Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class Behind the Scenes Minis: All Things Clean About this episode Tracy talks about her background writing copy for sanitation and cleaning products. She and Holly also discuss how the implementation of the Wells' recommendations could have prevented a lot of illness.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
0:04 Speaker 01 Snoring, gasping for air during sleep, daytime sleepiness? I'm Shaquille O'Neal, and this shouldn't be anybody's experience. Ask your doctor about Zepbound Trisepotide, the first and only FDA-approved prescription medicine for moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea in adults with obesity.
0:20 Speaker 02 Zepbound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea, OSA, and obesity to improve their OSA. Zepbound is approved as a 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, or 15-milligram injection. Zepbound contains trisepotide and should not be used with other trisepotide-containing products or any GLP-1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if Zepbound is safe and effective for use in children. Don't share needles or pens, or reuse needles. Don't take if allergic to it, or if you or someone in your family had medullary thyroid cancer, or if you've had multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2. Tell your doctor if you get a lump or swelling in your neck. Stop Zepbound and call your doctor if you have severe stomach pain or a serious allergic
1:05 Speaker 02 reaction. Severe side effects may include inflamed pancreas or gallbladder problems. Tell your doctor if you experience vision changes before scheduled procedures with anesthesia, if you're nursing, pregnant, plant-to-be, or taking birth control pills. Taking Zepbound with a sulfonylurea or insulin may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and worsen kidney problems.
1:27 Speaker 01 Talk to your doctor. Call 1-800-545-5979, or visit zepbound.lily.com.
1:34 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
2:05 Tracy V. Wilson? You ever show up late to the game and your friends already saved your seat, your drink, even a plate? That's looking out. That's having your back. And that's exactly what AT&T does with the AT&T Guarantee. They know staying connected matters, so they actually guarantee a network that comes through when it counts. AT&T has connectivity you can depend on, or they'll proactively make it right, just like that friend who takes care of things before you even ask. AT&T: Connecting Changes Everything. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com/guarantee for details.
2:38 Speaker 05 This stress check, aka friendly have fun reminder, is brought to you by State Farm, because you deserve to decompress and protect your peace. For me, it's painting my tabletop miniatures. I know, random, but it works. Big stress, mini warriors, total reset. It helps me clear my head, slow down, and just breathe. Mental health matters, and hobbies help. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.
3:06 Holly Frey? Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.
3:17 Tracy V. Wilson? Hello and happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And I'm Holly Frey. We talked about soap this week. Yeah, we did. Here's a little backstory for why I had it on my list. When Holly and I first joined the podcast, we were moving from another podcast that we'd worked on together, had a totally different focus. And I tried to line myself up some initial starting episodes that I already had more background familiarity with to make this transitional process hopefully easier, so that I could have a sort of learning by doing of how to research and write these episodes
4:00 Tracy V. Wilson? with some stuff that I already had some foundational knowledge in, to make it a little easier. And one of those topics was soap, because one of my previous jobs was writing for a company that sold cleaning and sanitation products. And I wrote, like, product literature. I wrote newsletters for the businesses that we did business with.
4:25 Tracy V. Wilson? So I already had knowledge of various things related to soap and saponification and how soap was made and that story about the animal sacrifices being burned and washed down the mountain, all of that. And then part of it was like, is anybody else interested in this, in the aspects of it that I find interesting? I don't really know. And then part of it was just, you know, over time, I didn't feel like I quite needed the training wheel of things I already felt like I could almost write off the top of my head. And I never got around to it. But then we got a request for it. So great. Bring it back. Relearn
5:06 Tracy V. Wilson? stuff that I have forgotten in the, at this point, more than 20, well, more than 20 years since I had that job.
5:17 Holly Frey? Yeah. I have, we talked about saponification a lot in the episode we did on the lady who turned to soap.
5:25 Tracy V. Wilson? Oh, yeah. Which I forgot. I have not re-listened to that. And I remember doing the episode, but like, the details of it are not in my brain.
