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My whole life, I've been told this one story about my family, about how my great great grandmother was killed by the mafia back in Sicily. I was never sure if it was true, so I decided to find out. And even though my uncle Jimmy told me, I'd only be making the vendetta worse. I'm going to Sicily anyway. Come to Italy with me to solve this 10 zero year old murder mystery. Listen to the Sicilian inheritance on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to stuff you should know. A production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. And there's Chuck. And Jerry's here, too. Back again in the trip of a lifetime. And it's the three amigos, the Three Musketeers, the trace caballeros. Stuff you should know.

That's right. Talking about e n t. Oi, oi, oi.

Hey, that was pretty good, Chuck. I was not expecting that.

Sometimes I wouldn't either.

Sometimes there's, like, a little. A little pause in between you talking and me responding, and it's because I'm just astounded. And that was a good example of that. You did great. Yeah.

Ent, baby. Let's do it.

Okay, so, we're talking today about testosterone, estrogen. What people commonly think of are the two hormones, the female hormone, the male hormone, and that those are what divides us. The sexes are binary. They're bisexual. There's male, there's female. Gender is a totally different topic, as we'll. We'll talk about a little bit. But if you have a lot of estrogen, you're female. A lot of testosterone, you're a male. And it turns out that we can trace that. That's all, like, generally incorrect. It's such a. Such a broad stroke explanation of estrogen and testosterone that it actually has tripped us up all this time. And just from researching this, Chuck, I learned, like, wow, this is if we had just never considered estrogen female and testosterone male. I think our general understanding of those two hormones would be so much deeper.

Yeah. And it's one of those things where we can trace back to a time where that sort of whole notion came from. And of course, it's early science. They were trying to figure stuff out. But starting at about the mid 19th century is when scientists started kind of going wild with animals and organs and doing things like, hey, rat, let me remove your testicles and let me put some ovaries in you and see what happens. And there was a lot of this going on. There was a british physiologist named Ernest Starling who actually coined the word hormone from the greek word to excite in 1905. And this is sort of right around that time, in the early 19 hundreds, when there were other scientists and physiologists doing all kinds of wacky experiments to see what happened.

Yeah, and we should say hormones are simply chemical messengers that basically relay messages and trigger responses or keep responses from happening in the body. And that estrogen and testosterone are two kinds of hormones, specifically steroid hormones, meaning they're made from cholesterol, which for some reason I find really gross.

So. Well, you might find this gross, too. Then there was an Austrian named Eugene Steinech who was doing these kinds of experiments that I was just talking about. And he was saying, like, come here, frog, let me poke around your testicles and get some liquid out of there. Let me, like I said earlier, let me take this rat, let me castrate it. Let me transplant some ovaries onto this rat and then observe what happens. And Steinach was one of those early scientists who kind of led to this sort of binary idea that, you know, if you do this, you're going to feminize a rat or you're going to masculinize a rat if you do sort of the vice versa operation. But very, very quickly, there were people, even back then, scientists that were like, oh, wait a minute. This is, it's not quite as binary as you're making it out to be. And there's plenty of examples and reasons why.

Yeah, you can almost lay the entire problem at the feet of Eugene Steinach. That he was the one who basically said that humans are bisexual, is how he put it. Binary sexes, male, female, and it depends on whether you have testosterone or estrogen. And like you said, he got pushback. There was one guy in particular, an embryologist named Karl Moore, who was like, hey, Stein, stop and think about what you're saying here. Even without your mad scientist experiments, female rats do all sorts of male behaviors and vice versa. And even with your flip flop ovaries and gonad rats, they're still doing behaviors that are, are not easily assigned to one sex or the other. So I'm not 100% sure that it's quite as cut and dried as you have explained it. And Eugene Steinek had Carl Moore murdered. Silence forever.

Not true. At least I don't think it is. Was that true?

I don't think so. I hope not.

I just thought he might have just leaned in with the pillow and gave him the forever hug, you know?

That's right.

So flashing forward a little bit to about the turn of the 20th century is when research got a little more serious about it. And they found that extracts from your ovaries could have beneficial treatments for things like hot flashes during menopause. And it could stimulate what's called estrus, which is where the word estrogen comes from. But estrus is like when an animal is in heat. If you've ever seen a cat or something or a dog in heat, it's pretty clear that something different is going on. And that word estrogen in 1906 comes from that word estrus, which is from the greek word oestros, which means mad desire.

It also sounds like a brand of yogurt.

Oestros. Yeah, oestros.

Yeah. So once these guys, like, this is the beginning of the 20th century, very late 19th, but mostly the first couple decades of the 20th century, scientists are starting to isolate hormones, and in particular, sex hormones, and they're like, well, what happens if you give them to humans now? Forget frogs and rats and all that stuff. And what they figured out very quickly is, like you said, they, like menopause, have been around for a while, and they're like, well, women have menopause, and estrogen seems to be the woman's sex hormone. Let's give them estrogen and see what happens. And it actually had a pretty beneficial effect. It's been long known that estrogen, given as, like a drug, can treat symptoms of menopause, like hot flashes and stuff. And the first estrogen, I guess, prescription drug, is called premarin, which has a perfectly legitimate big pharma sound to it. Right? Premarin. That's a great name for a drug, but it's even better if you know what it stands for.

