Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Worst Birth Control Device Ever Invented

Jan. 5, 2021 - Behind the Bastards

01:26:40

Part One: The Worst Birth Control Device Ever Invented

# usaid policy rt ravenholt raymond pearl ah robbins chinese exclusion act dalkon shield erwin lerner eugenics history hugh davis iud usage lebensraum margaret sanger medical malpractice miles w lord population control

Part One: The Worst Birth Control Device Ever Invented exposes the Dalkon Shield, a 1971 contraceptive by A.H. Robbins that caused severe infections and deaths due to its unsealed nylon string acting as a "bacterial expressway." Despite a known 5.5% failure rate, the company sold over 2.2 million units while hiding copper salts to evade FDA regulation, eventually shifting sales to USAID under Director R.T. Ravenholt at a 48% discount after learning of its flaws in 1972. This tragedy, leading to Robbins' 1985 bankruptcy and the collapse of U.S. IUD usage, is framed as a direct legacy of late-19th-century eugenics and white supremacist ideologies that evolved into global population control policies, linking historical racial exclusion to modern contraceptive distribution. [Automatically generated summary]
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Trust Your Girlfriends 00:02:07
	This is an iHeart podcast.
	Guaranteed human.
	When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
	I vowed I will be his last target.
	He is not going to get away with this.
	He's going to get what he deserves.
	We always say that.
	Trust your girlfriends.
	Listen to the girlfriends.
	Trust me, babe.
	On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
	I'm Lori Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
	This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
	I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
	An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
	My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
	Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
	Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
	Check out my newest episode with Josh Groban.
	You related to the Phantom at that point.
	Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
	That's so funny.
	Share stay with me each night, each morning.
	Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
	What's up, everyone?
	I'm Ego Modem.
	My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
	My dad gave me the best advice ever.
	He goes, just give it a shot.
	But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
	If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
	It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
	Yeah, it would not be.
	Right, it wouldn't be that.
The Pill vs Shield 00:16:12
	There's a lot of life.
	Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
	Welcome to Behind the Bastards, the podcast that is only ever introduced properly once, and it's this time.
	So you got your one.
	Yeah, thank you.
	This is the only time, Zovi.
	I'm proud of you.
	Next time I'm going to be back to just shouting the name of a dead dictator or screaming incoherently.
	I wouldn't have it any other way, Robert.
	This is our one.
	This is our one.
	And that good introduction was to celebrate our very special guest for today's episode, Samantha McVeigh of Stuff Mom Never Told You.
	Oh, I feel so special.
	Thanks.
	Thank you.
	Thank you, Samantha.
	Not related to friend of the pod, Tim McVay.
	You had to do it.
	I knew it was coming.
	I was really, really scared.
	Spelled differently.
	I'm a donkey.
	Let's just go put those two caveats in there.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I mean, he's, you know, we always bring up, we always bring up old cousin Timmy when we can.
	Who doesn't?
	Yeah.
	Cousin Timmy and Uncle Ted are North stars.
	No.
	You know, we're not talking about terrorists today, but in a way, we kind of are.
	We're talking about a bunch of people who thought that they were doing good things and wound up having a larger negative impact than any single terrorist I've ever heard of.
	And that's always a fun story.
	Mostly, yeah, actually, absolutely.
	Yeah, the mass.
	Well, and white women and white women.
	There's a white woman who factors pretty centrally into this story as well.
	But yes, mostly white men.
	Yeah.
	So, have you ever heard, Samantha, of the Dalkon Shield?
	I have not.
	Please tell me.
	Oh, this is a bad story.
	Oh, no.
	Is it gonna like break our friendship that's just beginning?
	Yeah, no, it's gonna shatter everything.
	Oh, hell, here we go.
	None of this is going to be good.
	So, obviously, Samantha, the IUD or intra-utera device is a very popular form of birth control, at least from like the user satisfaction.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Most people who get them tend to be happy with them.
	Gynecologists emphasize that the devices are extremely safe and effective.
	And in fact, by some counts, the basic idea behind an IUD, which is a device you insert into the uterus in order to stop pregnancy from happening, goes back.
	It could go back as far as a thousand years.
	People have been doing versions of this for a long time.
	Can I just say I'm so excited that you have me on for this episode?
	Oh, yeah.
	I don't know if it would be more fitting.
	Sophie, good job.
	Robert, great job.
	Sophie nailed it on this one.
	All I did was read about a horrible, horrible tragedy for three days.
	Yay!
	So, obviously, modern IUDs tend to be hormone-based, which works better with the caveat that it can cause some health issues.
	The marina would be the best modern example of that.
	There's currently a big class action lawsuit brewing against Bayer Pharmaceuticals.
	The device has kind of a nasty tendency to perforate the uterus of its wearer, which keep that in mind.
	We'll be talking more about that in a minute.
	Yeah, there's also issues with the synthetic hormone the marina releases, progestin.
	There's another set of lawsuits that argues this can cause idiopathic intracranial hypertension and basically things that mimic tumors, which you know has happened to someone pretty close to me.
	And yeah, it's messed up.
	But also still kind of being litigated.
	We don't know exactly that it's the IUD that caused it, but obviously, like, you know, any kind of medical device, there's issues.
	And I don't think, you know, it's possible Bayer's culpable to some extent in hiding aspects of it, but it's also possible that they did nothing wrong and that just, you know, when you have a device out like this that's hormonal over the course of years, you start to realize their side effects.
	That's a pretty normal part of medicine.
	There's always like at least 5% or less chance that you hear that extra warning.
	Yeah, exactly.
	So I don't like I certainly, you know, whatever is actually happening with the marina, we don't really know the full extent or the full case of it yet.
	And it doesn't seem like a case where people were just going off whole hog and doing something they knew were going to hurt people.
	The story of the Dow Con Shield is a very different tale.
	This might be one of the darkest stories in the history of contraception.
	Also, it sounds like a sci-fi name for a bad weapon.
	Yeah, it sounds kind of like a spaceship, actually.
	I expect that to be on Star Trek.
	Someone tell me.
	Yeah, I think it'd be a Romulan vessel, maybe.
	Yeah.
	Okay, that went way farther than that.
	Maybe a Cardassian.
	But Samantha and I went, what?
	There was a moment of boss.
	Yeah.
	What have I gotten myself into?
	Okay, keep going.
	So the first modern IUD was invented in 1909 by a German guy.
	It was made out of silkworm gut, and it was not very popular.
	Jesus.
	Probably not hard to see why.
	I don't know that it was a bad IUD, but silkworm gut doesn't seem like something you would want to put in your body.
	I don't know.
	Yeah, Ernst Grafenberg, who was another German, invented the ring IUD not long after.
	He's also, Grafenberg is the namesake for the G-Spot.
	Yeah, and as a result, he was very unpopular in Nazi Germany.
	Both because he was focused on the fact that women could feel pleasure and on stopping you.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	The Nazis also weren't big on the concept of contraception because that meant less German babies, which was not their own relations, of course.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Specific genocides.
	And anti-genocide for one group of people, I guess.
	So not that probably shouldn't even go down that road.
	So wrong show.
	Okay.
	Relatively decent IUDs started being invented in the early 60s, and the device has gained rapid popularity among people with uteruses and a desire to avoid getting babies in said uteruses.
	Uteri?
	I don't know.
	This state of affairs.
	Uteri?
	I don't know.
	I'll allow it, but I don't think it's still.
	I think it's uteruses.
	I've never had to say the plural.
	So this state of affairs continued until 1971 when a pharmaceutical giant named A.H. Robbins debuted the Dalkon Shield.
	The Dalkon Shield featured a revolutionary design.
	And like it, like, what's a bad revolution?
	Ah, they're all pretty great.
	Imagine a bad revolution.
	It's not a good revolution.
	It looks like...
	Yeah?
	I'm trying to picture one.
	Keep going.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I'm trying to get this word picture in my head so I can follow along.
	I'm going to actually suggest Sophie finds a picture and sends it to you while I describe it.
	Some people, most people will describe it as looking like a crab.
	I actually think it looks more like a trilobite.
	It's a tiny piece of plastic with like five spiky legs, and the legs are meant to stop it from coming free once it's inside of you.
	But it kind of looks like the trilobite, the silhouette of a trilobite.
	Like you look at it, and it immediately looks like something that shouldn't be inside a person.
	Okay, so I'm thinking of the matrix, that thing that comes out of the stars.
	Yes.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	It does look like the thing that comes out of Neo's stomach in the Matrix.
	You're going to be so dead.
	I'm happy when I saw this in a second.
	Oh, no.
	Like, I don't have a uterus, but as soon as I saw it, I was like, that should not be in a person.
	Oh, no.
	It crawled and it is going to eat up your body.
	It looks like a monster.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	Fantastic.
	Everybody loves that story.
	Honestly, it looks for all.
	Yeah.
	As much like a space invader as it does like a crab.
	So yeah, the legs were kind of meant to hook in place inside of your uterus, and it also had a string, which was how it could be removed later.
	And we'll talk more about the string later.
	Like, obviously, a lot of IUDs have strings.
	They tend to do them differently than the Dowcon Shield did for a very good reason.
