Modern Wisdom - #769 - Dr Shanna Swan - Why Are Men’s Testosterone Levels Plummeting?

Episode Date: April 11, 2024

Dr. Shanna Swan is a Professor at the Icahn School of Medicine, an environmental and reproductive epidemiologist and an author. Many of us have heard about about harmful chemicals in plastics, food and water that can mess with our hormones. But just how much truth is in this? How much of our health is disrupted by our modern environment? Expect to learn what is happening to male and female reproductive health, how important testosterone is for everyone, the problems with male fertility rates and sperm count, the chemicals that are most impacting reproductive health, what men can do to improve and increase their sperm count, how to limit your exposure to bad chemicals and much more... Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://www.shopify.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get a 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 5.0 at https://manscaped.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: http://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: http://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: http://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dr Shana Swan. She's a professor at the Icahn School of Medicine, an environmental and reproductive epidemiologist and an author. Many of us have heard about the harmful chemicals in plastics, food and water that can mess with our hormones, but just how much truth is in this? How much of our health is being disrupted by the modern environment? Expect to learn what is happening to male and female reproductive health, how important testosterone is for everyone, the problems with male fertility rates and sperm count, the chemicals that are most impacting reproductive health,

what men can do to improve and increase their sperm count, how to limit your exposure to bad chemicals, and much more. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. From the launch your online shop stage to the first real life store stage, all the way to the did we just hit a million orders stage, Shopify is there to help you grow.

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That's manscaped.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. This episode is brought to you by Element. I have started my morning every single day for the last three years the same way, which is with Element in water. It tastes fantastic. It reduces muscle cramps and fatigue. It optimises your brain health, it regulates appetite and it helps to curb cravings. It's got a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium and magnesium.

Super simple. There is nothing fancy going on here, but it really does work. Also, they have a no BS, no questions asked refund policy. So you can buy it 100% risk free. And if you do not like it, they will give you your money back and you don't even need to return the box. That's how confident they are that you love it. They are the exclusive hydration partner to team USA weightlifting and relied on by tons of Olympic athletes and high performers in the NFL, But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr. Shana Swan. What's happening to testosterone levels in men? So that's a great question and actually I work with a research group and have been for

quite a long time now since, you know, 10 years looking at trends. And the trend we're looking at right now is testosterone. And it's difficult. We haven't finished it. We're in the midst of it. Maybe I'll come back and talk to you when we get the results. But there are a number of papers published that we think are pretty authoritative that talk about declining testosterone.

But the other thing that we can look at, which is different from doing a literature review, you can say, well, how is it clinically? And there's a lot of data showing that the use of testosterone, particularly by young men, has been climbing alarmingly actually. So from a lot of measures, we have hints that testosterone is declining. That's a long way from saying what we said was sperm count, worldwide we see a decline. And we'll come back to that, I'm sure. We can't say that about testosterone at this point, but we can say there are a lot of signals suggesting that testosterone is in trouble.

Yeah. Obviously one of the challenges we have here is our young men taking testosterone because they are suffering with the effects of low T, erectile dysfunction, low energy, low mood, et cetera, et cetera. Or is it because of increases in body dysmorphia or unrealistic representations of, of men in media and they feel like they need to use testosterone as a performance enhancer to become more masculine or to become more muscular and stuff.

Why is it the case that you have more verifiable data around sperm count than you do around testosterone levels? I would have thought that testosterone levels would have been more widely available. I know more guys that know their testosterone count than know their sperm count. That's a good point. That's today and probably in the US. But sperm count has been under study for 65 years. So there's a long history of studying sperm count and there's been very little on testosterone. So I can't tell you why that is. I can't tell you why that is. Men give a sperm sample for a number of reasons, not just research. They give it for pre-vizectomy. They give it because they want to be tested for possible

infertility. They give it for a lot of reasons. I think it's much more common. Giving a testosterone, a blood sample, which you have to give for testosterone is, I think, less, I know it's less widespread because there's much less literature on it. And when scientists- How interesting. Yeah. It's so interesting to me. You know, again, maybe again, you're probably right. This is my not only weird bias, but also my Austin podcast bro biohacker world bias coming into play, where all of my friends know that they're at 755 nanograms per deciliter and

they're going to try and get up to 900 because the blah, blah, blah. I don't know who knows their sperm count. Um, just before we get onto sperm count, tell me from the testosterone, it seems there are some, uh, sort of, I guess, uh, rough, hewn signals that indicate the testosterone is going down. Um, how important is testosterone? You know, there is a, uh, somewhat in the media of a demonization in some ways of, of testosterone in men or some of the activities, I suppose, of,

you know, high testosterone men. Um, how important is testosterone to function for men for longevity, for health, reproduction? What does it do in your world? Absolutely, absolutely critical for many, many things. And I would start with the testosterone in the developing fuse. So the first time the testosterone matters a lot is in the first part of the first trimester. That's how early it is.

And it turns out that, okay, so let me back off. Okay. At the beginning of pregnancy, as soon as you can measure anything or see anything, you will see a genital ridge in males and females. That's the genital tract, but not different in males and females. It's just this ridge, right? And then at the right time, and we're not sure exactly of that time, we know it in rodents, and rodents would stay 18 to 21, but in humans, not so much. We know that it's in early first trimester. At that time, genetically programmed, if it's a genetic male, programming will start the production of testosterone by the testes, formation of the testes, then testosterone gets produced. And that testosterone is what kicks off

the genetic male differentiating himself from the genetic female. Up until that point, it's all the same. And in fact, if the testosterone is not there at the right time or at the right amount, then that male will not proceed on the path to a male typical genital. He might have the smaller testicles, smaller penis, small, less descended testicles. And then my favorite is the anegeneral distance, which we should talk about for sure. I'm so glad that's your favorite. I was waiting for you to bring it up. Well, the reason it's my favorite is because until I

started looking at it, it had only been looked at in animals. Nobody thought anything about AGD, A-energenital dissonance. It was not considered interesting for humans. And then I showed it was, yes, extremely interesting for humans. And so the first thing, talking about this differentiation, when you start out, everybody has the same AGD. Length works. And then as the testosterone comes in, the AGD in the male gets longer, longer until it's about, you know, twice as long as the female or something like that. It's markedly longer. If that doesn't happen, then it's still a male, but he's an incompletely masculinized male. So this measure is really, really critical. And other things happen, the testes don't descend

into the scrotum and the penis is actually smaller, which a lot of people get upset about and other things. So that, you know, fulfilling that potential of a male typical general requires, you said, is it important? I would say most men would say that's pretty important. Yes. Okay. Roll me forward. Because what we're talking about there presumably is

endocrine disruption in the mother, which impacts the growing fetus natally. What about when a mother and son are no longer attached? What, how important is testosterone for development as we move into adult life? Yeah. So the testosterone is important at many stages. It's important for puberty. It's important for other markers of male development.