Yeah. And this is. Well, should we say what it stands for or say what it is and then what it stands for?

I think you can do both simultaneously, actually.

Well, it's not a synthetic estrogen. It was actually a natural, isolated estrogen derived from the urine of a pregnant horse. So primarin stood for pre pregnant mare. Mare. And the end from urine. So premarin, pregnant horse urine.

Yeah.

And it was, I believe this is 1939, it was made of like ten different estrogens and was available commercially in the US just a few years later, and by 1992 was the highest selling drug in the United States.

Yeah. If you want to have a good idea of just how crazy the pharmaceutical market has become in the US, premarin was the, I think you said, the most prescribed drug in the US.

Well, the best selling, I guess that would match. Yeah, the hit single.

Exactly. So this hit single, premarin, in 1997, had revenues of $1 billion. Pretty, not shabby. It'd be about $2 billion today. Humira, the second best selling drug in 2022, had revenues of $21 billion. And isn't that nuts? Like, that's. That's just night and day compared to how far we've. I guess how far we've come is one way to put it. But the upside is premarin was. It was a lifesaver. Men were like, hey, I'd like you to be sexually available. Why don't you take this horse urine estrogen? And women were like, it solves my hot flash problems. Sold. So it actually really was very popular for a while. And it wasn't until, I think, 2002 that it just dropped off precipitously. Right, yeah.

And we should mention, too, that this was, you know, it was obviously for things like hot flashes, but they were also marketing it as a way to maintain femininity as you age. None other than William Masters of masters and Johnson's fame sex. Crank said that women should use the drug to avoid falling into the third sex or the neutral gender, which is very off base to say the least. But, yeah, in 2002, things changed because the Women's Health Initiative released a study about attitudes that really changed everything when it comes to how women, or people in general, think of hormone therapy. When they said that it can cause breast cancer, heart disease, blood clots and stroke, if you take what was called by this time primpro, which is primarin and provera, as sort of a cocktail, and they meant it so much, they said, we're even stopping this study. But it turns out there was just a lot of bad reporting about that. Right?

Yeah. There's a New York Times magazine article about menopause by a writer named Susan Dominus, who basically reported that, and the media just jumped all over it. There's like there's a 26% increased risk in developing breast cancer if you take prem pro, or generally have hormone replacement therapy. And that's whopping. That's a big, a big number, a big percentage, but in absolute numbers, it's actually not that big. So the average woman had a 2.33% chance of developing breast cancer. If you took Prempro, you had a 2.99% chance. So, like, that was your 26% increase. And in real terms, it sorted out to, based on the population at the time, an additional eight women developing breast cancer out of every 10,000 who were taking replacement hormones, nothing to sneeze at. Those eight women, I'm sure, would much rather prefer not to have breast cancer. But the point was that the risks of it were grossly overstated and that it got, but it got such a bad rap because of the reporting that for a couple of decades, just trust. And hormone replacement therapy dropped off and a lot of women suffered unnecessarily as a result.

Yeah. And I think they didn't even find that, um, the transdermal variety was, in fact, much safer, uh, than the other way of taking it.

Yeah, absolutely. So, like, if you take it orally, which is what it was always before, pretty much. It has to go through your liver to be processed, and while it's there, it can do all sorts of nasty stuff, side effects that you don't really want, like causing thrombosis and blood clots that can lead to heart disease, whereas if you do it transdermally, it just enters the bloodstream and it does its thing with minimal side effects. So we've reached the point today where there, um, your average gynecologist is probably going to say, the benefits, if you're healthy, outweigh the risk of taking it, especially if you are under age 60, and especially if you're under age 70 and you start. Apparently there's a, if the, if you have a gap between menopause and then starting hormone replacement therapy of a decade or two, then it can become pretty risky. And by the way, I don't have my lab coat on right now. I would advise you not to take gynecological health advice from me. Uh, instead, ask your doctor. But this is what I've seen from research.

Yeah. And that, I mean, you say that virtually every time you meet someone in person. I've heard you say those same words.

I'm big on that, for sure.

Say, hi, I'm Josh. Nice to meet you. I do the stuff you should know. Please don't take gynecological advice from me, no matter what comes out of my mouth at this dinner party, I mean.

It'S just a smart thing to say.

It is. So this is all going on on the estrogen side, on the testosterone side, and we're going to kind of bop back and forth between the two of these. That was isolated, I believe, in 1935. In fact, thats when the name testosterone got its name, which is sort of the big daddy male hormone. And well talk about all the versions of these in a second. And on its own, testosterone wasnt doing very much. But when they added estrone, which is a quote unquote female hormone, it became very powerful. And in 1939, there were a couple of guys, dude, named, I guess one guy, sorry, Leopold Ruzica. Oh, no, no. There were two guys and Adolf Boutenant of Germany. They won the Nobel Prize for chemistry by working on largely testosterone, but sex hormones as a whole. And none other than Mister Adolf Hitler was one of the early adopters when it came to testosterone treatment.

