The Jordan Harbinger Show - 658: Shanna Swan | The Reproduction Crisis and Humanity's Future

Episode Date: April 28, 2022

Dr. Shanna Swan (@drshannaswan) is the Professor of Environmental Medicine and Public Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and the author of Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race. What We Discuss with Dr. Shanna Swan: Why has sperm count among men in Western countries decreased by over 50 percent in the past four decades? What can increasing reproductive problems in the animal kingdom tell us about diminishing human fertility? The same chemicals that cause reproductive decline are responsible for the obesity epidemic. What are some of the best practices we can personally observe for recovering from some of the most common fertility issues we face? What steps can society take today to ensure we have enough of a population to constitute a society tomorrow? And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/658 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Miss our conversation with Ishmael Beah, a former child soldier and New York Times bestselling author? Get caught up with episode 622: Ishmael Beah | Memoirs of a Boy Soldier here! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy mad yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

An interesting episode to checkout is called Speaking Truth to Goop, where Jen Gunter breaks down the pseudoscience behind the wellness industry in a way that is super entertaining and eye-opening. It's sharp, funny, and makes you a lot harder to fool, which, if you listen to this show, you know I'm all about that. From exploring cults to analyzing our cultural and political landscape, the Conspiratuality Podcast will help you stay informed against misinformation and resist fear tactics.

Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. The problem is that the risk is very different in that it's smaller risk. It's not like you're going to be born with no arms. You're going to have these small changes that you won't see unless you're in a study that measures it. So it doesn't cause huge harms to any one person.

It causes huge harms when you consider the entire population. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills are the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with scientists and entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional mafia, money laundering expert, or tech mogul, and each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better thinker.

Now, if you're new to the show or you're looking for a way to tell your friends about it, I suggest our episode's starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes organized by topic to help new listeners get a taste of everything that we do here on the show. Topics like negotiation and communication, technology and futurism, scams and conspiracies, crime and cults, failure and resilience, and more. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today we're talking with Dr. Shanna Swan. For over 20 years, Dr. Swan has been studying the impact of environmental chemicals on neuro and sexual development. we're going to learn just how our fertility is in grave danger and seemingly getting worse every year. This isn't just too much laptop use or keeping your cell phone in your pocket.

I'm talking about the results of chemical exposure through our skin, the air we breathe, the water we drink, even things that just exist around us that we don't ingest, at least not intentionally. There is so much in this episode. And I know that after this interview, I immediately went and did a pretty serious closet clean out. I changed a lot of things around the house here. I know that might sound a little paranoid, but a lot of these harmful chemicals and ingredients and many of the things we trust are safe to use might actually really be out to get us,

or at least out to get our future offspring. You're going to learn a ton from this. And hey, it's not just fear-mongering. I'm including a lot of practicals in the show close as well. Here we go with Dr. Shanna Swan. Right now, we're in what you've described as a global fertility crisis. Can you describe, in brief, what that is? Sure.

So when we look at where a typical man's sperm count is, it's about half of what it was 40 years ago. And that is more or less alarming, depending on how much you understand this. It does take only one sperm to conceive a child. So you might think, okay, I just need one and I'm good to go. But it's kind of like a lottery. And you want to have a lot of, you know, invested in. And so you really need those. millions of sperm, believe it or not, in order to get one that's going to make it through and do the job. Here's how it works with sperm count. When it's high, and that's anything, I would say, over 60 is going to be plenty. That's 60 million sperm per milliliter. That's a lot of sperm. Over that, it doesn't matter a lot. So whether you have 60 or 70 or 90 or 100, it's kind of the same chances of getting somebody pregnant each time you try. But when you drop below 50, 45, and where exactly that is, is up for grabs. But somewhere down there, it's getting harder. And the lower the number, the harder it is to get somebody pregnant. And how do you know that? It takes longer. It takes more

tries. It takes more months. And one of the things that people look at is the probability of conceiving on a given cycle, right? So that number goes down. down really rapidly when you go below 40. So where are we now? Last time we looked, when we published in 2021, we were at 47 million sperm per milliter, and that's for a typical man. And we can talk about what that is. Okay. So 47, you can see, is pretty close to the point at which it's getting harder to conceive. It's taking longer, it's taking more tries. And when that number drops lower and lower to zero, of course, there's zero chance of getting anyone pregnant, no matter how long you try, right? No sperm, no go. But it turns out it drops off pretty rapidly. So where we are now at 47

is pretty close to the point where a substantial number of men and couples are going to have trouble conceiving a child, the usual way. That is without assistance. That's where we are now. And the reproductive crisis doesn't stop with sperm. There's a lot of other measures of reproductive health for men, like their level of testosterone, which is also in trouble. We could talk about that. And for women, frequent miscarriage, repeated miscarriage, menstrual problems, premature ovarian failure. That means fancy name for saying not enough eggs left at the end of your reproductive life, right? And also there's endometriosis, there's polycystic ovarian syndrome, and so on and so forth. So all kinds of things can go wrong, and they are.

And the result is that world fertility has dropped in part because of these things, also 50%. So we have 50% drop in sperm count. We have a 50% drop in fertility worldwide and increases in all the bad things like testicular cancer and miscarriage and blah, blah, blah, blah. So it doesn't look good. It's not a healthy picture. It's not leading to reproductive health. What can we learn from the animal world in terms of the fertility? crisis. You know, you hear people, including total, you know, nut jobs like Alex Jones, who

I'm sure people have quoted this to you, like, there's chemicals in the water, turning the frogs gay, right? Have you heard this guy? Yeah. Yeah. But that's like the one thing that he wasn't completely insanely off about, right? Maybe they're not gay frogs, but there's things in the water that are turning the frogs into, I guess you'd call it ambiguous genitalia is what you wrote in the book. Yeah. And actually, my colleague Tyrone Hayes can actually produce in a laboratory, frogs that prefer to mate with other male frogs. So a male frog. So they are gay frogs.

Oh my gosh. Right? They are gay frogs. And that happens actually in the wild. And so what Tyrone wanted to do is make sure it was causal. And to do that, you do an experiment. And he did that and he showed that was true. And then you have also observations like smaller genitalia,

like shorter penises and alligators when they're exposed to pesticides. And other animals having. shorter organs and so on. So it's definitely possible that we can learn that, but there's something else we can learn from animals, which is if we want to know whether a chemical is going to harm us, what would be well to do is to test it on an animal first, an animal that has a similar system to our. So if we're worried about reproduction, we want an animal like a rodent is very good for looking at reproductive health. Other animals, pigs are good for other things, how pregnancies you know, advance and so on. So depending on the system that you're looking at, you want to pick

an animal that's going to reflect development in humans. And then you can do an experiment. So you can't do an experiment on us, although we kind of are part of a massive experiment. We can talk about that. Yeah. But, you know, you can't get approval to assign these women to take thallates and these women not to take thallates, for example. You can't do that. That's not ethical. No, it's not ethical. Right. We're just doing it to ourselves without any permission because we're putting, I don't know, face cream on that has it in there already. Right. So we have the option to do it to ourselves and we are. But in terms of me doing it in an experiment, I can't do that. But we can't to animals. So what that means is we can actually do a controlled experiment, exposed, unexposed, when they're exposed, how much they're exposed, and learn a lot of things about risk. What's the most risky period? What's the most risky dose? and so on, right? So that's something we can learn from animals. I've heard also that younger folks are less interested in sexual activity these days and that's sort of contributing to this. I mean, look,

