Instant Genius - Why this common women’s health condition is so misunderstood

Episode Date: July 2, 2026

Despite affecting as many as 80 per cent of women by the age of 50, fibroids, lumps of tissue that grow in or around the womb, are not commonly discussed outside of specialist doctors’ offices. However, they can cause a whole host of health issues, such as heavy or painful periods, poor bladder control, chronic constipation, and even affect fertility and complicate childbirth. In this episode, we’re joined by Dr Michelle Griffin, a women's health expert, author and former BBC Science Focus columnist, to talk about her latest book, Fibroids – Everything You Need to Know, From Symptoms to Diagnosis and Beyond. She tells us how the location of fibroids determines the specific symptoms and complications associated with them; the role hormones play in their development and growth and talks us through some of the latest developments in treating this common but overlooked condition. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-size masterclass in podcast form. Every Monday and Friday, you'll heal world-leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor, a BBC science focus. Despite affecting as many of 80% of women by the age of 50, fibroids, lumps of tissue that grow in or around the womb, are not commonly discussed outside of specialist doctor's offices. However, they can cause a whole host of health issues, such as heavy or painful periods, poor blood of control, chronic constipation,

and even affect fertility and complicate childbirth. In this episode, we're joined by Dr Michelle Griffin, a women's health expert, author and former BBC Science Focus columnist, to talk about her latest book, Fibroids, everything you need to know, from symptoms to diagnosis and beyond. She tells us how the exact location of fibroids determines the specific symptoms and complications associated with them,

the roles hormones play in their development and growth, and talks us through some of the latest developments in treating this common but overlooked condition. So welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining us. Oh, thank you so much for having me. It's lovely to be here. So today we're talking about your latest book, Fibroids, everything you need to know from symptoms to diagnosis and beyond.

So I think the best place to start then is with the obvious question. What exactly are fibroids? Yes, that is such a good question because I think if you went to most people and asked them, they would never have heard of them and wouldn't be able to tell you what they are. And so it's really important to start there and just say that they are lumps of fibrous tissue that grows only in the uterus, so in the womb in women. So do you get different kinds of fibroids? Yes, in that, what we know so far is that you get, the way that we decide the different types of fibroids isn't so much that they're growing out of different types of tissue, but it's more about where exactly they sit inside the womb.

So going back into the anatomy session a little bit now, if we think of a uterus like an onion and there's several different layers of the uterus, the inner most kind of core of the uterus is the cavity, which is where your baby would grow if you were pregnant, and the lining of that cavity is what develops during a moment. menstrual cycle and is what comes away during a period. Now, if you grow a fibroid around inside that cavity, we call that a submucosal fibroid. And they're pretty common and they cause a lot of

problems. Specifically, women will suffer from very heavy periods because you've got a fibroid sitting and disrupting that inside of the uterus, that cavity space. If you go to the next layer out, that's the muscle layer, and this is like the big bulk of the uterus. And if you have a fibroid in that muscle layer, that's an intramural fibroid. And then the last layer is really the outside coating of the uterus, which we call the serosa. And if you can grow fibroids in like just under that serosal coating, we call that the sub-serosal fibroids. So they are all made of the same type of fibrous tissue, but where exactly they're located in the womb has quite an impact on the type of symptoms that a woman would experience and also the kind of treatment options

that are available to them. So it really is location, location, location that has an impact on a woman and when we talk about the different types of fibroids, that's what we're meaning. Right. So you mentioned know, one of the symptoms could be heavy periods. So what other symptoms do we see from fibroids? Yeah, I think it's very much that fibroids go hand in hand with heavy periods. That's the common one we talk about. But that isn't all by any means. If we just think about periods, you can get very heavy, very long periods of bleeding and they can be very, very painful because of the fibroids. But in actual fact, you get a lot more symptoms. And most of those come into the fact. of just, if you imagine, you've got these lumps of fibrous, heavy, hard tissue sitting in the pelvis.