Yeah, he had low t. I meant to, I meant to send you this, and I'm sorry, I didn't. But I turned up something that there was a, in British World War two military files. There were like a bunch of ideas of how to, like, basically take, neutralize Hitler. And one of them was to start slipping estrogen into his food. And that over time, it would basically turn him from a maniac, murderous, killer psycho to maybe a little calmer, maybe a little more feminized. And the whole idea was that if you put poison in his food, he had tasters, and the tasters would die from the poison and he would know that he was being poisoned. That would not happen with estrogen. It would take place over such a long time, they wouldn't be able to taste it. That apparently was never even attempted or certainly not carried out. But that was someone's idea to take care of Hitler. It would have been hilarious, dude, to see that transition, like, had they done that, and then just to be able to look back all these years later and watch the progression.

There's a Benny Hill sketch in there somewhere for sure. So initially, medically speaking, the first use of testosterone was to try and cure homosexuality in males, which was a, needless to say, spectacularly backfired because all it did was it didn't alter any orientation. It just created, I guess, super tops and power bottoms and ramped up the sex drive. And then, of course, trans people. This was very early in the days of hormone therapy for trans people. It was actually going on. We did a whole episode in April 2019 called Michael Dillon, trans Pioneer, about the englishman who was, I mean, I think, probably the first person, at least from the female to male transition, to use that hormone in 1940.

Yeah, yeah. Definitely was from what we could tell.

And by the way, if you go back and listen to that episode, if you're like, oh, my goodness, we heard from listeners, we goofed up the pronouns on that one because we thought, and this is five years ago, we know better now, but we thought it would be a good idea to sort of let the pronouns follow the journey of Michael Dillon's life. We know better now, so just take that with a grain of salt.

Yeah, good coa. And while we're on that, we should probably say we're using male and female and man and woman. Just generally a shorthand, biological shorthand. With the advent of trans people, there's a much more specific way of talking about that. Specifically, we should be saying typically developing, assigned male at birth or assigned female at birth. People who haven't altered their hormones. That's tough to say over and over again, rather than man or woman. So please forgive us for that. We're not being disrespectful in that way. We're certainly not excluding trans people from this because this very much has a lot to do with trans.

Yeah. And, well, you know, that'll come in part two, obviously, for sure.

I say we take a break and come back and we'll start talking about estrogen.

Let's do it.

Bring a little optimism into your life with the bright side, a new kind of daily podcast from hello, Sunshine, hosted.

By me, Danielle Robet and me, Simone Boyce. Every weekday, we're bringing you conversations about culture, the latest trends, inspiration, and so much more.

Thank you for taking the light, and you're gonna shine it all over the world, and it makes me really happy.

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All right, so we're back with estrogen. Welcome to the studio. Estrogen, how have you been doing? Uh, so that is, um, usually you think of estrogen as one of the two female sex hormones, uh, with, uh, progesterone. And it is actually a family of three hormones, uh, the first one being estrone. And that is the. That's not the money. Estrogen, that's the weakest one. Uh, it menopause, you know, it keeps getting produced through menopause, right? It's made in the adrenal glands, it's made in the ovaries, it's made in fatty tissue, and it can actually serve as a sort of a warehouse keeping place for estrogen, right?

Yeah, for sure. So here's where we get to the idea that it's just misguided to think estrogen is a woman's sex hormone. And that's it. There's so much more to it. The whole reason you would continue producing estrogen as a woman in some form or fashion after menopause. I mean, if you're not having sex, if you can't reproduce any longer, why would you produce estrogen? You would produce a weaker version because it's still doing other things, like it's really important for bone growth and muscle development and to keep yourself active. There's a lot of stuff that estrogen does just beyond forming the reproductive system or for sexing females.

Yeah. And we also did mention, and this is probably if someone wants more, quote unquote proof, estrogen is found in plants like rice.

Yeah, I mean, we could just end the podcast right here.

Testosterone is not found in plants, only in the animal world, but we'll get to that.

All right.

The next one we come to that was e one, by the way. E two is estradiol, which is.

This is.

This is the money estrogen. This is the potent one. This is made in the ovaries of women and made in the testes of men.

What?

Once again, men and women both have each in different levels. And this is the one that really kicks in during puberty and then takes a break during menopause. Not a break, but more like a retirement.

Yeah, it goes to Florida.

Yeah, exactly.

Maybe. Yeah, Florida. Sure. For once, I'm just gonna stick with my original one.

Good.