And one of the things that's really key is it's important for libido. And by the way, it's not just the male. I just want to put in a little word for the female here. So we'll talk about chemicals that influence testosterone. And I'll just say that a class that I've studied is the class of chemicals they make plastic soft. That's the phthalates. Now, when the mother or just a woman, it doesn't have to be a mother, is exposed to less, well, actually more phthalates, then she is less satisfied sexually.

So we found that out by asking women. We said, how satisfied are you with your sex life? How often do you have sex? That was in our study, we asked them that. And we got their urine, and in the urine we measured their phthalates. And it turned out that when the woman had low phthalates, she was less satisfied and she had sex less often.

What does low phthalates relate to from a testosterone in female perspective? In both males and females, phthalates lower testosterone. Okay. Hang on, but you said low phthalates mean low testosterone. Would it not be high phthalates would mean low testosterone? I meant to say low phthalates, low testosterone, right. Phthalates come in, testosterone goes down. Understood. High phthalates, low testosterone in both men and women. Okay. Presumably this is a double-edged sword. If women who are high in phthalates, lower in testosterone, less sexual satisfaction, and also the men who are lower in testosterone

have lower libido, probably lower like erection quality and stuff like that. So you have an environment, an endocrine environment here, which is reducing sexual satisfaction for both partners and their ability to satisfy each other as well. Correct. And I do not have evidence, firm evidence of this. However, you probably know that fertility rates worldwide are down. And in particular in East Asia, they are absolutely at the bottom. One of the things that's happening is people are not having sex. They are not marrying, they're not coupling, they're not having sex. The government is trying to pay people to turn this around. It's really serious. Now, no one has linked that specifically to an endocrine disrupting chemical,

but I cannot believe given what we know about the action of these chemicals that it is not playing a role. In Japan, there are two phenomena I want to mention. One is called rent a family, where if you haven't, yeah, you can sign on to rent a family to get a child for a party or a spouse for a party. Right? And the other one is a phenomena of Japanese women marrying themselves. And that is the weirdest thing to me that, and you can go online and look for that. There are women who have ceremonies at which they marry themselves. So to me, this is one of the clearest indications of a lack of libido.

Very strange. Yes. Are you looking up? Solo weddings. Japan's solo weddings for single women. Self-marriage has become increasingly popular in the 21st century, especially among affluent women. As of 2014, a travel agency in Kyoto is offering self-marriage packages for women, with some customers being wives who were dissatisfied with their original wedding. Wow. I mean, that's even worse than being left for the guy next door being left for

yourself is, is a, a, a real tough pill to swallow. So yeah, I mean, look, I've had a lot of conversations on the show about declining birth rates, something I'm increasingly concerned about, but Dr. Stephen Shaw on the show, who I think is probably the best population demographer when it comes to birth rates at the moment. He did an amazing documentary called Birth Gap. And I agree. Me and my evolution-pilled buddies, a lot of the time we're talking about the mating

crisis, we're talking about issues with women finding a man that they're attracted to, hypergamy, more distractions from screens, you know, just more life options that people have, delayed adolescence, pushing people's lives a little bit further, all of these and they're all, you know, socials, psychology, slash evolutionary explanations that come into attraction. But if we just straight up say, libido is lower, like if we just have that just as one factor, libido gets reduced. We don't know by how much, maybe it's by 10%, maybe it's by 50%. We don't know. But people just less bothered about being sexually active with, with, and like just that on its own,

that is fundamentally the driver and people can reverse engineer. You, I'm sure that you'll be familiar with the difference between proximate and ultimate explanations for behavior. So the proximate explanation for having sex is sex feels good. The ultimate explanation for having sex is that it makes babies. Now what we're looking at a good bit of the time, I think in my world, and this is something that's maybe an error that I need to bring up with the guys. We're looking at the ultimate explanation a lot of the time. We're thinking, well, people are kind

of reasoning themselves. It's a very cerebral, cognitive kind of, um, like right brain approach to people are reasoning themselves into having kids or reason themselves out of having kids. I've got other things to do, but if you just look way closer to home, sex is just less of a driver, Look way closer to home. Sex is just less of a driver potentially due to reduced libido, reduced testosterone in both men and women. And that means that people are just not so fussed about getting into bed with each other. You know, I remember when I was at university 15 years ago, started at university, oh God, 18 years ago now.

And when I went there, it was still this sort of very driven, Larry Lout sort of British culture and, you know, all of it. Whereas now I think 50% of men aged 18 to 30 aren't looking for long-term or casual relationships. To me, a man who went through that period of my life, you know, the reality distorting power of the male sex drive in that age bracket is a sight to behold. It's very powerful.

So yes, absolutely. I think that that base rate should be factored in. How can testosterone just impact our desire to have sex? And then downstream from that, the babies, the marriage, all the rest of the stuff, like if you're the sort of person that wants to have sex once a year, or the sort of person that wants to have sex once a year, or the sort of person that wants to have sex once a week, your desire, your motivation

to go out and get a partner is going to be really different. Yeah. Yeah. I wanted to mention, you mentioned briefly, the effect of testosterone over your lifespan, and I do want to say that there is now, and there was just a new study out about this, we have increasing evidence that men with low sperm count, men and women who are infertile have a shorter lifespan. It's really pretty. Now it's been shown enough times in Denmark by Mike Eisenberg in Stanford. I think there's probably a half a dozen papers on this.

It's really a lot. First of all, men and women who have impaired, I would say, hormone systems are more likely to have other medical problems. For example, heart disease is increased, diabetes is increased, reproductive cancers are increased. What this adds up to is you died earlier. So here's something that you're exposed to pre-adol-ly, and then again, in adult life, of course, or in adolescence, we can talk about when the exposures are important. But throughout your lifespan, particularly early in life, you're setting up, you're setting up your health for the rest of your life. Exposures during pregnancy are most important for your whole

life's health. Everything's developing then, right? What is the relationship between testosterone and sperm count for men? Ah, well, if you don't, it's complicated. Men who use testosterone supplementation do not produce sperm. Do you know that? Of course. Yeah, you do. I mean, I say of course like everyone does, but I think a lot of people think that going on TRT will somehow increase your sperm quality or increase fertility, but it doesn't.

The opposite. The opposite, the opposite. However, for the maintenance of the system, you need adequate testosterone. So on an ongoing basis, for the system to work properly, and it's not just directly testosterone and sperm, it's you need adequate testosterone. So interfering with that is going to mess up your brain and mess up the production of sperm,

mess up whatever, the whole gamut. Presumably low, so am I right in thinking there must be a U-shaped curve to testosterone and sperm quality, that too low testosterone in men, or is it just a linear line? The lower the testosterone, the more sperm, because obviously too much, which is the exogenous stuff, that decreases sperm count. But what about too little?