And that's going to have an impact. And just to give the listeners a sense here, the fibroids can vary in size so massively. So you can have some the size of a pea. And the common size is really around the size of an orange. And but it can go all the way up to as big as a watermelon. And if you can, you just have some sort of sense of what that means, that's quite equivalent to if a woman was pregnant at the late stages of her pregnancy. So that's the kind of size that somebody could be experiencing, but it's not a baby. It's actually made of a heavy, fibrous tissue. And that woman is living with that fibroid day and day out. And of course, you get a lot of symptoms related to just having this lump of tissue sitting in the pelvis that shouldn't be there. And, of course, you get a lot of symptoms.

at all. And one of the biggest kind of group of symptoms that you get is really pressure because it's so heavy and so big these fibroids sitting there. And it impacts on the bladder, the organ sitting at the front of the uterus that obviously holds our wee. And we should really normally speaking be able to hold your urine and not need to go to the toilet for a wee for something like four hours on average. And if you've got a big lump of one fibroid or several fibroids sitting in the womb, pushing up against that bladder so that bladder can't have the space to get big enough to hold the wee as normal, then you're actually getting women who are saying, I can't get through 10 minutes before I need to go to the toilet again because there's physically no space for the bladder to

enlarge and hold urine like it should normally do. So, So women will often come and say, yeah, I get heavy periods. Yes, they're really painful. But I feel pain all the time, this pressing down, this heaviness sensation. My tummy is really bloated. I can actually feel a hardness in my tummy all the time. It doesn't get bigger or smaller. It's there all the time. And, you know, they may not have connected or know that they've got fibroids, but they definitely know that they can't hold their wee very much and they're going to the toilet all the time. And the same thing can be happening because of the size against pushing against the bowels at the back of the body. And that's actually leading to constipation. You can't actually go to

the toilet and open your bowels properly. And so you're getting both pressure on the front and the back of the body. And then also this downward pressure, this feeling that something's coming down all the time and it can actually make intimacy really, really difficult and very painful as well. So that's just some of the symptoms that a woman could be feeling and experiencing. So what are some of the sort of common risk factors then if developing fibroids? Thinking of things like maybe age or ethnicity and things like that. Yes, definitely. Those two do have an impact for sure. And it's really a shame at the moment that we don't 100% know the single or the causes of fibroids. This is still a massively under-researched

area. But what we do know is that fibroids definitely run in families. So if I was to see a woman in my clinic, it's more than likely that if I diagnose her with fibroids, then she'll also say, you know what, my sister, my mum, my grandmother, my aunt, etc. all the females in the family almost will have had fibroids. Yes, they may have had different symptoms. They may have been different locations and different sizes. They may have responded to different treatment, but what we see is fibroids definitely run in families. So that teaches us that there's definitely a genetic component. And what was great to see is that, you know, we had already seen that there were some genes that had been identified that had been linked to fibroids.

But it was only last year that was really the first study that had looked at families and women from across all different ethnicities. So we could start to get a bigger sense of what's going on. Previous studies had focused mainly on white European women. And now last year's study looked at over 75,000 women with fibroids and a quarter of those women were not white and they weren't from European countries. And then we compared that to women, you know, nearly over 400,000 women who didn't have fibroids. And we started to see what genes were turning up in the women who did have fibroids and they weren't in the women who didn't have fibroids. And even further, in the women who did have fibroids, let's look at the women,

who were white. Let's look at the women who were black and let's look at all the different ethnicities and see if there were any specific genes that were turning up in the women who had fibroids and all had similar ethnicities. And we definitely see that women from black Afro-Caribbean backgrounds definitely have a higher risk factor for developing fibroids and also for having a bigger burden of fibroids. And what I mean by that is, they usually get fibroids at a younger age, bigger fibroids, more fibroids, and the symptoms they get from fibroids are more severe. And so we don't quite know what's going on there, but there does seem to be an association that something may be happening. It may be genetics, but it's probably

likely to be the environment. And this is where we look at other risk factors. We know that age is one of the biggest risk factors. And that is that as we're going to be the risk factors, and that is that as we get older, we're more likely to develop fibroids. So by the age of 50, you would expect to see, what we see is up to 80% of women have a fibroid. They may not know about it and they may not even have symptoms from it. But most women get symptoms. And, you know, if you looked at a group of five women, you know, we would expect to see that four of those women at the age of 50 would have fibroids. So it's so common. And a lot of that is related to the fact of the hormone environment.