Estriol is another one. This one is mostly produced during pregnancy to help the uterus grow. And it also helps with breastfeeding. It leads to most of the body changes during pregnancy. You can thank estriol for that. And there are other types of estrogen, but typically it's those three. Those are the big ones. And it's obviously, everyone knows estrogen is the reason that you have breasts and that your hips fill out and that it has a lot to do with a woman's monthly cycle. Right. And that's absolutely true. That has a lot to do with everything. Like, that's what estrogen does. But it is, again, it's important for metabolizing muscles, for preventing your muscles from injury. It also contributes to endurance, which if you read about ultra marathons, women tend to dominate those I was reading about, like short runs. Men can outrun women very easily. Marathons, typically men win. But then as you get further and further and further, and actually there's a moment, I think it's like, like 150 miles or some mind boggling amount of distance, women start to slowly overtake men. And then the longer you go, the, the further ahead. Women finish before men in tests of endurance like that.

And they think it's because they have higher stores of estrogen, which is helping their muscles work better.

So you also talked about good for like, you know, muscle growth and muscle formation.

Sure.

Um, also estrogen can help facilitate brain activity, um, skin elasticity.

Yeah.

Uh, which, you know, is that why, like, wrinkles happen as you age? Is that because of drop in, among other things, in estrogen?

I would think so. I think it's also just they've been around the block so many times. Like skin, I mean. Yeah.

Yeah. So if you're a doctor, Doctor Clark. Okay, why am I going wrinkly around the eyes here? What's going on with physiologically with my body, you know, it's been around the block. What more can I say? And also, don't take any gynecological advice from me.

Right. They'd be like, I thought you were a dermatologist. Oh, I'm neither, Evan.

Oh, boy. So, estrogen is something that can affect mood, but, you know, it's. It fluctuates. I think pre menopausal women have a range of about 30 to 40 picograms per milliliter, but it varies from person to person. And then, like we said, it rises and falls during the menstrual cycle. It's not like a set number. I think postmenopausal, uh, that drops all the way down from literally zero to 30. And then for men, for guys like you and me, yeah. Uh, we have a range of about ten to 50. I'm probably more like 55 or 60 would be my guess.

So I'm right there with you, buddy. So, again, the reason why men would have it at all is because it's not just a woman's sex or a female sex hormone. It does other stuff. Just. Just. I can't say this enough, because it was such a.

Sure you can.

Like, it was a. It was such an epiphany for me. I'm just like, oh, I had no idea that it was this. That things overlap this much.

Yeah.

I mean, I didn't think it was just, like, cut and dry, but I knew there was some crossover, but I didn't realize just how much Steinbock screwed us up with that whole binary thing.

Yeah, I was trying to make a joke about a pop act that crossed over, but I couldn't come up with it. Just think, someone send in a good joke there.

How about Beyonce? She's in a country.

I heard about that. Was it. Did you hear it? Is it good?

Yeah, it's fine. I'm not huge in the country, but.

So it's real country, then, huh?

No, it's like dance floor. Line dancing con. Yeah, sure. It is real country, yes, but it's not like. It's not like Hank or anything like that, but it's like. It's more like Garth. It's like a Garth Brooks song.

Oh, geez, I need to hear it. I thought it was more just like, hi, I'm Beyonce, and I put on a cowboy hat, so now.

No, she's from Texas. You know, she knows what she's talking about.

Yeah, that's true. Can we talk about the big t? Don't.

Please don't quote me on that I'm not in the bay hive either.

I went to that concert. It was great.

Yeah, I'll bet.

Can we talk about the big t?

Oh, we're here, huh?

Yeah, I mean, we're going to go back and forth, but t needs to. T needs. This. Tea is ready to speak, I think.

Oh, before we do, I want to say one other thing about estrogen. It apparently encourages physical movement. And you're like. So, like, with low estrogen, your will to get up and move or walk across the room or go take a walk is depleted because your estrogen is lower. It's as simple as that. Isn't that nuts?

Yeah, that's cool.

So, yes, now we're on to t. That's right.

The male hormone.

In part, yes. And that's no joke. Like, for sure. Estrogen helps form females, testosterone helps form males. And apparently, in the uterus, they're both exposed to copious amounts of testosterone. It's just what differentiates females from males or keeps females from developing into males? Because I didn't know this either, Chuck. We all start out as females. Did you know that?

I think we talked about that in our puberty episode.

Okay, so just bear with me for a second. We all start out as females, and then we're all in. We're all kind of inundated with testosterone. But females typically have something called aromatase, which is an enzyme that converts testosterone into estrogen, much more prevalent in. In the feta, in the placenta, with the fetus. And so it's basically like batting away all the testosterone so the baby comes out assigned female at birth. Pretty interesting, huh? Like, without the injection of testosterone, we would all be females. Or without the presence of aromatase, we would all be males.

That's right. And then once things are, you know, I guess what, that's around the 7th week or so?

Yeah, something like that.

That's when the testicles start to produce testosterone. That's when the factory opens up. And I don't think we mentioned, but testosterone is a member of a family of androgen hormones. Boy. Should we even try and say these or just say the shorthand.