	Did you just open the image?
	Because you just made a face.
	Oh.
	Yeah.
	What do you think of that?
	That looks like a shoehorn with tentacles.
	Like an old school shoehorn with tentacles.
	What is happening?
	We can debate on what it looks like, but it definitely looks like something that should not go in a person.
	That is a misplaced keychain.
	Yeah.
	It's not what you put inside.
	It's a clickchain.
	You don't put that in yourself unless you're really bored.
	I mean, if that's your thing, you do you.
	Yeah, I mean, yeah, no shame.
	But like, if that is your thing, you're probably going to the doctor.
	You need to see a doctor immediately.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	So, yeah, as I stated, the legs were kind of meant to hook it in place inside of your uterus.
	It had a string.
	And most importantly, for what's going to come next, the shield was invented by two male doctors, Hugh Davis and Erwin Lerner.
	Davis was the gynecologist, and he was a major opponent of the pill, which was new at the time, and at the time had a lot of problems.
	There'd just been like a big congressional trial over it because it had been, the companies selling it had misrepresented the side effects.
	And I think they may like that it's better now, but obviously there's still side effects to the pill.
	So there was a big backlash against the pill because the companies that had been selling had been like, this thing, it's just consequence-free birth control.
	And it absolutely is not.
	And so people were, there was a big backlash against the pill.
	And Davis, this gynecologist who makes the Dowcon shield, is both like, doesn't like the pill and also sees an opportunity in the backlash against it.
	And so he and this guy, Lerner, form a company called the Dalkon Company, and they start marketing their shield as an alternative to the pill without any side effects.
	Unlike the pill, which had side effects.
	Let me guess that that's factually incorrect.
	Yeah, it didn't wind up being true.
	I just really am hung on the fact that it's called the shield itself.
	Like the name, the naming of it all together, the whole thing.
	I mean, to be fair, it kind of looks like a shield, I guess.
	It does kind of look like a shield.
	Yeah.
	Shoeborn keychain weird cooking shield.
	Crab shield.
	Keychain shield.
	Yeah.
	Horrible.
	Horrible.
	Definitely horrible.
	So, yeah, the pharmaceutical giant A.H. Robbins, though, buys into Dalcon's marketing scheme and purchases the shields because they want the rights to sell it and manufacture it and stuff.
	And they launched an unprecedented ad blitz, the biggest ad campaign that had ever preceded a contraceptives release onto the market in the United States is launched by A.H. Robbins to sell the Dalcon Shield.
	And I'm going to quote from the Embryo Project now to talk about that.
	In 1971, the A.H. Robbins Company, producers of the cough medicine Robotussin, bought the device from Davis and put it on the market.
	The A.H. Robbins company began selling the shields in the U.S. and Puerto Rico and launched a large marketing campaign for the device.
	The campaign emphasized the safety of the IUD compared to traditional contraceptive pills.
	According to reporter Robert Thomas, prior to government regulation of birth control, many Americans were concerned with the safety of birth control pills and sought safer alternatives.
	The manufacturers of the Dalcon Shield capitalized on that, claiming that the device was safer than existing methods of birth control.
	So that's, you know, kind of the.
	Including the pull-out method?
	Yeah.
	I'm just that's the safest method, obviously.
	The only method with no consequences is the pull-out method.
	Works 100% of the time as long as you pull out fast enough.
	Behind the Bastards is sponsored by the pull-out method.
	Robert, I'm glad to be a part of this.
	You know what?
	Not the worst fake sponsor we've had.
	So man, it's become a lot of fun.
	Well, the pull-out method is heavily sponsored by Raytheon.
	Raytheon, the more kids you have accidentally, the more targets we have for missiles.
	Hey.
	Yeah, sorry.
	So good.
	You're so good at this.
	Robert, lose people.
	Slowly.
	No, the Adri's alone, fake or real.
	Yeah.
	I buy it.
	I don't know what it was.
	You can't stop advertising.
	So, yeah, the big ad blitz comes out.
	And the Shields Adventors, like the guys who actually made the Dalcon Shield, had conducted an internal study before they sold it to A.H. Robbins.
	And their studies showed that the device had a failure rate of about 1.1%.
	And other IUDs on the market had a failure rate of 2% to 3%.
	So they advertise of like 99% effective, better than all the other IUDs.
	That was another big part of their claim to fame.
	It was billed as completely safe, reliable, and consequence-free.
	And since it was mostly plastic, it was made in the same factory as Chapstick, another A.H. Robbins product.
	It retailed for $4.35, which made it one of the most affordable methods of long-term birth control on the market.
	So that all sounds fine.
	1.1% failure rate.
	Cheap, affordable, made with the chapstick people.
	I'm just wondering how there's, do they give the chapsticks that help you to load that up with chapstick and try to stick it in yourself?
	Yeah, with chapsticks, you get a discount if you use it if they let you use a chapstick.
	I can still.
	Yeah.
	I keep thinking about it.
	Oh, that would be better than Rob is done.
	Every time they say it, I keep thinking of the radish.
	The Daikon radish.
	Oh, the Daikon radish?
	Yes.
	And like, it kind of has sprouts like that.
	Yeah, it would be a safer method of birth control than the Dalcon Shield, for sure.
	So, in 1971, the FDA was not the all-powerful entity that it is today.
	Drug laws were looser, and since the shield was not a method of hormonal birth control, it wasn't regulated as a drug.
	So it got to skip the testing process normally required for medical devices that go inside a human body.
	And it kind of turns out, unfortunately, that giant pharmaceutical company A.H. Robbins lied to everybody about a number of, you know, minor, minor things.
	For example, they lied about the rate at which the device worked because the first study into the shield's efficacy was flawed.
	It had been done by two scientists over a period of eight months with just a handful of people.
	I was going to say, did they deal with two people?
	And be like, oh, you didn't get pregnant in three months.
	We're good.
	Yeah.
	It was a tiny number of people and it was a short period of time.
	And further study wasn't required by the FDA.
	So A.H. Robbins just didn't do any further study.
	Every time you say his name, I do think of like a bond villain.
	Like every time you say his name.
	A.H. Robbins or David.
	Yeah.
	Robbins.
	I don't know why.
	It's like H.H. Holmes.
	He's like, yo, there it is.
	Yeah, A.H. Robbins winds up racking up a body count similar to H.H. Holmes, actually.
	Yeah, throughout the course of the story.
	Yeah, so A.H. Robbins, like these two scientists who invent this thing, you know, study a couple of dozen people over a few months and are like, this is the failure rate.
	And A.H. Robbins sells it to millions of people without doing any further research on it because they don't have to.
	And companies don't do anything they don't have to.
	And this is a problem because the first year's sales suggest the failure rate was actually something like 5.5%, which makes it twice what other products on the market were.
	And it would wind up actually being much higher than that.
	So they pretty immediately know that it fails a lot more often than they're advertising, but they don't change their advertisements because that helps them make money.
	Now, A.H. Robbins, yeah, of course.
	A.H. Robbins also chose to keep on the DL the fact that the shield contained copper salts.
	Those were an active ingredient in the Dalkon shield.
	No big, no big.
	No big.
	Because if they told people about that, then it would have to be regulated as a drug and they would have had to go through FDA testing.
	So they just lied, you know.
	Just, you know, just slightly.
	Snitch the buck a little bit.
	Just a little bit.
	Why would you, you know, this is a very dangerous grift.
	Yeah, it's getting dangerouser.
	To obscure the fact that it included medical, like it did include drugs, without technically lying, salespeople were instructed to tell clients that the Dalcon shield contained a confidential blending of ingredients.
	Because if you say it's magic ingredients, yeah.
	You don't got to say anybody.
	It's a secret ingredient.
	It's a family recipe.
	And please tell me these people came around, these salespeople, with like briefcases to show off their dynamic keychain.
	Oh, yeah, no, I've actually seen some of the packaging for that.
	If anybody's got a Dalkon shield at home, we would love a couple.
	Yeah.
	Anybody?
Hidden Medical Risks 00:15:35
	So in three years, more than 2.2 million Dalcon shields were sold in the United States, making it the top-selling IUD in the nation throughout the early 1970s.
	A.H. Robbins and the device's inventors pocketed massive amounts of money, and all was well.
	Except all was not well.
	That was a lie.
	Because the pharmaceutical giant knew from the beginning that things were horribly wrong with the Dalcon shield.
	And I'm going to quote here from a contemporary write-up in Mother Jones.
	Only a few months after the Dalcon shield went on sale in 1971, reports of adverse reactions began pouring into the headquarters of the manufacturer, A.H. Robbins.
	There were cases of pelvic inflammatory disease, an infection of the uterus that can require weeks of bed rest and antibiotic treatment, septicemia, blood poisoning, pregnancies resulting from spontaneous abortions, ectopic, tubal pregnancies, and perforations of the uterus.
	In a number of cases, the damage was so severe as to require a hysterectomy.
	There were even medical reports of Dalcon shields ripping their way through the walls of the uterus and being found floating free in the abdominal cavity, far from the uterus.
	So that's not ideal.
	Yeah, so this went on for how long?
