Billy: Today Regina hits a dead end online when researching forms of male birth control. 

Regina: Have you guys ever heard of heat based contraception? 

John: Like not not having babies with hot people. 

Regina: What? No. 

Adrianne: Not having babies because it’s a heat wave and it’s too hot to move. 

Regina: Honestly that one I understand. 

Billy: You’re talking about watching the movie Heat from 1995 with Robert De Niro while having intercourse. 

Regina: All of you are wrong. Heat based contraception is basically when you cook your testicles and as a result, you become infertile. So you can do this a variety of ways. You can take a hot bath, you could have heat generated by ultrasound.

I’m reading all of this from a Wikipedia article, but the article is flagged for not having good enough citations.

John: Why were you looking into this? 

Regina: So I’m at home at my sister’s house and she has a newly born baby who cries 16 to 18 hours of the day. And so I’m thinking about babies and then I come across this tweet from this woman named Gabrielle Blair and she, in a series of 10,000 tweets — they were all great but they were very long — makes the point that you know, men are responsible for causing pregnancy and yet women are responsible for preventing pregnancy. And so I thought you know, like it’s a 50-50 split going into it. Why can’t it be a 50/50 split preventing it and so that’s how I got into this like rabbit hole of male birth control.

Billy: Right, like there’s no male pill. 

John: So what brought you to heat-based contraception with that in mind? 

Regina: I think I was just Googling male contraception and looking at different options. And then on Wikipedia when you come across it, you go to heat-based contraception, or I got linked to the Wikipedia page for heat based contraception.

John: Got it.

Regina: So you can apply the heat a bunch of different ways. But the point is that by heating your balls, you become infertile. 

Billy: I’m actually very familiar with this. I’ve been doing this with a MacBook Pro for years.

Regina: MacBooks aren’t mentioned in this article, but it does link to a study that used hot baths. It seems like if a man bathed in a 116 degrees Fahrenheit than it could provide contraceptive protection for six months and if he did a 110 degrees and it could be four months.

Billy: Wait, what what is this? Like is this scientific?

John: This can’t be real.

Regina: They did it. They tested it with like eight volunteers 9 volunteers. 

John: That doesn’t seem statistically significant. 

Regina: Hold on. I literally just found a website made by a guy who tried this it looks like. 

Adrianne: Oh my god.

Regina: His name is Chris Jenks, and he was testing what he calls testicular heating.

Adrianne: Testicular heating is a really good phrase. 

Regina: Oh starting in November 1998. 

John: What?

Regina: Puzzle piece dot-org slash b control slash male BC dot HTML. Careful. It’s not secure.

John: I’m gonna just. This seems to be a hand coded website. Is what I’m 

guessing.

Billy: Wow. 

Adrianne: There are photos. Photos of underwear. 

Regina: Oh, wow, he has a photo of underwear with the string attached.

“The loop goes around my penis at the base and is secured to my underwear in the part between my legs by a safety pin.”

Billy: Woah.

Adrianne: This is amazing.

John: This is a very bad accident waiting to happen. So there’s a pair of tighty whities here on out on a red sheet. And then at the very bottom of the underwear, there’s a piece of like yarn or twine that’s safety pinned to the bottom in kind of a loop and that loop is being closed by what looks like one of those like spring loaded.

Regina: Like a backpack clip? 

John: Yeah, like a backpack clip.

Billy: He calls it a cord stop which, it looks like, I don’t know. Like you would see these on like backpacks. It’s like a button you can push, and when you push it you can slide it on the string, and then when you let it go it tightens. But this whole site I would say is very, it feels very homebrew, for lack of a better term.

It’s like very plain HTML. It’s the pictures of the underwear look very you know, it’s like it’s like a step below something you’d buy on Etsy.

Regina: I mean, yeah who would buy this on Etsy? 

I didn’t realize anatomy-wise that you can literally push your balls like out of the scrotum and into your abdomen.

John: No!

Billy: What, wait what?

Regina: Yeah. 

Adrianne: Why is that helpful, to put them in the abdomen? Don’t you want them isolated so you could heat them? 

Regina: That heats them up. Basically you’re pushing them in there. So they get hot. 

Adrianne: So this is a thing that a lot of people do I think for other reasons? Like transgender women with testicles will will do this.

John: But the concept of doing it for for heating your testicles specifically  seems like… unique, is the word. 

