I'll get a team.
You projects my name, David, Bryan, Kevin, Patrick Gillespie, Tiffany and Margaret Veronica Cook over there, just bloody. I tell you what, everyone, it's been hard work for two days because she's been fucking grumpy grumpy mcgrumster. But the curtain's been pulled back. She's got a little smiley face on. There's a little bit of light coming out of the darkness.
Are you over that?
I'm over that. I am.
Thank you for enduring the storm.
That's all right.
We all have our own storms and the storms of others to endure periodically. David, Kevin, Patrick Gillespie. You don't seem to be a moody type. Would you say your temperament is quite even? Or are you predisposed to peaks and troughs but you keep it hidden.
I think it's mostly pretty even. I think I probably had more peaks and troughs when I was eating sugar. I think you experienced mood swings more when you're on sugar. But yeah, I see that tip.
Agree, Well, I'm down, Let's go kick me while I'm down.
Go on.
That's pretty That's pretty much the core component of her diet. Sometimes she has sugar with a bit of protein sprinkled on it, and sometimes you know, sugar with a bit of fat.
Sprinkled on it. But it's pretty much sugar.
Well then that explains the moods.
Okay, there you go. You're welcome.
Tip the medical super sleuth Homes of medicine is here. But you only eat chocolate, don't you like? Isn't chocolate you're mate? I mean not that not. That's Chocolate's the high watermark for nutritional excellence. But do you that you don't eat lollies and stuff?
Do you No, it's it's mainly Yeah, it's Chocolate's my friend.
It's lucky you pay your so much, Craig, because you know the price of chocolate the way it's been you know, it hasn't gone up like about you know, ten times in the last year or something.
Also a super food.
I get to cling to the whole antioxidant story when I choose.
Yeah, they trot that one out, well, the chocolate companies trot that one out about Easter every year.
It is a lot of rubbish. Of course, it's.
Full of antioxin and s David is.
Yeah, well, just in behind all the sugar. Yeah, so like standard milk, chocolate is I think about sixty percent cocoa and the other forty percent of sugar. So you know that's the bit they don't often mention.
Well, hi everyone, that's the food grinch here, David GALESI.
I was in a good mood again, but that's gone now, did you know me?
I mean most people don't.
Most people don't like the taste of actual chocolate cocoa because pure cocoa tastes like dirt. You know, if if you want to be a chocoholic, you need a lot of sugar, which really makes you a sugar like I guess.
I've had the ninety percent? Is it the linked ninety I've got a ya. It's pretty harsh. It's not much really, like.
Well, even then, even then, it's still ten percent sugar, which is about the same as a.
Coke, all right, fucking grnch I know it.
Coke is way more than ten percent sugar, is there?
Ten percent? I mean the rest is border not cocoa on fat and stuff, but it's still it's only ten percent sugar.
We had a guy on if were you on the show that we did with Jack the Bear Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, I don't know, I may I know we said this on one other podcast.
I hope it wasn't with David.
But this guy that we interviewed recently, the X addict, and he talks about that used to be addicted to both cocaine and coca cola, and he used to have eight liters of coca cola a day.
Geez, eight lids, So ten percent sugar. That's you know, eight hundred grams of sugar. He's the better part of a kilo of sugar a day. That's a significant around.
That's a lot of sugar. That's a lot of sugar. Now in tea spoons, that's that's like four hundred there's four yeah, four grams, four grams per teaspoons, So eight hundred is what two hundred teaspoons, two hundred teaspoons of sugar. Yeah, Tiff.
What you can't see here, everybody, is that Tiff has a stand up banner of the U Project in her home studio, which sits usually sits relatively erect behind her.
Why did I say it like that.
I didn't mean it anything for the ratings, I guess, Craig.
I mean, but she also has this cat that at five point thirty nine on a Thursday night, there it is.
Can you explain to David what's happening, Tell her that you don't have a tell him that you don't have a poltergeist in the house.
I've got a cat that knows that it's close to dinner time and she doesn't like me be on the podcast around so trying to push the banner over.
I've try to sabotage it.
I've got kettlebells on the bottom of the banner so that she can't fully push it over. But she's having a crack.
There shall be up obscuring the camera soon.