that's maybe a different cause. It's not chemicals in the environment, but, or are chemicals in the environment causing less interest in sexual activity? I guess maybe we don't even know, right? We have some clues. And I would say it's probably like everything else, complicated and due to lots of causes. But just to give you an example, the study that I've conducted for a long time, which just, it's called tides. So in tides, we asked women about their interest in sex and about their satisfaction with their sex life. And it turned out that those that had more thalates in their urine, at the time they answered this question, were less satisfied with their sex life. That's pretty dramatic. And it's on the female side. It also happens on their

male side so that when you lower testosterone, as you probably know, you have lots of problems with libido interest and also with the ability like erectile dysfunction and that has been going up. And it is, it's related to all of these chemicals that were exposed to. When I was younger, I was going through like business stress and 2020 hindsight is probably a little depressed, but I just didn't see it in the moment because I was like 29, 30 years old. I was like, what do I have to be sad about. And I was stressed out a lot. And I couldn't, I mean, you could have plopped the most beautiful woman in front of me. And I would have been like, what's on TV, man? In fact, don't even turn on the TV. I'm going back to bed. You know, I just couldn't have cared less. And so I imagine that that plus

chemical exposure, plus stress, plus moving to an urban environment and not being able to afford a house and having 100 grad in student loans or whatever, like that kind of thing. That'll do it. Man, that's the boner killer right there for a lot of people. Right. Stress is a very, very, very big driver of sexual problems, definitely. But what I'm here to tell you is that chemicals also can do this. And so you have a confounding, if you will, of your lifestyle factors. For example, obesity, actually, for example, let's take obesity. Obesity is not good for your spurtout. It's not good for your testosterone. It's not good for your sexual libido, right? And if in addition, you're being exposed to these chemicals that can also affect these functions, then you're getting a double whammy.

sometimes they even interact. So you have a worse effect if you're obese than if you're not. Right. Yeah. Oh, man. As we know, a lot of Westerners, but Americans especially, we're not getting any thinner as a population, most of us. Right. And that, by the way, if you read the book, there's a book on Obesagens, things that cause obesity, the same chemicals that cause reproductive problems are causing obesity. Interesting. So don't take it just for me, look it up. Obesigens. It's, well, well known in our field, that this is another area along with reproductive function, along with neurodevelopment that are being affected by these chemicals.

And of course, sex drive and the ability to lose weight quickly are often, I would say, associated with testosterone in men anyway, actually probably in everyone. And so if testosterone is indeed getting lower, and you mentioned that sort of in the open of the show, that would affect sperm count, desire to have sex in the first place, your weight, and then possibly cause a spiral, right? Because then you're getting bigger, you're less interested, your testosterone goes down even further. Like, it just doesn't, there's no sort of check there.

Right. It's not a pretty picture. No. This could lead to demographic collapse. I don't want to be dramatic, right? But, I mean, if we're talking about people having fewer kids and that going, spreading across a whole population, we see things like that in China, Japan, Korea,

where there's just not enough young people to produce, uphold the GDP, take care of older folks, Are you worried about that at all or is that sort of outside your area of study? Yeah, I'm definitely worried about that. And let's talk about Japan for a minute. In Japan, there is a lot of really interesting media stuff that you can look up. You can look up, rent a family. Yeah, I've seen this.

Rent a family in Japan. You can also rent a stranger if you want to be somewhere like going out to dinner but not be seen eating alone. you can rent a stranger. You have women marrying themselves. They prefer not to marry a man. They marry themselves because that's simpler. And there are all these really scary developments. And they've produced what's called a loneliness epidemic in Japan. So it's not only loneliness in terms of your contact. It's also loneliness in terms of your family and your inability to actually reproduce. So there's a very, very low for you. rate, as you mentioned, in many parts of Asia. So that's in Singapore, in South Korea,

and Japan, and Hong Kong, and so on. And the interesting thing is that the government has tried to turn this around, right? They've tried to offer incentives, like subsidized housing, you know, for people with children, and if you have more children, more subsidies, and so on and so on, and it's actually not working. So the governments have not figured out how to incentivize people to have more children. And it's a problem. Yeah, I think China's going through something similar where they had the one child policy for so long. Now they have a two child policy. And I think you can have three if you live outside a major city. And everyone I know, I take Chinese lessons all the time. And I know all these young Chinese people because of that. And they're like, I'm never having kids that they're like,

I'll have one. I'm not going to have more than one. It's too expensive. It's like, even if they subsidize your housing, it's like, cool. Well, are you going to pay for all of the other things I have to pay for on my meager salary in order to raise a kid in anything that resembles a city. No, not really. And even if they did it, it's hard to turn the culture around. If your parents had one kid and you have one kid and suddenly your grandkids are supposed to have three, like, nah, come on, it's not going to happen. Right.

It's not going to happen. Yeah. And by the way, the people that are having children, more and more of them are having them through assisted reproduction. Uh-huh. Going to the medical route because they can't do it on their own. So that makes it more challenging as well. Assisted reproduction is expensive.

It's also painful to the woman if you choose certain roots. And it's just difficult. Add to that that many people don't become aware of the problem until they're pretty old. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So you have this aging problem, which is confounding this, you know, acting on top of it. So you have older people who might have been able to get pregnant when they were younger or guys would be able to do it when they were younger.

But then when they're older, things aren't working as well. And so you got that dump whammy from age and chemicals. Because people are waiting longer to have kids and urbanizing and things like that. Okay. That's right. Right. So I guess if I wait till I'm 35 or 37, like I think I was 37 or 38 when I had my first kid, if I wait till then and I'm like, man, I'm trying for a year or two. I'm 39, 40 now. What's going on? Oh, well, you have this problem that you've had pretty badly for the last, I don't know, 10 years, eight years, the window may have already closed for me to really do anything about that, whereas if I'd started when I was 28, I might have had a shot. No pun intended. And in fact, most men don't know. They don't know their

same in quality. They don't know their sperm count. I don't know when you found out yours or if you ever did. I don't even maybe it's not something that most men know. Most men don't want to even go there. They're like, I'm okay. Yeah, ignorance is bliss. Right? If I need it, I'll have it when I need it. I did go to a sperm bank when I was younger because I heard, and when I was broke, I heard that if you had a really good education and you were X, Y, Z, that, and the other thing, you could get a bunch of money. So I went in and did the questionnaire and they're like, oh, you're in the top tier category for all these things.

And it's like $1,200 each time. And I was like, see you on Tuesdays. Yeah. So that was interesting. But they don't say you have X number of sperm per mill a meter. They don't tell you anything. And I think it's because of medical liability reasons. They don't want to be responsible for you have.

any sort of knowledge on their behalf. They just want to get the goods and get you out of the door. Well, the fact that they took you on and, you know, paid you that $1,200, I assume, means that everything was pretty good. Probably your count, the motility, how it moved, the shape they were in, and that's called morphology. That was probably all pretty good. So, good for you. So far, I've got two kids now, so, you know, it held up. It held up over the next decade. But if a younger guy, you know, finds that out, that he's good, maybe he wants to bank his sperm. You know, that way when he gets older, maybe he has more exposures. He's not ready when he's young, but he might be ready when he's older.

He's got some insurance in the bank. So I'm suggesting. And now it's gotten very easy. There are companies where you don't have to go into the office to give. You can do it at home. You can mail it in. These are reputable companies. And, you know, you might want to actually get one of those people on.

That stuff is interesting. A friend of mine, he had testicular cancer in our, I think we're in our early 30s. So the first thing, one of the first things he did was go and have his sperm frozen and, you know, he had cancer and chemo and all that and he made it through just fine. He recently just got married and he has a kid now because of that. So it was like good forward thinking on his part. So I think, look, if you're young and you think maybe I should have kids, I'd say it's worth a few hundred bucks or whatever it is per year, just to make sure you got that young, super healthy sperm of high quality, because it's not just quantity, right? It's also quality or especially quality, maybe. Right. Yeah. Women have that option as well, although it's not as uncomplicated for women.