Billy: And so the testicles stay up there and they’re heated by your body and that works as a form of birth control? 

Regina: That seems to be what he’s saying, yes. 

John: And he did this for 11 years?

Adrianne: No. 

Regina: Yeah. That’s dedication. I respect that.

Adrianne: Eleven years of heating? I just read that as 11 months. This is so wild. 

Regina: Yeah 11 years of heating. 

John: So what’s the question that we have to answer? 

Adrianne: The question is why haven’t we invested more in male contraception? 

Regina: That for sure but also like if we invested resources in this could this actually solve unplanned pregnancies?

John: I think we got to talk to this guy. 

Billy: Yeah. 

Regina: Oh, yeah, I’m into it.

Billy: Coming up, Regina tracks down Christopher Jenks, the man, who heated his testicles for 11 years in the name of science and equality.

Regina: Testicular heating. Testicular heating.

Billy: All right, Regina. What did you find? 

Regina: So I talked to Chris.

Chris: Hello?

Regina: Hi, is this Chris? 

Chris: Yes, this is Chris. 

John: What’s he like? 

Regina: So Chris was the most matter-of-fact person that I think I’ve ever talked to particularly about a topic that is so not matter of fact in literally any way. He just really wants to document things and share them with the world.

Chris: Well the inspiration for creating this website, puzzle piece dot-org — it’s actually run out of my web server in my home — was to put up things that are solutions for, I guess I consider them underutilized solutions. So they’re solutions which seem really elegant and effective, but which most people don’t know about.

John: Wait wait wait, so he’s hosting this website from his home? 

Regina: Oh yeah.

John: That’s amazing. 

Regina: Yeah, except for the fact that the first time I emailed him it didn’t work and his whole website went down. And so then I had all these like crazy anxiety conspiracy theories about how maybe I spooked him and like he didn’t realize that anyone could find his website because like he has all data on it.

But then of course it turns out that he just self hosts his website and the computer probably like turned off or something and so Billy found him on LinkedIn. 

Chris: My training is in organic chemistry, and so I have a scientific background. So that’s what gets me into all these experiments. And basically I’m interested in things that make life easier.

John: Okay, so this guy formally studied chemistry then. 

Regina: Yeah, he got a PhD in organic chemistry from UC Davis. 

John: So he’s a real scientist. 

Regina: Yeah, absolutely. 

Adrianne: So what are these other experiments, or these other solutions, that he’s doing? 

Regina: So he did one when both of his daughters got hair lice, and he didn’t like the store-bought options that were available.

Chris: If you go to the drugstore, you’ll be offered some kind of medicated shampoo that’s got a pesticide in it. 

Regina: And so he Googled around and he was looking for natural solutions and then he found one where you could I think it was petroleum jelly, so like Vaseline, basically. And so he found that so you could he could put that on his daughters heads and test it to see if it worked.

John: And did it?

Regina: Yeah, it did work. But he also did some research on stopping drug addiction. 

Chris: The first thing that I was going to put up there was actually a medication that’s used to treat drug addiction. It’s called ibogaine. And anybody who has a problem with drug addiction ought to at least know about that because of its promise as an option, but most people don’t, and so that’s one of the main sections on that website.

Regina: I think that he just does a lot of these types of experiments and contraception is just one of the things that he’s looked into. I think he has a great appreciation for people who contribute to that type of culture and is like this is what the internet’s for is learning things from other people and being able to share things with people you don’t know, and so he just sees this as like a public service.

Adrianne: Right and testicular heating is an area where there isn’t a lot of information, and so that sort of contribution can add a lot. 

Billy: Did you ask him if he had tried other forms of contraception? 

Regina: Yes. Yeah, they tried everything. He walked me through like all of the different things that they had tried.

Chris: We went through the conventional options, of course birth control pills would cause depression, the spermicide would cause burning skin, vasectomy is not reversible, neither is the tubal ligation. And then without spermicide, a lot of the mechanical barrier options aren’t very effective. 

Billy: God, I love this guy.

Regina: He’s great. 

Chris: I also want to add that another birth control method that we looked at was… what was it called? Fertility… I’m looking at my own notes here. It’s been so long… symptothermal method. And basically yeah that’s tracking cycles to find out when the infertile portion of my wife’s cycle would be, and then have sex during that period.