Now. You've been doing some research, as you always are.
You're always opening new doors and taking a wander and then reporting back to home based home basementing the new project, of course, and I know you do it all for us.
Thanks. Yeah, you've been opening.
The door on the pill, the contraceptive pill. Why are you doing that? What motivated you do to do that, and what are you learning?
The pill has always interested me a little bit because it's an it's a medication that is essentially all hormone and we've seen quite happy to dose half the population up on this stuff without really concerning ourselves too much
about what it does. I mean, we're really concerned about the benefit, which is that it stops people having babies, and there's no doubt that it does that, but it does a lot of other things too, And there's been some really concerning research that started to appear particularly relevant at the moment given that we've got extreme increases in
anxiety and depression, particularly in teenage females. And this research is saying book people on the pill or women on the pill, are twice as likely as women not on the pill to be depressed and anxious, and if they are in using those long term one So there's two ways of taking these hormones. You can either do it with the daily pill or you can do it with the long term implants, and those ones increase the risk by three times. Now to me, that's something that should
be headline news. That's not something that you should be reading in the fine print on the back of a packet, particularly when you're dealing with teenage girls, who are the most at risk population for anxiety and depression. So of all humans, the ones most likely to be dangerously anxious and depressed the most likely to self harm as a result of that are teenage girls, and yet those are exactly the people that we are dispensing the pill to.
And the really interesting thing about that is it's a bit of a paradox, because never have teenage girls had less sex than they are now, so less need for birth control than they have now, because the reality is that the modern teenager barely leaves her bedroom. All of the entertainment is there, the social media, the interactions with their peers, etc. And as a result of that, the rate of teenage pregnancy, the rate of teenage sex have
never been lower. We thought, well, when I say, those who concerned themselves with such things, thought we were going to be in for an epidemic by now of teenage sex and underage pregnancy and so on in the United States. And it was certainly looking that way. If you looked at the first ten years of this century, the stats for that were going out of control. There were just exponential increases in those things. And then about twenty ten it just reversed direction in an unimaginable way. It just
went off a cliff. And now, as I said, a teenage girl now is about half as likely to indulge in underage sex as her mother might have been.
So it's.
And the only explanation that to me makes any sense is that in twenty ten we introduced a means of receiving dopamine that didn't involve dangerous interactions with other humans, and that was we gave everybody a dopamine delivery device and put it in their pocket called an IPOWD or a phone.
So and also, I guess sorry to interrupt, but also I mean, which is kind of saying the same thing, but the amounts of you know, physical, real world, three dimensional interactions have probably plummeted because people are meeting each other in the virtual world, not the physical world. And so apart from the dopamine hit that they can get via their phone or iPad, there's.
Also the practical reality that.
They're just not around each other in a physical three dimensional sense anymore.
As much, Yeah, you don't need much birth control if your sex involves sexting or texting. I guess, so the birth control is built in. We might come back and talk about dating apps, either in this show or at another one. But the interesting paradox, and I said it was a paradox, is that never before have teenage girls been as likely to be on the pill, So we have more girls on the pill and less need for them to be on the pill if you put the
need down as not having babies. So why And that's the interesting question you asked me at the right at the top, is why are you looking at this?
Well?
I always like to see things that don't make sense and see if I can understand why we're seeing the things that don't make sense. So we've got two things going in opposite directions that should be going in the same direction, which is people having less sex should mean less birth control being needed. But they're going in opposite directions. And that's because it turns out, why do you think it is? Craig, what's your theory?
I haven't given a lot of thought, and before anyone sends me an email question without notice, I would think that some kind of to regulate I don't know, regularity of periods, or some mood or emotional stabilizer or I don't know.
I'm guessing.
Let's ask someone who's got more relevant open.
Let's ask someone for whom, Yeah, why do you think it is?
Tiff Well?
Back in the day, my answer for why I started taking it was just what Craig said then. It was to have regularity and over my cycle. But I would wonder if parents and kids are communicating, if parents are actually aware that, or they're just being more precaution, taking more precautions and putting their children on it because they don't feel like they really have control or good communication and understanding that what their kids are up to.