5:34 Holly Frey? Yeah. And I, of course, can't think about soap without thinking about Fight Club a lot.
5:41 Tracy V. Wilson? Oh, yeah. I also thought about Fight Club a lot. And about how to make soap, we must first render fat.
5:48 Holly Frey? Yeah. Which is, I mean, right, like, in Chuck Polynick's book and in the subsequent film, right? It's referencing all of the dirty things that have to happen to make soap.
6:01 Tracy V. Wilson? Right.
6:02 Holly Frey? And how that compares to our modern society, which looks very sanitized in many ways, but is ignoring all of the dirty things that have to happen to give you that sanitized experience. I really love that book. I really hate that a lot of people's takeaway was like, violence is cool. And it's like, you have missed the point entirely.
6:26 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
6:26 Holly Frey? And I really love that movie as well.
6:28 Tracy V. Wilson? One of the things that I noticed while doing this research is that a whole bunch of articles about soap were written in 2020 because of COVID.
6:36 Holly Frey? Yeah.
6:37 Tracy V. Wilson? A lot of discussion of where soap came from. This is one of the things that I have found weird about the beginning of COVID.
6:48 Tracy V. Wilson? Is that it feels like to a segment of people, the idea that you should wash your hands for 30 seconds was new information.
6:59 Holly Frey? Yeah.
7:00 Tracy V. Wilson? And stretching back to that job that I had where we sold cleaning and sanitation products to restaurants and grocery stores. Like I had been washing my hands, I had always been washing my hands regularly, but specifically washing my hands for 30 seconds with a little thing playing in my brain to make sure that I washed it for long enough. Like that goes back to doing that job more than 20 years ago. And so the seemingly surprise information that it seemed like about, yes, you should wash your hands and you should use soap. I was like, we should have all been doing this already, all of the time. And another thing that happened around that time was that there was kind of a little
7:45 Tracy V. Wilson? bit of freak out about whether it was okay to use the Dove Beauty Bar marketed as one quarter moisturizing cream to wash your hands during the time of COVID.
7:57 Holly Frey? Yeah.
7:57 Tracy V. Wilson? Because it's not actually soap. The answer, yes, it's fine. It's fine to do that. It's not technically soap. It does include surfactants and the surfactants are the important part
8:10 Tracy V. Wilson? to cleaning your hands sufficiently by washing them.
8:15 Holly Frey? Yeah.
8:15 Tracy V. Wilson? Because every time I came across another article that I was like, oh, and this is also from 2020 when everyone was thinking about soap. I'm still thinking about soap. Still washing my hands.
8:26 Holly Frey? I mean, listen, take away all of the cleanliness specific needs.
8:33 Tracy V. Wilson? Uh huh.
8:33 Holly Frey? Not entirely, but like, I'm always thinking about soap because it smells good. I'm a sucker man. Put pumpkin scent in a soap, I'm buying it.
8:43 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
8:43 Holly Frey? This is the first year that I've seen, and I know there are people that are going to groan at what I'm about to say. And yes, I am the most basic woman on live. But this year, for the first time, I found pumpkin scented. Laundry detergent. I bought like a case of it. I love that business. Pumpkin, everything. So, and I want it year round. So, yeah, I'm, I'm always, I'm all about that. Every marketer that makes Fru Fru Radonkadoodle soap that smells like cake, candy and pumpkins. They're like,
9:16 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
9:16 Holly Frey? What's Holly Frey's email address? We're a little short this, this quarter. We gotta just.
9:20 Tracy V. Wilson? Send them directly to Holly.
9:22 Holly Frey? Shoot some marketing her way because we know this will pan out.
9:25 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
9:26 Holly Frey? Yeah.
9:27 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. The fragrances are also like a, almost a whole separate history from
9:34 Holly Frey? Yes.
9:35 Tracy V. Wilson? The soap. And something that I did not get into here, I read an article that was not exactly like debunking the, the whole thing about using ash on wool and it would combine with lanolin to make soap.
9:50 Holly Frey? Oh, right.