Yeah. So that when you're taking testosterone, your body gets the, everything, all of these hormones work on feedback, feedback loops. And so if you give the message, wait, I got enough of this stuff, you don't need to make this. Your own testosterone production will be cut down and your production of sperm will be cut down. So it's complicated and I'm not an andrologist, so I can't really speak knowledgeably about this, but I can tell you what we observe that, you know, that when men go, as you know, men go on testosterone, they stop producing sperm.

Yeah. All right. So moving on to the big one, sperm count. What is, what are the statistics, uh, the trajectory of sperm count over the last 65 years? Right. So until some, many people have looked at this And we looked at this, I would say, arguably better than anyone because we used techniques that were not available in the past. And we used something

called a meta-analysis. And we did a very deep dive on the whole world's literature looking at sperm count. And I'll tell you the conclusion and then we can talk about what went into that. The conclusion was that sperm counts are going down at about 1% per year and they're not stopping. It's consistent. It's now we know from recent studies that we've done is actually worldwide. And it's increasing in fact. In our most recent study, the rate of decline was 2% per year after 2000. 2% per year, which is huge. So we published that in 2022. So after 2000, if you go all the way back till 1973 and look at the whole spread, it's

over 1% a year. So that tells you that things are not getting better. The getting was, it's increasingly decreasing. That's right. Increasingly decreasing. That's kind of weird, it's increasingly decreasing. That's right. Increasingly decreasing. That's kind of weird, but there it is. Yeah. The other thing we found in our update was it actually does seem to be worldwide.

In our initial analysis, we had to take the data. We always have to take the data that's available. Can't make it up, right? And the publications in the non-Western countries were very few. So there was not very much data from Asia, Africa, and South America. But in our 2022 paper, there was much more.

And I think what happened was when our paper came out in 2017, which was kind of a big thing, a lot of people started saying, wait, what about us? And started looking in these other countries and tossed that in and then we saw that it was worldwide. So our conclusion of that 2022 paper was sperm count is declining worldwide

and the rate of the decline is increasing. Have you got any idea what countries are having this decrease at a slower rate? Are there any blue zone equivalents for sperm? That's a great question. I don't think we know enough to generalize, but I will say that in Denmark, the rate of decline seems to have leveled up. That's one of the best studied countries because a lot of the work was done there. Originally, the first sperm decline paper came out of there

and a lot of work. They're excellent. They've been following military recruits, young men coming into the military and asking them if they could get a semen sample. They've been doing that for a long time. What they're seeing now is that it doesn't seem to be getting worse. So I would say if we had to find one place that seems to be doing better, I would say, is Denmark. They're still not doing great. They still have a lot of men with very low sperm count. Nevertheless, now Finland on the other hand, which used to be much better than

Denmark is now going down to meet Denmark. So that's confusing because they're very similar popular, you know, demographically they're not that different, their exposures are probably not that different. So that's a conundrum that we have to deal with. I'm fascinated by trying to map this, because obviously if you could look at fertility rates, marriage rates, if you could do some self-report studies

of how much do you desire sex? How often do you want to have sex? How often do you have sex? You know, you could, I guess, do surveys as well about people's beliefs and desires to get into relationships and stuff like that. I would love to map and then look at what is very prevalent in the water. What are the sort of packaging that are used, what's the type of consumption, et cetera. I would be fascinated to see how much of this Asian downturn in birth rates can be seen as,

there is a particular brand of plastic that is exclusively used to package all meats and vegetables and it only exists in Finland. It recently got introduced to Finland and it has been in fucking South Korea or whatever for ages. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I share that wish with you, but I don't think we're gonna find that.

Let's just talk about social factors since you kind of brought those up. And I haven't said, but I'm sure you know, you've had a fertility expert on a demographer on, excellent person. So you know that the fertility rate, which is the number of children that a couple can expect to have in their lifetime. That fertility rate, which should be 2.1 to maintain the species, is now going down almost all over the world. And I'll give you the exception, but almost all over the world. It's including African countries which had a very high fertility rate. Okay. In East Asia, so we want to aim for 2.1, okay? 2.1 maintains the status goal. In South Korea, at last look, it was 0.8. Right? It's also like, I think 0.9 in Japan. Those East

Asian countries are very, very low. Germany, also not good at all. Not good at all, if you want to maintain the population. And the governments are trying a lot economically to pay couples, to get married, to have children, to get a tax credit for the child. Hungary did that thing where the woman got, I think for three kids didn't pay tax for the rest of her life.

Yeah, right. So, but it's not working. It's not turning that around. And so there's something else going on here, you see. And so that's what we as a society have to think about if we want to maintain our existence. I mean, there are endangered species and then humans do fulfill- We are one of them. Yeah, so, but let me say, I'm not saying it's all chemicals. Okay?

I want to make that clear. I think the chemicals that affect our body's hormones are extremely important in this story, but they're not the whole story. So here's a couple of things that lower sperm count that you can control. Good to know, right? Your diet, you mentioned the blue zones, it would be interesting to see the fertility in the blue zones and the sperm count and so on. I don't think that Dan has done that, Dan Buettner. But we did a study with Harvard on the man's diet and we showed that

men who were eating the Mediterranean diet had better sperm showed that men who were eating the Mediterranean diet had better sperm count than men who were eating the Western diet. So that's one thing that's pretty clear. We know that smoking is a huge risk factor for low sperm count. So smoking, there's another one. You could say that is chemical, but I'm putting it under lifestyle. In some sense, everything is chemical. Then there's obesity and exercise and the usual.

If you're obese, your sperm count is lower, your fertility is lower. If you don't exercise, same. Stress is really important. We asked men who gave us sperm sample in our studies about their stressors in their lives, in their daily lives. Typical stressors are moving and change of job and change of partner and death of a loved one and divorce. If you look at those, you see that the more stressors the man has, the lower his brunck.

That's not surprising, but there's another factor. So we're talking about a lot of lifestyle factors. Alcohol is important too, particularly binge drinking. You know, Saturday night, five drinks, six drinks, eight, bad, bad for your sperm count. And we can find more, but the point is here that it's not just these chemicals that are hormone disruptors that I'm caring about or that other people care about. They're also the lifestyle factors. Now in terms of fertility, there are sort of different factors and they're also important and they particularly have to do with the female side, I think.

By the way, those factors also affect female fertility, obesity, smoking, all those things, stress, all that. The availability of contraception, which primarily has an impact on females, I think, drives down the fertility rate. So, if you have contraception available, you're going to have fewer children. Okay. If you have women educated, you're going to have fewer children. If you have women in the workforce, you're going to have fewer children. Right? So, women's place in society is very important for the fertility rate. So that's a very different kind of factor, but it's not a chemical, right?

