,
and he was like, all right, vaccines and shit, that's
my fucking thing. The problem with this there's this free

(43:41):
school and it's full of Jewish immigrant kids, is that
higher education was anti Semitic and had informal caps on
the number of Jewish kids admitted. So it was very
hard for the city college kids to get into higher schools,
like once they finished their undergrad This entire establishment was
built in funded to help the children of immigrants. But

(44:01):
there's like a serious glass ceiling put into place by
WASP America. So Jonas Salk applied everywhere, and every place
rejected him except one. So we went to what's now
called the New York University College of Medicine. His interest
was in medical research, and so people were like, just
get a PhD instead of an MD, and he was like, no,

(44:22):
I'm going to be a doctor, just a research doctor.
And in this new school he was entirely unremarkable and forgettable.
He barely made any friends. He lived at home with
his overbearing mom. Sorry anyway, oh god. He had to
find work to pay for school, so he started working
in research, and he was good at medical research right away.

(44:46):
If you were interested in animal rights, this man is
not a hero.

Speaker 2 (44:49):
I was just one of the many maybe categories we
can say.

Speaker 4 (44:53):
Yeah, and that one's like a style at the time
thing and like animal testing is a complicated subject that
I don't want to get into the morality of anyway whatever.
He starts working in research, and he is good at
this shit right away. His second research project was to
cultivate scarlet fever, or rather the bacteria that causes it,
and give rabbits scarlet fever. He improved the process of

(45:15):
cultivating bacteria, speeding it up by a factor of seven,
and got his first paper published in an academic journal
when he was twenty two. So this is like kind
of the first time he's like really like standing out,
you know.

Speaker 2 (45:31):
Yeah, is overbearing mom.

Speaker 4 (45:33):
Yeah, we're all doing air quotes this whole time. I
think everyone can hear it in our voices.

Speaker 2 (45:37):
I hope you can hear the air quote.

Speaker 4 (45:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (45:39):
Has been like you're not good at this, You're not
good at this. He's been a part of all these
organizations and now has something that he feels good at.

Speaker 4 (45:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (45:51):
It's really painting a picture of somebody who was trying
a bunch of things and looking for the one thing
that like they would really excel at.

Speaker 4 (46:01):
Yeah, totally. He's good at this stuff. He might not
be as groundbreaking as people later paint him, but he
is genuinely good at this stuff. And when he gets
interested in vaccines. There are a few bacterial vaccines and
a few viral vaccines around, and bacterial vaccines can be

(46:23):
made using dead bacteria, but viral vaccines at the time,
like for smallpox, rabies, and yellow fever, they had to
be made out of weakened but live viruses. So you
isolate a virus, beat it up, tell it that it's
no good, never going to amount to anything, and then

(46:43):
you inject that into someone. And this is seen as
an axiom. Viral infections can only be vaccinated against by
live viruses, and live virus vaccines are inherently a bit riskier.
People still use them and actually it's going to be
a live virus that's going to actually get rid of folio.

(47:05):
Live vaccines are more likely to provide lifelong immunity. You
and everyone listening to this has likely had both, and
if you haven't, then get mad at your parents for
not vaccinating you and go get vaccinated. But live vaccines
are not always appropriate. The flu shot we use now
is an inactive vaccine. It's a dead virus vaccine. And

(47:25):
Jonah Sulk is part of why we get the flu shot.
He was working for a virologist named Thomas Francis Junior,
who was the first man to isolate the flu virus
and later who developed the flu shot, or led the
research team that developed the flu shot. There's a lot
of I mean, no one's like writing hagiographies about him,
but you know, he's part of a team. Thomas had

(47:49):
Jonas try to stimulate antibodies in mice with that flu virus.
The basic idea of vaccines, which people probably know, but
in case you don't, say, either contain antibodies to a
viral bacterial infection, or they convince your body to make
its own antibodies, which is even better. So Jonas is
working to stimulate antibodies in mice with dead flu viruses

(48:12):
like a normal person who has normal hobbies. Yeah, I'm
actually gratefully did this. I'm not complaining.

Speaker 2 (48:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (48:20):
Meanwhile, he fell for a woman named Donna Lindsay, who
was an inch taller than him and from a rich
family and was pursuing her master's in social work at
this point. They're both leftists and they shared a desire
to make the world better. This does not sound like
a really great romance. He was completely smitten with her
and she was like, I don't know, and I've read

(48:43):
it described in multiple places as he basically kind of
wore her down until she was like final, marry you.

Speaker 2 (48:49):
Yeah. She was like, I don't need you, I'm good.

Speaker 4 (48:54):
But he, yeah, he persisted, which means that she's gonna
have to like give up her career and like raise
their kids, and like it was a you know, it
was the early twentieth century.