It's much harder to retrieve the eggs. It doesn't mean it's definitely going to work, but it's something to think about and talk to your doctor about if you think you want to delay, maybe till you're in your late 30s. Definitely your chances of conceiving go down rapidly after 35. and your chances of having eggs that have mutations also go up past 35. So if you want to, you know, have an egg that you feel safe and comfortable with, talk to your doctor about whether you should be freezing or not. How much of people having fewer kids is because of, you know, education, economy, so wanting fewer kids and lower fertility, like being able to have fewer kids.

Because, you know, I read, like Denmark, they have one kid because they're higher educated. And when education goes up in some of these developing countries, their rates of fertility go way down. Or I should say the amount of offspring they have goes way down. Right. That's pretty common. I assume you control for that when you're studying things like fertility. Okay. Complicated. Yeah.

Question. Let me try to answer a few things. First of all, fertility is a complicated word. Okay. Yeah. The word total fertility is used by demographers to talk about how many children a woman has on average. Okay. And you can go to a very good website.

called World Bank Fertility Data. Anybody can Google that. And you can see how many children, on average, a woman has. And how that's changed over time and how it differs from country to country. So that's really informative. If you do that, you can see that back in 1960, the world had five children per woman. And now 2021, I think is the latest they have. It's 2.4. So cut in half, right? So why? That's your question. So you're absolutely. right that education, economics, contraception, women entering the workforce are all, I would say, positive factors that are causing women to have fewer children. They have that option in many places now. They have that right. And so they're exercising that, and I think that's a great thing.

What's not so clear is how do you separate that from other causes like chemical causes that affects sperm count and all these other factors that we talked about. There's no question that exposure to a number of these hormonally active chemicals that affect sperm count also affect your ability to conceive or your time to conception or their probability of conceiving in any cycle. That is also affected. So I'd say it's joint and I can't give you a percent like 50-50 or 40-60. That's really too hard to do. I would say they're both significant causes and they're probably also interacting because if you're educated and your higher socioeconomic status, you're going to have the ability to control your exposures more. You're going to be able to

buy unprocessed food and buy organic food and buy safer cosmetics and so on and so on and so which you can't do if you're poorer or maybe live in a food desert. There's no fresh food around. You can't afford organic food. Then you're going to be hit in multiple. ways. So it's very complicated to separate who are you talking about upper middle class Caucasians? Are you talking about people, you know, in lower socioeconomic status or other countries that are more impacted? It's really hard to separate. I've heard also that young women are going through puberty a lot earlier, and we think that might be linked to chemical exposure. Can you speak to that a little bit? Because that's creepy in multiple ways. Yeah. So women are going through puberty earlier, particularly in terms of

breast development, earlier breast development, and this is particularly true of African-American women in the United States. It's been studied most thoroughly in the United States. One of the reasons is that it's tied to the level of, you know, body weight. So women who have higher body weight and are obese are more likely to develop earlier. So then you have this complicated situation of women who are being exposed to chemicals that increase obesity and also affect maybe independently their age of puberty. I can't say that it's all through obesity, but that definitely plays a role. And it's definitely happening that there is this decrease earlier age at first, menstrual cycle, for example, and earlier age at breast development. It's most marked in people

of color for various reasons. I would imagine that causes a lot of other issues, right? Because not just maybe unwanted attention, but like body image stuff going on? Because when you're that young, if you're developing earlier, your emotional capacity to deal with that stuff doesn't necessarily come earlier. You're just stuck with it for a while, right? Yeah, and it's very hard on those girls. They're different. Fortunately, neither I nor my kids had those problems, but I'm concerned for those girls. I think it's putting them under stress that they don't deserve. And we don't know, I don't know, and perhaps other people do know, how that earlier age of puberty is related to how long they're reproductively active, the reproductive lifespan. But that's something to be

concerned about as well. Sure. Yeah. Like do I lose all my eggs faster, or not faster, but sooner, I should say, if I start 10 years before I'm even really ready to start using those things, or 15 years beforehand, does that subtract 15 years from the back end where I'm, you know, now I'm in 401, 32 instead of 42. Yeah. So by the way, just to put this in perspective, we're not talking about 10 to 15 years. We're talking about months or possibly year, year and a half. We're not talking about huge changes, not 10 to 15 years.

But still. Okay. Well, that's a relief. Yeah. Yeah, right. I suppose that makes sense. I don't know. That just made me sound like super weird.

but I'll leave it in. I'll leave it in, whatever. I'm not going to meant. I'm going to write it off with that. That's a relief, though. I guess I just assumed it meant like five plus years earlier instead of just a few months or a few years. But even so, every week counts if you're in your late 30s finally settled in your career and you want to have a kid and you can't because you wanted to puberty when you were 12 or 13 instead of when you were 15. Right. So, yeah, it's kind of a raw deal. Some of this chemical exposure stuff is really interesting and kind of a morbid. way the play behavior, so PCBs causing feminine behavior and boys. What is this chemical, first of all? How can it change the way boys play? That's unnerving. Yeah. So actually, I'd rather talk to you about phthalates because we found the same thing with phallites. Okay. I haven't studied PCBs myself. Okay. But phallates, which are chemicals in plastic and they make plastic soft and flexible, also in cosmetics, we can talk about all the places that thalates are found. So in that study,

I told you about called Tides, our study, where we asked women about their sexual satisfaction. Remember that? In that same study, we got the mother's urine when they were pregnant, right? So once you have the urine, you can, guess what? Find out how much chemicals in the body. Actually, that's the only way you can do it for these things like phallids and bisphenolite. So those things are water soluble, so they go into water means they go into the urine. They do it pretty quickly, by the way. You can measure that half-life is 46 hours. You can measure it, really right away. And that tells you what the exposure was. So we did that. We did that for all of these pregnant women in our study, over 800 women. And then we related those levels in the women to various

things, how the genitals of their children looked, and then how did they develop? And we looked at their language development. We looked at their play. And that's what you asked me about. So let me talk about play. So play is a really controversial issue. There's a lot of question about how much is determined socially and how much is determined genetically and how much might be influenced by chemicals to just say that this is a touchy, a little bit touchy subject. So when I talk about male typical and female typical play, this is from questionnaires that are quite old. And today's questionnaires probably wouldn't use that language because certainly women can do pretty much what men can do and why should they have different play and so on and so

forth. And in toy stores, you used to always see boys, toys and girls' toys, right? But there's been a lot of effort to do away with that and to do away with the sex typical toys. Nevertheless, experiments in monkeys find that monkeys make similar toy choices to humans suggesting that it's not all social. Oh, interesting. So, for example, the vervent monkey. male will choose a wheeled car to push around. Really? Or a female will pick a doll and cradle it. Wow.

You know, so there's something there, isn't there? Yeah, that's so interesting. Wow. So we asked the mother to tell us how their child played at around four years. And we asked 24 standard questions and they were asked in the FPCB study you talked about and they were asked in many other studies. These questions are about what has been called sex typical play. And that means play typical of a genetic male or a genetic female. We have to be careful about that these days, right?

Yeah, we do. Yeah. Carol Hooven and I talked about this. I don't know if you're familiar with her at all. No, no. We talked about the development of hormones, or I should say hormones in the development of the reproductive system and any disruption in these hormones can cause things to develop abnormally or not at all.