And what I mean by that is how exposed are women to the hormones? And we're just talking about hormones that women naturally produce inside their bodies here. So we're not talking about whether you've been on the contraceptive pill or you've taken hormone replacement therapy. We're just concentrating on the fact that if a girl starts her peoply, periods in her teenage years and then goes through her 20s and 30s and 40s, she's looking at many decades of having produced natural estrogen progesterone in her body from her ovaries. And this is this exposure to hormones, knowing that fibroids grow and they're really greedy, they feed off estrogen and progesterone. So the longer that our bodies are making estrogen and progesterone is part of

their natural way of working, increases our chances of actually developing fibroids. And then you add into the mix anything else that's going on that could increase your exposure to estrogen and progesterone. So if you started your periods very early, if you finished your periods and went through menopause much later, your overall exposure to hormones is greater. But also things that if you have other medical conditions such as POMOS or metabolic syndrome that's changing how your natural hormones are produced and how they work inside your body, all of this we think is related and associated with an increased risk of fibroids.

So say someone is experiencing some of these symptoms and they suspect, oh, you know, possibly I've got fibroids, you know, how do they go about getting a diagnosis? Yeah, well, this is one bit of good news actually about fibroids where they're in a space that there isn't that much. But it's actually really pretty straightforward to get a diagnosis. Thankfully, you know, we do have a pretty good test and that is the ultrasound where we're doing a scan off the tummy and often we will need to put that ultrasound probe inside the vagina so we can get a clearer, closer look at the uterus and then at the fibroids in there. What's great about this test is it's very common. It's very easy to access. Quite often you will,

you know, we're running ultrasounds every day and night in a hospital. And also often in GP surgeries, they will have their own ultrasound machine. And you could just do quite a basic ultrasound, even at your GP surgery. And so it's a very easy test. You're not having to have a blood test. You're not having to wait for years. And often in women's health conditions, we don't yet even have. a good test to diagnose somebody, for example, with something like endometriosis. But with fibroids, it really relies on imaging. We need to see these fibrous lumps. They have a pretty characteristic look on ultrasound. So it's not as though we get them mixed up with something else that might be going on. And from there, we can easily have a look at where exactly in the uterus these fibroids

are, because as I say, location is really important. We can accurately measure them and get an idea of the size and we can count very simply how many fibroids there are. And, you know, overall, quite often what you see on this ultrasound image is you see these really fibrous lumps of the fibroid tissue, but you can actually see how much they've distorted the uterus and how much bigger the overall size of the uterus, which now is the uterus plus the fibroids. And you can see, oh, right, this is how big. your uterus with fibroids now is. This now explains a lot of the symptoms that you're telling me. And therefore, as a doctor, you can move swiftly into thinking, okay, what's the next step?

How do we best manage it? What are you looking to get from this treatment? And is that going to be possible? Now I've got the information about your fibroids, where they are, how big they are, how many you have. Yeah, so as we've said, the fibroids affect the uterus. So can they cause complications with things like fertility, pregnancy, and even birth itself? Yes, definitely. Fibroids are one of actually the most common causes for complications across all three of fertility, pregnancy and birth. And that's because you've got these lumps sitting in the uterus. And as I said, they're distorting not only the shape and size of the uterus, but the way that that uterus can function. And one of the prime aims of a uterus is to actually contain an egg ready to be fertilised to be the beginnings

of a baby and a pregnancy. So if you have a fibroid sitting at the entrance of where the fallopian tubes which transport the egg from the ovary outside the uterus into the uterus, And you've got a fibroid actually blocking that egg being able to be passed down from the fallopian tubes into that central core cavity of the uterus. Then you've got a very clear, obvious reason for why women are not getting pregnant. You've got a physical barrier to that egg getting into the right space and becoming fertilised and that woman becoming pregnant. But also kind of more indirectly, if you've got fibroids,

affecting that core cavity of the uterus, whether they be submucosal or intramural, those ones that are more towards the centre of the uterus, then we know that that can disrupt. We don't fully understand how, but we know it can disrupt fertility. And so often people don't get pregnant at all. Or if they do, it can result in miscarriage. And often it can result in recurrent miscarriage. So this is women who actually maybe have several miscarriages within the first few months of pregnancy. Then if you do become pregnant and we're now looking kind of scrolling into further on in pregnancy