	Years.
	How many cases?
	And no one really kind of associated this?
	I mean, we'll get to the end numbers, but they sell millions of these before anything really blows up in the media about it.
	No.
	And when I say sell millions of these, I mean millions of these were put into people's bodies.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	So disturbing.
	Yeah.
	Doctors didn't have a clue that this was going to be problematic.
	Well, no, some of them did, actually.
	There were doctors who noticed the shield's flaws almost immediately.
	And Planned Parenthood advocates of Arizona made this note in a write-up.
	Quote, not everyone who laid eyes on the Dalcon shield got a warm and fuzzy feeling from it.
	Those feet gave many people the heebie-jeebies.
	Dorothy Lansing, an OBGYN from Pennsylvania, derided the shield in 1974, calling it a veritable instrument of torture, a gruesome-looking little device with vicious spikes that made removal very difficult for the doctor and painful for the user.
	She refused to offer shields to her patients.
	Of course, a female doctor.
	A female doctor.
	Yeah, there's a female doctor in here, but yeah, you suspect most of the first people to recognize it were the lady OBGYNs.
	Now, those vicious spikes were not the worst part of the shield's design, unfortunately.
	That would be the string.
	So like I said, most IEDs have a string attached to them.
	It makes it easier to remove.
	Normally, those strings are made out of a very particular kind of material that cannot transfer bacteria, right?
	Because the uterus is sterile, right?
	And you want to see that.
	They didn't use that material.
	No.
	They used dental floss.
	They used nylon.
	Which is like...
	Yeah.
	They use nylon wrapped in a sheath that deteriorated inside the body, and the string was knotted at each end, and so not sealed.
	Erwin Lerner, who was the Dowcon company's president, thought that the knot would be enough to keep bacteria from getting into the string, and it was not.
	And, you know, there were...
	Did they know how a body works?
	Yeah, a lot of people did.
	A lot of people warned them that this knot, like bacteria will get inside it, will travel up the string into the uterus.
	And they said, eh, that's never going to happen.
	It's fine.
	It's fine.
	They'll never know.
	It's fine.
	We'd have to change the product and that'll cost money.
	By the time they figure it out, I'll have their money.
	It's all good.
	All good.
	Now, one of the reasons Lerner thought that the shield he'd helped design was safe was the fact that the uterus is, again, a sterile environment, which is why so many people use uteruses to clean their kitchens.
	Unfortunately, yeah, of course.
	Yeah, it's just the right tool for the job.
	It's the skins out.
	Yeah, it gets nature's bleach.
	Just saying.
	So the nylon in the string was not sterile, as I said, and bacteria were able to enter through that unsealed knot and travel up from the vagina into the uterus, crawling up the Dalcon shield strings like Rapunzel's hair ladder.
	And the fact that there was actually a sheath around the string protected the traveling bacteria from cervical mucus, which is normally a barrier to bacteria.
	So that Planned Parenthood write-up I found described the string on the Dalcon shield as a bacterial expressway.
	In other words, they couldn't have designed a better device to transfer dangerous bacteria into the womb if they had tried.
	Like it's made for that.
	They really upgraded themselves.
	They're like, watch this, hold my beer.
	Germs, viruses, hold my beer.
	Yeah.
	No, we made you guys your own little road.
	And it's just for women.
	We love you so much.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	So one of the first publicized failures of the Dalcon Shield came in 1973 when the device had already been inserted into nearly 2 million women.
	Doctors with the University of Arizona Medical Center inserted a shield into a patient who wound up getting pregnant anyway.
	At this point in medical history, it was standard procedure to leave the IUD in the uterus during a pregnancy.
	I think that's different now, but that's the way things were at that point.
	And at this point, data was suggesting that the Dow Con Shield's failure rate was closer to 10% than to 5%.
	Again, the company had not updated any of their marketing material.
	Now, unfortunately, this patient who got pregnant on the shield, the bacteria highway thing in the string introduced a bunch of deadly bacteria into her womb, and she started presenting with flu-like symptoms.
	And three days later, she miscarried her 19-week old fetus and died from a massive bacterial infection.
	Horrible.
	Yeah.
	So the head of obstetrics at the medical center where that woman died was an OBGYN named Dr. Donald Christian.
	He began screaming as loud as he could to anyone who would listen about the dangers of the Dalcon Shield.
	So we do have one good male doctor who's like, what the fuck?
	This is like clearly a problem.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	And he took this on as a crusade.
	He started talking to gynecologists and obstetricians around the country and gathering hundreds and hundreds of stories of Dalcon Shield users who had been injured or killed by massive bacterial infections that started in their uteruses.
	By the spring of 1973, he felt he had enough data to bring to the FDA.
	Christian's goal was to get them to suspend sales and use of the Dalcon Shield until further research could be done.
	But being history's greatest monsters and also a bunch of cowards without the stones to assault my mountaintop compound, the FDA waffled.
	Enraged and dismayed, Dr. Christian wrote a book-length study into the shield titled Maternal Deaths Associated with an intrauterine device.
	He wasn't great at titling, but he did the work.
	He's to the point.
	Yeah.
	His study focused on four deaths and six life-threatening infections suffered by Shield users.
	Now, while he was working on his manuscript, other doctors and women's health advocates grew more and more aware of the shield's flaws.
	By 1974, 17 deaths had been traced directly to the device, and the actual number was probably significantly highly.
	I think at least 24 we know now.
	I was going to say, how many people were told this is not the reason?
	It's because of your fault.
	You're negligence.
	You did this wrong.
	You did this here.
	You're dirty and you got sick.
	Yeah.
	Which is essentially what happens to women or those who have uteruses in general.
	They're told it's your fault you did this wrong.
	Sorry.
	Yep.
	Yep.
	So you have to assume 17 is the minimum that had died at this point.
	And that's just hundreds and hundreds, potentially even tens of thousands with some level of serious, serious adverse effects.
	Like in a lot of cases, like if you're getting pelvic inflammatory syndrome, like you're bedridden for weeks.
	Like this is the amount of human misery that has been caused by 1974 is pretty astonishing.
	The estimate that I found is that for every million dollars A.H. Robbins, the pharmaceutical company, profited from selling the Dalkon Shield, their customers spent an estimated $20 million on medical care due to the illnesses it caused, which is pretty bad.
	It's just kind of like one more thing of like how little they care about women's health, people with uterus health, like people in that general gynecology, how little is actually worried about.
	And even to this day, obviously.
	Yeah, like I think it's better, but not good now.
	I mean, you know, yeah, and I'm certainly not saying it's absolutely better now.
	I wouldn't know, but I haven't heard of one quite this bad.
	Although maybe that marina will wind up being that bad.
	Like, we don't really know at this point.
	Don't tell me that.
	Although, Robert Y. Not that we're friends.
	I think people should look into that.
	There's some interesting lawsuits happening now.
	I know a lot of people who have them and have great experiences with them, but it does concern me a bit.
	Those numbers are still astonishing and things that are being figured out.
	Not the best.
	Yeah.
	Not the best.
	And this is just so blatantly horrible.
	Right.
	Like, you're talking by 1974, when it's mostly still on the market, tens of thousands of women have been hospitalized because of their Dalcon shields.
	We're not talking about, oh, yeah, you know, 1% of people or whatever are going to have a negative response, and that's a problem.
	But it's like within, like, this is a sizable chunk of the people who get the Dalcon shield inserted have health consequences as a result of it.
	Right.
	Because we're not just talking about death.
	We're talking about all of the problematic issues that come from.
	Miscarriages and topic pregnancies, which are nightmares.
	And for those who, yeah, are wanting children and loss of children and all of these things.
	It's just such a heartbreaking thing.
	Well, especially, you have a lot of women who wanted children, who got pregnant and then, or who wanted children at some point, but didn't want them now, got the Dalcon Shield, and because of complications, had their uteruses removed.
	Right.
	Yeah, it's just a real bummer.
	Yeah, I'm going to quote from Mother Jones again.
	The Dowcon shield was turning out to be far more dangerous than any other IUD already on the market.
	Later research in Canada and Germany showed that microscopic defects helped account for the shield's ability to slice into the uterine wall.
	Physicians found insertion was difficult.
	Patients found it almost unbearable.
	As early as February 1971, a physician wrote to A.H. Robbins in reference to the insertion of the Dowcon Shield.
	I have found the procedure to be the most traumatic manipulation ever perpetrated on womanhood, and I have inserted thousands of other varieties.
	Why would they keep doing this?
	Like, what?
	Because they're telling them not to stop.
	It's like, eh, I tried.
	They think it went quite well.
	We just kept pushing.
	It's fine.
	They're fine.
	They screamed a little bit.
	Everything's fine.
	I think these doctors are stopping.
	Like, I think the doctors who are complaining, like, do it a few times and have a horror, realize that it's bad on everyone, and then say, well, I'm not going to do this anymore.
	I wonder how many doctors just kept pushing and be like, eh, suck it up, which, by the way, women do here today about some procedures and being told, you're not really in pain.
	You're making this shit up.
	So I can't imagine them where they're like, eh, suck it up.