So if you put all those aside, I would say what you're left with is the chemical and we can talk about that. But I just wanted, I didn't want to give the impression that I'm all about chemicals. No, I mean, we've covered, you're the first person that I've spoken to about endocrine disruptors and what's happening, I guess, physiologically inside of the body, beyond diet and sedentary nurse and stuff like that. I'm gonna guess that sleep, poor sleep, which we are increasingly subject to screens at night,

distraction, blah, blah, blah. I'm gonna guess that makes a difference. Can I give you my bro science theory about why testosterone levels are socially mediated by contraception? So as I'm sure that you're aware, men who are around guns see an increase in testosterone. If I was here and I just had weapons strewn around the table,

my testosterone would be a bit higher. Probably if I was wielding a sword as well, it would be a little bit higher. But the same thing is also true for men who are around women that are fertile. So if you give men the t-shirts of women who are ovulating and you get them to smell it, they were able to pick those women. You can show men the silhouettes of women walking and the women who are ovulating men are able, they, they prefer that there is something in their gate design that changes based on this, the stage of their ovulatory cycle. So I think it is neuroscience time. I think that the artificial suppression of women in men's local environment, their fertility through hormonal birth control, the coil, et cetera, et cetera,

is causing men because that's another huge mediator. If you were, if it was me in a bunch of grandmas or three year old girls, I'm surrounded by females, but I wouldn't be surrounded by fertile females. That would have an impact on my testosterone level and presumably on my sperm count. So it's my belief that you've got everything that you've spoken about. Plus this evolutionarily mediated testosterone and sperm mechanism, which occurs by men just being around fertile women.

And because there are fewer fertile women, because of contraception, that's also causing a problem. And Chris, I want to use a word here, which I'm sure you know, but it's really relevant and that's pheromones. Yes? So the pheromones that are produced, and that's what the t-shirt you were saying that you give a man a t-shirt from a woman. Those are pheromones. And the influence of those pheromones on men's hormones and sperm count, I don't know a study specifically where you looked at sperm count in relation to, but I suspect it's there. The other thing is we do know that when the woman, you have a couple, the woman is pregnant, his testosterone goes

down. Because he's not, he's going to be staying at home and not playing around for a while. Oh, yes, of course. Men's testosterone goes down when they get into a relationship, when they get married and then when they have children, we make less risky behavior. That wouldn't, so I, that mechanism works. Okay. So we understand that the mechanism of a being around an unfertile female mediates

it. What we don't know is how much is this happening en masse? How much, here's another one I haven't even thought about until now, how much of the increasing social isolation of men, you know, just spending time in their house. Maybe they work remote, maybe they've got a job that allows them to work from home, maybe they spend a lot of time on screens, as opposed to mixing, going to church, going to bars, going out dancing, playing sports, doing things that would have allowed them to interact with women, fertile women in the environment. So yeah, we just have, it's this huge cocktail of social,

huge cocktail of social, hormonal, psychological, physical, environmental, lifestyle impacts that are all coalescing to like, neuter the human race, both men and women. Yeah, I don't want to go so far as to say neuter, but certainly alter the hormones of. You're the scientist. I'm the one that can use the explosive language. That's fine. You can do that. You can do that. And I think all of that is extremely important. However, I don't want to lose sight of the ability of chemicals to also alter our body's hormones.

And- Let's get into the chemicals. Tell us what we need to know. Okay. So can we go back to the unborn fetus? And I'll tell you the story. So I'm flying to Japan with a colleague named John Brock, who's a chemist, wonderful chemist. And he works for CDC. And CDC Centers for Disease Control,

they've just figured out how to measure a whole lot of chemicals in a lot of people for not a lot of money. So this actually changed the whole research field because until then we didn't know how to look. If I want to know your levels of things in your body, chemicals in your body, I can't, I can ask you, I can ask you how much you smoke. I can ask you how much drugs you took, blah, blah, blah, blah. I can't ask you how much bisphenol A is in your body, BPA. Right?

I can't ask you. So the only way I can know that is to look inside your body. And it turns out that a lot of these chemicals are water soluble and so they're in the urine and that makes it very easy. Okay. The ones that aren't water soluble are usually fat soluble and they're in the serum and so that's another way you can do it, but that's a little more difficult because you get to draw blood and stuff.

But urine is really easy. So when CDC could measure tons of chemicals in urine, it changed our research field entirely, forever. Okay, so here I am on the plane with John and we're having a long flight to Japan and he says, Shauna, you should study phthalates. Okay. And I said, as you might, if you didn't know better, what's phthalates? Right? And because I never heard of them. And by the way, my background is in mathematics and I'm not a chemist, so this is like phthalates or phthalate.

So he told me and he told me something about where they're found, which I can tell you in a minute, but he also said they're in everybody. So that's fact one. Phthalates are measurable in everybody's urine in the United States in the sample, representative sample they looked at. And then he told me the kicker, which is that at the National Toxicology Program, scientists had fed these same phthalates that we have in our bodies to rats, pregnant rats, early in pregnancy. And what they found was, what I've already told you, that the male offspring are incompletely masculinized. They are born with genitals that haven't made

the full transition from neutral to masculine. Okay? That is huge. I mean, really, this was the first time that anybody thought that this could happen on this physiological level in utero from these chemicals. Okay? So I was like, wow. And then I thought, naturally being an epidemiologist, at that time, I asked, what about humans? Because he told me about rats. So I said, well, okay. So

then if we want to ask that question of humans, what do we need? So, we have to know how much that is because in the lab for the rats, you gave the measure. You could know how much because you gave it to them. But we can't give that to people. It's unethical. You're not allowed to feed test chemicals to subjects except for very rare circumstances. And so we'd have to know how much they accidentally got in their bodies. And that's when we realized you could do that in urine because John had measured it in urine, right? So okay, so all I need to do is get the urine of pregnant women, and I got half the equation. And fortunately, I had a study in which I had saved the urine of pregnant women. It's always good to save urine because it's cheap and it's easy to get.

And I always tell my students, save the urine, save the urine if you can, because it's just going to come out useful. And here it was being extremely useful. So we got out these urine samples from the freezer, sent them to the Centers for Disease Control and asked them to measure the phthalates in the urine. And we found them, tons of them. Okay, so then to finish this, I had to do the second half, which was look at the offspring, right? So to do that, I had to contact the mother and say, could you bring your baby in so we

can measure its genitals? Kind of weird, right? But we did that and women did bring them in. And what we found was that humans, like rats, had this condition which is called the thalate syndrome. So, I mean, this was so important because this is a sign from one other syndrome which is alcohol, fetal alcohol. I'm sure you've heard of that.