and we're looking from about sort of 16, 20 weeks pregnancy and carrying on in the pregnancy, these are some of the real growth development stages of a baby. And so this is typically where you'll see a woman and the uterus will start to grow week on week. And you can really see the changes in yourself if you're pregnant or you're looking at somebody else. Now obviously, again, size and location of the fibroid is really important here because it will directly potentially impact the growth of a baby. So anybody who has any fibroids diagnosed pre-pregnancy or during a pregnancy because obviously in pregnancy, we're doing scans to diagnose the pregnancy and then to monitor the, you know, the baby and how well is the baby growing and developing. That's when you can actually pick up

fibroids. And you can see that you almost can get a competition between the baby growing in a normal pregnancy. That's what we'd expect. But also the fibroid is growing. And there can be a competition for space. Because what helps that baby growing, part is hormones, but at the same time, those hormones are actually fueling growth in the fibroids. So you can get real problems because you get such extreme growth of fibroids in pregnancy that directly impact the growth of the baby, but also it can lead to complications because the fibroids grow so fast. They can almost grow too fast. And the blood supply that's helping them grow doesn't actually keep up with the growth and you get the sudden death of the tissue in the fibroid.

And that's called red degeneration. And it's usually where there's been this sudden rapid growth of a fibroid and the fibroid doesn't have enough blood supply to keep it alive. And so the cells and the tissue die. And this is incredibly painful. And we're always very, very concerned about women who have fibroids in pregnancy and let them know if you get this sudden sharp pain, it could be this red degeneration of a fibroid, and you must get to hospital straight away. And then moving forward, when we look at later stages of pregnancy and like planning for birth,

we really need to be looking here at the location of the fibroids, because you can also get fibroids very low down in the womb, or perhaps in the cervix, which is the neck of the womb, And normally during a labour, that neck of the womb would open up and obviously allow the baby to come through the uterus and be delivered for a vaginal delivery. But of course, if you've got a fibroid there, again, a bit like blocking the egg from a fertility point of view, you could block the baby, actually physically block the baby

being able to come out of the womb. And for those women, we would be having discussions saying, look, we think we need to actually opt for a cesarean section where we serve. deliver the baby and we can, we've scanned and we know where the fibroids are and we can locate those fibroids and do our best to avoid them. Because if you either cut into a fibroid because of surgery or if you're changing how that fibroid is sitting in its position while the woman is going through labour and obviously the uterus is changing and contracting and you're having labor contractions, then you can actually cause an awful lot of bleeding because these fibroid tissue

is very, very vascular. And that is our biggest concern to a woman, is that they are at such a high risk of bleeding at any time in pregnancy or in labour. And it can be very, very difficult to control that bleeding. So let's say we've established that a patient does have fibroids. Let's have a look at some of the next steps we can take. So firstly, other things like changes in lifestyle that we can employ to help manage the symptoms of fibroids? Yeah, definitely. And I think whilst I said that we didn't have a single or clear cause for fibroids, what we do know is we've got more information about things that are related to fibroids. And the biggest one is often women who have low vitamin D levels, which we naturally produce in our bodies and we produce it in response to being in the sun.

We need sunlight to get our vitamin D. And often what we see is women who've developed fibroids, especially very big or lots of fibroids, usually have very low vitamin D levels. And what we're now seeing is actually if you give those women vitamin D supplements, so they take it as a medication, rather than just relying on their body to make it, you actually help increase those vitamin D levels. What we're starting to see is that maybe people don't develop as many fibroids or they don't develop as bigger size of fibroids.

So anyone with a diagnosis of fibroids would definitely benefit from having a vitamin D blood test taken and if it's low, definitely take vitamin D. But also I would recommend that if women know that fibroids run in their family and they haven't yet been diagnosed with fibroids, especially if they have non-white skin, so brown, black skin, it's definitely worth taking vitamin D because we know that people who have more pigment in their skin

actually are more likely to make vitamin D slower and therefore they're more likely to have lower levels of vitamin D. And so would respond really well as more of a preventative measure, to be taking vitamin D supplements. Other things that can help is definitely looking at the kind of food that you're eating. This speaks to the fact of we know the hormone environment really impacts women and developing fibroids. So we know that if you are having a diet that's quite high in sugar and processed food, you're probably impacting your insulin and other hormones that are linked so closely to estrogen and progesterone. Therefore, you're getting a kind of cascade domino effect