9:51 Tracy V. Wilson? It, it didn't feel like it had been written specifically to debunk that idea. It was more like, here is an experimental approach to this historical fact of how people might have discovered soap. And the, this experiment was like, yeah, this, with the, with the wool and the lanolin, that did not actually make soap. But one fat thing that they found that did make soap was cleaning the like cheesecloth type of cloths that would have been used in perfume making. Where the, the perfume making would have involved, involved like an oil and the fragrance and then repeatedly cycling through the oil and the fragrance to like
10:35 Tracy V. Wilson? make the perfume that would stick on your body. And then you would have these cloths left over and you would need to wash the cloths. And they would be embedded at that point with like fats that had been used in the perfume making process. And that really did yield more soap, but is not what was mentioned in those Sumerian tablets.
10:58 Tracy V. Wilson? I found that very interesting. I also found it very interesting about how some of the marketing of soap as soap became like a real commercial industrial product, invented some concepts related to things like body odor as a product that needed to, or as an issue that needed to be resolved through the use of soap. And it reminded me a little bit of the coining of the term halitosis to sell mouthwash. Yeah.
11:26 Holly Frey? I do have a question.
11:27 Tracy V. Wilson? Okay.
11:28 Holly Frey? Because those things existed.
11:30 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, sure, sure.
11:31 Holly Frey? Bad breath and body odor did exist.
11:34 Tracy V. Wilson? Yes.
11:35 Holly Frey? So there is like a fine line of we've solved this problem. Versus any amount of this makes you wrong.
11:45 Tracy V. Wilson? Sure.
11:46 Holly Frey? Right? And did you find in any of your research? Like that tipping point where it started to be like, nothing that tips off the robots that you're human should, should be allowed.
11:59 Tracy V. Wilson? I found kind of oblique references to that and to like the differing standards around the world.
12:05 Holly Frey? Right.
12:06 Tracy V. Wilson? Like when I was in college, I had a girlfriend who spent a summer or a year abroad in France. And when she got back, she was like, I am so mad that now I have to spend all this time every single day showering and washing my hair. Because while I was in France, it was socially acceptable to like, have a couple of days pass. Like, I still felt like I was okay to be out in public if it had been a day or two since taking a shower.
12:44 Holly Frey? Right.
12:44 Tracy V. Wilson? But here in the US, it has to be every day. And it has to be like, the amount of time it's taking me to wash my hair every day really sucks. I'm mad that this is like what I have to spend my time on. And I have no concept of like whether she felt like she had a perceptible difference in her. Level of hygiene with an American versus a French standard. But she definitely felt like in the United States, if she wasn't going out and like if she wasn't showering before going out, that she was doing something wrong.
13:23 Holly Frey? Right.
13:23 Tracy V. Wilson? Does that make sense?
13:24 Holly Frey? Mm hmm.
13:25 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, I'm sure there's probably anthropological and sociological study onto those questions.
13:31 Holly Frey? Yeah.
13:31 Tracy V. Wilson? And like more specifically, how those standards are determined and then socially maintained.
13:39 Holly Frey? Yeah, yeah, it's a, it's super fascinating. I mean, there are also just like, the other element of it is that there are also just personal preferences within that spectrum, right? Of like,
13:51 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, yeah.
13:52 Holly Frey? I do not like when my hair is not freshly washed.
13:56 Tracy V. Wilson? Me too.
13:57 Holly Frey? But I know a lot of people who actually think their hair looks better on like the second or third day.
14:02 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, yeah.
14:03 Holly Frey? And they don't wash even every time they shower, which is totally fine. But like, everybody has like a different
14:10 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
14:11 Holly Frey? space in there where they feel comfortable. So it becomes a weird.
14:14 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
14:14 Holly Frey? The, the sort of like homogenization of like ultimate cleanliness as the goal.
14:20 Tracy V. Wilson? Oh, sure.
14:21 Holly Frey? Is always a little bit silly and weird to me.
14:24 Tracy V. Wilson? Sometimes an algorithm will take me on to, I will like wind up in curly hair maintenance videos.