And of course, she got, like, canceled for saying that there are genetic sexes, essentially. And it was kind of rough for... Yeah. That's why I'm being really careful here. Yeah, good idea. Right. And so I'm just saying, using this older instrument, I can just tell you what we found. So there are 24 questions, and every one of those questions is classified as male and female.

Right there, a lot of people would scream and say, can't do that. And probably you can't do that. nearly as well as people thought, you know, 20 years ago. But there are things like how often does your child play with T-sets? How often does your child play dress-up as a princess? How often does your child play with wheeled cars? How often does your child play with guns or things that look like guns? And so on and so forth. And from that, you construct masculine score and a feminine score. So depending on how often they answer the more female typical, they'll get a higher feminine score and a male typical, a more male.

So just saying again, this is controversial. It's difficult. Nevertheless, it did show something in several studies, and I'll just tell you what we found. Sure. That when the mother was exposed to higher levels of certain phthalates, those chemicals that make plastic soft and flexible, and are actually also related to testosterone, and also related to the general development, which we haven't talked of, then the boy was less likely to play in a male typical manner. He was more likely to play, have more of the feminine answers than he would if he was less exposed.

You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Dr. Shanna Swan. We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these amazing folks for the show, these authors, thinkers, and creators, well, it's because of my network and I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. The course is about improving your networking and connection skills, of course, but also inspiring others to develop a personal and professional relationship with you. It'll make you a better networker and a better connector, but most importantly, it'll make you a better thinker. That's all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course, and most of the guests that you hear on this show, they already subscribe and contribute to the course. So come on and join us. You'll be in

smart company where you belong. Now, back to Dr. Shanna Swan. I'm of two minds here, right? Because on the one hand, it doesn't matter to me if a kid turns out to be more feminine than male, a little boy does. That doesn't matter. But it does matter if it's caused by chemical pollution. That is somehow much worse. Because then it's not, again, it's hard to say this without getting canceled. But like you want kids to develop, quote unquote, naturally. And wherever nature takes them is actually quite fine.

But when it's like some crap that the mom had in the drawer that's loaded with phthalates that's causing a behavior change, then it's definitely not fine. the kid's a victim of this, right? And then ends up with a completely different life path because of a chemical, which is not something that I think anybody is really comfortable with, I would imagine. Right. And a lot more work has to be done on this using better tools. So let me just mention something. We said to the mother, how often does your child play with dolls, for example, play with T-sets? And suppose it's a boy. You know, whether the kid plays with a doll or a T-Sit might in part be whether that was in their world, in their life, in their toy chest, right? Yeah.

We tried to get around that by asking the mother's attitude and the father's attitude towards sex typical or sex atypical play. Again, very difficult to do. And I think a better test of this than asking the mother would be to take the child, put them in a room, give them 50 toys, and see what they go for. Right. And see how they play with it and see how long they play with it. You'd get a much better sense of what really their choice was.

Yeah. Because a little boy with five older sisters is going to play with T-sets and dolls. He doesn't have a choice, right? If he wants to play by himself. Right, right. Right. Right. And so we actually took into account the sex of the older siblings, how many there were, and the mother's attitude, the father's attitude.

Nevertheless, it's a crude tool. Yeah. But it did have this finding, and it's a replicable finding. It's been repeated. So it's not a fly-by-night finding. So I would say it's controversial, it's difficult, and it's something that should be investigated further. That's all we can say. Are kids getting hit mostly with these chemicals while they're in the womb and the mom's

using, let's say, cosmetics loaded with dallates, or is it as they grow older just in their house? Or is it like a double whammy where they're getting it in the womb and then they come out and then they're hit with it because it's on the carpet or something? Yeah. So that's a great question. it really depends on what outcome you're talking about, to some extent. So if you're talking about how the genitals are developing, then you have to say, when does that happen? When is the most important period for that development? And it turns out we know that

exactly in rats, and we know it much less exactly in humans, but we know it's in the first trimester. Well, remember, you can't like assign somebody phallate exposure and then stop it and start it. True. So you have to take what you can get and you can't get urine every day. So you're right. So you get maybe three samples. That's what we got. And we showed that the effect of these chemicals on the genital development was only in the first trimester. Gotcha. I feel like you could get urine every day. Step it up, Dr. Swan. Come on. There's a lot of pee out there. But if you're looking at something else like neurodevelopment, when is that happening? Wow, that's a very complicated story, right? And it's going on all the time. It continues until

you're like a boy of 18 is still having his prefrontal lobes develop. So yeah, up until 27. Right, right? You have a very, you know, different sense of what the critical period is. And so on for other things, the development of the thyroid, the development, you know, every system in the body can be affected, and it's affected most at the time that it's developing the most, right? So that's what you have to know. When is this system developing? So, yes, and I'll talk about reproduction, because that's my thing. Reproduction is most sensitive in early first trimester in humans. But that's not to say that there can't be an effect later on as well. So let me give you an example of smoking. So smoking is not a good thing for reproductive development. It affects sperm in the man whose mother smoked and also

in the man who smokes himself. Oh, wow. So even if the mother didn't smoke when she was pregnant with him and he smokes, he's going to reduce his sperm count. Let's just say one estimate has been 20% on average. Okay. Okay. If the mother smokes during this critical period, that can reduce his sperm count 40%. Oh, wow. Now, the other difference is, not only that it's a more effect in the critical period, but what he does as an adult can be fixed. So if your sperm count is down because you're a smoker and you want to get somebody pregnant, you want to become a father, then stop smoking, your sperm count will recover. It takes about three months because that's how long it takes to produce a sperm. So that's a good thing to do. If the mother smoked when she was

pregnant, particularly in early pregnancy, and that's disrupted the germ cells that later produced the sperm when the guy was in his mid-20s or 30s, that can't be fixed. Can't fix that. Yeah. So you have two different kinds of exposures, something that causes permanent harm and something that causes fixable harm. And so they're different. Here's another example.

Many pesticides are really bad for sperm. And there was one super bad one called DBCP, diaclachloropropane. It was a nematicide killed nematodes and it was put on pine. pineapple and other things. And it was discovered a long time ago that the wives of these workers who were using this just weren't getting pregnant, just weren't getting pregnant. And they got together and talked about it. Wait, well, I'm not getting pregnant. You're getting pregnant. And so they checked the guys and they had no sperm. Oh, wow. Oh, what a horrible discovery. Right? Yeah. But here's the good news. They stopped using DBCP. And within a few months, the sperm count

recovered. That's good news, I suppose, for men everywhere. Like, this is sort of reversible, a lot of the time anyway. Right. Right. Yeah. So if it's an adult exposure, you stop that exposure, you're going to recover your sperm cap. Okay. So that's good news. So, yes, adult exposure matters, prenatal exposure matters. There's probably an interaction between the two, like you suggested, you get double whammy. But that hasn't been very much studied. We're actually looking at that now. We have our children that we have the urine from while the mother was pregnant. And now we have the urine when the kid is four and six and we're getting at eight and nine and so on. So we're going to see which one matters the most and how they interact and how they maybe produce a double or triple

wammie if you keep getting exposed. So it's unfolding. Does the dose of chemicals have to be high to sustain damage or is this like trace amounts can do sort of a disproportionate amount of damage? doesn't have to be high, doesn't have to be high for sure. And let me give you an example. This is kind of a little aside. It turns out that if you look at a rodent, a rodent has a lot of pups, right? Maybe a litter of 10, 12, 50, you know, and these pups are inside the womb, and the womb actually has what's called these horns. So there are these little pups sitting there and they're developing, right? And some males are between two males. And some, Some males are between two females and so on, right?

Sure. And some very elegant work back in the 1990s, believed or not, showed that the sex of the neighbor influenced how that pup developed in terms of how large his genitals were and who he wanted to have sex with and how often. That's interesting. Absolutely amazing. Yeah. And what's amazing, here I just brought it up because of the dose.