There are no syndromes named after chemicals of this kind. No prenatal exposure produces this cluster of adverse outcomes named after a chemical. So here's the phthalate syndrome, and it was just the same as in the rats. By the way, in the rats, the researchers had been measuring these things for about 50 years. They had been using AGD, Energenital Distance, and these other measures as measures of what they call reproductive toxicity. That's part of their protocol. It's part of the NTP protocol. But no one had done it in humans. So what we had to do was say, well, what does that look like in humans? How do you translate that exam in a rat to that exam in an offspring of a female human? So designing that protocol, that exam was, you know, okay, it was difficult, but we did that. And then we had to show it was repeatable and reliable and two people got the same measure

and you know, if you did it a week later, you got the same result and all this kind of thing, you have to do that. So we did that and published and it was a, it was a groundbreaker. It was huge. And it led to legislation to keep phthalates out of certain things, not quite the right things. They took them out of children's toys, which is not related to mother's exposure. But anyway, they were on the right track, limit phthalate exposure. And then other people started seeing that there were other chemicals that could do this. So it's not just thallides that lower testosterone. And the class of chemicals

that lower testosterone are called antiandrogens. And then at the same time, a researcher in Washington state discovered that there was an estrogen influencing chemical, and that was bisphenolite. So bisphenolite makes plastic water bottles hard. And so, gradually, people started saying, oh, and what else can go wrong? And what can influence thyroid? And what can influence this hormone and this hormone? And that class of chemicals are called endocrine disrupting chemicals because as a class, they disrupt the endocrine system. So there's 80 hormones in the body, so a lot of room. A lot of room to defer disruption. And there's like maybe 100,000 chemicals out there in commerce,

so there's a lot of room for chemicals to affect that. And so this is a huge job saying how can this huge class of chemicals in commerce affect these very large number of hormones, which govern our entire function? Our entire function and health is governed hormonally. So it's extremely important. And it plays a big role in the sperm story and in the fertility story and what we're talking about today.

So that's my rant on chemicals. And what you're talking about here specifically is, or at least so far, natally, what does presumably a mother's consumption do to impact the development of a baby in utero? But then that baby is going to grow up and start consuming things that are encased in BPA water bottles and that have got phthalates that may be in drinking water and whatever, whatever. When it comes to the culprits of environmental and lifestyle absorption, consumption, what are the big movers? What is it that people are exposed to, objects and things,

that are causing these to go into our bodies, whether you're a mother or a five-year-old child? Food, I would say, is the primary, is number one. Because there's so many opportunities, and we can talk about what those are. There are also the chemicals we put on our body like skincare products, makeup, because they're absorbed. So when you use a chemical, it will influence you to the extent that it enters you. If it doesn't enter you, you don't worry, it will influence you to the extent that it enters you.

If it doesn't enter you, you don't worry about it, right? It's still like, it's over the other side of the room still. Right, right, they're not going to hurt you. But unless it's in your air duct or something. So the three ways you get the stuff in your body is you eat it or drink it, that's ingestion. You breathe it, respiration, or it's germinally exposed through your skin. And it turns out that several of these chemicals are designed to increase absorption.

They're put into products. Phthalates particularly are put into products. So they'll go into your skin. That's what we're focusing on. The thing we don't want in us makes stuff that we do want in us more likely to carry the thing we don't want in us makes stuff that we do want in us more likely to carry the thing we don't want in us into us. Exactly, into us.

Fantastic. All right. When it comes to foods, what do you mean when you say foods? Is it the content of foods? Is it the packaging of foods? How so? How can we avoid it? All of the above.

So go back to the growth of the food. There's the question of organic and inorganic, which is another thing we can talk about. But I just want to add that some chemicals are added, like phthalates, to increase the absorption of the pesticide into the plant. So even the pesticide will be harmful on its own and it will also be harmful because phthalates are entering that lettuce or that asparagus because they're put in deliberately to increase absorption. So in the growth process, you have the concern about endocrine disruption. And then in the packaging from the farm to the factory, to the grocery store, to your house, all along the way you have the option of introducing these chemicals. Milk is a great example. I was at a farmer's market. I talked to the farmer and he's very proud of his milk. He said, I'm organic, food for the cows is organic and so on and so forth. And I said, great. And how do you milk them? You see it, right? I can see you're smiling. You got it. So,

milk that's hand milked has no phthalates and other chemicals in it, if the farm was organic. Milk that's collected through a milking machine, which has lots of tubes, you've seen those pictures of the milking machines with all the tubes. Those are conveying the phthalate that's in the tubing, which is put there to make that tubing soft. And it turns out that the chemical is not bound to the matrix that it's in. It's very easy to come out of the matrix and enter, particularly if it's a warm product. So the milk is warm, the phthalate goes into the milk, it goes into the bucket, it goes into the bottle, it goes into us.

And you can think of this for lots and lots of food, making spaghetti sauce It goes into the bucket, it goes into the bottle, it goes into us. And you can think of it as for lots and lots of food, making spaghetti sauce and making any product that's going to be processed is going to go through some contact with some plastic. It's unavoidable. So it's in the growing, it's in the shipping because the shipping containers contain plastic, it's in the processing. And then there's concern of how we store it in our fridge and how we heat it.

And I'm sure you've heard you never should microwave in plastic, right? I mean, no, no, no, that's like the biggest known. And, and, um, yeah. So I actually want to do a little study called farm to fork where you take this little tomato or this, you know, bottle of milk at the farm and just track it and see what the levels are of these chemicals all along the way. But no one's given me the money to buy. Maybe, maybe someone will after this, presumably as well. on the way, but no one's given me the money to buy a part. Maybe, maybe someone will after this, presumably as well.

Um, the increasing shelf life that we have of produce, uh, gives them more time to be wrapped in plastic, to sit on a shelf, to accumulate in that whatever preservative or maybe something's been pasteurized and because it's been pasteurized, it's able to sit without accumulating bacteria and going off. All of this is just more opportunity for these endocrine disrupting chemicals to just leak into the food and then for us to absorb them into our body. Just to kind of round out that from a lifestyle perspective, what are the principles that you try to follow yourself or what are the biggest movers people can do to try and avoid this stuff? Presumably

eating organic, trying to get there. I mean, if there's someone that wraps their tomatoes in a paper bag, like what are the things people can do beyond do not microwave your food in plastic? This podcast should be called Do Not Microwave Your Food in Plastic. Beyond that, what are the other lifestyle changes and things people can do beyond do not microwave your food in plastic. This podcast should be called Do Not Microwave Your Food in Plastic. Beyond that, what are the other lifestyle changes and things people can do either when shopping, storing, et cetera, to maximize this? Yeah. So I've had some experience going around the supermarket with people who are concerned. And actually we filmed that and that's another story.

But it's really interesting to do that and pay close attention to how much plastic there is in our supermarket and how unavoidable it is. It's not completely unavoidable. If you go to the vegetable area, the produce area, you can see in some supermarkets packaged lettuces and in some places just open heads of lettuce. It's so refreshing to see that. I did a little experiment with some friends I was going around with and I said, let's weigh these. It turned out that the unpackaged ones actually were a lot cheaper than

the packaged ones. That's a little aside. But they're also, and that's true of fish that's already been filleted or meat that's already been cut up or whatever. There's always going to be more exposure and more cost. So it's really to people's advantage to get as simply as possible. And my ideal is if you have a farmer's market near you, which not everyone has the good fortune to have, you go to that farmer's market and you buy it in the simplest, most primitive form possible, out of the ground if possible. Take it home, wash it, and then don't put it in plastic. There are other kinds of bags you can buy. You can buy beeswax bags.