I want to say them.

Knock yourself out.

Andro stenidion. I practiced androstenida. Androstenodione.

Yeah, I think that's right.

Dehydroepiandrosterone, also known as dhea.

Sure.

Dehydroepiandrosterone, sulfate, Dheas, and then dihydrotestosterone. Dht.

Yeah. Nice work.

Thanks.

You get to move on in our medical competition. You could be a doctor.

But. But I'm not, so don't listen to me for gynecological advice.

Never, never. Or any medical advice.

Sure.

So, like I said, the testosterone factory is open at about seven weeks, and the reason we went back and kind of named the others is because some of that testosterone at that age is converted into the DHeA, right? Yeah, I'm not going to say it. And that is sort of the money hormone for making the penis form and grow in a prostate. And about seven months in is when the trigger is kicked off by testosterone for testicular descent. Even though that can happen after you're.

Born, it makes a hilarious sound.

Oh, man. Where's your slide whistle?

I don't have it on me. Maybe Jerry will work it in.

Yeah, I think you actually isolated some slide whistle cuts, so don't tell everybody I know.

Um, here's one of the facts of the podcast to me. I had no idea about this, but, um. So male babies are flooded with testosterone. They don't have a bunch of aromatase to convert all of it into estrogen, so they become male. And all the stuff that you just mentioned happens, but they do have some aromatase, and some of that testosterone is converted into estradiol. And that estradiol actually is what forms the male brain. So estrogen forms the male brain starts out as testosterone converted into estradiol. It causes the changes in the brain that create the male brain.

Whatever, snowflake.

I just, I just think that's awesome. Like, it also just goes to show you, like, just how. So, I mean, I just imagine what an intricate chemical dance this is and how you just adjust this a little bit and adjust that a little bit and all sorts of different outcomes can happen. It's just fascinating.

Oh, for sure. I mean, when you're a little kid, there's not a lot of difference between your testosterone levels. If you're a little girl, little boy, I think usually under ten nanograms per deciliter. It's at puberty where things just go hog wild. And little boys, testosterone just shoots through the roof. It rises in girls as well, but nothing like it does in boys. Once you become a big man, a full grown man like us, you're going to have t levels between 301,000 if you have normal t, women have much lower levels between 15 and 70. And this is in little boys, it's what's going to trigger your voice, to change your bone and muscle mass to grow. All of a sudden, you're going to have body hair and facial hair and stuff like that. And also. And I think we've talked about this at some point, but it is related to male pattern baldness. But I don't think they're still at the level where they can say, like, hey, if you have high tea, then you're more likely to be bald.

Yes. And that's really, really important to point out, dude, is that we are not at a place in microbiology or human chemistry where we're like, this is what this hormone does, and this is what that hormone does. And one of the reasons why is because the same hormone can have wildly different effects depending on at what stage in a reaction it comes in or in what tissues or what regions of the brain or the body it's interacting with other things. So when you add all these different. Not just other kinds of hormones, but also, like, neurotransmitters and neuromodulators and all this stuff, it just becomes exponentially more complicated and complex. So we're still kind of at the place where it's like, yeah, testosterone's for boys and estrogens for girls, and we're making tons of headway. But generally speaking, we're still at a very basic level in understanding what hormones are capable of. And then also, on the flip side, looking at behavior and saying, like, oh, well, clearly, aggression is related to high levels of testosterone.

Yeah. And we'll get to that coming up in a sec, for sure, Evan. When there have been lots of studies. Well, we need to talk about testosterone dropping over the years, because men don't experience, like, a. A drop off in testosterone like women do with, uh, menopause and estrogen. But, uh, it does decline in both men and women testosterone by about a percentage a year, starting in your thirties, uh, sort of early to mid thirties, generally, although that can vary as well. And it can vary just from time to time, too. A mans level of testosterone can go up or down fairly dramatically for different reasons over short periods of time. Evan.

Yeah. And just like with estrogen, testosterone is also responsible for bone growth and development and remodeling. Apparently, the testosterone is useful for the hard outer layers of the bone, and estrogen is for the spongy interior layers. That's cool. And also, something else that stood out to me is men's estrogen levels are roughly similar to women's testosterone levels under normal circumstances.

Yeah, I guess so. Right?

Yeah, I think it's pretty interesting.

I'm looking at the numbers.

They add up.

Well, you were talking about aggression. I mean, should we take a break and talk about that, or should we wait?

I say we take a break now. We've already. The monkey's already flown the cooperation.

All right, the monkey's out of the bag. The cat is out of the cage. We'll be right back.

Bring a little optimism into your life with the bright side, a new kind of daily podcast from hello, sunshine, hosted.

By me, Danielle Robet, and me, Simone Boyce. Every weekday, we're bringing you conversations about culture, the latest trends, inspiration, and so much more.

Thank you for taking the light, and you're gonna shine it all over the world, and it makes me really happy.

I never imagined that I would get the chance to carry this honor and help be a part of this legacy.