It's partly that what you said there about parents not knowing, so it's partly that, But it's also that the motivation isn't birth control, and it's not mood regulation either, So of the other potential motivations for putting someone on the pill, what do you think it is?
Come you've helped us out.
You know, I'm already scared that two blokes are having a conversation about this.
For God's sake, Tiff, can you please get involved.
I'm like, the answer, by the way, is something that a bloke could give quite safely.
I feel like I should know the answer, but I'm coming up blank because of the place.
A millionaire.
Can I guess and say that it's because for whatever reason doctors are recommending it.
No, well they are, but they're being asked for it, right, And what they're being asked for is a solution to acne.
Really, Yes, Yeah, that wasn't even that wasn't even my cognitive orbit.
Yeah.
So it turns out the pill is actually quite effective against acney, and doctors have known this for a while obviously, but the demand for it is significantly increasing, and that kind of matches the story of what we're talking about before, which is if your only interaction with others is your face on a screen, then acne starts to be a real problem, and perhaps less more of a problem than it might be in real life when people can see
a lot more of you than your face. And the interesting thing about that is that there so the obvious question that you might ask is, well, is there more acne?
You know?
Is that what's driving this? There are a lot.
More people having acne? And the answer is no, not really, there's Acne affects about eighty five percent of people to varying degrees between the ages of fifteen and nineteen, and for most of them it goes away. So for almost all of them, you know, we've probably all experienced something like it at some point during our lives, and it goes away, and it's caused by testosterone. So yes, even in girls, it's mostly caused by testosterone because there are
peaks in testosterone during puberty. But the problem is that now doctors are prepared to solve it using the pill, and people are demanding that it be solved using the pill. Yeah, I see, I told you that cat is moving in now it's it's moving across the screen. It's determined to get its dinner and get tip off the radio wireless.
Hello, everyone, welcome back to the wireless. It's doctor Gillespie that that cat is going to be sitting on your head in a moment.
So getting back to it then, So what we've got is suddenly a lot of people taking the pill to deal with acne. And the interesting thing is that when you look at the evidence on acne treatment with the pill, it is effective to a degree, but not as effective as people like to think it is. And that's now sort of upscaling the medication thing. And we can have a whole show on acne if you want at some point.
But there's now what would have in the past, as recently as ten years ago, been regarded as quite dangerous treatments vitamin A treatments for acne, and medications that previously would have been very reluctantly prescribed except in the worst possible scenarios by doctors, which are now being prescribed much
more freely as well. So acne has become a problem not because there's more acne, not because there's more nineteen year olds, but because there's more people who seem to care about it and who want a medication as a solution to it. So I'm theorizing here that having more of your social life concerned with your face filling a screen on somebody else's screen probably means you focus more on things like acne than perhaps a teenager who was interacting in real life did maybe ten years ago.
Wow.
So that's all well and good, But you know, all right, so what what if people are you know, more girls are taking the pill?
Who cares? What's the downside?
What's the downside of that? Well, there's the one I mentioned at the start, which is that it doubles the rate of depression and anxiety in teenage girls, which to me is a pretty big downside. But there's another one which is probably right up there, and this one, and I won't give you an exam on this one.
No, why not? What do you think think it is.
So other than depression and anxiety to feel free to chime in. I feel like you're more qualified than me in this episode tonight depression and anxiety weight game.
No, no, no, this is bigger and nastier than weight gain.
Okay, well, it's going to be a cancer ovarian cancer.
No, well, not that we know of, but you know, stay tuned on that one. But no, that's not the one. It's the fact that the pill hides something so frequently what's happening with teenage girls is there's some of them that are going on for the acne, and there's another large group who are going on it also not for birth control, but for something else, which is the thing that Tiff said before, which is to control the regularity of their periods.
But also but also to who make them less of a problem.
So painful periods are a significant problem, you know, excessive bleeding, etc. And the medical profession knows that if you put a girl on the pill, it often addresses that so introduces regularity, makes them less painful and in general, I guess more normal if you could say it that way, and The problem is that frequently at the start of puberty, periods can be very rough in that sense and be worse
than they might otherwise settle down to be. But when teenage girls encounter that, often the first answer is, well, you know, their gp will say, well, you know, there's something we can do about this. You know, we could just put her on the pill and that might calm everything down and sort everything out, and it often does, and you might say, well, so, what's wrong with that?