You can buy, that, this area is kind of underserved, I would say, by industry, but I think it's growing. It's getting more, more options. There are bags that are safer. From my perspective, one of the biggest changes I made less long ago than I would like to have known, but as soon as I kind of found out, there's a number of Pyrex do quite a few of glass Tupperware containers. Now I'm yet to find one that has a glass lid. Most of them tend to have plastic

lid plastic seals, but I'm going to guess that the food is actually touching the glass part, which is the bottom, the main bottom bit. You can go on Amazon and get these. Typically, I think you want to get a two litre or above. One litre sounds like a ton of food, but when you actually look at the size of a piece of Tupperware that's only a litre, it's not actually that big. So go two litres or above and, you know, just replace you right now. Get rid of the Tupperware, get rid of whatever you're doing and Pyrex or some of the company will make some really great glass bowl. I'm going to guess you're okay with glass.

Glass is all right. Absolutely the best. I love that. Yeah. Are there any types of plastic that are worse or better for us? Let's say that somebody can't avoid either due to they don't have a farmers market near them, they are battling against budget restrictions or whatever it might be. Is there something that we can look for when we're looking at the plastics of the foods

and the drinks and stuff? Is that better and worse? And how do we work that out? So silicone products resemble plastic and they are safer. They are not, I understand for my packaging friends, they are not ideal, but they're certainly better than, they are not going to contain phthalates, they're not going to contain the bisphenols. We didn't talk much about bisphenols, but the bisphenols, BPA, BPF, BPS, BPFS, there's now more and more of them because by the way, when people said, oh, I don't want BPA, then the manufacturer said, okay, we're taking it out, but we're not going to tell you that we've put in BPF and BPS, which do the same thing, by the way. So that's been going on for quite a while.

This thing we call whack-a-mole, which is just swapping out things people don't want with things that are just as bad, but has a- They don't know about. Yeah. They don't yet know about them. So anyway, yeah, if you can, silicone is preferable. Glass, like I said, is perfect. So China, you know, anything that's, you know, pottery, not lead, pottery without lead. And I buy a lot of things in glass

and then I wash out the jars and I just save them. And I have a couple of jars full of glass jars and I just use those to the extent that I can. I've heard you talking, I've heard you talking before about the number in the triangle on the recycling thing. What is that? I think that's a moving target, Chris. I don't actually, um, ascribed to that anymore myself.

I don't, um, I, I believe that recycling is, um, not going to solve the problem for us and, and the purpose of those numbers is to get you to recycle, to buy recyclable and to increase recycling. But the problem is that if you have a chemical that's harmful to start with and when you recycle it, it's still harmful. So I'm not, I'm not, I, you know, I'm, I, I've moved my emphasis from recycling to trying to get these things out at the beginning, you know, so that we don't have to keep exposing ourselves. Yeah. All right.

So, uh, 10, I'm just thinking about some of the other places that people might consume stuff from presumably, uh, plastic bottles of water, not good, much better to get bottled water from glass. What about those, you know, the very large cooler, like water cooler in the office type things? Is that the same? Many of them are plastic. Right. Yeah.

But any plastic. So there's basically, if it's plastic, assume that it's bad. Right, that would be mine. Okay. It's still proven otherwise. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. By the way, can I just say that there are ways

to treat water. It's not just the container now we're worrying about, it's also the water itself. So I'm sure, have you heard of these micro nanoplastics? Presume I haven't. What? Presume that I haven't. Okay.

So this is a kind of a new development in the field and people are realizing that the breakdown products of recycled products and disposed of plastic products are not actually leaving us, they're reentering in various forms. So they're reentering, for example, in our water and in our air, and they've now been found alarmingly in many cells in the body. The scarier thing about these is they're very, very tiny and they have two possible adverse effects. This is just in a research stage now. So grain of salt, but they have a physical presence that can be harmful like asbestos. Asbestos is harmful because primarily it's physical presence. And they have a chemical presence. And they can carry with them not only the chemicals from which they were produced, but other chemicals

they pick up along the way. So keep your eyes out for research on, and maybe sometime I'll know more and I'll come back and talk to you about it. But I would say for the last couple of years, this is the most important new development in this field. That these chemicals that are put out there in the plastics that we think we've gotten rid of, they're here. They're back. You know, it's like, I mean, on that, you know, it's yeah. So my, you can tell me whether or not my solution actually works for this. For years, for over a decade, I would only drink water from a Brita filter,

you know, like a classic desktop style filter. I then kind of got red-pilled about that doesn't, it may get rid of something, but it's not getting rid of reallyilled about that doesn't, it may get rid of something, but it's not getting rid of really any of the things you want it to get rid of. I'm now using a four-stage reverse osmosis filtration system. In your experience, if it's of high quality, how good is that at getting rid of what we need to? Yeah, I would say I would look at what it's made of, what the components are made of, and where is there plastic in

that device, because obviously you prefer not to pass the water through plastic. I want to mention an alternative, which is what I happen to use, which is a desktop or tabletop distiller. So we actually distill our water. It's very simple. It's free. You don't have to change any filters. You don't have to, you know, you just put the water, it boils it, it's steam, steam comes up and then it condenses and it comes down into a glass container and that's it. So there are alternatives. RO is good. Distillation is good. Filtration

is complicated in part because of the filters, what's in the filters and you have to change them and you have to pay for them. So, yeah. Yeah, there's two. The brand that I use is Aqua True. They're great. I do need to look at what pipes are internal to the system, But I certainly know that the carafe that it fills at the front is glass. And my solution is I have this steel,

steel shaker, and I just fill like five of those and they live in the fridge of the door. So I always have water going from four stage. The other big one that I think sometimes is sold out, sometimes isn't called a Berkey. So this is a charcoal filter, like a multi-level charcoal filter thing. And the whole thing is made of steel.

So in terms of plastic, I think it's made of steel. I really hope that the spout at the front isn't a plastic spout, but I can't remember. And I don't own one, but I'll ask my friends about that. But a bunch of my friends have got those. So those are the two that I don't own one, but I'll ask my friends about that. But a bunch of my friends have got those. So those are the two that I know, at least from my experience

and what my friends are talking about, Berkey and Aqua True, those are the two for water. And thinking about, you know, everyone's thinking about how can I get more hydration? I know that water is really important for me and I need to stay hydrated, but you know, there is a world in which you increase your hydration at the cost of increasing the amount of phthalates and microplastics and BPA and stuff that you're, um, that

you're being exposed to. One of my friends lives in Dubai and I went into his fridge and he's health conscious dude. And it was just bottles and bottles and bottles of Evian. You think it's high quality water held in plastic bottles. So I'm like, dude, I really want to, I was going to buy him one of those things, but I don't think that they shipped there. So, um, okay.

