Aug 19, 2026 · 53 min · 19 segments
What if safer sex didn’t have to be rooted in fear? In this episode of Please Me!, Eve Hall and Robert Johnson explore how modern sexual health tools are changing the way we think about STIs, HPV, HIV…
Eve HallHostWell, I'm 46 years old, Eve, and so, and this, these are just in my lifetime.
So if you compare the type of sex, safe sex that I can have compared to my parents, it's a completely different ballgame.
And so earlier when we were talking about people should feel better about these things, I really hope that they do, even though we spent the past half hour or so talking about all the things [laughs] that, that could go wrong.
We, we hope we did that in a good-natured way that people actually want to have sex more than they did before they listened to this show.
So in 1981, the hepatitis B vaccine came out, and hepatitis B is an important sexually transmitted infection.
So if you're, like, 35 years old or younger, you've probably been vaccinated for hepatitis B, and that's great.
And if you're older than that, you can certainly talk to your physician about getting that.
And that reduces the number of outbreaks and it suppresses the amount of virus if somebody has the HSV virus in their body, and that has prevented, not only helped people be more comfortable who have HSV, certainly that's probably the main thing, but it's also certainly reduced the number of infections or how likely someone is to be infectious.
Imagine if somebody tells you, "I have genital HSV-1, but my last outbreak was two years ago.
I take valacyclovir every single day." I'm not putting words in your mouth, but you'd probably be much more likely to have sex with that person, because, A, you would know that that person knows what's going on with their sexual health-
... and that's a lot, that's a lot smarter than somebody just saying, "I don't know.
Well, I'm 46 years old, Eve, and so, and this, these are just in my lifetime.
So if you compare the type of sex, safe sex that I can have compared to my parents, it's a completely different ballgame.
And so earlier when we were talking about people should feel better about these things, I really hope that they do, even though we spent the past half hour or so talking about all the things [laughs] that, that could go wrong.
We, we hope we did that in a good-natured way that people actually want to have sex more than they did before they listened to this show.
So in 1981, the hepatitis B vaccine came out, and hepatitis B is an important sexually transmitted infection.
So if you're, like, 35 years old or younger, you've probably been vaccinated for hepatitis B, and that's great.
And if you're older than that, you can certainly talk to your physician about getting that.
And that reduces the number of outbreaks and it suppresses the amount of virus if somebody has the HSV virus in their body, and that has prevented, not only helped people be more comfortable who have HSV, certainly that's probably the main thing, but it's also certainly reduced the number of infections or how likely someone is to be infectious.
Imagine if somebody tells you, "I have genital HSV-1, but my last outbreak was two years ago.
I take valacyclovir every single day." I'm not putting words in your mouth, but you'd probably be much more likely to have sex with that person, because, A, you would know that that person knows what's going on with their sexual health-
... and that's a lot, that's a lot smarter than somebody just saying, "I don't know.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.