14:33 Holly Frey? Oh, I get so many of those.
14:35 Tracy V. Wilson? Which is like a very different, very different kind of care than my hair, which is very straight. And less now that I'm older, but from my teens through age 40 was also very oily. And if I did not wash it every day, it felt gross. And while like natural skin and body care companies would be like, if you're doing it every day, you're stripping the oils. And if you just stop, then it will regulate itself. I did not find that to be true ever. But like a lot of people whose hair is really curly or people of different races and ethnicities.
15:10 Holly Frey? Oh, for sure, for sure.
15:11 Tracy V. Wilson? Shampooing a hundred percent bad idea.
15:14 Holly Frey? Yeah.
15:15 Tracy V. Wilson? I would wager that the couple of books that are more focused on cleanliness than on soap.
15:22 Tracy V. Wilson? Which came up in my research, but I did not get, I did not try to check them out or anything, because I thought that they would probably just take me down rabbit holes that were not going to help.
15:31 Holly Frey? Yeah.
15:32 Tracy V. Wilson? Probably have a lot more of stuff about that, like when, like how cultures de- develop their idea of what clean is and how often showering needs to happen to be considered clean.
15:45 Holly Frey? Yeah, yeah. And then there are cats that don't bathe at all. It's fine. They're fine.
15:55 Tracy V. Wilson? They bathe with their mouths.
15:57 Holly Frey? Yeah, yeah. Listen, we're in prime soap season, so I'm excited right now anyway.
16:02 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
16:03 Holly Frey? Getting all the hand soaps, stocking up for the year. I have a, you know, personal every day is Halloween soap rule, so there are always things that smell like autumnal stuff for the most part, with a case of bubble gums and roses thrown in.
16:18 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
16:20 Holly Frey? I am that person that has a stockpile of every scent you could possibly wish for.
16:25 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
16:26 Holly Frey? It's a storage problem. It's not a problem in my heart, just a problem of space.
16:31 Tracy V. Wilson? Right. There are definitely like a number of soaps and lotions and things that smell particularly good to me that I especially like using, and they make me feel a little happier. There have been times that I have like been on a vacation and whatever product line was being used in the hotel or like the spa, if I had a spa visit, has just made me feel so happy that I've been like, I'm buying that and taking it home with me.
16:57 Holly Frey? Yeah, all the time.
16:58 Tracy V. Wilson? So, yeah, yeah. Currently I have a lotion that I'm using that is, came directly, it's a vacation lotion that is making my lotioning process happen. It's like a little luxury every single day.
17:12 Holly Frey? Vacation lotion. Oh.
17:18 Speaker 01 Snoring, gasping for air during sleep, daytime sleepiness? I'm Shaquille O'Neal, and this shouldn't be anybody's experience. Ask your doctor about Zepbound Trzepatide, the first and only FDA-approved prescription medicine for moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea in adults with obesity.
17:33 Speaker 02 Zepbound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) and obesity to improve their OSA. Zepbound is approved as a 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, or 15-milligram injection. Zepbound contains Trzepatide and should not be used with other Trzepatide-containing products or any GLP-1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if Zepbound is safe and effective for use in children. Don't share needles or pens, or reuse needles. Don't take if allergic to it, or if you or someone in your family had medullary thyroid cancer, or if you've had multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2. Tell your doctor if you get a lump or swelling in your neck. Stop Zepbound and call your doctor if you have severe stomach pain or a serious allergic
18:18 Speaker 02 reaction. Severe side effects may include inflamed pancreas or gallbladder problems. Tell your doctor if you experience vision changes before scheduled procedures with anesthesia. If you're nursing, pregnant, plant-to-be, or taking birth control pills. Taking Zepbound with a sulphonal urea or insulin may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and worsen kidney problems.
18:41 Speaker 01 Talk to your doctor. Call 1-800-545-5979, or visit zepbound.lily.com.