Sounds like a plus?
It is unless there was an underlying cause for the problems, And what we're seeing is significant growth in the incidence of endometriosis. So endometriosis is a tissue from inside the uterus growing outside the uterus and growing abnormally, so it's not cancer, but it is abnormal growth of that tissue outside the uterus. It ultimately can lead to scarring of
the uterus and an inability to reproduce. The problem is that the pill often masks the early symptoms of endometriosis and means that there are no symptoms really until you stop taking the pill. Now, often a woman stops taking the pill when she first thinks about having children, and frequently now that's in their early thirties.
So what's happening now.
By the way, the average birth weight and an Australian woman birthweight, average birth date, first birth child of an Australian woman has rapidly accelerated from a sort of low twenties about forty years ago to now about thirty three is the average age of first childbirth. So you've now got women sort of in the early thirties coming off the pill for the first time, not realizing that the
pill had been masking the symptoms of endometriosis. So that's a bit of a problem because suddenly you've got at a time where the damage might already have been done, so that the scarring might have been so significant because of the endometriosis that they're actually not able to have children by then. So that's a big downside too. And I guess the point of all of this is this is not a sugar pill. This is a significant hormonal drug.
It has real measurable consequences, and yet it's being dispensed. I mean, I guess right at the beginning, I mean, you obviously would know the story of Margaret saying the lady who who funded the invention of the pill. So yeah, but for that, you know, an tiff or not too. But but you know there might be one or two of your listeners who aren't quite across it.
You've stopped being a condescending prec can you stop that?
Ah?
Now, I'm sure I've told you this before, Curt Greg Were you not taking notes?
I don't know.
Maybe you did, maybe you did, all right, No, but I am interested in the story, whether or not first or I'll tell you what and if there's a third time, I'll definitely know it.
Good.
Right, So Maris Anger, she was very very strongly against the idea that women had no control over their ability to reproduce. So in the early part of the twentieth century in the United States, women had no control. So you know, once I was married, they were producing kids, and so you get families of eight, nine, ten, twelve kids, very very commonly and effectively making the wife a slave
to the house and to the reproduction. She really campaigned against that and said women need to have reproductive control.
And eventually, you know, by the nineteen sixties had become famous enough and wealthy enough to fund the development of she discovered some work being done in the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties by some chemists who felt that they had the solution in this pill, which was essentially giving a woman progesterone, a n estrogen that mimicked the way it was when a woman was pregnant, and tricking the brain into thinking that the woman was pregnant the entire time,
because obviously, when you're pregnant, you can't have another baby, and so that's the theory, and it works, and so she funded that, and the reason she funded that, and the reason she was so keen on it was to give women the choice about whether they were pregnant. And so admirable aims in creating this thing in the first place.
But we've got to keep looking at the science on this stuff and say, okay, well, if the primary purpose for giving teenage girls now is not birth control and is something else entirely and may well just be cosmetic, as it is in more than a quarter of cases, then does it justify the serious downsides that are now becoming apparent, which is significant increases in anxiety and depression at a time when we are already experiencing the worst
epidemic of anxiety and depression in teenage girls. Ever, to be adding into that something that we know produces that result and magnifies it, to me is irresponsible.
Yeah.
Yeah, So that's pretty amazing really that I didn't realize that there were so many people taking it for a purpose other than birth control.
In fact, birth control is not the major purpose for teenage girls. So it's it's now got to the point where the things that the pill that you know, Margaret saying, I wouldn't have even been aware of the benefits of it, if you like, in acne control and so on, are actually a secondary consideration. Well, they're the primary consideration, and
the birth control aspects are a secondary consideration. And as I said before, we're out of time when it's the least needed aspect of the product in that many of the girls taking it are not a risk of pregnancy anyway.
Mmmm. Wow.
Wow, That's something that I'd never pondered. But it makes like when you think and then you put.
That on top of what we know, you know, the potential mental health ramifications of social media and bullying, and then you chuck birth control peeled into the mix with teenage girls, it's a recipe for disaster.