that actually increases your estrogen and progesterone. So if you could look to reduce your sugar and process food and turn more towards that Mediterranean diet, looking at more fresh meat, vegetables, fruit, fish, and really cutting that processed food, that can also help as well. So sticking with hormones then, are there any hormone therapy is available that we can use to help treat fibroids? Yeah, actually, hormone therapy is really the mainstay of the kind of medical arm of treating fibroids. There's also a surgical arm, but when we just look at medication, hormones really are the mainstain, which may feel a bit counterintuitive because I have just been discussing about how hormones, do kind of drive the growth of fibroids, and that is true. However, what we also see is that if

you give medication that is hormone-related, so specifically progesterone-type medication, that can really help. Not by shrinking the fibroid, it wouldn't do that because, as we just said, estrogen and progesterone grow a fibroid. But what we actually find is if you give progesterone-type medication to women, some women with quite small fibroids, which is why getting the size and the number of fibroids from that ultrasound diagnosis is really helpful. So we're talking about women who typically have fibroids, the biggest size fibroids, around two to three centimetres. So something really like about a grape. size we're talking about there. Those women tend to get most symptoms are related to heavy periods,

painful periods. That's not 100%, but that's what we generally find. So a woman who's coming in who says, I've got several fibroids, this is the ultrasound, they're all around pea to grape size and I'm really struggling with heavy, long, painful periods. I'm passing a lot of blood, passing lumps of blood, having to change my period products, you know, every hour or so, that would all speak to me and say, yep, I'm going to start with a progesterone-based medication for you. Now, we can give that in lots of different ways, but all of them work to actually reduce how much blood you lose during your periods. And if we look at one particular way, which is a interuterine device, so we're looking at a device that actually sits,

sits inside the uterus and that can be inserted in a similar way to how a woman would have had a smear, their legs are apart, we're actually putting something through the vagina, through the cervix, which is the neck of the womb, and into the uterus. And it would sit there for several years. Different devices have different amount of hormone, which means they can sit in the uterus and work for a different amount of time. But on average, we're talking about something like three to five years a woman could have this device inside the womb and it actually is giving out local secretion of progesterone like medication which is actually impacting that lining of the womb and reducing how much blood you lose during your period so it's making your periods

It's lighter and less painful. That works really well for small fibroids. If we want to look at some other medication, which typically we would tend to use with women who have more symptoms than just heavy periods, they've usually, but not necessarily, but usually have got bigger fibroids and perhaps more fibroids, then we would actually see these women who have got problems with the pressure symptoms. on the bladder on the bowel, feeling a lot of pain on a regular daily basis, then we can look at medication which actually doesn't directly impact the womb now, but it is actually working on

our brain and it's working on glands within the brain that are sending signals normally to the ovary to produce estrogen and progesterote. And these medications are hormone-based, but they are basically blocking the glands that produce hormones and they are saying these receptors that sit on these glands, they are blocking them and that blocks the signal to the ovary. They work in a variety of ways, but they have that same outcome that when you take this medication, you block the signal from the brain to the ovary and that has the result of reducing the amount of estrogen and progesterone the ovaries make. Now this is therefore reducing how much you're feeding the fibroids. So this type of medication will actually shrink your fibroids. It's incredibly effective.

It works so well. Women really get the benefit of a reduction in fibroids. We could rescan these women after taking this medication after a month, two months, and we will see a significant reduction in the size of the fibroids, and most importantly, women will stop having symptoms of the fibroids. However, reducing estrogen and progesterone doesn't just work on the fibroids, actually has an impact on the rest of a woman's body. And estrogen and progesterone is so key for so many other normal, healthy function in a woman's body, that it therefore means that you get side effects of this medication. And that makes it very difficult for a woman to tolerate the medication.