18:49 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. Tune in for season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenx. Hosted by public health and policy expert Dr. Martine Hackett, Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition pushes the conversation within the rare disease community forward. Featuring guests living with MG, CIDP, myositis, SMA, and other rare autoimmune conditions, each episode explores hope, progress, and connection. How does research create new opportunities? How do shared experiences help light the way forward? How do we best show up for each other?
19:33 Holly Frey? Tune in to find out. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
19:44 Speaker 05 This stress check, AKA friendly reminder that your hobbies matter, is brought to you by State Farm because you deserve to lose yourself in the stuff that brings you joy. Here's mine: painting my tabletop battle miniatures. Yeah, seriously. After a long day, I grab a brush, pop in some music, and just get into it. And there's no wrong way to do it. It helps me clear my head, slow down, and just breathe. But it works. Big stress, mini warriors, total reset. No pressure, just paint, creativity, and a little reminder of what makes me happy. Some people bake, some people garden. Me, I paint warriors with interesting tech. And guess what? It works. You don't have to be good at your hobby.
20:27 Speaker 05 You just have to enjoy it. So carve out that time, tune out the noise, and do something that's just for you. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.
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21:13 Tracy V. Wilson? We talked about William Firth Wells and Mildred Weeks Wells, inspired by an episode of 99% Invisible that made me real mad.
21:24 Tracy V. Wilson? I re-listened to our Max von Peppen Koffer episode, which is one of the things that was discussed in that 99% Invisible episode. They were sort of focused on how Max von Peppen Koffer was one of the last people to like really hype up the idea that miasmas were spreading disease when the rest of the scientific and medical community was almost entirely at that point accepting the germ theory of disease, and how he was wrong about a lot of stuff. But he was right about some things, like he was right about indoor ventilation being really important.
22:09 Tracy V. Wilson? To help reduce the spread of of indoor diseases. And so it was very funny to me when I like listened to this episode of 99% Invisible and got progressively more frustrated. And then I re listened to that episode and was like, oh, I didn't find this extreme. I didn't find this frustrating at all when we recorded it, which I think was in early 2020, if I'm remembering correctly, because like the following five years had not happened. Right. But I, one of the things that I have found frustrating over the last five years is that the COVID pandemic made it so crystal clear that illnesses that spread through
22:54 Tracy V. Wilson? the respiratory system can be spread very easily in indoor environments with bad ventilation, especially if they are crowded. And like even back in the 2020 into 2021 time period, I was like, man, we just sort of accepted the fact that if you go to a con, you're probably going to come home with con crud. We could have been living in a world where there was enough ventilation and enough indoor air sanitation that maybe that would not have just been viewed as like the probable
23:37 Tracy V. Wilson? inevitable likelihood of going to a convention. And this is the same kind of stuff that Mildred and Richard were talking about like 100 years ago. I feel you. Uh huh. But the way I con, that wouldn't have mattered. Yeah. Like, I think if you're a person that goes to panels and maybe does other stuff, but if you're like going somewhere like Dragon Con where it's like huge drink ups, like people, you know what I mean? Like.
24:06 Holly Frey? I don't know that any amount of air fix it can
24:10 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
24:10 Holly Frey? can counter a bunch of drunk people singing in each other's faces.
24:15 Tracy V. Wilson? It's true.
24:16 Holly Frey? That's what I'm saying.
24:17 Tracy V. Wilson? Right. Yeah.
24:18 Holly Frey? So I think some of that is situational.
24:21 Tracy V. Wilson? For sure.
24:22 Holly Frey? And I, I mean, some cons probably have a different vibe than that, but I think so much of the con experience is about connecting with the people you don't get to see all the time.
24:34 Tracy V. Wilson? Uh huh.
24:35 Holly Frey? And it does tend to devolve into a little bit of, you know, nerdy gra bacchanalia that it may not have helped that much. If that, that may or may not make you feel any better about it. It still sucks. Nobody was doing it, but.
24:48 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, yeah.
24:49 Holly Frey? I feel like we would have all had to do Dexter's lab style, personal lamination to actually prevent con crud.