Listen to the bright side on America's number one podcast network, I heart. Open your free iHeart app and search the bright side.

I never thought I'd take my three young kids to Sicily to solve a century old mystery, but that's what I'm doing in my new podcast, the sicilian inheritance. Join us as we travel thousands of miles on the beautiful and crazy island of Sicily as I trace my roots back through a mystery for the ages and untangle clues within my family's origin story, which has morphed like a game of telephone through the generations. Was our family matriarch killed in a land deal gone wrong? Or was it, by the sicilian mafia, a lover's quarrel? Or was she, as my father believed, a witch? Listen to the Sicilian inheritance on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

IHeart podcast update this week on your free iHeartRadio app. Fodor's Guide to espionage, a sixties era spy story of the world's first and greatest travel writer, Eugene Fodor, as he jet sets around the globe. Tongue unbroken. Season two this podcast explores complex concepts of identity, resilience, erasure, and genocide. Table for two season two. Think of the show as a deconstructed Oscar party in podcast form. Each episode takes place over the romance of a meal and feels like you're seated next to a different guest at that dinner. Hear these podcasts and more on your free iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Okay, Chuck, so we're back. We found the cat, put him in the cradle with the silver spoon, so everything's back to normal.

Hmm. Saddest song.

Oh, it is. It is pretty sad. Especially if you like your dad.

Especially if you had problems with your dad.

Oh, yeah, I guess so. I guess so.

Yeah.

Yeah. Is there any circumstance where that wouldn't be a sad song?

I don't know. Maybe the perfect amount of care and love from your father and with. With no accompanying abuse.

Gotcha. Perfect.

I don't know.

I'm sure that's very prevalent.

Yeah.

Um, so, yeah, we're talking about testosterone, we're talking about sex, we're talking about aggression. Um, all of those things seem to be very much intertwined in the public consciousness about testosterone. Right. The more testosterone you have, the more stallone esque you are, the more likely you are to wear, like, a floor length mink coat with no shirt underneath, which I have to say, if I could wear that, I definitely would. If I could rock that look. It's a good look.

And, Josh, I think, if you remember, I wore that exact code in the movie. In my film Nighthawks.

Is that what that was from?

I think he wore a mink coat in Nighthawks.

Okay.

Although he was a cop in Nighthawks. He couldn't afford a mink coat.

No way. Not on a cop salary. Not an honest cop.

An underrated movie.

So is it?

Yeah, I don't know if it holds up.

Great.

But I thought it had a pretty good ending. We won't spoil.

No, no, it's. And it's definitely spoilable, for sure, but.

And that was my stallone, by the way. People are just like, what are you even talking about? Why did Chuck slur there?

For a little while, I thought it came through loud and clear.

Okay, good.

But the idea is that, like, the whole reason the Rambo films were made, particularly two and three, is because Sylvester Stallone experienced a massive spike in testosterone and had to get it out in some productive way. Right?

Oh, I thought it was because Rambo was. No expendable.

I haven't seen those movies.

Huh? No, no, no. That was a joke from Rainbow two.

Oh, well, he was also in the expendables.

Yeah, I know. I wonder if that had anything to do with that line. Probably not.

Could be at inter. I'm sure there's some people who are like, shut up and talk about aggression and testosterone. You're making me aggressive.

Well, what if you neuter a male dog? That's a good sort of first example.

That's a great entree, Chuck. Most people would say that if you. If you neuter, if you remove the testicles of a male dog, it's going to become much more submissive, much chiller. Probably a lot more fun at parties. Will come pick you up if your car breaks down, that kind of thing. And there is some data that shows that that's the case, that some dogs are calmer once they're neutered. But the other studies have shown, like, the exact opposite is true, that dogs can become actually more aggressive when they're neutered, which is a head scratcher of a puzzler, if you ask me.

Yeah, I mean, I just went through this with Gibson, and he's not more aggressive because that's a. Aggressive is a weird word. Cause aggressive isn't the same thing as, like, you know, heaper. No, just like a excitable puppy. Like, that's not aggression necessarily, but it definitely did not chill him out at all.

Yeah, yeah. I don't know that it's supposed to, but, yeah, I think some people think it does. But the idea that it would make a dog more aggressive, so it had, like, no impact on him as far as, like, his, his energy level went, is what you're saying.

Yeah.

So imagine if he was generally like that before, and then you neutered him and then he started, like, biting people. Yeah, that's what happens with some dogs. And they're like, well, that doesn't make any sense whatsoever. One of the explanations is that we think testosterone is tied up with confidence more than aggression, and that a dog that has this chemical confidence removed through neutering can actually become more. More nervous. And nervous dogs frequently will bite or bark more than they did when they had confidence via testosterone.

Yeah. And that ties in perfectly to the fact that, and this, to me, is one of the facts of the show. But they have done studies, and male athletes, like, you know, superior male athletes, actors, believe it or not, blue collar workers and confidence artists, con men, they all have above average levels of testosterone.

