Michael Hobbes
speaker
4,402 appearances
6 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 21 Sep
Michael Hobbes’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Everyone agrees that in the early years of AIDS, there was a lot of like debate over what was causing it.
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So the first reports appear in 1981 of men who have this, like, very strange cancer.
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And then you start getting more and more reports of, like, gay men dying of this weird thing, and it presents very differently.
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Is this when they named it GRIDS?
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Yes, Gay Related Immune Deficiency.
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Although even earlier than that, it was literally called, like, gay cancer in the press.
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Yeah.
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Holy Jones.
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So there's lots of theories on what was causing it, basically because it was just so mysterious and weird.
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One of the theories was that sperm in your butt reduces immune function.
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We've all been there.
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Another explanation was poppers, which are these inhalants that men take for muscle relaxant.
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It makes anal sex better.
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This was like one of the like fairly prominent early explanations because a lot of the people that got AIDS had been using poppers.
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Apparently poppers do have like a slightly immunosuppressing effect.
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And I guess they're like really bad for you.
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I was like reading the Cleveland Clinic website this morning.
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But because they're a vasodilator, they had been given to heart disease patients for years and none of them got AIDS.
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So that gets discarded pretty quickly.
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It is, I will say, very funny to think about.
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Showing 21–40 of 4,402 · page 2 of 221
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