24:56 Tracy V. Wilson? Well, and I'm, I'm not saying it would have possibly eliminated con crud entirely, but like reduced it, fewer illnesses. And then, you know, I also sort of thought about the, their work with measles, which, you know, was then not that long after, I think after, I don't remember the exact timeline, even though we've done an episode on measles, like measles became preventable through a vaccine, but at the time that they were doing this work, it was not. And so it was seen as inevitable that children would get measles at some point during their childhood, most likely. And if not, they would get measles at some point eventually.
25:39 Tracy V. Wilson? And so it just sort of was accepted as inevitable that kids going to school would get measles. And their work seemed promising, at least as far as slowing down the spread of a measles outbreak, so it wasn't a sudden intense crisis. Could that have been built on to like more stop the spread of measles instead of slowing it down? Maybe things that are not quite as aggressively contagious as measles, because measles is incredibly contagious. It's like one of the most contagious illnesses that we know about. Could that have dropped way down the amount of disease, the amount of disease risk?
26:22 Tracy V. Wilson? I also have frustrations in part because in the last.
26:29 Tracy V. Wilson? Three years or so, I think the five-ish like respiratory illnesses that I have gotten,
26:39 Holly Frey? Mm-hmm.
26:40 Tracy V. Wilson? Three were contracted almost certainly at the doctor or dentist office.
26:46 Holly Frey? Yeah.
26:47 Tracy V. Wilson? And where, you know, I was not having face-to-face contact with anyone other than the doctor or the dental hygienist, but was in a facility where the air had been breathed into by lots of other people for a very long time, which is the kind of stuff that their research seemed the most, the most likely of like slowing down.
27:11 Holly Frey? Yeah.
27:12 Tracy V. Wilson? And then I also just have the general question of like, if we had been living in a world where there was already a focus, like a very strong focus on indoor ventilation and indoor air sanitation, if that would have meant less transmission of COVID, less need for as many long-term interventions against COVID, and if that might have meant less of a backlash to the idea of public health than what we are living through in this moment, who knows? That's all very speculative.
27:46 Holly Frey? Yeah. This is unfortunately, Milan Kandira's unbearable lightness of being, right? You can only have one life experience.
27:54 Tracy V. Wilson? Sure.
27:54 Holly Frey? You can't know what the other possibilities would have been.
27:57 Tracy V. Wilson? It is a good point. It's also normal to kind of wonder about this stuff and speculate.
28:03 Holly Frey? Oh, of course, of course.
28:08 Speaker 01 Snoring, gasping for air during sleep, daytime sleepiness? I'm Shaquille O'Neal, and this shouldn't be anybody's experience. Ask your doctor about Zepbound terzepatide, the first and only FDA-approved prescription medicine for moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea in adults with obesity.
28:24 Speaker 02 Zepbound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea, OSA, and obesity to improve their OSA. Zepbound is approved as a 2.5, 5, 7 point 5, 10, 12.5 or 15-milligram injection. Zepbound contains trisepotide and should not be used with other trisepotide-containing products or any GLP-1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if Zepbound is safe and effective for use in children. Don't share needles or pens, or reuse needles. Don't take if allergic to it, or if you or someone in your family had medullary thyroid cancer, or if you've had multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2. Tell your doctor if you get a lump or swelling in your neck. Stop Zepbound and call your doctor if you have severe stomach pain or a serious allergic
29:09 Speaker 02 reaction. Severe side effects may include inflamed pancreas or gallbladder problems. Tell your doctor if you experience vision changes before scheduled procedures with anesthesia, if you're nursing, pregnant, plant-to-be, or taking birth control pills. Taking Zepbound with a sulphonal urea or insulin may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and worsen kidney problems.
29:32 Speaker 01 Talk to your doctor. Call 1-800-545-5979 or visit zepbound.lily.com.
29:39 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. Tune in for season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenx. Hosted by public health and policy expert Dr. Martine Hackett, Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition pushes the conversation within the rare disease community forward. Featuring guests living with MG, CIDP, myositis, SMA, and other rare autoimmune conditions, each episode explores hope, progress, and connection. How does research create new opportunities? How do shared experiences help light the way forward? How do we best show up for each other?