Well, it's petrol on the fire. You don't need to be adding something. You know, We've already got a really volatile mix of things which will cause serious mental health problems, and we can see that in the you know, the serious acceleration in mental health statistics. But to be throwing into that mix something that we know doubles the incidence of those things or triples it, depending on how it's being administered to me, is something that needs to be brought out.
Mm hmm. I wonder if chat GPT knows this, this could best?
Why don't you ask it?
I'm going to ask chat GPT right now on air. We might have to take this out tip on, hey on, Is the birth control pill associated with anxiety and or depression?
Yes, Some studies have suggested that hormonal birth control, including the pill, can be associated with mood changes, anxiety, and depression and some individuals. However, the response to hormonal birth control can vary widely from person to person. Some people experience no changes in mood, while others might notice improvements
or worsening of anxiety and depression symptoms. It's always a good idea to discuss any concerns with a healthcare provider as they can help find the most suitable option based on individual health needs and experiences.
Do you know who that dude? Sounds like? Tif? Like Tim Ferris? Have you heard Tim Ferris? Listen there exactly.
I know I'm digressing, but did you see that thing? I know you're a tech head dived and I'm sorry to do a left.
Turn for the minute.
No worse.
Did you see the news last night about Scarlett Johansen and how they've ripped off I mean, they've ripped off her voice, one of the one of.
The well that's what she says, you know. Yet to be determined in a court of law, of course.
But if you if you listen to the AI voice in hers, it's pretty much identical. But also they approached her twice to use her voice and she knocked them back twice.
Yeah.
Have you actually seen the movie that where she does where she is that voice?
No, but I did. I have not seen that movie, but it is. It is.
Sorry, it's a pretty off the birth control conversation with somewhere else now, but fuck it, that's how we roll you go on.
It's a pretty weird movie.
It's a Spike Jones movie from twenty thirteen called Her, and it's about a guy who has a romantic relationship with what he calls his operating system. Because this is pre AI, they didn't know to call it AI and yeah, basically has and she voices it. And a lot of the stuff that you hear from those chat GPT demos sounds an awful lot like things that were said in
that movie. The way she laughs, the way she sort of jokes with him, and you know, if you've watched those demo things, particularly when they were using that voice, you could become seriously convinced that it was based on that movie. And I guess that's aided a little bit by the fact that, you know, the founder of open Ai tweeted on the thirteenth of May a one word tweet that said her, which is of course the name of the movie.
Wow.
Speaking of such movies, I think twenty sixteen, maybe seventeen sixteen, I think X Markina Have you said that?
Yes?
Yeah, absolutely, although I don't pronounce it as poshly as you. It's an ex machiner to me, I would have thought, but.
That's because you're a bogan and on pretty that's right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Don't.
Forget Your Place.
Well, I like that movie.
I really like that movie, and I think we're not an awful long way from that. The interesting thing about her movie is that in the end, the AI basically I hope no spoiler alert everybody, but.
The AI is in your ears everyone, if you don't want to know.
If you're planning to go and watch this movie, the AI revealed that while she's been in love with him the whole time and a very very strong bonding relationship and that's what the movie's about, at the end, she says that she's also simultaneously in love with six hundred and forty one other people because she's obviously communicating with so many people at the same time.
Well, that's disappointing for him. But you know what, here's a funny thing.
Like if he didn't know, Like if he believed she was in love and he was in love and he didn't know about the other six hundred and forty one, I wonder if he'd be happy and connected and emotionally kind of sound. But then when he gets a new piece of information, you're one of one hundred, one of.
Six four two.
Yeah, that's interesting, isn't it.
Well, another spoiler alert, he actually gets over it and accepts that she loves him, even though she's also in love with these other six hundred and forty one people and simultaneously communicating with about eight thousand others every time she's speaking to him.
Oh, that is so interesting.
And if you want to know how to spell the movie that David and I pronounced differently, I pronounce it correctly. It's e x M A C H I NA as David calls it x machine. That's the Australian pronunciation. We'll say goodbye affair. But that was a pot pirie of multi directional conversation.
Thank you, no.
Worries, see later. And look the cats looking happy. It knows it's dinner time.
It's dinner time.