The amount of testosterone or estrogen that that rodent is getting from his neighbor or her neighbor is tiny, tiny, but it makes all the difference. And it can affect, like I say, how they develop and how they perform later on in life. So that's just to prove that tiny doses matter. But we also see it in humans when we measure the dose that people are getting. It doesn't have to be big. Yeah, it seems like smaller amounts. I guess it depends on what you're mimicking. right, like alcohol. Too much, you go to sleep, just the right amount you're embarrassing yourself in front of a room of hundreds of your peers, right? It's like, hypothetically. That's a great example. You feel free to use it. Yeah, okay. So because actually my favorite

example is exercise. I'll just tell you exercise. Sure. So if you exercise a lot, super, you know, a lot like you're doing marathons. If you're a woman, you may not be menstruate. That's not good for conceiving. That's just an extreme. that if you're very high exerciser, that may not be good for your fertility. If you don't exercise at all, you're a couch potato, you're laying around, you're not getting any exercise, that's not good for your fertility. In between is the sweet spot, which is good for your fertility. And that's like that. With alcohol and for many, many things, we see this you shape where this is bad, this is bad, this is good, right? Yeah, that makes sense. I mean,

everything is kind of on a bell curve in nature. Well, I don't know. I might be speaking out of turn, everything seems like it's on a bell curve in nature, right? More or less. The bell curve is a universal law, but I'm not talking about that exactly. I'm talking about this U shape or inverted U for risk. So risk, you know, being high at high doses, high at low doses, which is the case for exercise, and low in the middle. Think of that as a you. That's not a bell shape. That's a U. It's a different curve. Yeah. What is the AGD? I read about this and I thought, well, you'll learn something every day. there's a term for this. And I think it's kind of, not only is it a little comical, but it's also

really funny how indicative this is of reproductive health. Something that I thought for sure didn't matter in the scheme of things. Turns out to be a really good indicator. You and your listeners know this by taint. Okay. Okay. Maybe Gooch and Grundle or some other street names for it. That's funny that you know all those. But yeah, go ahead. Continue. I guess you would have have to. Yeah. People have brought this up before. So it's a really important mission. And what is it? It's how long a measured distance with a ruler, you can do this, a calipers, from, just like it says, from the anus to the genitals, ano genital distance. Okay. So how you actually measure it, if you want, we can go into that, but you can do it on babies, you can do it on adults.

And here's the thing. It's amazing. It tells you two things. A baby's born and you measure it. Now, what do you expect? You expect it to be quite a bit larger in a male than a female. That stands to reason because there's, if you think of what's in the space from the anus to the genitals, there's a lot more real estate, if you will, in a male than a female, right? Sure. A lot to go in there. And it's actually 50 to 100% as big in a male as a female. That's what's normal. So when a baby's born, and we did this for our tides and also for another earlier study, measured this distance on babies at birth, and then we looked at it in relation to the mother's

phthalates. Why would we do that? Well, it turns out that this measurement reflects how much testosterone was present when these genitals were developing. Think about that. Remember we talked about critical windows? Yeah. So that early trimester, first trimester, is when this all happens, when the males become male typical, the females become female typical, that starts to happen there. And it happens because of testosterone. So actually, the default is female, believe it or not. So if testosterone doesn't come along, you're going to have a female. If testosterone comes along, then the male parts start developing. And if there isn't enough testosterone or is too late for that critical window, then you won't get the transition. to the male typical genitals. What can do that? Thalates. Thalates lower fetal testosterone,

and so they interrupt or interfere with this progression from the neutral to the male genitals. And then you can measure that at birth, and we did. Before we did it, they did it in animals, and they define something called a thallate syndrome. So a whole syndrome of what happens

when the mother gets thalates. And it's a shorter in a genital distance, smaller penis, smaller scrotum, less descended scrotum, and other changes internally, which we don't have to go into. Since everybody, half the audience anyway, is getting a tape measure right now, what is a normal AGD for these people so they don't have to Google it? I actually hesitate to say that. Because first of all, it's not a hard thing to measure, but you got to do it right or you can get it. the wrong answer.

Yeah. No, you need a partner. Yeah, yeah. You need a partner and you need actually calipers. But if you want to read countdown, we have a lot about that in there. Yeah. I'm not recommending that people measure their own. I am recommending, however, that this could become a standard of care as a measurement of every newborn.

I see. I see. Let me tell you why. Not only does it tell you something about what happened before the baby was born, it tells you something about how they're going to perform as adults. That's the amazing thing. Oh, interesting. That's interesting. Right? Yeah. What we did in another study, we got a bunch of college students in the University of Rochester to allow us to measure their AGD males and also to give us a semen sample. And what we found was the longer the AGD, guess what? The higher the sperm count?

Bingo. Wow. Right. Oh, man. Now, every. Everyone's for sure going to want to do this at home. All right. Well, they can get the book or Google it and figure it up. Because you just think that's a distance that, like, you know, nobody's paying attention to this. Did you come up with the idea to measure that? Because that's just like, where would that even come from?

That seems so random, incredibly. Well, I told you there was a thallic syndrome to find it in animals, right? Right. So they've been measuring this AGD in animals. And they've actually done that for more than 100 deer as animals. Huh. But not in humans. And that actually, whoa, why?

At the time that we published our first study, there had been one other study that had used this in humans. And they didn't use it to say, how bad is thallis or how bad is a chemical? We were the first people to do that. So what happened was I heard about this thallate syndrome, and I thought, does that exist in humans? Right? It's a reasonable question for an epidemiologist to ask, right? And then I thought, well, how would we do that? And so that was fun because I began to think about, well, what are they doing animals?

and how do you translate that to humans? And, well, we have to know what their thallate exposure was. How do we know that? Well, I happened to have a study on hand in which we'd stored urine from women who were pregnant. So I could get that urine. I could test it for thallates, and then I could get the kids and measure their agD

and compare them. And that's what we did. And we found the Thalli syndrome in humans. Unbelievable. It's really incredible the connection that you find that. I mean, rarely are things almost so, I won't say they're cut and dry, but rarely are things so obviously correlated, right?

It's such a stroke of luck, I guess you would say, to find a metric like that. What's scarier about things like Thalates, and you mentioned this in the book, is that, look, if I come up with a new food or a new drug, I've got to go through the FDA and I've got to prove that it's safe and all these different things. But chemicals are the opposite. It's almost like innocent until proven guilty. They can be used until they're proven dangerous. And then me as a chemical or packaging manufacturer can lobby and delay and throw disinformation out

there for another decade to use this thing times 85,000 chemicals are used in products. Most of them are untested. So there's a lot that can be done to make sure that dangerous chemicals or things that we can't yet prove are dangerous are just still in use. Absolutely. I want to think, hey, the plastic that I'm using to wrap my food, they've tested this to make sure it doesn't leach in there. Not really. They're just waiting for like a million more people to sue them until they change it up. It's unreal. That's correct. That's correct. It's the FDA, like you said, for food, drugs, agriculture, there's pretty good control. That is, by the way, as a result of what happened when it wasn't control in the past, you know, lots of things like thalidomide, you probably heard of that, you know, baby's born without arms and so on, and also a drug called diethyl sylbestrol.