One thing, one of the most interesting things that I learned from you is these chemicals impact behavior. So the way that children play the way that they boys and girls learn to speak and stuff like that, can you explain what the effects are there? Sure. Um, so just as the genitals need hormones to develop and to differentiate between males and females, they're different. That's just also true of the brain.

And, um, this is kind of a controversial topic in some political circles that people don't like to say that the brain is sexually dimorphic, but there's no question you can see this is a safe space for you here, Shana. And, um, so the changes, uh, in the brain are influenced by testosterone just as the genitals are. And not quite the same time, it's also in pregnancy, but it's later in pregnancy. So there's a lot of things you can see on MRIs, but you can see those differences between males and females in different parts of the brain. I think you're referring, by the way, you've read my book, right?

Countdown? Is that how you know? Yes. So I want to put in a plug for Countdown maybe. Yes. In Countdown, this is one of the things we discussed, but it's not the main focus because the book is largely focused on reproduction function. But I had a colleague who said, Shauna, the brain is the biggest sex organ in the body. And it's true that the brain

is influenced by sex hormones just as the genitals are. So if you're going to mess with the estrogen and testosterone, you're going to mess with the brain. And specific things that we looked at was language development. So how do males and females differ? One way they differ is that, and this is going to sound very – there'll be people that won't like this again politically, but females have better earlier language development. And they know if you have a child, you see how quickly they acquire words. see how quickly they acquire words. Men on the other hand have better spatial ability. That's the joke about a woman will never find her way out of a box.

I'm like that. I always lose my way, but men are much better spatially. So we found in our study, we asked four-year-olds, the mothers of four-year-olds, how many words the child knew or could understand. We did it in our study and also with a colleague in Sweden. And we found that the phthalate levels were related to the number of words the child knew or understood at age four, particularly in females. It wasn't much in males, but in females it was pretty marked. The other study that you're referring to I think is the play behavior. And this is even more controversial because it's based on the assumption that the behavior of children in

play and in their daily activities is sexually dimorphic and that you can ask a mother, how often does your child play with guns or play with cars or play with tea sets or play dress up or play with dolls. Well, first of all, they did this with monkeys and they showed that the monkeys made the same choices as human children, that a male monkey will go for the car and go with the car and the female monkey won't. And it turns out in our study when we asked the mother about the play behavior of the child and ranked their answers as male and female, less male typical in men, boys who were exposed to phthalates. So that's for what that is. It's, it's an suggestion. I would say that exposure to these chemicals in pregnancy during pregnancy,

cause it all happens in pregnancy, um, are going to affect the masculinization of the brain. Could this change gender identity? I knew you were gonna ask that. That's the $64,000 question, isn't it? Yeah. So there's some indication that it could, but I wouldn't say we know at all the answer to that question.

But here's two things. If you look at, so I have to tell you about twins. Okay. So if you have, I'll start with rats. They're not twins. There's like 10 of them in the uterus or something. Okay. So the, the rat gets, if it's a male rat between two females, he's slightly

less masculinized at birth and that's true of his HED too, by the way. And the female between two males is somewhat masculinized. Okay. So what that's- It's like a uterus environment that, that, where they're bleeding between each other. Right. Okay. Yeah. Exactly.

And that's called the, the, um, in utero position effect. And it's been known for a long time. What about humans? Um, well, it turns out that when, uh, that when – the study looked at twins in Finland and found that female-female twins were more likely to get married and had more children than male-female twins. So they were maybe a little less feminized if they had a male co-twin. Okay, now I'm going to turn to your question. It turns out that if you look at twins, and this is a very nice and pretty recent study, you look at twins, the twins that have a partner, co-twin of the opposite sex are more likely to be gender

dysphoric. So they're getting an influence, they're getting some influence from their co-twin. So how has this been done with adoptive twins in like a plomonesque style? How do you know that this isn't just sisters growing up with brothers, brothers imprinting behaviorally, uh, social roles, theory type stuff, social learning theory. I, not from that study, but the, um, the brains you can look in look in MRI at the brains of the male and female, and you see that reflect there. I don't have that-

So less female typical brain development in the female that has the, right, yeah, understood. There's a really great, I brought this up a couple of weeks ago on a podcast, there's a really great bit of data around MRI scans of 10 year old boys and girls and the computer can predict with 90% accuracy, whether it's a male or a female just based on the brain scan. But that's almost the same level of accuracy that humans have when looking at the face of another human. So if you cut my face out and showed it to someone, it's around about 90, it's a tiny little bit higher.

So your ability to, I know what a man or a woman is. Well, so does the MRI machine and it's around about as accurate as you are. But even in utero, you know, I've been over this David putts, he did a phenomenal bunch of work on this David Geary as well, who did a ton of great stuff on this. In utero brain scans of developing fetuses, they show sex differences, I think three months old, three months, four months, five months old. You can start to see, that's, you know, you're a minus six month year old. This isn't anything to do with socialization.

Yeah, that's because, Chris, the time in your life that your cells are most rapidly dividing and forming organs is then. It's all happening then, you know, in utero. But I mean, it changes, like generals are very early and brain is later, but that's the sensitive period. You asked me before about sensitive periods, and I want to just mention some other. So there's the in utero period, of course, we're talking about that a lot. There's a period right

after birth called the mini puberty, and it's the first six months of life. And there's been some work showing that that period is very sensitive to environmental insults as well. And then there's puberty, which is another period. You want to look for the periods of rapid cell division. That's, that's, so puberty. And then for women in pregnancy themselves when they're pregnant. And then for menopause, there's a lot of changes in menopause. Oh, interesting. So very little study, very little studied in menopause. That's fascinating.

Yeah. Very little studied in menopause, but, but, um, yeah. We're talking about menopause. What is happening to the relationship between female and male age and reproductive success or fertility in the modern world? I. It's very hard to say because so much of it is choice now. Women couples are postponing having children and so the natural default is that women and men's reproductive function decreases with time, but women's much more dramatically, of course, at menopause, and men just decline very, very, very slowly until their death.

So if you push women particularly into the period of lower fertility, natural fertility, you're going to have fertility, either through because they're going to school or because they're in the workforce or because they want to do something else for a while. So I don't know how to separate that from the biological changes. Yeah, I understand. I guess maybe one of the things that you could look at would be at what age do people start using fertility treatments more sooner? There should just be a number of people. And if there are more 30 year olds or there are more 35 year olds going

in to use IVF or whatever, that would be an interesting place to start. But again, you know, it's kind of circumstantial. But, but I promised you something and I want to come back to it because we talked about fertility decline worldwide and I told you every country was declining. And now I want to tell you the exception and that's Israel. And the reason is fertility includes artificial assisted reproduction, births. It's just births. It doesn't say how they got there. And in Israel, people are guaranteed to children if they need it by artificial ART, artificial reproductive technology. And their fertility is not declined. So, you know, that's pretty dramatic every other country.