And although we could have done that, we were organized enough to effectively do that, the problem is that then we can’t have sex during the time when her libido is the highest, which is when she’s fertile. And so it’s not an optimal method to have to use that. 

Billy: So he’s like there’s got to be a better way.

Regina: Yes.

Billy: It’s a very noble endeavor when you put it that way. 

Regina: I think he just really doesn’t think that this is that strange and was like, okay, I hate all the methods of birth control that are out there for women. As a man, what can I do? I want it to be reversible. 

Adrianne: So you think he was just like Googling around for male contraception and then found heat-based contraception and then just kind of went down an internet rabbit hole. 

Regina: Yeah, which is exactly what I did. 

Chris: I just started doing internet searches, which I always turn to when I have a problem and can’t figure out a good, you know, happy solution. And I found these studies of a lady in India.

Regina: Basically in the 1940s there was this Swiss doctor who’s working in India named Marthe Voegeli, and she ran these tests on nine men of different backgrounds, and she found that she could induce temporary infertility using hot baths. 

Chris: They were trying to deal with the famine at that time. People didn’t want have children because there wasn’t enough food to go around and she wanted to offer them an effective method of contraception.

Regina: So basically what happened is the men would sit in hot water for 45 minutes a day for three weeks, and then they would be infertile for six months. 

Chris: And so if they just took this hot bath at regular intervals, then they wouldn’t have children. 

Regina: But that meant that they had to be really hot. It had to be 116 degrees Fahrenheit.

Chris: The study went on to say that couples after the famine did go on to have normal children.

So not only does that show that the method is reversible, it seems to show that the you know, at least in the small sample that the children can be normal after the contraception is reversed. 

Regina: Dr. Voegeli wanted to develop a small device that could be worn by men who didn’t have 45 minutes to spend in a hot bath on a regular basis.

John: This is sounding familiar. 

Billy: Okay, so what happened? 

Regina: Men weren’t on board. In 1956, she wrote a letter to the editor of the Lancet in London trying to get her findings officially published, but it never happened. And then a year later, in 1957, the hormonal birth control for women was approved by the FDA in the US for regulating menstrual cycles.

Three years later, it was approved for contraceptive use and by 1965, the pill was the most popular form of contraception in the US. 

Adrianne: Okay. So now that there’s a way for women to take care of the whole birth control thing, men don’t need to do it anymore. Is that where we’re going with this? 

Regina: Yeah, so as long as the solution depends on men to actually be proactive and do something about it, it’s not going to work because it’s not going to scale, because there’s very few men who are going to be willing to actually do that. And so then women can do it and it doesn’t matter what the side effects are, because women will just do it. That seems to line up with the way that I know the world.

Adrianne: That seems believable.

Regina: Yeah, so Chris was basically doing this in an attempt to help course correct that history. 

Chris: I had to decide between this hot bath method or my heating method, which was basically a rubber band that would cause my testicles to remain in my inguinal canals, which is basically meaning they’re raised into my abdomen. And doing that causes them to be at pretty close to my core body temperature rather than more at ambient as they normally would be.

So what I end up with doing was getting a piece of yarn and attaching it to the bottom of my underwear and then I put it around the base my penis and put a cord stop at the top. And so that’s what I use the rest of the time and and that seemed to be effective. So everyday I just break off a piece of yarn and that would be what I’d use and I tend to use thick yarn because it would be less constricting.

Adrianne: He’s very precise. 

Regina: He’s super precise. 

Billy: But in a way that I feel like would not pass in like a scientific laboratory. 

John: You can’t — yeah. 

Adrianne: How is he actually confident that it was actually working? Like this seems like pretty high stakes to sort of, not know. 

Regina: Well, he counted his sperm. 

Chris: First I needed a baseline of my sperm count and so I went to the Sutter Hospital and got referred to a fertility clinic where they measured my sperm count. 

Regina: So men make — this is terrifying — men make 1,000 sperm every second. 

John: Okay, that seems like a pretty large number… 

Regina: I told you it was terrifying.

John: Of sperm every second. 

Billy: Yeah, and I did a quick Google search here to see what the normal ranges are. According to the American Pregnancy Association, they say that between 20 million and 300 million sperm per milliliter of semen is like a normal range for a fertile man.

And below 10 million is considered not good. 

Regina: Yeah, so I’m going to set the scene for you. It’s November 23rd, 1998. That’s all the details I have. I don’t know what the weather was that day. 

