The Cancer Episode

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Josh Clark (0:11)

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too. And this is a good old-fashioned episode of Stuff You Should Know. I guess one that we hope helps people understand things better is the clumsiest way I can put it.

Charles W. Bryant (0:27)

Yeah, it's pretty clumsy.

Josh Clark (0:29)

Thanks.

Charles W. Bryant (0:31)

You did well then.

Josh Clark (0:34)

Did you already know a lot about cancer before researching this?

Charles W. Bryant (0:38)

Yeah. I mean, I feel like I knew most of this stuff.

Josh Clark (0:42)

Oh, really?

Charles W. Bryant (0:42)

Generally. Like, obviously, you know that we're going to go over a lot of statistics and stuff early on, so I wasn't super dialed in. But yeah, I mean, we have cancer in our family on my mom's side.

Like, my mom had breast cancer. My, her sister had some kind of cancer. My, one of her brothers had some kind of cancer. So it's sort of been around, and I've lost a couple of friends to cancer.

Josh Clark (1:10)

Yeah.

Charles W. Bryant (1:11)

So it's popped up here and there.

Josh Clark (1:14)

Yeah. I would say that's more than your fair share based on some of these statistics.

Charles W. Bryant (1:19)

Yeah. And, you know, I was, I mean, not to spoil anything, but I did see that only 5 to 10 percent of all cancer cases could be attributed to genetic defects.

Josh Clark (1:32)

Yeah, I saw something like that too.

Charles W. Bryant (1:34)

So that made me feel better as far as, you know, knowing that I'm going to die of heart disease.

Josh Clark (1:40)

Right. I mean, that is all American though, isn't it?

Charles W. Bryant (1:45)

Oh, baby, it is.

Josh Clark (1:48)

They give you a little American flag to hold in your casket when you die of heart disease. Yeah.

Charles W. Bryant (1:54)

But, you know, I mean, those are the two leading causes, especially if you're an American. So, you know, that's one of the two is probably going to take me out.

Josh Clark (2:04)

Well, that's the thing. It sucks to think about this kind of stuff, but there's 100 percent chance you're going to go somehow some way.

Charles W. Bryant (2:12)

That's right. And I think 40 percent of men and women in the United States will get a cancer diagnosis at some point.

Josh Clark (2:21)

That's a lot. Yeah.

One in every 2.5 Americans. Yeah.

Charles W. Bryant (2:26)

That's a sobering stat.

Josh Clark (2:28)

And I feel bad for that 0.5 American because they already have it hard enough.

Charles W. Bryant (2:32)

Right. I knew you'd find a way to get a little humor in here.

Josh Clark (2:37)

So, let me kind of tell you what I learned about cancer that I just did not understand, okay? Which is kind of like the overview of what cancer is. It's, cancer is not just one disease, which I kind of knew, but I'd heard that I had no idea what people are talking about. What they're talking about is it's actually nowadays an umbrella term for a collection of more than 200 different diseases.

Charles W. Bryant (3:02)

Yeah.

Josh Clark (3:03)

And they all share two important things in common. One, they are, they come from genetic defects, not just inherited genetic defects like you were talking about.

And then two, the mechanism of the disease is uncontrolled cell growth.

That's cancer. But the reason it's so insidious and difficult to treat and kill so many people, is because it comes from your own body. It's not like a foreign invader. It's your body doing what it normally does, which is cells divide and they don't do it quite right sometimes, and they can turn cancerous. And your body has ways to handle that stuff and get rid of it. But if your body starts to get overwhelmed or your immune system starts to get depleted as you age, then the cancer can take hold and then it goes from a normal byproduct of cell division to disease. I didn't really understand cancer in those terms until I researched this. Yeah.

Charles W. Bryant (4:01)

Well, that's good. I mean, that probably means you haven't faced it a lot in your immediate surroundings.

Josh Clark (4:07)

Yeah. Yumi's brother, her older brother Bobby, has stage four cancer right now. And he's been hanging in there for a really long time. He's living his best life and everything, but it's just kind of this constant in our lives.