Speaker 2 (49:06):
It was like the type of romances that we still,
unfortunately sometimes paint romantically, but at the time was very
romantic of just a man being like I got her.
Eventually I wore her dad. Yeah, she saw how smart
I was. I'm not a nerd.

Speaker 4 (49:24):
Yeah, totally well, and he's like she's so beautiful, and
she's always like he's all right, I don't know. He
graduated on June eighth, nineteen thirty nine, and he and
Donna got married on June ninth, nineteen thirty nine, the
very next day. And the reason it happened in this

(49:45):
order is that she's from this like wealthy Jewish family,
and his parents don't like that her family isn't really
practicing Jewish, but her family doesn't like that his family
is poor. Donna's dad is already pretty mad that his
daughter is marrying below her station, so he insisted that

(50:06):
it be done after he graduated, so that the announcement
could say Jonas Edward Sulk MD. And you might be
thinking to yourself, but doesn't he not have a middle name? Well,
Donna's dad was mad that Jonas didn't have a middle
name had not been properly anglicized, so he insisted that

(50:27):
Jonas take Edward as a middle name. So he gets
his middle name from his father in law, who's like,
you are an Edward.

Speaker 2 (50:37):
Wow, there's also something to be said about you know what,
the day after you graduate, we're just gonna take out
all the air out of what you did.

Speaker 4 (50:49):
Yeah and put it here totally, totally.

Speaker 2 (50:54):
Yeah, that was a real move. Okay.

Speaker 4 (50:57):
So he's married now and I think he moves out
of the house. He has a two year internship at
a research hospital and he wanted to keep doing virology,
but he was Jewish and he wasn't from an ivy league,
so he kept getting turned down everywhere until his former supervisor,
Thomas Franz and Junior, the guy who had him testing
dead viruses on mice, brought him out to ann Arbor, Michigan.

(51:18):
To keep working on influenza. Eventually, Donad's going to be like,
I'm you can't just fucking drag me all over the
country for your shitty fucking research and then ignore me
all the time. But that hasn't happened yet, and he
like never talked about her or their relationship, Like, are
we shocked to know? Anyway? They're out. Ann Arbor, Thomas

(51:39):
Francis Junior and some others had developed a vaccine ready
for human trials for the first time for the flu shot,
and the lab rats that they were going to use
for this were patients at state hospitals for people with
severe mental illnesses who were not in any way able
to provide meaningful consent.

Speaker 2 (51:57):
Yeah, I love that nightmare Land. Yes it is okay.

Speaker 4 (52:07):
Jonas Salk spoke at the end of his life about
the importance of taking calculated risks in order to advance science.
He seemed to genuinely consider the human costs of those risks,
but he sure took a lot of them. He oversaw
eight thousand patients who got the vaccine or a placebo.
Antibodies went up, but there was no flu that season,

(52:30):
so they couldn't really prove anything. So they were like, ah,
the problem is that none of these people got the flu.
Option A, oh, no way to hear.

Speaker 3 (52:41):
Option B.

Speaker 4 (52:43):
Take infected mouse lung tissue and spray it into people's
noses who are not able to consent because they have
severe mental illnesses and rewards of the state. He goes
for Option B.

Speaker 2 (52:53):
Yep, that's what I was afraid of.

Speaker 4 (52:56):
Yeah, this kind of thing did not fall out of
style until the Nuremberg Trials of nineteen forty seven, when
people were like, maybe there should be ethical standards for
testing on people.

Speaker 2 (53:09):
Yeah, maybe there's a lot.

Speaker 4 (53:11):
Of stuff that the Nazis did that was kind of
just what everyone in the West was doing, but cranked
up like three notches, you know, yeah, and it made
everyone feel like, oh, were we doing.

Speaker 2 (53:23):
Let's really go for it. Yeah, if we're gonna do it,
let's just go yeah, and made everybody else be like
oh yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 (53:33):
You'd think they'd be like, maybe this eugenics thing is
no good, but it actually took decades before the West
got over their obsession with eugenics. Some people like Sock
died obsessed with I don't know if he defined what
he did as eugenics. I couldn't actually find the answer
to that, but we'll talk about that later. This worked,
the flu shots and the giving people the flu without
their permission. The control group got the flu at about

(53:54):
fifty percent, while the vaccinated folks got it at sixteen percent,
So it's a very effective at stopping the flu. That year.
In nineteen forty three, they got to show the world
that they'd done good as a flu epidemic spread. Twelve
five hundred soldiers were put into a trial. No need
to spray infected mouse lungs into their noses because there's
actually a flu this year, and only two percent of

(54:18):
the inoculated folks got sick, and the mental patients who
had been tested on the year before were still immune.
So dead viruses can work. And that's where we're going
to leave it today. Our hero is doing great things.
It's just messy. This is just like like he's not
in any way acting abnormally to what he does for

(54:41):
work at this point, and that's just an indictment of
people refusing to think about ethics.