And it also means that a woman can't keep on this medication, you know, for much longer than three to six months. So usually we use this medication to give relief from symptoms and actually shrink the fibroids ahead of moving to surgery. Oh, okay. Yeah. So I was going to ask about surgery next then. So presumably if we've tried other treatments that haven't been effective, then surgery

is kind of treated it as the sort of last resort. I mean, that's probably not the best way of putting it, but, you know, like the final option. Yeah, definitely. And I totally get your sentiment there, because it is about saying if we've tried other treatments where we're not looking at having such an impact on you, not being so interventional, that's always the best way to do things in medicine, rather than going for the most interventional invasive, which is usually a surgical option. However, if those treatments haven't yet worked, then we would be looking at let's move on to surgery. And essentially the principle of surgery is removing fibroids. You know, that's what's so simple about it. Where the complications or the difficulty in the discussion and the thinking comes is

what is the best way to remove that fibroid. And a lot of factors come into that. one, it is primarily what does that woman want to achieve? So if that woman hasn't completed her family, perhaps she hasn't even started her family, we can't be looking and offering a hysterectomy where we're removing the whole uterus because to actually, for a woman to become pregnant, she needs her uterus. So we would be looking at removing the fibroid alone and this is called a myomectomy. Now, the great thing about that is that you're just removing the fibroid, you enable that woman to carry on having a uterus, but there is still a chance that that woman could regrow fibroids. So that is one of the biggest downsides.

The other thing is, depending on, again, the location and the size of the fibroid, it can be very difficult to actually remove the fibroid, actually get to the fibroid and surgically remove it without damaging the uterus. And often we've seen fibroids so big, it's invaded into the uterus. There's not actually that much uterus left. And as I said, these fibroids are very, very vascular. And when you start doing surgery, you're actually putting that woman at a massive risk of bleeding a significant amount. And we obviously don't want to cause that major complication of very high blood loss during surgery. So sometimes it's just not possible to isolate

and only remove the fibroid. And therefore, we would be looking at a hysterectomy and removing the whole womb. But these are the kind of two main parts of surgery, removing only the fibroid with a myomectomy or removing the whole womb in a hysterectomy. There are some other treatments that have tried to kind of come on board

and some women find great success, which is actually shrinking the fibroid, not so much with cutting it out, but actually blasting it with really high energy. So like really kind of burning it with a very high temperature laser. Or we actually look at impacting and kind of cutting off, well, blocking the blood supply to the uterus, which actually partially blocks blood supply to the uterus, which means the uterus stays healthy, but it actually impacts how well the fibroid can grow. And this is called artery embolization. And it's a method that we use across the whole body

when we want to block blood supply to something that shouldn't be growing or shouldn't be there. But all of these things, they are more invasive and they have complications with it. And obviously those complications, are specific as well to the individual woman, what her medical history is, and, you know, does she want to go on and conceive and become pregnant? But also does she have other medical problems that would impact how well surgery or these other treatments would work for her?

Yeah, so sort of summing up then, do you have any final words of advice for someone who's listening who thinks, oh, you know, those symptoms, they sound very familiar for me. I think, possibly that I've got fibroids, or perhaps they've just been recently diagnosed, you know, what could you say to them? Yes, I think the biggest message is, and I'd love listeners to take this away, is to really focus on what are you experiencing, whether you've been diagnosed or fibroids or you're not there yet. What is your personal experience?

What are your symptoms? Track those symptoms. And you don't have to be fancy about it. You can just write it on a piece of paper. record it in your phone on your calendar or wherever, but say, you know, on this day, during this night, at work, this happened to me. And not only explain the symptom like, you know, I bled for two weeks this month, but what did that mean? That meant you missed what at work? You couldn't do this at home. You couldn't do that activity. You couldn't socialise. And then track that over,

what, two, three months. And that is really great to give a very clear, picture to a doctor straight away in a very quick way and for that doctor to understand, right, I totally get now how these fibroids are impacting you. Let's get on and start treatment. And I think what can be really helpful as well is for a woman to say, out of everything I'm experiencing, this is the first thing that I really want to work on or this is what I really want to set a goal. So for example, if a woman is regularly, missing days off every month because of how heavy and painful her periods are, then that will be her goal perhaps that she says, I want to stop having to miss work because of my fibroids,

because of the periods I get. Can we work together, you and me as the doctor, on how we can make that happen? And let's set that as our target and let's work towards that. And I think that will lead to a much more effective shared care that leads to better outcomes for a woman. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Dr Michelle Griffin. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out her book, Fibroids, everything you need to know, from symptoms to diagnosis and beyond. If you liked what you just heard, then please do consider subscribing to Instant Genius, on your preferred podcast platform.

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