Chris: Let’s see. I got 89 million sperm per milliliter as the result of that test. And at the same time, I needed to develop some way that I could do these tests on my own because these things, these tests, cost about $100, $150 a piece, and I know I couldn’t do that regularly every month or two whenever I wanted to know what was going on.

So I bought a microscope. 

Billy: So how does it work? He’s not individually counting sperm, right? 

Regina: No, so what he does is he takes a sample and then he takes that amount that he can put underneath the microscope. 

Chris: And figuring out the area of a slide and figuring out the area I was looking at when they look through the microscope at the slide so I can divide that by total area.

And I also immobilize the sperm using formaldehyde. I used a very tiny amount of formaldehyde so that sperm wouldn’t be moving, so I could count them in the time that they would have otherwise swam away. 

Regina: And then they’re stationary, he counts them, and then he multiplies that by 26,000. 

Adrianne: And where does the 26,000 come from just to clarify?

Regina: Because that’s like the amount that he can see in the microscope is 1/26,000th of a milliliter.

Adrianne: Oh, okay. Thank you. 

Billy: That’s like in and of itself form of contraception. It’s like honey, I’m sorry. I’m going to stay up tonight counting my sperm. 

Regina: Yeah, I mean, maybe that’s the secret. So he was at 89 million in the very beginning and then he has —

Billy: Which is normal?

Regina: Yeah, which is normal. He’s perfectly fertile. Could get a woman pregnant.

Chris: So then seven days later, I did a test on my own and that was the 21 million.

Regina: So he pretty quickly cuts it into a quarter, right? He’s at 21 million which is maybe technically still in the fertile range, but significantly lower than he was.

Chris: And then 10 days after starting it was down to 23,000 per milliliter. From 26 days on, it’s below 26,000, and below 26,000 basically means that I’m not seeing a single live sperm on the slide, so that’s the way it was for the first four months. I saw nothing. I saw a couple for the next several years. 

John: It’s just dawning on me now that for 11 years, not only was he tying this thing to himself every day, but like, every month or two he had to get out the microscope and count his sperm. 

Adrianne: What does his wife think about all of this? 

Regina: His wife kind of seems to be used to it. 

Chris: She likes to do adventures with me and she appreciates that I find these technical things that are useful and interesting. So it was nice to collaborate with her on this.

Adrianne: That’s great. 

John: Okay, so this seems to be working out well for Chris, but what do the more formal scientific communities have to say about this stuff? 

Regina: So I had the same feeling and so I made a phone call. 

John Amory: Hi, it’s John Amory. 

John: Who’s he?

Regina: He is an endocrinologist. 

John Amory: I’m a physician and researcher here at the University of Washington and I’ve been working in the area of male contraceptive development for about 20 years.

Regina: And so I asked him to divide up those 20 years that he’s been working and what the arc of male contraception has been in that time. And he basically divided into two sections. 

John Amory: For the first 10 years, I was working in hormonal contraceptives. That work dates back to the seventies. It just didn’t seem like it was progressing to the point where it was going to make it to the market.

Hormonal male contraceptives work about 90% of the time. But they don’t work, crucially, in 10% of men. We don’t know who those men are. And it was also quite difficult to dose because most of the regimens involved injections, and dosing orally didn’t seem possible. So initially we had some drug company support for that work, but that had sort of petered out by about 2008 and about 10 years ago, I switched off from that, and now I’ve been doing non-hormonal contraceptive development looking at blocking the function of vitamin A in the testes because vitamin A in the testes is needed for sperm production. 

Regina: Anyways,  we’ll get to that. 

John: Had he heard of Chris before? 

Regina: He had not heard of Chris before. 

John: Interesting.

Regina: I asked about using heat based contraception. He said oh, yeah. 

John Amory: Oh yeah, people have been interested that for a while. You know when we’re talking about infertile men. We tell them to avoid hot tubs we’ve known for a long time that heat is bad for spermatogenesis. In fact, that’s why the testes are outside of the body. 

Regina: He said he had never seen anybody take it to the degree that Chris had. Get it? Degree. Yeah, the thing is, he made that joke to me first. 

John: God. 

John Amory: Hahaha, degree? Get it? 

Regina: Wow, I actually didn’t get it, but I’ll keep that in the podcast. 

John Amory: He did. He took it to a really, really high degree. 

Regina: 116 degrees FahrenheIt, I believe is what it is. 