	I think it's most doctors do that because you do have good doctors like Christian, like this person who wrote that letter in 1971, like the woman we heard from the lady Obi Itua and we heard from earlier, who try to blow the whistle, who complain, who say this is unacceptable.
	But I think the bulk of people inserting them are just like, yeah, it hurts.
	Like, what do you want?
	Like, stop complaining.
	You know, you all have sex.
	You have to have pain to have sex.
	And then obviously.
	And then, and then die on the operating table.
	Yeah.
	But I wonder also for Dr. Christensen, it took someone to die before realizing how bad this was.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	I mean, I don't know what his direct experience was, because he was like the head of the unit at the hospital.
	So I don't know if he was actually putting them in, if this was the first time he maybe thought about it.
	Like, I don't know enough about the guy's actual history.
	I just know that when that happened, he went on the warpath.
	But I don't know.
	Like, maybe he was putting it in for years before someone died.
	I really just, I couldn't tell.
	So many questions.
	So many questions.
	So in May of 1974, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America banned the Dalkon shield from use in their clinics.
	They recommended it be removed from patients who had had it inserted.
	Even this came with harms to patients because the vicious spikes in the Dalcon Shield side had a tendency to tear through soft tissue when yanked out.
	As deaths and nightmare stories of injuries mounted, the FDA begged A.H. Robbins to stop selling their vaginal death crap, which is a pretty good name for a band.
	I was going to say, whose band name is this?
	Yeah, vaginal death crap.
	Valcrab.
	Yeah, solid metal band.
	Oh, my God.
	The songs, or maybe it's just an emo band.
	Yeah, Dalcon Shield's not a bad band name either.
	You know, I'm still holding to that's a Star Trek weapon.
	Yeah, yeah, I do think it's more of a Star Trek, a Star Trek ship.
	So the company refused to stop selling, you know, their horrible, horrible poisoned IUD.
	Executives worried that doing so would be seen as an admission of guilt.
	And since tens of thousands of women were suing them for injuries, it would be expensive to admit guilt.
	So because so many people are suing us, we can't stop selling this because then they'll win their cases against us for the injuries that we did to them.
	Right.
	So I assume there would be a lot of lawsuits.
	Yeah.
	And it would go.
	So many.
	So many lawsuits.
	This company gets sued like you would not believe.
	Well, like you would absolutely believe because of their contempt for human life.
	Yeah.
	So A.H. Robbins lawyers took the tact that the shield was no more dangerous than any other IUD.
	They argued that all the pelvic inflammatory disease cases tied to the shield had actually nothing to do with it.
	The company spokesman Thomas Poe told press, they have their experts.
	We have ours.
	Which is a very capitalism thing to say.
	Well, we got our own experts.
	You say we're paying for it.
	Let me bring my people who have no degree in this, but they're going to be really loud about it.
	Yeah, it's that oil industry shit where it's like, yeah, well, we got scientists too, and we pay them to say the opposite of what you're saying, but louder.
	On better media.
	Despite all of this, by the end of 1974, the Dowcon Shield was effectively off the market.
	They kind of just quietly stopped selling it after a while.
	More than two and a half million, well, they stopped selling it in the U.S. after a while.
	More on that later.
	More than two and a half million American women had the shields installed in their bodies.
	As many as 200,000 people testified that they had been injured by the Dowcon Shield and filed claims against A.H. Robbins.
	Some count say 400,000.
	Like a huge amount of the people who get this wind up with like, you know, legal complaints against A.H. Robbins.
	So the pharmaceutical giant would spend a full decade fighting these cases tooth and nail, doing everything in its power to avoid any kind of legal consequences for its actions.
	Numerous company executives perjured themselves in court.
	Tens of thousands of pages of internal documents were destroyed in direct violation with court orders.
	FDA offices and Capitol Hill were flooded with A.H. Robbins lawyers, just doing everything that they could to slow down the process at which they were litigated because they knew eventually litigation was going to mean the end of the company and they wanted to suck as much value out of it as they possibly could and put it in the hands of their shareholders.
	Part of why they're delaying this so much is because they're selling it to other people outside the United States after they stop selling it in the U.S.
	They gotta keep their savings.
	Yeah, you gotta keep that shit going before your company's destroyed by a river of lawsuits.
	No one was dark and grifty.
	Oh, it's about to.
	Oh, Sophie, you have no idea how bad this is gonna get.
	It's gonna get so much worse.
	Well, before we get to so much worse, Robert, you know what parameters, right?
Avoiding Lawsuit Rivers 00:04:23
	Yeah, you know what?
	Won't sell vaginal death crabs.
	God, I hope not.
	Audible?
	Blood lobster?
	Yeah, either way.
	What's up, everyone?
	I'm Ego Modem.
	My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
	It's Will Farrell.
	My dad gave me the best advice ever.
	I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
	I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
	I'm working my way up through it.
	I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
	He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
	Yeah.
	He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
	And he's like, just give it a shot.
	He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
	If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
	It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat.
	Just hang in there.
	Yeah, it would not be.
	Right, it wouldn't be that.
	There's a lot of luck.
	Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
	10-10 shots fired in the city hall building.
	A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
	From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
	How could this have happened in City Hall?
	Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey, who did it?
	July 2003.
	Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
	Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
	And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
	Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
	A shocking public murder.
	I scream, get down, get down.
	Those are shots.
	Those are shots.
	Get down.
	A charismatic politician.
	You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
	I still have a weapon.
	And I could shoot you.
	And an outsider with a secret.
	He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
	That may or may not have been political.
	That may have been about sex.
	Listen to Rorschach.
	Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
	Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
	There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
	Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
	You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
	And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
	We always say, trust your girlfriends.
	I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
	Oh my God, this is the same man.
	A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
	I felt like I got hit by a truck.
	I thought, how could this happen to me?
	The cops didn't seem to care.
	So they take matters into their own hands.
	I said, oh, hell no.
	I vowed I will be his last target.
	He's going to get what he deserves.
	Listen to the girlfriends.
	Trust me, babe.
	On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
	I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
	This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
	I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
	From power to parenthood.
	Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
	This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
	From addiction to acceleration.
	The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
	You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
From Addiction to Acceleration 00:03:18
	And it's a multiplayer game.
	What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
	Find out on Mostly Human.
	My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
	Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
	We're back.
	And I'm thinking about Red Lobster because of what you just said.
	Because they have a new Mountain Dew margarita.
	I really wanted to go.
	I went to the nearest Red Lobster to me, and it was across the river in Washington.
	And everyone in the line outside didn't have a mask, and it was inside seating only.
	And I was like, no, that seems, I don't want to get COVID for this margarita.
	Are you sure?
	Yeah.
	I mean, but really, what about the cheddar biscuits?
	I've gotten a lot of diseases for cheddar biscuits in the past.
	Enough that I think I don't need that anymore.
	I'm starting to question what you're worth.
	Like, what, what?
	We've all gotten a little bit of waggy thing.
	Hepatitis, whatever.
	It's fine.
	Yeah.
	You're not going to go to Red Lobster and not get a disease.
	I mean, they sell bacon wrap scallops that are kind of cooked.
	They are kind of cooked, and only about a third of them have the Hantavirus.
	So that's a pretty good ratio.
	I mean, have you gone for Shrimp Fest?
	Come on.
	Oh, yeah.
	No, you're definitely getting the Hantavirus at Shrimp Fest.
	Absolutely.
	Anyway.
	But man, them shrimps is cheap.
	So good.
	All you can eat.
	So in the end, the law did come for A.H. Robbins.
	In 1984, Judge Miles W. Lord ruled against the company and in favor of its hundreds of thousands of victims.
	Again, they're being sued in court by more than like a quarter of a million people at this point, which is if that many people are suing you, you're in the wrong.
	Like, I don't even need to hear about the case.
	Oh, 250,000 people are suing you.
	Okay.
	But that's only like 5% of the population.
	You should.
	Come on.
	You shouldn't be allowed in society anymore, maybe.
	It's fine.
	It's fine.
	That's fine.
	So some of those victims were in the courtroom while Judge Lord read his judgment, and many of them wept openly as he read this to the company's top executives.
	It is not enough to say, I did not know.
	It was not me.
	Look elsewhere.
	Time and time again, each of you has used this kind of argument in refusing to acknowledge your responsibility and in pretending to the world that the chief officers and the directors of your gigantic multinational corporation have no responsibility for the company's acts and omissions.
	Under your direction, your company has in fact continued to allow women, tens of thousands of them, to wear this device, a deadly depth charge in their wombs, ready to explode at any time.
	This is corporate irresponsibility at its meanest.
	Pretty good.
	So many good band names in there.
	Yeah.
	Aren't there a vaginal depth charge?
	Come on.
	I want to know where that conviction is today because I feel like we do not hold, obviously, and I don't know you know of all people, enough heads of corporations irresponsible for these things.
Deadly Depth Charges 00:06:32
	And they didn't then.
	Like the company was destroyed, which is good.
	Better than like what's happening to Purdue for starting the opiate crisis.
	But they didn't.
	None of these guys went to prison and they should have.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	You put 20 of these guys in prison.