Yeah.

So there you have it.

So, too. All right, case closed. So, too, though. And this is the state of study right now with studying the stuff where we're relating human behavior to hormones like testosterone or estrogen. Like, there's results like that out there, but that we arrive at the question, well, wait a minute. Do, do people who have higher levels of testosterone naturally gravitate to those professions or does being in a profession like acting or being a con man raise your testosterone level? They're like, well, hold on. Okay, I got this. We're going to go study prisoners, specifically violent criminal offenders, and see what their testosterone levels are like. Sure enough, they found that their testosterone levels were above average. But that still raises the question, do higher levels of testosterone make you more prone to antisocial violent behavior? Or does being in prison raise your levels of testosterone. We still don't know at this point.

Yeah, yeah. It's pretty interesting because I think a lot of people, like the general, just old way of thinking was like, of course it does.

Right. And what they're finding, they think, is that it's more that testosterone is released when you need it.

Yeah. It meets the occasion.

Right. It's not the thing that's driving the behavior. It's like, oh, this guy says it's go time. We better release some. Some testosterone to keep it going.

Yeah. This next thing is super interesting to me. Moment to moment throughout your day, your testosterone is going to rise and fall some. And they have found that if you lose, like a running race or a basketball game or an arm wrestling match or even a chess match, you will lose testosterone. So it's not even necessarily can be something as cerebral as a chest match. But losing reduces your testosterone. Winning increases and boosts your testosterone. And they even found, this is crazy to me, that they sampled male voters for, like, an election, and just your candidate losing causes a drop in testosterone.

Yeah. Isn't that nuts? That was among McCain voters because it was the 2008 election. Yeah, it's crazy.

Yeah. It's like. It's unbelievable. Like winning and losing, even if you're not participating other than voting.

Yeah. So they also found that they think that social expectations can kind of modulate behavior. Right. And this kind of ties into that idea that, um, testosterone kind of helps foster a response rather than triggering a response. Right.

Right.

So essentially what they found is that with testosterone levels, we can correlate it as far as if. If you are having. If you're faced with a fight or flight situation and you choose to fight, you probably are experiencing an uptick in testosterone levels. Again, that's, you didn't have testosterone, and now you're choosing to fight. They think the exact opposite is true, that you've chosen to fight and your testosterone levels go up. On the other hand, they found that if you choose to flee or say, not be aggressive, your cortisol levels, your stress hormone levels increase. So our response seems to be based on what we think society will either reward or punish, and then based on our decision from that, our hormones kick in to help kind of carry out whichever response we decide to go with. So one other thing that I found was that that surprised me is that testosterone isn't just made in, like, the testes or the ovaries, depending on your sex assigned at birth, but that it's actually made locally in the brain, and that testosterone can also be transformed into different types of estrogen in the brain, too. And they think that locally produced is what it's called.

Um, testosterone in, like, our neural pathways, um, has much more of an effect on behavior, mood, that kind of stuff than the stuff that's made in the testes or the ovaries. And that actually accounts for some of the baffling results we've gotten where, you know, if you. If you take the. A blood sample of somebody and find that they're. They were just being aggressive, but their blood doesn't show any kind of spike in testosterone. Well, that would account for that, because it's not the stuff that's floating around in their blood that's making them do that. It's the locally produced testosterone in their brain that's connecting with their amygdala or something like that that's helping them. Their aggressiveness, I guess, along.

And now I know everyone wants to get to the part about sex and what testosterone does there. And testosterone does sort of directly ramp up the sex drive in men and women. And they have done trials where they have shown that it increases the libido. But just because your t falls doesn't necessarily mean it's going to decrease your libido. It can, but it doesn't mean it has to.

Right? Yeah. Again, there's baffling results we get sometimes from just studies of what we presume has to do with testosterone or estrogen, and it just doesn't quite jive.

All right, so I guess now we can sort of finish up with some talk of intersex people and where we stand now with hormone therapy, right?

Yeah, because one group, there's a lot of different people besides postmenopausal or perimenopausal women who take hormone replacement therapy, intersex people, people who are born with ambiguous genitalia, because, like we mentioned, that whole amazingly intricate dance of chemicals and hormones during development, fetal development, can just take one step to the left or one step to the right, and all of a sudden there's just a different outcome that happens to some people. And some people take hormone replacement therapy to either become more like the gender they presume that they would have been assigned at birth or the gender that they feel like they were assigned at birth, but their genitalia doesn't quite match. There's a lot of different outcomes that are basically considered conditions that you can kind of help alleviate with hormone replacement.