30:24 Holly Frey? Tune in to find out. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
30:35 Speaker 05 This stress check, AKA friendly reminder that your hobbies matter, is brought to you by State Farm because you deserve to lose yourself in the stuff that brings you joy. Here's mine: painting my tabletop battle miniatures. Yeah, seriously. After a long day, I grab a brush, pop in some music and just get into it. And there's no wrong way to do it. It helps me clear my head, slow down and just breathe. But it works. Big stress, mini warriors, total reset. No pressure, just paint, creativity, and a little reminder of what makes me happy. Some people bake, some people garden. Me, I paint warriors with interesting tech. And guess what? It works. You don't have to be
31:17 Speaker 05 good at your hobby, you just have to enjoy it. So carve out that time, tune out the noise, and do something that's just for you. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.
31:27 Speaker 00 OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.
32:03 Tracy V. Wilson? So yeah, I am also interested and glad to know that there was, that Mildred Weeks Wells was like working at the capacity that she was working at during the time that she was, even though she was paid way less or not paid at all. Because we don't hear nearly as much about women doing that kind of work during that period.
32:23 Holly Frey? For sure. Do you, like me, want to know all of the dirt on what happened with their marriage?
32:29 Tracy V. Wilson? I want so much more personal information about each of them. That's why I said at the top of the episode that I have not read this book, Airborne by Carl Zimmer. I did get it. I got it the last thing in research. Like, I had already read all of these other papers and all of these other articles. I had already, like, I had gotten Williams' entire book. Like, I had done all of this stuff. And I was like, man, not only is... Not only do I have almost no biographical information about either of them, some of the information that I do have, I am confused by. Like, I was, for example, very confused by what was going on with Mildred's father's embezzlement thing.
33:13 Holly Frey? Right.
33:14 Tracy V. Wilson? And I was having a really hard time finding any reporting about it. So I finally got this book to like, just sort of try to confirm details about the two of them, which is one portion of that book. The biggest thing that helped me there was learning that her father's, the reporting around her father's accusations and trial and all of that, had been reported with his first and middle initial and not his whole first name, which that finally led me to newspaper articles that I could read about it. Whereas before that, I was finding basically nothing. And I was like, what is this financial mismanagement thing in Texas that I can't seem to find anything about?
33:59 Holly Frey? That seems to be a big secret.
34:00 Tracy V. Wilson? Seems, yeah, and like, all of the brief write-ups of her grandfather are almost glowing and how they talk about him. And I was like, but it seems like there was an embezzlement thing? Like, what?
34:14 Tracy V. Wilson? Having a really hard time. So, yeah, the fact that so much of that is just like a total mystery. I wish we knew more. And I definitely wish we knew more about some of the more gossipy stuff, like what specifically happened in their marriage? Was it really that the two of them were just difficult to work with that led to their losing their jobs? Like?
34:38 Holly Frey? Yeah. I also, you know, it seems like you did this research, so you might have insight that I wouldn't. But as we get to the end of their story, where they just kind of like are working on their own things. I'm like, is this one of those instances where they were living at a time where it was a little more stigmatized to get divorced? And so they essentially were separated.
35:03 Holly Frey? In behavior, but maybe not in declaration.
35:07 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, they were still legally married until the end of their lives, as far as I know.
35:13 Holly Frey? But just not, they didn't seem to be living a life together at all.
35:16 Tracy V. Wilson? No, Mildred did move to another city with Bud. And even then, it still seems like he was spending some of his time with them. But not like living with them full time.
35:31 Holly Frey? Right.
35:32 Tracy V. Wilson? I'm imagining to like maintain a relationship with his son in some way could be a reason for that. But yeah, it seems like for all practical purposes, they were not married. Even though they were legally still married and they were definitely not really research partners anymore in the last few years of their career after approximately 1944.
35:55 Holly Frey? And then I think about married couples who work together.
36:00 Tracy V. Wilson? Oh, yeah.