	Maybe we wouldn't have had an opiate crisis because maybe Purdue would have been like, oh shit, there's still A.H. Robin guys doing time for the vaginal depth charges.
	I don't know.
	I feel like those are narcissists who really believe they're the ones who can get away with it.
	So it really doesn't matter.
	Maybe.
	I say we still give it a shot and throw the company.
	I mean, I'm not opposed to that.
	Don't get me wrong.
	So, now the company was set up to start a multi-million dollar, and eventually I think it was a multi-billion dollar program to remove the shields from women and pay them for their pain and injuries.
	Of the more than 400,000 lawsuits filed against the company, 9,500 were litigated or settled.
	And a lot of those were aggregating like thousands of cases together, obviously.
	Because you get that many people suing and you start like lumping them into class actions and stuff.
	The company was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1985 and it collapsed under the weight of so many judgments.
	By 1986, an estimated 100,000 American women still had Dowcon shields in their bodies.
	So it's like it took that long.
	Wow.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	The catastrophic and extremely public failure of the Dowcon Shield nearly killed the IUD itself.
	By 1986, only one brand of IUD was still on the market in the United States.
	In the 1970s, nearly 10% of U.S. women who used contraception used an IUD.
	Today, that number is less than 1%.
	It's around 1%.
	And it's generally agreed that the main reason for the collapse in popularity of the IUD was the Dalkon Shield, that it cratered people.
	Because obviously, like you hear that story, like you're not going to get one of those.
	You already get the horror story of the, you know, floating IUD.
	Yeah.
	Which does happen.
	Yeah.
	It does.
	In European nations, most of which never imported the shield, IUDs remained popular.
	And the U.S. still has the lowest rate of IUD use of any Western nation.
	According to the Guttmacher Institute, quote, the public health need for more widespread use of the IUD is revealed in one simple statistic.
	53% of unintended pregnancies in the United States are the result of contraceptive failure or misuse.
	Because the IUD is almost impossible to misuse and is far less likely to fail than the pill, the condom, or the injectable, a national increase in IUD use that comes at the expense of such methods would reduce the number of unintended pregnancies.
	If some women choose the IUD instead of relying on natural birth control methods or chance, the number of unintended pregnancies should also decline.
	An industry-sponsored survey of 7,000 U.S. women conducted in 1999 revealed that many current IUD users had switched from the condom, the pill, or withdrawal.
	So again, pretty significant consequences to this outside of the suffering of the people who have it implanted in them.
	There's just, there's God knows how many millions at this point of unintended pregnancies have occurred as a result of this thing.
	You know, which it's, it's, it's just the amount of human shrapnel caused by A.H. Robbins is pretty astonishing.
	And you add that to the couple of dozen people we know died, the hundreds of thousands of people who were injured and rendered infertile.
	And yeah, A.H. Robbins and the Dalcon company make a pretty solid bastard.
	But we're actually just scraping the start of this story, Samantha.
	I don't like your use of barely gotten started.
	Yeah, scraping.
	Between the word slicing and scraping and this is a slicey, scrapy kind of day.
	Bacterial Expressway, which is another good band name.
	This is a great episode for that.
	That is a punk band.
	Oh, yeah.
	I saw Bacterial Expressway open for uterine depth charge back in 98.
	Good.
	So good.
	So the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, exists to do exactly what the name would suggest, help other nations to develop.
	Now, one of the ways in which 1970s thinkers in the government felt poor nations needed help developing was in giving their populations access to contraceptives.
	And obviously, this isn't necessarily nefarious.
	It's great.
	A lot of people are poor.
	They don't have money for contraceptives.
	Give them free contraceptives.
	Always a good thing.
	I am supportive of people having access to good birth control.
	Not a problem.
	Except it becomes a problem because of the way that they do it.
	So back in 1972, horrifying stories of the Dalcon Shield's deadly flaws had first started going public in a big way.
	And it was immediately obvious.
	They didn't stop selling it for two more years.
	But the people at A.H. Robbins knew pretty much as soon as this thing got on the market that it was going to get taken off the market because it was hurting too many people.
	And they didn't stop selling it in the U.S. because of that.
	God know.
	But they did immediately start looking at places they could sell it overseas in order to make sure that they had a long-term way of making money off of the Dalcon Shield.
	Because they're good people.
	Oh, okay.
	Yeah.
	So, yeah.
	Yeah.
	Obviously, they still kept pumping out as many of these devices into the U.S. market as possible, but being forward-thinking capitalists, they started looking further afield for new markets from Mother Jones.
	With any other kind of hazardous product, the manufacturer might, at this point, have had to search out some sleazy broker to arrange a secret dump.
	Not so with a contraceptive device.
	The Office of Population within AID had a budget of $125 million to spend on the purchase and overseas distribution of contraceptives.
	Director R.T. Ravenholt was known to be a population control enthusiast who would ask few questions about a good deal on Dalcon Shields.
	It was only natural for Robbins to turn to the government.
	Robert W. Nichols, Robbins' Director of International Marketing, wrote to the Population Office of AID to interest them in placing this fine product with the population control programs and family planning clinics throughout the third world.
	Nicholas sweetened the deal with a special discount, which dramatically illustrates the double standard drug companies apply to third world consumers.
	The company offered AID the shield in bulk packages unsterilized at 48% off.
	So that's not a good sign.
	So the word population control says a lot.
	That's not a good sign either, is it?
	That's never a good sentence or a phrase to hear.
	A B, I just love vaginal death crabs for everyone at a discounted price.
	Unsterilized.
	You're welcome.
	No problems.
	There's no problem.
	Let the paw have vaginal death crabs.
	Everyone.
	Celebrate.
	Also, this is going to remain in your vagina for a long while, hanging in there.
	Hanging in there.
	If you try to move it out, it's going to rip you up like a fucking shrapnel from a mortar.
	But it's okay because it's population control.
Population Control Lies 00:08:49
	Because we've got to control that population of you kinds of people.
	Yeah.
	So you did kind of hit on the fact that population control enthusiast is a terrifying thing to call someone.
	Now, that actually refers to a specific intellectual movement within the Western civilization that goes back almost 100 years.
	See, so I had this written a little bit differently, but I'm just going to go ahead and say, surprise!
	This is not an episode about the Dowcon Shield.
	That was just the introduction.
	This is an episode about the population control movement.
	And I just kind of wanted to, like a Dalcon shield, like slide in secretly and then surprise you.
	No, it does not.
	It turns out that it turns out jamming and wedging.
	I wedged myself in there.
	And now we're going to learn about the population control.
	You and I are not going to be friends, Robert.
	You're not going to be friends after that.
	Sorry.
	I feel like I betrayed Samantha.
	That is exactly.
	If I could flip this desk over in a dramatic way.
	You know, we talked about the bacterial superhighway, and now we're going to take a hard right turn onto the eugenics superhighway because that's what this episode is secretly about.
	I just.
	Can we also say that's an expressway?
	Keep going.
	Oh, yeah.
	Maybe a tollway.
	Let's make it shittier.
	The first concerted project to control world population started in the late 1800s in four colonizer-dominated nations, the United States, mostly California, Australia, Canada, and South Africa.
	Now, in California, Canada, and Australia, white people were increasingly terrified about the fact that Asian people were immigrating there and having babies.
	In California, Asian immigration had actually been stoked by a U.S. government policy from the 1860s.
	Washington, D.C. had heavily pressured China's imperial government to make it easier for Chinese citizens to leave the country because we wanted workers and stuff.
	The U.S. actually argued that Beijing was treading on their people's, quote, inherent and inalienable right to change their home and allegiance by stopping them from leaving the country.
	So keep that in mind.
	The U.S. government argued that restricting people from leaving China for the U.S. was a violation of their inherent and inalienable right to change their home and allegiance.
	The only time you'll hear that from the United States government ever.
	I was just going to say, this is such a hard left from what we know.
	Well, yeah, because that's one where it's like, I'm totally on board with the United States there.
	People do have an inherent right to change their home and allegiance.
	How dare you?
	They don't stick with that for long.
	From an article in the Journal of Past and Present by the Oxford University Press, quote, disgruntled workers in California attacked Asian immigrants and in 1877 began political mobilization, much to the alarm of East Coast elites.
	Writing for the North American Review the following year, MJD sought to justify anti-Chinese attacks.
	Immigration was not just another form of international trade, he insisted.
	And the frugal Chinese worker was not just another labor-saving machine.
	Migration was a biological process.
	Centuries of overpopulation in places like India and China had produced people able to subsist on wages that would starve Europeans.
	Facing such competition, whites would fail to reproduce.
	Dire consequences would therefore ensue should they withdraw the intelligence of artificial selection from the environment and leave the battle to the chances of natural selection.
	So that's pretty racist.
	Wow.
	I mean, it's fitting with the current administration, so go ahead, I guess.
	Yeah, I mean, we're really, really a blast to the past there.
	But yeah, that's the argument there.
	That's why, so initially, the government's like forcing the Chinese government to let more people come here because we need the workers.
	But then, like, white people feel like they're getting undercut and so pressure the government to stop Chinese people from coming into the country.
	Like, that's the basic way that things go in the late 1800s.