Speaker 2 (54:48):
Wow, well, I'm very eager to see the downfall of
this year. Oh that doesn't happen like the keys of
the downfall.

Speaker 4 (54:57):
No, he die as a hero.

Speaker 2 (55:00):
Ah Okay.

Speaker 4 (55:02):
I started researching him because people painted a real pretty
picture of him, and I was like, he's going to
win to cover because you can paint a real pretty
picture of this man, And like, maybe this is just
like a no Heroes moment right where you're like, well, yeah,
whoever does this kind of work is going to have
a willingness to hurt people to help people in a

(55:23):
way that is like morally messy. But I still kind
of come down on this particular guy not so great.
In the end.

Speaker 2 (55:34):
I think taking in the complexities of anybody is good. Yeah,
and then like science, weighing the information you get and
forming your opinion.

Speaker 4 (55:45):
Ah, all right, Well instead of telling the listener what
to think about this man, you mean, I should just
continue to explain this story and then interesting es. Although
I didn't name this cool, people did cool stuff, so
I always feel like I got to kind of specifically
be like, this man is not worthy of the title,
but the thing that happened, the creation of a polio

(56:06):
vaccine is.

Speaker 2 (56:08):
Well, that's also complicated. You know, this show is just
called cool stuff too.

Speaker 4 (56:12):
Yeah, totally, it's just cool stuff. Well, if people are
like but I want to hear you any Reese on
the podcast more, but I don't want to wait till Wednesday.
What can they do?

Speaker 2 (56:23):
Well, you can find me on stuff when I never
told you, or Savor wherever you get your podcast, and
I'm out and about but not really yeah, fair enough.
I don't even know why say yeah, but yes, you
can find me there.

Speaker 4 (56:36):
I finally post on Instagram like yesterday, being like, I'm
not checking Dmazon here anymore. I am so tired of
meta with a company.

Speaker 2 (56:44):
And yeah, yeah, pretty much that's where I am.

Speaker 4 (56:48):
Still on Blue Sky you can find me there. I'm
on Substack find me there. And podcasts and also what
podcast I listened to this week that I was like,
I can't wait to plug this one on air now.

Speaker 2 (57:02):
I don't remember what it was, dudeude, I don't know.

Speaker 4 (57:06):
Sorry, it was probably sixteenth minute, but I don't even
remember what the most recent sixteenth minute was.

Speaker 6 (57:10):
So it's about the Hawk Tua SEC scandal.

Speaker 4 (57:14):
Oh, I mean I did listen to that, but I.

Speaker 6 (57:16):
Was like, that doesn't seem like something you'd be like wow,
wow wow about really great episode by the way, she.

Speaker 4 (57:21):
Listened, it is a good episode. Good Yeah, And it
was a good update to it.

Speaker 6 (57:24):
I don't know, but like financial scandal, not really your What.

Speaker 4 (57:27):
Was the most recent Hood Politics?

Speaker 5 (57:29):
Maybe?

Speaker 2 (57:29):
Is that Politics? A great show? Yeah?

Speaker 4 (57:32):
Well, listen to Hood Politics with prop and sixteenth minute
and everything else from cool Zone Media and everything else
that Annie Reese does and listen to all of it
before Wednesday, because I will be quizzing you.

Speaker 2 (57:44):
Yeah, all right, Hi everyone, Bye.

Speaker 5 (57:49):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media,
visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com or check us out
on the iHeartRadio appts.

Speaker 6 (58:01):
Or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 2 (58:07):
That brings us to the end of this episode that
I guessed on of Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
with Margaret Kiljoy. Shout out to Sophie who is also
on the show and contacted me and Ian the producer,
who is great. Uh and yeah, it was just a
wonderful experience. We love them and go go check them

(58:31):
out again if you have not already. We will bring
part two of this two parter about vaccines soon, but
in the meantime, if you would like to contact us,
you can You can email us at Hello at stuff
Whenever Told You dot com. You can find us on
Blue skuy at mom Stuff podcast or on Instagram and
TikTok at stuff When Never Told You. We're also on YouTube.

(58:51):
We have new merchandise at compurerou and we have a
book you can get wherever you get your books. Thanks
as always to our super producer Christina, executive Prusumya, and
contributor Joey. Thank you and thanks to you for listening
Stefan Never Told You Struction of My Heart Radio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, you can check out
the heart Radio app, Apple podcast or if you listen
to your favorite shows