So there were these exposures to the fetus that people didn't worry about. And then when these really bad things happened, then people said, whoops, we got to control this. And that's when the FDA got teeth in their legislature and got, you know, things really controlled. That has to happen for environmental chemicals, for chemicals in our daily product. The problem is that the risk is very different in that it's smaller risk. It's not like you're going to be born with no arms. You're going to have these small changes that you won't see unless you're in a study that measures it. So it doesn't cause huge harms to any one person. It causes huge harms when you consider the entire population. Right. If you're taking a hundred million people and you're saying, well, a bunch of them are going to have a lot more trouble

conceiving and someone won't be able to at all because they're something, something AGD ends up shorter. Then it's like, well, we can't prove it was from that. It's going to be really hard to do. And also, why put the cart before the horse and jump the gun here? We got to use these chemicals, because they make your cosmetic, your eyeliner stay on or whatever it is. Yeah, they're very useful. There's no question about that. And what we have to do as a society is figure out how to meet those demands for those uses with safer chemicals.

And many people are working on that and it's a really hard job. One of the problems is how do you define safe? Yeah. So you can imagine, you know, is it safe for a rodent? Is it safe for a human? Okay, how long are you going to wait to find that out? A lot of this stuff never goes away, right? there are POPs persistently.

Persistent organic pollutants, yeah. Yeah. Those are the original bad guys that were banned, and they were really bad. There are things like DDT and PCBs and dioxins and things that were clearly no-nows. So those were the first to be banned. But there are persistence right now, not maybe as persistent. So let's talk about persistence for a little bit. It means, you know, how long does it stay in the body?

And phthalates and the bisphenols, which we haven't talked about, make plastic hard. also bad actors, they leave really quickly because they're water soluble. Anything that's water soluble will be peed out, you know, get rid of it. So that's good. But if it's fat soluble, it's going to be stored in fat. Oh, yeah. So the persistence will stick around, and there's a whole class of chemicals, the P-FOS chemicals, which we haven't talked about.

And there are the flavor tardens. And so these are chemicals that stick around longer, but not like those really bad pops, the ones like DDT, which stays around forever in dioxins and so on. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Dr. Shanna Swan. We'll be right back. Thank you for listening and supporting the show. I really appreciate it. I love these conversations.

I really love hearing from you after these conversations. And of course, I got to keep the lights on around here. So all those sponsors and codes and URLs, they get kind of complicated and icky and mucky sometimes. We put them all in one place on one page, Jordan Harbinger.com. slash deals. If you're on the market for a friggin' mattress or some kind of trimmer for your, you know what, go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals and please consider supporting those who support us. Now, for the rest of my conversation with Dr. Shana Swan. If this is stored in fat,

if I lose fat through diet and exercise, am I agitating these things back into my bloodstream from those fat cells? I don't know. It's a great question. Sure, somebody knows, but I haven't studied that. So I can't answer that. It's a really, really good question. What about if I eat some animal that's in the woods and it's been getting flame retardants from eating, I don't know, something that was in there, some flame retardant that was sprayed on a bunch of houses or something like that. And then I shoot that deer and eat it. Am I getting all of those fat soluble chemicals? I'm just ingesting all that stuff, even though it's been years. Oh, yeah, that's horrible. Yes. Yes. And by the way, we haven't mentioned metals. For example, you have to watch the fish that you eat. I'm having

sushi for lunch and I'm like, there's mercury in there for sure. Okay. Right. You're on to that. Man. Yeah, but tell me about it because I think a lot of people have heard of this, but we don't really know or we think, oh, it's so small or it's only in tuna. That's kind of where I wrote it off, but it's not really true, is it?

No, I mean, it's, tuna is certainly a risk. You know, there are lists of fish that are, some are better than others, but they're whole studies that have looked at, for example, one in Denmark and the Faroe Islands, where they actually looked really carefully at all the fish because they're fishers. and showed that there were huge impacts on brain development and immune function, which is very important right now because of COVID, those children that were more highly exposed had less response to vaccination. Oh, man.

It's getting at us from every direction, and we just have to better regulate what's in the food we eat and things we put on our body. So if it's fat soluble, and maybe this is there two different sources of fat, so I could be talking out the wrong end here, but if, like my wife breastfed our kids, but if she had something stuck in her fat, isn't some of that getting into breast milk? Absolutely. Okay, great. Well, that's also super unfortunate.

Yeah, there's been a lot of studies of the levels of these chemicals in breast milk, and it's definitely in there. And by the way, when a woman is pregnant and she's carrying these fat soluble chemicals, she will offload them onto her firstborn. So the exposure in the firstborn is greater than the exposure in the next and next, next. So she gradually gets rid of them with her pregnancy. Not so nice for the kid. No, that's interesting, though.

I wonder why the body's just like, oh, finally, a chance to get rid of all this. I'm just going to put it in my offspring that's carrying my DNA into the future. That could go wrong. Tell me about microplastics. We know there's a ton of plastic in the ocean. We've heard about this like Texas-sized garbage patch of plastic and things like that. But I recently stopped using, you know, a bunch of those like scrubby things for the shower. and I looked at what those little beads are,

because I figured they were bamboo or sand or something. No, they're plastic beads. I immediately stopped washing that stuff down the drain because I figured it's, unfortunately, a little bit safer in a landfill. And there's natural stuff that uses like bamboo instead, but they're so small you can't even see them. So are there just trillions upon trillions of these little plastic beads then in the ocean? Absolutely, absolutely.

In the ocean, in water, in our roads, and they're everywhere. They're in our clothing, clothing that's made from recycled plastic. Bottles, for example, is going to put these chemicals into our bodies through our skin. We have dermal absorption of these chemicals as well. Really, you can absorb plastic through your skin. Yes, absolutely. Oh, man. Not the plastic, but the chemicals put out by the plastic.

Sure, yeah. And by the way, even before going to the recycling, if we have chemicals that have thallites in them, like, phallates actually have the ability to increase absorption. They help cosmetics be absorbed, and they hold scent and color. So they're in every fragrance. Oh, man. Every fragrance, every bit of lipstick, every bit of nail polish, you're getting phallates breathing it through your skin.

You know, if you put a hand cream on your skin, you'll come back later, half hour later, it's gone, right? Yeah. A good one is, the oily ones aren't, right? The phallate-free ones probably not, yeah. Oh, my gosh. So it's absorbed. What am I looking at in my medicine cabinet then for things that have thallites?

Is it going to say, like, thalates are in here? Like, is it say thallate one, or is it some other fancy name that I can't detect? Not going to be on there. Medicine cabinet is not necessarily where you keep your cosmetics. You don't use cosmetics, but personal care products. Sure. But there are coatings on medications that have thallites in them and have been shown measurable, you know, exposure to thallites through certain medication because the coating contains

sali. So can I not find these things that I have that have thallites because they're just not going to tell me if it's in there? That's right. Wow. That's so wrong somehow. You have to go to an educated website. We have resources in countdown to tell you where to look up things if you want to know where X and Y and Z is. But a simple one to remember is EWG. So EWG has in this list of consumer products and you can look under cosmetics, you can look under sunscreen, you can look under cleaning products, and get some sense of what's one thing is safer than the other. Wow. You know, it's a moving target. And by the way, not everybody has the resources to do that, either the knowledge to do it, to look it up or the money to pay for these because the better products

tend to be more expensive. Yeah, I was going to say if you get all natural stuff, great, but now you're going to like ESOP where it's 100 bucks for some face cream instead of just like 39. CVS. That's right. But it sounds like we just live in an alphabet soup of harmful chemicals. You wrote that many chemicals that were harmful and got a lot of bad press and negative attention were simply replaced with other chemicals that are equally harmful, but maybe just don't have as bad of a press rep. They're just lesser known.