	So, that same year, 1877, there started to come out because you know how the way that like all culture really flows.
	This is one of the things, I say this a couple of times, that Andrew Breitbart got right.
	Politics is downhill of culture, right?
	So, what starts happening in the culture in the late 1800s that leads to all of these like Chinese exclusion acts and stuff is this flood of novels and short stories that are like trying to warn white people of an invasion of Europe in the United States.
	Like, that's this big thing that starts happening in the media right now.
	So, you've got like this mix of like, you know, people who are, I guess their modern equivalent would be the guys writing for the Atlantic, you know, like Connor Friedersdorf, and then, you know, people like Steve Bannon, like writing like racist fiction about how Chinese people are going to, it's white genocide shit, right?
	Like, it's always been the same fear.
	You're talking about today, right?
	Yeah, yeah, it's changed a lot.
	Okay, okay, goodbye.
	Yeah.
	Quote, Chinese were depicted not as nationals of a particular country, but as a hoarder flood, a force of nature.
	This image also featured in European journalistic and fictional accounts of migration.
	The German geographer Friedrich Retzel, perhaps the first European to draw attention to the Chinese question in California, would go on to popularize the notion of Liebensraum.
	Do you know what that?
	You guys know Liebens Raum, right?
	Everybody remembers that from high school?
	Yeah.
	I did not realize that's where that concept had started.
	Oh, this is pretty good.
	This is so bad, Robert.
	It gets really bad.
	I'm waiting for the big, yeah, I want the big finale.
	Let's keep going.
	Yeah, yeah, that's coming.
	We got to build up a bit.
	So obviously, the term Liebensraum was one of Hitler's chief talking points.
	The literal meaning of the term is living space.
	Hitler pointed to the U.S., which had genocided its way into possession of a vast continent and argued that Germany deserves that kind of space too.
	But the actual term Lebensraum had originated in California from these Europeans and like American white people who were seeing Chinese people immigrate and being like, they're crowding us out.
	Like that's actually where it started.
	Historian Matthew Connolly notes, it suggested the words Liebensraum suggested that biological processes of growth and movement underlay politics and were more fundamental than mere political borders.
	So Leibensraum wasn't just a matter of physical space.
	In fact, it wasn't mostly a matter of physical space because California is still empty today.
	Most of California, nobody fucking lives in.
	Like as big as Los Angeles is, like, it's a huge landmass.
	So is like the whole continent.
	Like these, these people who started using this term weren't actually short on space.
	Living space meant more directly physical and not physical, but philosophical space for white people and white culture and white genes to spread.
	That's really what.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Exactly.
	Exactly.
	Yeah.
	So, yeah.
	On a ground level, anti-Asian sentiment in this period was driven by working class white people who were angry that Chinese immigrants were undercutting their wages and taking jobs.
	But on the loftier philosophical level that politics kind of flows downstream from, it was a question of the survival of the white race.
	Now, then is now, white supremacist ideologues were happy to take advantage of poor white resentment over economic trouble and turn this into a boiling race hatred.
	In 1885, all this race baiting boiled over into a series of mass expulsions of Chinese immigrants all across the West Coast.
	Further inland, there were even murders and straight-up massacres.
	There were ethnic cleansings in California of Chinese communities.
	White supremacist writers defended the killers, describing their actions as an example of workers expressing their citizenship.
	The expulsions and the violence were positively compared to anti-Jewish pogroms in Europe, as both Jews and Chinese immigrants were depicted by racists as quote disease-carrying cosmopolitans who excelled in economic competition.
	It was the same basic thing, you know, that you saw happening with anti-Semitism.
	I'm not going to lie, it's just kind of like, are we doing this again today?
	Except, like, Chinese immigrants.
	It's like, hmm, this is too familiar.
	Yeah.
	In a way, we never stopped.
	Yeah, I mean, I think the focus is the threat of white hierarchy, whether or not they're going to be decimated and no longer exist, as if that could possibly happen, especially in the next generation or so.
	But interesting.
	Well, and it's this matter of like the fuel for the movement comes from poor white workers who are getting edged out of jobs by people being paid less than them.
	But the problem isn't the people being paid less than them.
	The problem is, for example, the fact that there's all sorts of holes in our labor market whereby certain types of people who are not documented citizens can be treated subhumanly by companies without any consequence.
	And it's just cheaper for them to not treat people or pay them properly.
	Right.
	Yep.
	And companies like State Farm, who love to advocate for special cards for immigrations who don't have citizenship rights but can be underpaid, pay taxes, and no longer be recognized as individuals.
Fuel for the Movement 00:04:31
	Hey, it's great.
	It's good.
	It's all fine.
	Yeah.
	We're better now.
	It's fine.
	Everything's fine.
	Yeah.
	Everything's on fire.
	Yeah.
	I mean, I wish everything were on fire sometimes.
	Do you know what is most likely not on fire?
	This is my worst, my worst way.
	You know what I wouldn't set on fire, Samantha?
	There we go.
	The products and services that support this podcast.
	That would be biting the dog that feeds me.
	I really wish we could transition like that.
	All you got to do is believe in yourself.
	Like.
	What's up, everyone?
	I'm Ego Modem.
	My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
	It's Will Farrell.
	My dad gave me the best advice ever.
	I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
	I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
	I'm working my way up through it.
	I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
	He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
	Yeah.
	He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
	And he's like, just give it a shot.
	He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
	If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
	It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
	Yeah, it would not be right.
	It wouldn't be that.
	There's a lot of luck.
	Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
	10-10 shots five.
	City hall building.
	A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
	From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
	How could this have happened in City Hall?
	Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey Hood did.
	July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
	Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
	And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
	Everybody in the chamber ducks.
	A shocking public murder.
	I scream, get down, get down.
	Those are shots.
	Those are shots.
	Get down.
	A charismatic politician.
	You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
	I still have a weapon.
	And I could shoot you.
	And an outsider with a secret.
	He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
	That may or may not have been political.
	That may have been about sex.
	Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
	There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
	Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
	You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
	And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
	We always say, trust your girlfriends.
	I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
	Oh my God, this is the same man.
	A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
	I felt like I got hit by a truck.
	I thought, how could this happen to me?
	The cops didn't seem to care.
	So they take matters into their own hands.
	I said, oh, hell no.
	I vowed I will be his last target.
	He's going to get what he deserves.
	Listen to the girlfriends.
	Trust me, babe.
	On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
	I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
	This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
	I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
	From power to parenthood.
	Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
Nazi Adjacent History 00:15:20
	This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
	From addiction to acceleration.
	The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
	You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
	And it's a multiplayer game.
	What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
	Find out on Mostly Human.
	My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
	Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
	We're back.
	So we're talking about racism.
	So new legal barriers.
	Yeah, it's so good.
	It's discrimination of cultures and individuals and, you know, different racial peoples.
	Let's go.
	Population.
	What I love is a melting pot.
	As in...
	Yeah, no, I won't make a cannibalism.
	Yeah.
	New legal barriers were added to Chinese immigration by the same government that had literally like a decade earlier lobbied the Chinese government about the inherent freedom of human beings to change their place of residence.
	That shit switches around real damn fast.
	Chinese migrants had to develop new ways of faking their identity paperwork in order to gain entrance into the United States.
	Meanwhile, immigration officials developed an ever more sophisticated and invasive system of tracking people, which Matthew Connolly, who's a great historian, describes as a prerequisite for modern systems of population control.
	So all of this human monitoring shit that we deal with today really does start in order to stop Chinese people from immigrating to the United States.
	The whole infrastructure that like ICE is the current manifestation of begins here, which is great.
	Just cool.
	Everybody's got to start somewhere.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	So by 1908, America's top racist, President Theodore Roosevelt, was calling openly for Asian immigrants to be banned from entering not just the United States, but all English-speaking nations.
	Wow.
	We don't say that about Teddy enough.
	Yeah.
	We just talk about the parks he made, but no, yeah, he tried to ban every Asian person from English-speaking nations.
	Pretty cool.
	And, you know, this is not just a U.S. is bad thing because elected leaders in Canada and Australia expressed significant solidarity with Roosevelt's idea.
	White folks everywhere.
	Yeah, get on them.
	Solidarity, buddies.
	So cute.
	That's my favorite rom-com.
	Let's go.
	Yeah.
	White people everywhere cheered when Roosevelt dispatched the White Fleet to the Pacific.
	Now, the White Fleet was a U.S. Navy squadron named for the color of the holes on its ships, not for the white race, but kind of for the white race.
	And it was dispatched for the most part as an international goodwill exercise.
	Like the United States was starting to become a world power at this point.
	We built this big modern fleet.
	Roosevelt wanted to sail it around the world and have it stop in like 20 or 30 countries and do diplomatic visits and just be like, hey, the U.S. is here.
	We're going to be in the Pacific more.
	Like, we're a real country.
	Like, check out how cool we are.
	Which is, you know, I guess fine, broadly speaking.
	And most of those trips were very pleasant.
	You know, the U.S. expressing its goodwill and desire to trade with everybody.
	We were not a world military power at this point.
	We weren't an invade people all the time.