Yeah, for sure. Another one. And I'm pretty sure we talked about this in our female puberty episode was starting in the 1940s, and maybe even before that, estrogen therapy and hormone treatment could help. Basically what they would say. Like, you don't want your daughter to grow too tall, so they would use a hormone blocker. You don't see that as much today. It was called precocious puberty, which is, you know, still a thing that can happen, I think, if you enter puberty, I think it's, like, a year or two to what's considered too early or, you know, just with. Outside of the normal range. Um, you can also use these hormone blocking drugs. Uh, I mean, they still use them today, but that it's not, like, so you don't grow too tall. It's basically just to save off puberty and to halt precocious puberty in its tracks. Uh, also, if you are a trans kid, uh, you can use a hormone blocker to just sort of hit the pause button to give you a little time to decide what kind of puberty to go through. Evan.

Yeah. Because once you go through puberty, uh, particularly if you think it was the wrong puberty for the gender you identify with, there are going to be changes that are essentially irreversible, aside from surgery. Like, if you go through female puberty, uh, but you're a trans male, um, you. You're still going to have breasts that have to be removed. Or if you're a trans woman and you went through male puberty, your vocal cords are going to think you're going to have a deeper voice, and maybe an Adam's apple surgery will have to remove that. That's how powerful the. The hormones that get released and the amounts that they get released in during puberty. So if you're not quite sure which gender you belong to yet, using hormone blockers can actually help. Kind of, like you said, buy you some time until you figure out which way you want to go. Evan. Yeah.

And as far as testosterone therapy goes, if you have a deficiency in testosterone because of hypogonadism or maybe from hiv or something like that, it's obviously going to help with that. Also, problems like. And here's where it gets a little tricky. Depression, low muscle mass, low energy. There is some evidence that can improve sexual function, but not as much that it can increase your low energy if you're just sort of losing testosterone at that normal rate of, like, one. Uh, what was it? I can't remember.

The, um, 1% a year, I think.

Is it 1%? Yeah, 1% a year. Um, but if you have an actual deficiency, they've shown that it can improve, uh, sexual function and just don't have as much proof with energy level.

So does that mean that the ad that has Frank Thomas and Doug flutie in it, talking about how they're, like, crushing their workouts, that actually doesn't work?

Well, I don't know if they're just saying if they're claiming they just have a natural decline in age or if they had a deficiency to begin with, because that seems to be the differentiating factor.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Who knows?

I mean, let's call up Doug Flutie.

And let's get him on the horn.

Exactly.

You got anything else?

No, I got nothing else.

I got nothing else either. This is a very enlightening podcast episode. I should say a lot of stuff I didn't know about, and now I know more. And you still shouldn't take my advice, medically speaking.

Never.

Since Chuck said never after a nice, hearty chuckle. It means it's time for listener mail.

Hey, guys. I was turned on your show about six months ago and have been rapidly consuming multiple episodes each day, going back and forth to work. I heard the school bus yellow episode this morning and thought you might not have found this little nugget. You pointed out, Mister Cyr Sire was credited with the standardization. I believe you also noted some other districts had already turned to bright paint jobs on school busses. But on March 23, 1931, the Pleasant Hill tragedy near Towner, Colorado, was because had a blizzard that came in that morning, the school shut down, sent the kids home, and one of the school busses ran off the road, stuck in the snow for 30 plus hours, resulting in the death of five of the 20 students and the bus driver.

Oh, my God.

The aftermath theorized that a brightly painted school bus would have been much easier to spot in the whiteout and might not have sat waiting so long to be found. So busses in Colorado adopted the yellow standard by 1939, and the proposal for Mister sire became a national standard. Unfortunately, it was a reactive, not proactive, solution brought on by a spring blue lizard on the plains of eastern Colorado. That is from John Coltz. And I was just curious. John didn't say. I guess that school bus might have been white.

I would think so, yeah.

Not a great color.

No, no, for sure. Thanks a lot, John. That was a really amazing email. Never heard of that one. It's terrible. If you want to bring us down terribly like John did, you can send us an email, wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to. To stuffpodcastheartradio.com Dot.

Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart radio visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Bring a little optimism into your life with the bright side, a new kind of daily podcast from hello Sunshine, hosted.

By me, Danielle Robet and me, Simone Boyce. Every weekday we're bringing you conversations about culture, the latest trends, inspiration, and so much more.

I am so excited about this podcast. The bright side. You guys are giving people a chance to shine a light on their lives. Shine a light on a little advice that they want to share.

Listen to the bright side on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search.

The bright side my whole life I've been told this one story about my family, about how my great great grandmother was killed by the mafia back in Sicily. I was never sure if it was true, so I decided to find out. And even though my uncle Jimmy told me, I'd only be making the vendetta worse. I'm going to Sicily anyway. Come to Italy with me to solve this hundred year old murder mystery. Listen to the Sicilian inheritance on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I heart podcast update this week on your free iHeartRadio app, Fodor's guide to espionage a sixties era spy story of the world's first and greatest travel writer, Eugene Fodor, as he jet sets around the globe. Tongue Unbroken season two this podcast explores complex concepts of identity, resilience, erasure, and genocide. Table for two season two think of the show as a deconstructed Oscar party in podcast form. Each episode takes place over the romance of a meal and feels like you're seated next to a different guest at that dinner. Hear these podcasts and more on your free iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.