So it sounds like, oh, we got rid of thallates. Now we've got some other thing in there that's not thallates, but 10 times worse or the same amount of bad. And we can just say, hey, we got rid of thalates. Thalate free over here. Buy this. Yeah. You're describing something which we in the field like to call regrettable substitution. So it's when consumers make a big fuss about a product like BPA, you know, you have had a baby, so you know BPA-free, baby bottles, right?

Or if you run, water bottles say BPA-free. Great. That's because people don't want BPA. But what they don't know is that instead of BPA, BPA stands for Bisfenal A. But there are other forms of bisfanel A. But there are other forms of bisphenol, not very different. Just tweak one or two chemicals, and you'll get BPF or BPS, and those don't have to be labeled, because all it's saying is BPA-free. Right. It doesn't say B-P-F-free, doesn't say BPS-free, right? So you buy this and it has B-PFRS, and then you get the same harm, or maybe close to,

and you're tricked. It's a trick. Yeah. I feel that consumers should be really angry about this. Yeah, it's like we're wrong. forced to play whack-a-mole and say that chemical's bad. Finally, we got it banned. Okay, we got some legislation, or at least the reputation of this is so bad, nobody's going to buy anything with that in there. Oh, now we've got another one. It's the same thing with a tweak on the end because they hired

a chemist to just make it look different so we could legally say it's not in there. Now we're spending five years getting rid of that thing. And then, you know, 50 years later, the whole thing is finally banned because it's causing millions and millions of birth defects or something along those lines that never go away. I mean, that's just criminal almost in nature to do this. Right. It really is deception. In our tide study, I told you, we looked at how much there was of this very bad thallite called D-EHP, diethyl hexyl thallate, lowers testosterone. It's one of the bad actors. And we compared it to how much there was in our earlier study and had gone down 50%. I was thrilled. Sure. I was like, wow. Until. Until I found out that there were other thalates that have been

substituted that have gone up. And they seem to do the same thing. Yeah. You know, to do these studies, I studied DAHP for, well, more than 10 years. And that study cost close to $10 million, those two studies. That's just, you know, one class of chemicals. And so you think about switching those out, well, those later ones were never even measured in the first study. Right. So now I have to do it all again. Right. I have to write my grant. I have to get my $5 million grant. I have to get my $5 million grant. I have to enroll the women. I have to take five years to do that study and maybe another five years to replicate it. And then maybe I can say this other thyroid is just as bad.

Sure. Yeah, you need to live to 300 years old and have $2 billion in research funding and then we can finally solve this problem. Right, right, exactly. Jeez. Yeah. Do we pass these things down to our kids? You know, epigenetics, I'm sure you're familiar with this.

They flip switches in our body. Like, what if my grandpa worked with pineapples or something like that? Did he end up getting that giving some of this problem to my dad who ended up giving it to me, and now we've got like three generations of compounding effects of these chemicals in our bodies? Yes. Your grandmother was exposed. And your father, say, was in utero. And then your father had in his body germ cells that would go on to produce the next generation from his sperm.

So you got three generations there. you can see that three generations are already affected by the exposure to your grandmother. Yeah. And now some people say it goes further. Some people say it goes up to seven generations. Oh, my. I haven't done that work, and I believe the people who have done it, but I don't want to talk about it because it's not my field. But certainly I very clearly understand these three generations.

And here's the good news. You ready for some good news? Yeah. How about some good news? Yeah. The good news is, and this is, and this is. is a study that was done by Pat Hunt from University of Washington. So she took a mouse that had been messed up by, let's just say, D.HP. I don't remember exactly which chemical was, but he had low sperm

count, AGD, blah, blah, blah, blah. So he was messed up. And then he went on to mate and actually produce offspring. And those offspring were kept in a very clean environment. No thallis, no bisphenolite, you know, very clean environment. Those offspring went on to produce more offspring with females that had also been kept in a clean environment. And so this continued for three generations. After three generations, the male function was completely restored. There was no problem with the testosterone, with the intangelo distance, with the fertility was restored. Yes, by cleaning up successive generations, we can stop this. It doesn't have to go on forever. But what we have to do is stop exposing.

people in subsequent generations. Right. Yeah, the trick is making the cleaning up of the environment part that you mentioned before. Right. But it just seems like if my grandmother is exposed and my father is also exposed, not just from my grandmother, but just from, let's say they grew up in Detroit, which is true, and they're exposed to lead in the air from gasoline or whatever. And then let's say I grow up in that same environment and let's pretend that there's still lead in gasoline everywhere because nothing changes. Thalates come to mind. Then I have the damage from my grandma, the damage from my dad, and now my own damage that I'm exposed to. So I was born with, let's say, 2x, you know, two notches of damage.

Now I'm getting my own. And then it just seems like it compounds over time, like you said, until we clean up the environment. But that's kind of like until pigs fly, we're going to still be exposed to thallates and chemicals that cause reproductive harm. Yeah. By the way, let me just say,

because you said this in passing very fast, lead was a success story. Lead was cleaned up. So let's not forget that. Yeah, yeah. We sometimes have success. It is possible. Just very hard, right?

Yes. That's what we're going to have to do. And I'm not totally pessimistic. I think that there are some very smart chemists and well-meaning people, manufacturers who are really trying to clean up their products and clean up the environment, corporations that are supporting this research. So I'm not completely negative. I just think it's hard.

And what it takes is people being aware of this. And that's why I wrote countdown. And I think that the most. more people are aware of this, and the more they ask questions, and the more they demand safer products, the more it's going to happen. If we just write it off as, oh, well, this is just something we can't do anything about, then we're not going to make progress. So I'd like people to be aware that it's bad, but it's not, it is fixable. We just have to make a lot of noise and put a lot of pressure. That's why I'm doing the show, because if this was just, by the way, there's nothing you can do,

I'd be like, well, that was a depressing book. It's probably kind of important for people to know, but I don't really want to expose my audience to that. But since this is a solvable problem, I want as many people to know as possible, not just so they're like, oh my God, I can't eat sushi again and look at all these things I shouldn't put on my face.

I mean, that's part of it maybe. But the real take home here is make sure you pay attention to what you buy and also make sure that you vote for things. Like when you see fallates on the ballot or something like that, you don't just go, I don't know what that is. You're paying attention to this because,

yeah, maybe our generation or the latest, our kids can be like, I can't believe my parents. They're still using this. and they make this cleanup effort to turn things around. Before I let you go, I'd love to know about medication, speaking of cheerful topics, medication polluting waterways and drinking water, because I did not know that drinking water has birth control pill medication in it because people are urinating and it goes in the water

and it just can't be cleaned up. Like that's really not only disgusting, but also very disturbing that these molecules persist. This is true. And by the way, also things like medication. for depression, for anxiety. These are in the water as well. And there's a wonderful project in Israel where they actually looked at lettuce.

Lettuce. That was produced, lettuce, that was grown in water that had some of these chemicals in them. And the lettuce conveyed the exposure as well. Wow. Yeah. So it's not only the water, it's things that are grown with that water.

And, you know, it sticks around. It's a problem. That is extremely disturbed. Because, of course, a lot of water for farms is just like pumped in from wherever there's water. Usually it's cleaned up. This group in Israel was using recharge water. So you take the water basically off of the toilet, do something to it, but not totally clean it, and then put it on the props. And so if you do that, you're going to get those chemicals in the crops.

And that's what they show. That must affect animals, though, right? Because if I'm a fish and I'm swimming around in antidepressants and birth control stuff, that's got to affect my fertility or at least make me, if I'm infertile, extremely, I don't know, overly happy all the time. I'm not sure. What does it do to the animals that ingest this stuff? I don't know that, but I know it certainly does affect the fertility of the animals. Yeah.