	I mean, the Spanish-American War accepted, had not done a huge amount of that, not nearly as much as we would do at this point.
	So it was mostly about trading, except for when it got to Japan, because Roosevelt had sent it to Japan to threaten the Japanese government to stop them from sending Japanese or letting Japanese people come over to the United States.
	Yeah, it's pretty bad.
	Does the white fleet have a special white cloak that they wore?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I mean, why not?
	It's a part of the theme, right?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, it is a little on the nose that name.
	Especially since when Roosevelt ordered them to intimidate the Japanese government, he specifically said that they were there to protect white civilization.
	Yeah, it's cool stuff.
	And a big reason for this was that the Empire of the Rising Sun had just beaten Russia in a war in like 1905, which was the first time that an Asian power beat a European power in a modern conflict.
	Like the Russian North Fleet sailed into the area around the coast of China where the Japanese were, and they had this huge, like they just got massacred by the Japanese Navy, which like absolutely shocked the hell out of everybody in Europe at the time.
	Because this is like colonialism's at its height at this point.
	They are not used to having to have any sort of conflict that's a real fight with anyone who's not a white person.
	And it really scares the hell out of racists, which the Japanese Empire was too at this point.
	We're not talking about good.
	They all kind of are terrible.
	Yeah.
	Talk to the Okinawans about that.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I mean, it was two imperial powers going to war with each other and then another imperial power threatening that imperial power to not let everybody's bad.
	It's 19 ethnicity.
	I'm like, wait.
	Yeah, definitely not heroes.
	Yeah.
	So, yeah, the fleet was met with protests in Japan, most of which were inspired by the fact that California had just passed a law segregating Japanese children out of white schools, which is interesting because if you look at like that, you can find maps online that will show like which states had segregation and which didn't.
	And California is always listed as a state that did not have segregation.
	But Japanese, and I think a number of other Asian people were segregated out of white schools in California.
	So it's not true that California had no segregation.
	Which is not surprising.
	Nope.
	Yeah, no, absolutely not.
	I mean, the guy who was the first Supreme Court justice in Oregon who passed the lash law saying that like black people had to be whipped if they didn't leave Oregon became the first governor of California.
	And one of the first things he did as governor of California was try to kick all the Chinese people out of California.
	So, yeah.
	Yeah, it's pretty bad.
	It's pretty bad all the way down.
	Yay, history.
	Yeah, it's fun.
	You get to learn new ways about how people suck.
	Well, yep, that's about what I feel of 2020.
	Like, new ways how people suck.
	Yeah, this is good.
	They never stop finding ways to suck.
	It's remarkable.
	By this point, American intellectuals largely agreed that regulation of the, quote, composition of immigration was necessary to safeguard the fertility and thus the supremacy of native stocks, meaning white people.
	I'm going to quote now from the Journal of Pasteur.
	You had the audacity to say native?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I know.
	It's pretty wild, right?
	My dudes.
	My dudes.
	That got me.
	That got me.
	All right, keep going.
	Yeah.
	Quote, in the United States, the Immigration Bureau won congressional approval for collecting statistics according to a list of races and peoples rather than country of origin.
	This became a tool to prove the inferiority of racial groups and a model for like-minded French officials.
	In Canada, Australia, and several European states as well, Italians came to be known as the Chinese of Europe.
	What is happening?
	I love this juxtaposition of this whole conversation.
	Keep going.
	As an Italian-descended person, I always love getting those little glimpses of racism against Italians because at this point, it's just like, like a little bit funny.
	But yeah, at the time, they were like, yeah, they were the Chinese of Europe.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Yeah.
	That's how you know, by the way, you're really racist when you start making gradients of white people when you're like, oh, Hungarians.
	Right, right.
	Wow.
	So the category of peoples requiring containment thus grew beyond Asians, defined not by nationality so much as by biology.
	That is, their supposed capacity to propagate on wages that would lower other people's living standards and fertility.
	Though Roosevelt failed to coordinate exclusionary measures, researchers and activists saw them as the beginning of a de facto policy of global population control.
	In 1912, the sociologist Edward Ellsworth Ross, from whom Roosevelt had borrowed the idea of race suicide, which is again the genesis of the white genocide myth.
	That was the first term before white genocide, because genocide didn't really exist as a term at this point.
	It was race suicide.
	That was the thing that all of these guys like Ross were warning people of.
	That's what Roosevelt believed.
	The white race is committing suicide by letting Chinese people and Italian people into our country.
	Yeah.
	Talk about dramatic.
	Yeah, like these guys are all fucking drama queens.
	Absolutely.
	Yeah.
	Ross argued that northern European nations had to hold fast to every settlement colony and fill them with their offspring or else see them filled with the children of the brown and the yellow races.
	He predicted that the world will be cut up with immigration barriers, which will never be leveled until the intelligent accommodation of numbers and to resources has greatly equalized population pressure around the globe.
	I'm going to need you to read everything in that accent from now on, please.
	Yeah.
	If any of this is sounding a bit Nazi adjacent, that's because it was.
	I was saying, wasn't that at the very beginning when we were talking about it?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, all of this shit had a huge impact with Adolf Hitler and other Nazi thinkers.
	It was an American, like we just talked about how it was a European living in California who came up with the term Liebensraum to talk about white people being overwhelmed by Chinese people.
	It was an American named Prescott Hall of the Immigration Restriction League who first started describing Asian immigrants to the U.S. as bacterial infections, which is Prescott.
	Of course.
	Was he a Jew?
	Definitely a Prescott.
	Like, I don't think you can be a Prescott and not a racist.
	Like, it's just, it's a law.
	It just has to be.
	Yeah, the world would break if that weren't the case.
	So, barely 20 years after Prescott defined Chinese immigrants as bacterial infections, Hitler would refer to Jews as plague bacillus in a clear imitation of this, right?
	Like, the terminology that people like Prescott are using for Asian immigrants is almost identical to the terminology Hitler is using for Jewish people.
	And a lot of those Jewish people are immigrants.
	A lot of the people who he was like ranting about were immigrants from Russia, like Jewish communities in Russia who had fled from the Civil War into Germany, which proved not to be a great idea.
	Although, if you were a Jewish person in Eastern Europe in the early half of the 19th century or 20th century, really no good options.
	They really had no real good options.
	You're kind of fucked no matter what happens.
	Get to the UK if you can, but you still might wind up in a concentration camp, which happened to thousands of Jewish people in the U.S.
	We don't talk about that that much either.
	So, yeah, Hall argued for world eugenics, in which fit and unfit in terms of individual people and races would be primary categories the government would use to determine who could immigrate.
	Hall and many others like him, who very much dominated immigration policy in this period, saw the state as, in Connolly's words, merely a mechanism for controlling biological processes, whether through promoting the propagation of the fit or excluding and sterilizing the unfit.
	Remember, that's what the people running the United States government in the early part of the 20th century, and particularly immigration, but all throughout the government, see the U.S. government as a mechanism for controlling biological processes, promoting the propagation of the fit, and excluding or sterilizing the unfit.
	That's what the government does.
	We're talking about Stephen Miller.
	Yeah, yeah, we are talking about Stephen Miller because he very much sees things that exact same way.
	I'm just wondering, even though he pretends his little Asian wife, but welcome to the different conversations.
	Yeah, certain racists have admitted Asians into the pantheon of white people now.
	That's how they're not racist.
	Yeah, as long as you're the right kind of Asian, you know, otherwise, yeah, that's, I think, Stephen Miller.
	I'm going to get myself in trouble.
	Keep going.
	So, now I'm going to guess most people are broadly familiar with the eugenics movement in the United States.
	We'll do a deep dive on that at some point.
	What's important to talk about today is how the eugenics movement splintered off into the population control movement.
	Remember, we heard that term a bit earlier when we were talking about that guy Ravenholt from USAID, who was a population control enthusiast.
	All of this is trying to explain where population control comes from because it's actually like a distinct, like, like school of intellectual thought.
	Very racist school of intellectual thought, but school of intellectual thought.
	So, what we're going to talk about today is how the eugenics movement, yes, splintered off into the population control movement, which wound up directing USAID policy until the 1980s and beyond.
	The process started when eugenicists realized that they had the most success in pushing their policies when they could find ways to make them appeal to the masses.
	Naked racism did not appeal to the masses because while most Americans were racist, they didn't like to think of themselves as racists, right?
	That's always been the key of racism in America, is saying you're not a racist.
	That's why, you know, blacks are not.
	Trump doesn't seem to be bothering a lot of people right now.
	I'm just saying.
	Trump is going to be a lot of people.
	You're correct.
	Yeah, you're correct.
	As long as we can say, I have a friend of.
	Yeah, there's a reason Enrique Tario was the head of the Proud Boys, you know?
	Right, right.
	Yeah.
	So, instead of just nakedly appealing to racism, eugenics advocates realized that they had more success when they appealed to improving maternal and child health and restricting immigration in order to protect jobs.
	Eugenicists could still push racist eugenic policies, but they wrapped them in a veil of concern for human welfare.
	In the wake of World War I, increasing numbers of white supremacist academics began ringing alarm bells about overpopulation.