John Amory: That’s high!

Regina: He said the main issue with it, is that it doesn’t work for all men and they don’t know why.

Adrianne: What? 

John Amory: Looking back, if you go and look in the literature, you know, there had been some work out of Christina Wang and Ron Swerdloff’s group sort of using heat as a male contraceptive. It didn’t appear that it worked in all men. You know that we have a similar problem with the hormonal approach, that there’s these subsets of men in whom these things don’t work. And if you’re trying to develop one for the market, you need it to pretty much work in everybody. 

So it looks like it worked for our friend. But you know, it’s hard to know whether his experience would be replicable in everyone. The data suggests that it’s not, actually, so. Although you know, maybe they weren’t as rigorous as he was.

Billy: Okay, so maybe heating your testicles doesn’t work for everyone but it worked for Chris, right? So if you could find a cheap way for people to easily monitor their sperm, this might be a real option for couples who don’t want to take medicine, right? 

Regina: Well, maybe. Chris ran into a problem and it’s a pretty big one.

So Chris’s wife is going through menopause. He doesn’t really need this anymore. He’s been tying his balls up for a really long time. And so he decides to stop. 

Chris: I decided to discontinue the method and I found that my sperm count went up to 10 million after two months. 

John: And it had been at its highest…? 

Regina: 89 

John: 89 million sperm.

Regina: Yes. His sperm doesn’t go back up right away. And he’s like well, I did do this for 11 years. Maybe it’s going to take some time. 

Chris: So two months later, I was at 21 million There are 16 million the next year. 14 million the year after. 

Regina: He keeps testing and not only has his sperm count gone way below the infertile level but their motility is very limited.

Adrianne: So they can’t swim. 

Regina: Right. So if you go to his website now, the one that he has to tell people about this method and to tell them it’s an option, in very big font, at the top, in bold, it says what happened to him, which is that it turned out to not be entirely reversible. 

John: So he’s infertile now. 

Regina: Yes. 

Billy: And one of the main reasons he did this method to begin with…

Regina: Was because it was reversible. 

John: Oh, man, so if the whole reason for this was that it was reversible, does he regret doing this? 

Regina: No, I don’t think he regrets it because I don’t think he was trying to have more kids. He says like well, my theory is that if a person is looking for temporary short-term birth control, than this might still be reversible.

Chris: The other data we have from that study in India shows that it can be reversible after a year or so. And we all know that sperm decreases in athletes when they have an athletic suspender and it recovers when they stopped using that. And so it’s not that this is irreversible, you know in all cases, it’s just in my extreme case because nobody had tested it for this length of time. 

Billy: So he still considers it to be a viable option with certain big caveats.

Regina: Right. So his thought was, I think that this could still work, but in shorter time periods.

John: But he doesn’t have proof of that.

Regina: He doesn’t really have proof of that. He is just thinking that based on the fact that athletes can do this for a little bit and other people can do it. Like you can work with your laptop on your lap, and then you can still have a baby. Billy Disney is evidence of this. Sorry Billy to bring you into this, but your wife is very pregnant.

Billy: Hey, you know.

John: So it sounds like John, our endocrinologist friend, isn’t totally sold on heat based contraception like what Chris is doing. But obviously he’s looking into male contraception of some sort. So what is it that he’s doing? 

Regina: He’s working on suppressing vitamin A in the testes. 

John: Is that more effective? 

Regina: It seems like it would be more effective.

John Amory: So in the late 50s and early 60s, researchers stumbled across this drug called WIN 18446 that they had been studying for parasitic infections and it made the lab mice, the males, infertile. And they didn’t know why, but it was reproducible in lots of species, and they even tested it in about a hundred men. And it suppressed sperm production.

Regina: So they said great. We got ourselves a male birth control pill. But then the issue, and I think this is very interesting. The issue with this male birth control pill, is that men couldn’t take the birth control pill and drink alcohol.

John Amory: I learned about this in about 2007 and hypothesized that it was working via the vitamin A pathway and in fact that turned out to be correct.

So we found out that this old drug, WIN 18446, was working via inhibition of the conversion of vitamin A to retinoic acid in the testes, and we identified the enzyme involved in that process and are now developing drugs to block it. 

Regina: So by doing this they would prevent vitamin A production. Only in the testis your body would still have vitamin A for all the things it needs elsewhere, but you would no longer produce sperm.