36:00 Holly Frey? And how often that creates really toxic situations. And I'm like, yeah, I could maybe see where people would want to be around. You know, I used to work for a married couple and it was a nightmare because I realized that they would argue through their employees.
36:17 Tracy V. Wilson? Right.
36:18 Holly Frey? And like, just, it just created havoc and it was suck. And I, I know, I know people do it.
36:25 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. Well, and so many companies today have rules about like, if married couples are both employed here, they cannot work in the same department. They cannot.
36:35 Holly Frey? Right.
36:36 Tracy V. Wilson? They like, especially one of them cannot supervise the other one.
36:40 Holly Frey? Yeah.
36:41 Tracy V. Wilson? And then in academia, there's this whole idea of like the quote, trailing spouse where like one spouse is the spouse that the college or university wants to hire. But they are married and they can only afford to move if the spouse can also find work. And like, that's a whole thing.
37:00 Holly Frey? Yeah.
37:01 Tracy V. Wilson? But the two of them were like. They were in a situation where they were, they were both working in the same department. I don't think he was technically her supervisor, but like,
37:12 Holly Frey? Yeah.
37:13 Tracy V. Wilson? They were working together on all of these things together and he was paid more than she was if she was paid at all.
37:20 Holly Frey? Yeah.
37:20 Tracy V. Wilson? And that does seem just like a dynamic that would be difficult.
37:24 Holly Frey? Yeah.
37:25 Tracy V. Wilson? Deal with.
37:26 Holly Frey? I feel compelled to say, I have worked with other married couples that were amazing.
37:29 Tracy V. Wilson? Sure.
37:30 Holly Frey? And did not have toxic garbage. In fact, one married couple that I started working at this company and I didn't know they were married for a long time because they were so hyper professional about like not in any way being in each other's business at work.
37:47 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
37:48 Holly Frey? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, oh, I wonder all of the secret.
37:54 Tracy V. Wilson? I do too.
37:55 Holly Frey? Meanderings of the Welles.
37:57 Tracy V. Wilson? I also wonder about their son because like everything that was written about him was, was pretty general. And also some of the ways that people described him contradicted each other. Like there was one paper, the paper that was sort of about the tuberculosis experiments that was written after his death. Use a word that we do not use today to describe him as intellectually disabled.
38:25 Tracy V. Wilson? But there was also a, a doctor who examined him when he was being institutionalized that was like, I don't think he has an intellectual disability based on his vocabulary and like what we can tell about his cognition. And his assessment was that it was a mental illness that involved psychosis and was possibly schizophrenia. Incredibly different from how another account had described him. So I don't really know.
38:54 Holly Frey? I think that's a good example of why it is important that
38:59 Holly Frey? there has been, and it's changing now, and I hope it continues to, like that thing where people are reticent when it comes to speaking about any such things. And as a consequence, there is a big gap in understanding.
39:13 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
39:13 Holly Frey? So.
39:15 Holly Frey? People's situations get described incorrectly all the time.
39:20 Tracy V. Wilson? Right.
39:20 Holly Frey? And I think it's getting better, but that is a problem, right?
39:25 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
39:25 Holly Frey? Yeah, I understand for some people it is uncomfortable or they don't want to discuss such things or they're worried they will say the wrong thing.
39:33 Tracy V. Wilson? Right.
39:34 Holly Frey? But yeah, it's a, it's tricky.
39:36 Tracy V. Wilson? And yeah.
39:39 Holly Frey? We need more information, not less.
39:41 Tracy V. Wilson? Correct.
39:42 Holly Frey? Not necessarily about any one given person, but about the possible various things that a person can, can be and have and do.
39:50 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, I agree.
39:52 Holly Frey? Anyway, that's my nerdy hippie moment today.
39:55 Tracy V. Wilson? I love nerdy hippie moments. Um, whatever's happening on your weekends, I hope it is as, as lovely as it possibly can be. We will be back with a Saturday classic tomorrow. You will have something brand new on Monday.
40:19 Tracy V. Wilson? Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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42:04 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
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