	And this starts to become after World War I.
	This is like really what the population control movement focuses on.
	Like, we can't talk about sterilizing whole races.
	Americans don't like that.
	That's a little bit too naked.
	When you talk about genocide, Americans are like, well, I don't really like, I don't, I'm racist, but I don't really like to think of myself as pro-genocide.
	Right.
	I mean, I'm on.
	I'm pro-life.
	We can't say that.
	So instead, you say, no, we just, overpopulation's bad.
	We gotta stop overpopulation.
	And then you start pushing.
	Yeah, exactly.
	From Connolly, quote: The Cambridge economist Harold Wright called for a world policy in regard to population problems, but worried that national rivalries were leading in precisely the opposite direction.
	The influential demographer A.M. Carr Saunders thought that war would inevitably result from differential growth rates among nations and races unless declining populations were provided with some form of international guarantee.
	Similarly, the former MP and editor of the Edinburgh Review, Harold Cox, thought that low-fertility nations needed to band together to defend themselves against any race that, by its too great fecundity, is threatening the peace of the world.
	The psychologist and future leader of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, C.P. Blacker, worried that Asia and Russia might become a solid bloc determined to shake off the yoke of the Western powers and of America.
	Birth control offered the only way to avoid a second world war, this time between East and West.
	But this required that every culture accept it.
	I like the whole block.
Flawed Abolitionist Roots 00:05:59
	Like it's just the block.
	Yeah, and of course, Russians aren't white in this period either.
	Right?
	Not white enough, you know.
	Yeah.
	When you start to study white racism in this period, you realize that like from the late 1800s to the early 1900s, there were about 11 actual white people on the planet.
	It's just a really fancy club.
	You have to be really, really, really perfectly put, right?
	Yeah, yeah, because you lose your whiteness if you're poor until they need your help to hurt other people.
	Then you get to be white again.
	Yeah, as long as you have to be at the front of possibly being hurt first.
	Yeah.
	Well, yeah, they're not going to get it.
	You're expendable.
	You have to be the expendable people.
	Of course you do.
	Why not?
	Yeah, you have to go invade Stalingrad.
	Yeah.
	Obviously.
	So in 1921, biologist Raymond Pearl addressed the International Eugenics Congress.
	Projecting our thought ahead for a moment to that time, at most a few centuries ahead, we perceive that the important question will then be: what kind of people are they to be who will then inherit the earth?
	Here enters the eugenic phase of the problem.
	Man, in theory at least, has it now completely in his power to determine what kind of people will make up the Earth's population of saturation.
	This is the way these guys are thinking: is that like, we, this tiny group of the very whitest, richest people in Europe, can determine what the entire population of the world will look like in the future by controlling eugenics.
	That's the goal, right?
	Obviously.
	Pretty cool stuff.
	Pearl said that it was pointless for eugenicists to go about their old tactics of urging the fitter classes of people to have more children as some sort of transcendental social duty.
	He also told them that simply targeting the obviously unfit would mean that Sterilization was not a good tactic.
	Instead, the poor and unfit had to be stopped en masse from increasing their numbers.
	One of Pearl's strongest allies in this would be a woman named Margaret Sanger.
	Margaret is the woman who popularized the term birth control.
	She went on to found the organizations that would eventually become the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
	And as it happened, her advocacy would, years after her death, help spread millions upon millions of unsterilized Dalkon shields to uteruses all over the global south.
	And we will talk more about that in part two.
	It'll be fun.
	How are you doing?
	How are you doing, Samantha?
	I'm digging all of this in.
	I'm just, first of all, all of the different names and phrases that I have, I get to, I get that.
	No, no, I mean, like, I get to use as my band names and/or screen names somewhere.
	This is definitely going to be happening soon.
	I'm enjoying every bit of this level of building up of what hierarchy and supremacy is.
	It's quite delightful, this little chain, this little adventure maze that you put me on.
	I am glad to hear that.
	We seek to please people here in our horrible stories of genocide and forced hysterectomies.
	As one of the brown, yellow people who may be infesting the nations, I will tell you, I have been one that has been inundated and not breeding.
	So you're welcome, I guess.
	Past white people, white supremacists.
	I'll tell Raymond Pearl that when he stops having been dead for half a century.
	I mean, you know, I want to give somebody some satisfaction and enjoy in their life.
	And that's how I did it.
	You're welcome.
	Oh, God.
	Yeah, it's weird.
	There's like, this is a tough one because a lot of the history we're talking about is misinterpreted by anti-birth control advocates, by like hardcore Catholic and Christian advocates who just think that who want to demonize Planned Parenthood.
	And they're wrong actually about what's bad.
	Like Margaret Sanger, there's a lot that's fucked up about her.
	They always lie about her and say stuff that she didn't actually say in order to condemn her.
	When there's stuff she said, it's just a different kind of bad.
	And the reason they don't say the bad stuff she actually did is that it's very similar to the bad stuff they say.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	I mean, that's kind of the whole like beginning of everything, whether there's the suffragette movement and how racist and fucked up the whole like community was to from get-go, but they did do some good work.
	And you have to sit back.
	That's critical work.
	Yeah, taking back through like, okay, how awful is this?
	And how do we need to correct it?
	It's kind of like, it's a constant change in trying to justify, I guess.
	I don't even know of the word justify, but trying to look back at how awful people were in historical context and who they were and what it was, but trying to also say, yeah, I guess they did do some good things too.
	You have to be fair without whitewashing.
	So like with the, you know, with the abolitionist movement, you have to point out like these people who are on the right side of history.
	It was an important, a critical fight and a heroic fight, and it's good that they did it.
	Also, a huge chunk of them were abolitionists because they didn't want black people anywhere near them.
	Like, right?
	Like, that's that.
	And that doesn't mean that it wasn't good that they were abolitionists.
	It just means that, like, let's be honest about what they were.
	And, like, it's the same thing with the suffragettes.
	A lot of the absolutely were fighting on the side of history and like doing the right thing.
	And it's good that they were there.
	Ton of them were racist as hell.
	You know, just see Harriet Tubman's Ain't I a Woman speech, right?
	Like, it's right.
	Yeah.
	It's absurd.
	And that's the same thing with abolitionists.
	It's not that they didn't do a good thing.
	It's literally they just didn't like black people, but that's everyone was supposed to happen.
	Well, it's like you go back to the civil rights movement and a number of like the black men who were like prominent in the civil rights movement were very misogynist.
	And like that's so people, people are not never perfect or even all that great usually, but it doesn't like what matters is you know the broad sweep of what they attempted to accomplish.
	You can't expect people to be perfect as long as they're fighting to make the world better.
	No one's gonna make the world perfect and nobody is perfect.
Racist Good Deeds 00:03:48
	And like, yeah, anyway.
	We definitely need to make sure you know the truth of it all before we idealize people in any of the such things.
	But as a rule, don't make statues of people.
	I am now gonna go sit in a fetal position and making sure no one comes near my vagina with a what was it?
	A vagina, what was it?
	A vaginal death crap, yeah, vaginal or a uterine depth charge.
	Both, again, great band names.
	I'm just saying, best band names ever.
	Samantha, you got any pluggables to plug before we roll out a part one?
	Well, if you guys want to find me on social media, I am under McVay Samantha on Twitter or Sam McVay at Instagram.
	You can see the pictures of my dogs because that's pretty much the only thing that hangs out with me now since we're in quarantine and never will leave.
	Or you can check me out on StuffCom Never Told You, which is an intersectional feminist podcast.
	So if you're afraid of that, you probably won't like it.
	But we're also with iHeart.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Check out Stuff Mom Never Told You on iHeart.
	Check out Samantha on theinterwebnet.com.
	Send her your favorite band names.
	Send me your favorite band names.
	Start a band.
	And come back on Thursday to hear more about the population control movement, Margaret Sanger, and finally the conclusion of our horrible story about the Dalcock Shield.
	All that and more coming up.
	When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
	I vowed I will be his last target.
	He is not going to get away with this.
	He's going to get what he deserves.
	We always say that: trust your girlfriends.
	Listen to the girlfriends.
	Trust me, babe.
	On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
	I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
	This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
	I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
	An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
	My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
	Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
	Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
	Check out my newest episode with Josh Groban.
	You related to the Phantom at that point.
	Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
	That's so funny.
	Share each day with me each night, each morning.
	Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
	What's up, everyone?
	I'm Ago Modern.
	My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
	My dad gave me the best advice ever.
	He goes, just give it a shot.
	But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
	If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
	It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
	Yeah, it would not be right.
	It wouldn't be that.
	There's a lot of life.
	Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
	This is an iHeart podcast.
	Guaranteed human.

Chapters

00:00:00 Trust Your Girlfriends
00:02:07 The Pill vs Shield
00:18:20 Hidden Medical Risks
00:33:55 Avoiding Lawsuit Rivers
00:38:19 From Addiction to Acceleration
00:41:37 Deadly Depth Charges
00:48:10 Population Control Lies
00:57:00 Fuel for the Movement
01:01:31 Nazi Adjacent History
01:16:52 Flawed Abolitionist Roots
01:22:52 Racist Good Deeds