And the other thing is that the use of assisted reproductive technologies has been increasing. I can't give you numbers on that right now, but it definitely has been. I have a friend who is within the next two years, the company is already up and running, although it's dark at the moment. I have a friend who is doing, uh, embryo selection for a variety of traits. So you can go in with your, um, harvest of 10 fertilized eggs and they can give you a polygenic risk score for externalizing behavior, for autism, for IQ, for a number of other things.

Obviously it's not a perfect science, but it's pretty predictive according to him. And that's already happening. I mean, that just straight up is happening now. I'm sure that you've learned about IVG as well, which is sort of the next stage beyond IVF, where you don't necessarily, you're not as restricted by harvest. You're not as restricted by a lot of different things. Um, how, well actually, even before that, let's, let's forget the, the. New fertility technologies coming down the pike.

What do you think the future of fertility has in store for humanity kind of generally at the moment? What's your prediction? I would say the most, well, first, my first prediction is that we're going to rely on it more and more. Whatever form it is, we're going to rely on artificial reproduction more and more because of the decline in sperm count and fertility. I don't think there's any way around it. But the technologies are rapidly, as you say, rapidly increasing. And the one that's so intriguing to me and wondering what's going to happen with this politically and otherwise is the production of egg and sperm from stem cells. Have you heard about this?

I've, that's IVG. Yeah. Okay. Right, okay, right. Okay. I didn't, I hadn't heard you call it IVG. Sorry. Yeah, that's IVF. IVF and IVG is the pluripotent stem cells. Yeah, I mean, this is some dystopian, if you wanted to, some dystopian future

where you have basically a million test tube babies, artificial wombs, and you just go to town. I basically a million test, you babies, artificial wombs. Um, and you can, you just go to town. I'm pretty sure you do it. You can even do it from skin cells and stuff like that. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

I actually think that a woman, a woman produces one egg per 28 days. Uh, how many trillion skin cells are there on my upper arm? Yeah. Yeah. So there's obviously a lot of scary scenarios here and a lot of hopeful scenarios and politically, particularly now with the ruling of the Alabama Supreme court, we have, you know what I'm talking about, right? It's, it's, it's going to be even more complicated.

And I don't know where this is going. I mean, but this is definitely what's happening right now. And part of the reason is that it's getting increasingly difficult for people to make kids the old fashioned way. That's driving this desire for new technologies. Right. Well, don't, don't forget, there's a decreasing diet desire for people to do the action that causes children to come about the old fashioned way as well.

You know, we can go even further upstream than the difficulty of the mechanism. We just, the desire is, is also being needed. Yeah. It's, um, it's fascinating. It's what a time to be alive, to be studying this stuff. It's just endlessly to me, this whole, it is apocalyptic, right? And I'm not saying that I'm glad that it's happening,

but in some ways it's just endlessly interesting to me. What's going on socially, environmentally, psychologically, physically, hormonally, everything. How can we combat this challenge? It's a big problem. And if we don't fix it, it's not good. And for the people that say, well, there's too many people on the planet and all the rest of it, your wish is already going to happen. You're going to see population decline within, maybe even within our lifetimes. We back end of the sort of two thousands, you're definitely going to see it start

to dip and then it could be precipitous. But here's the other thing. And this is like my, my super hardcore, uh, red pill, which is for the anti natalist subcultures that really don't want humans to destroy the planet. And, and, and, you know, there's too many people on here in any case and so on and so forth. A lot of people's ideologies, especially their political affiliation is heavily genetically predisposed.

It's not predetermined, but it is predisposed. If you are someone that wants to make a change in the world, the change that you're talking about will be washed aside by other groups that have lots of children, because those children are likely to have lots of children. So in a hundred years time, maybe it's just it's Mormons and it's the Israelites and it's like whoever else is, I don't know, like whoever's, whoever else is having a blues on people. Uh, and you go, well that, you know, that's the culture. That's the culture that the future will inherit because those are the only ones that have got positive birth rates. And, um,

yeah, another friend, he's the next level of the spicy red pill, which is a friend said to me, she thinks that this fertility bottleneck is good because it's basically culling stupid anti-human, anti-natalist cultures through this genetic predisposition to ideology. And that coming out on the other side, basically it's the same argument. I think Thomas Sowell made it about how the clergy is good because it screens fanaticism out of the gene pool. The people that are, you know, super crazy. I was like, wow, I mean, that's, that wasn't me. That was a friend that remained nameless. Look, Chris, Chris, you have children?

No, not yet, but I can't wait to become a dad. So if there's other couples that can't wait to become parents, and their opportunity for achieving that is taken away, I believe that they have been deprived of a basic human right. I think that is a right of people to have a child if and when they want it. I'm not saying anything about they should want it, but if they want it, when they should be able to. And to the extent that products, that plastics and products and pan lighters and food containers are taking away this option, is terrible to me. It's unfair. It's unfair. And I should add, by the way, that if you have money and education, you have a much better chance of avoiding losing that option. Because if you're poor and you're working two jobs and you don't

live near a farmer's market or a grocery store that has fresh vegetables and you don't know to go on the web and look for alternatives, you know, alternatives, safer alternatives, you can't do that. You can't take care of yourself that way. You're going to be more likely not to have it, be able to have a child. And so it's, it's not an equal opportunity for everybody to be deprived of having a child, right? So there's this whole social issue here too. Yeah.

Yeah, there absolutely is. It's a, like I say, just what a time to be alive and to be thinking about these problems and sort of grappling socially with what's going on. That's one of the things I'm really going to leave this conversation with is just how much of this is downstream from reduced libido. It sounds like such a basic bitch solution and to all of the questions that we're asking. But if people just want to have less sex, all of the things that occur

after that, the desire for relationships, the desire to get out of the house, the desire to leave the house, to leave the screen behind. Cause I'm just, I just, I got to find someone. Uh, yeah, it just, I gotta find someone. Yeah, it's amazing. Look, your work is really fascinating and it's the synthesis of a lot of different pet interests that I've got. Where should people go?

They want to find out more, the book, why should they go to check out more of the stuff that you do? So you can go to shamashwan.com and you can see, you know, lots of things I've said. And then you can go to Amazon or some other dealer, book dealer and order Countdown. By the way, it's important that you put in two words, count down, because Countdown one word is something else. Another book. So countdown, yeah, that's what I recommend. And if this stuff bothers you, this bombardment of our lives by

these chemicals, I suggest you go to environmental health sciences and see what you can do about it. That's a group I work with. And I think they're doing wonderful work to help turn this around. Hell yeah. Dr. Shana Swan, ladies and gentlemen. Shana, I really appreciate you.

Thank you, Chris. I had a lot of fun. Thanks, bye. Bye.