John Amory: And we think that that is a promising approach.  

Billy: So what’s the holdup it sounds like they found the solution. 

Regina: Well, the holdup is there’s no funding. 

John Amory: Drug companies are interested in making money and the big money right now in drug development is in oncology and immunology. 

Adrianne: How much funding do they need?

Regina: Drugs are really expensive. 

John Amory: You know Elon Musk by any chance or somebody really wealthy? 

Regina: I don’t know if he would be into this, it seems…

John Amory: He may not take your call. I had high hopes for Paul Allen, but now he’s dead. So there you go. 

Regina: What do you think that men specifically could do to move us there faster? 

John Amory: Men? Oh men, men need to basically make a lot of noise and start demanding better funding for men’s health research. It’s amazing really if you look at it the amount of money that goes into men’s reproductive health is almost nothing.

So about half of pregnancies in the United States are unintended and about half of those end in abortions. Now, maybe some of that is that women don’t have access to contraceptives, but there a lot of women who can’t take contraceptives because they can’t tolerate the side effects or because they actually have a contraindication such as a blood clot or other breast cancer or etcetera etcetera.

So they can actually use hormonal methods that are available to women. So there’s a big unmet need. So if men want to do something they should agitate for more funding for men’s health for infertility, contraception and so forth. 

Billy: Here’s the important question here. Do you feel like you now understand more about heat based contraception?

Regina: I don’t necessarily feel like I understand more about heat based contraception. 

Billy: That’s the goal of the show. 

John: Oh no, that’s the whole thing. 

Regina: No, but here’s the thing. Okay, so I maybe I understand more about it in the sense that when I came into this I thought that this was the potentially the solution and it was like, yeah just cook your balls, but no that is not the solution.

The solution is a little bit TBD, but we’re learning more every day, but the key to a solution to this problem is it working for all men.

John: Did John think Chris’s experiment was… Trustworthy? What’s the word I’m looking for? 

Regina: I think that he thought Chris’s experiment was what Chris is experiment was which is, really interesting, really extreme and not indicative of an actual solution for male birth control. 

Billy: It’s sort of just like interesting hobbyist case study. 

Regina: Right. 

John: It’s just like, I’m obviously a very different kind of person from him because I would like never do this in the first place. But to me if I had spent 11 years doing this, and it sounds like it could be really uncomfortable, at the end of that if I just spoke to another scientist who’s like, “yeah, dude, sometimes heat works and sometimes it doesn’t… You might have gotten lucky.” I don’t know, I’d feel like I wasted more than a decade of my life documenting something that doesn’t really have a future. 

Billy: Yeah, but but maybe Chris is one experiment doesn’t have that big of a real impact in terms of the data he was collecting, but I think the sentiment behind it… If more people thought like Chris does and we’re willing to take on some of these burdens so that women don’t have to then maybe the funding problem that John was talking about wouldn’t be an issue and maybe we would have already solved this problem. 

Regina: Right. One thing that Chris really emphasized to me was that he does these experiments to make life easier. 

Chris: Basically, I’m interested in things that make life easier in some very I guess I’m very practical as a scientist.

I have a hard time studying something if I don’t see it being useful for things. 

Regina: So it at first I laughed because I was like, how could this possibly be easier? But then I was like, oh, it’s not about being easier for him. It’s about making it easier for other people. So, you know people who are addicted to drugs, his daughters, his wife, and then he puts it all in the internet for people like me so that I can find things easier.

Chris: My interest is in more practical. I figure just the fact that there are actual clinical trials on rats to see if this might be a useful method of contraception means that you know, it’s promising enough to be worth studying for me. 

John: In a weird way, it is kind of altruistic, right? 

Regina: Yeah, I think Chris was doing it for his wife.

I think that Chris was like all of these options suck and I don’t understand why you’re the only one who has to suffer. So I’m going to cook my balls. For 11 years. Because that’s love.

John: Underunderstood is reported and produced by Billy Disney, Regina Dellea, Adrianne Jeffries, and me, John Lagomarsino. Our theme song is “Painted Memory” by Purr. Thanks to Chris Jenks and John Amory for talking to us today. If you want to hear more underunderstood and you should subscribe on literally any app you use to listen to podcasts. There more episodes waiting there for you right now.

Thanks for listening. We’ll be back next week with a trip to the zoo and a missing primate report.