There was a lake in Canada that a researcher named Karen Kidd, actually she added estrogen to it. They let her mess up a lake, a whole lake Canada, had a control and exposed lake. and she exposed a lake to estrogen and the fish just didn't reproduce. So definitely it has an effect. So the takeaway from that is have a reverse osmosis water filter at home that you're drinking from? I actually distill my water. You distill your water, yeah. What about showering? I know this is probably a dumb question. I'll drink reverse osmosis water that has, you know, quote unquote, nothing in it. But does it matter if it's falling on my skin if I'm, I assume I'm absorbing less if it's just washing off my skin versus chugging a gallon of it each day, but it's probably still not great for me to have, right?

You can get exposure through other routes than drinking. That's true. You could get germally absorbed chemicals. And when we did our water studies way back when I was in the health department, we did ask people how long they showered and bathed and how they treated their water. So it all matters. One thing that stood out was the idea that we shouldn't handle receipts, as in literally a receipt from buying something at the store? That seems so commonplace. That's bad for you? What's in there?

Receipts, you know, are coded, and that coding contains bisphenol A, unless the store had opted not to use a receipt with bisphenol A. So there is a choice, but most use of receipts have bisphenol A in them. And a very nice study, Fred von Salle did, did the study of cashiers who actually put hand cream on, just, you know, regular hand cream. And then they handled these receipts. and the hand cream made it increase the absorption of the bisphenol. Sure.

Whether you use hand cream or not, you're going to get some exposure. I personally ask for an electronic receipt so that I don't have to handle the receipts. Exactly, exactly. You don't want to be touching receipts if you can avoid it. But these things are lining tin cans. The same bisphenols are lining tin cans. They're in pizza boxes. They're all over the place.

Receipts are one source, but we want to be aware of lots of sources of it. exposure to these and other chemicals, which we haven't talked about. Right. Yeah, there's plenty more depressing stuff in the book if you want the full list of chemicals that are doing bad things to your body or not even the full list. But you should also say, Jordan, that in the book, we talk about things you can do. Right. So we talk, think about ways to decrease your exposure and actions you can take and resources. So it's not a totally negative book, right?

You just read it. You know, you didn't. Yeah, I did. In fact, I have a whole list of practical things people can do that I'm going to go over in the show close. I just don't want to have you list off something that I can list off. Your expertise is already, you know, written in the book for that. Yeah.

So, yeah, people stay tuned through the end. I've got maybe like 10 things you can do, you know, from vinyl shower curtains to making sure you're not sitting in a hot tub every day, which now is my primary method of birth control. But this is both fascinating and scary. Is it possible that fertility will go to zero at some point if we just do nothing about this or near zero? I don't think it'll go to zero. and the sperm count decline that curve that everyone looks at, who looks at the paper or publishes about the paper of decreasing sperm count.

We have to remember that's a mean, an average. And if that were zero, that would mean that a large number of men would have negative sperm count. But you can't have negative sperm count. No such thing, right? So you can come close to zero, but you can't ever touch it. So that's like a technical thing. But you can get alarmingly close, and I think we're getting alarmingly close. Dr. Swan, thank you very much for your time and expertise today.

Really appreciate it. Again, fascinating and scary, and I've got a whole lot of practicals for the end of the show, but I really appreciate your time. Thanks, Jordan, and thanks for being such an informed host. I'm really glad you read the book and you liked it. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger Show with Ishmael Beah, who at the age of 13, was forced to become a child soldier. I started when I was 13.

The first day that we went to war, I think it was the most terrifying thing that ever happened to me, just on the way there, knowing what we were going to do, but it hasn't yet happened. Having this feeling that I was descending into some kind of darkness, into some place that was going to chip away from who I had been, that I would no longer get back truly. And then there was an ambush, and then we started exchanging fire, and people who looked like us were shooting at us. And there was a kid that when we were training had looked up to me, he was next to me, and there was an explosion, and his body flew, and he was scared. There was blood all over my face and everything, and I just lost it.

I realized at that moment, I listen, if I don't shoot, I'm going to end up like everybody else who's been killed next to me. And I started shooting. Shooting to kill, and whatever could get you as high as possible. So you feel like you're kind of in a long nightmare, you took it.

That becomes a new reason to fight. You didn't want to come down from the high. But there's also, because you're on the high, you also get addicted to the violence itself. So you constantly keep yourself moving, being high, engaging in more violence until you're removed from it. Which is why sometimes people are shocked when soldiers come back from fighting and they're traumatized. Sometimes they shoot themselves, they become violent.

When you go and take out another life and dehumanize it, in reverse you dehumanize yourself, your own spirit, your own being, and it takes a lot of undoing. I was once a kid who loved hip-hop, run DMC, LL Kool-J, learned Shakespeare, wanted to be an economist. And then I became a soldier and I started doing things that I didn't think I would ever be able to be in a position to do. But I did them. To hear about life in a war zone where he fought for three years before being rescued by UNICEF, check out episode 622 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. You know, this is a tough topic because men, especially, I can speak from experience.

You know, this would be super emasculating. It's a core function of being a man in our eyes, the ability to have offspring and not have any issues with our dangle dongles. think Viagra's so popular. I know it doesn't increase fertility, but just even the appearance of not being able to do it is a problem. It's a billion dollar industry. Think about that. You know, the hot tub issue is something else. After two kids, the hot tub is actually my primary method of birth control now. So sometimes, yeah, it's the hot tub, but other times it's something else. So if you're having problems with this, go see someone right away. And if you're not sure, maybe you go see someone early because that window is closing. And that's true for men

and women, as Dr. Shana Swan mentioned in the book, as women's bodies age, their bodies become less resilient to chemical exposure. So as you get older, not only is your fertility window closing just by pure biology and nature, but also you're less able to withstand environmental pollution. And there is pollution and chemicals and freaking everything. Here's a partial list, okay, smoking obesity, obvious issues, cured meats, sugary drinks, sitting and watching TV, computer, whatever. That's not good for you. Maybe there's less chemicals involved there, but there's still issues. Cycling, right? We talked about that on the show. And this shouldn't surprise anybody, but still ended up being something I wasn't expecting. Opioids, right? They cause DNA damage in sperm. They can

lower your count. Antidepressants, something that you thought would have nothing to do with reproduction can also affect that. We live in an alphabet soup of harmful or potentially harmful chemicals. What we discussed today on the show is by no means an exhaustive list, if you can even call it a list. I promised you a bunch of practicals as well. Here they are. You can raise your sperm count by simply skipping the hot tub or the sauna. You can eat generally clean. What's good for your heart, health, and immune system is also generally good for reproduction. That is a quote from her book as well. Also, wash your vegetables if you're not doing that already. No need for a special vegetable spray. Just water is fine. You get some of those pesticides out of there. Also, rule of thumb,

Stick to foods that don't have a TV commercial. Plastic wrapping has BPA, thalates, substitutes in it. If there's a commercial for it, it's probably not celery or something grown in a backyard that's sold as a commodity everywhere, right? It's probably processed, wrapped, stored, loaded with preservatives, et cetera. Try organic meats with no hormones or antibiotics if they're near you and you can afford to do that. That is something that I made a major change on because I don't really think about it before, if I'm honest.

I grew up eating that stuff, so I'm sure the damage. is already done, but look, I got two kids. It'll probably catch up with me when I'm older. Also, when you're microwaving something, you want to avoid microwaving anything that's not glass or ceramic. But here's a little rhyme if you don't have a choice. Maybe you're at the office. So talking about plastic types, four, five, one, and two, all the rest are bad for you. Again, that's four, five, one, and two, all the rest are bad for you. And again, try not to microwave any plastic or anything that's not ceramic or glass and definitely microwave safe, but some of these microwave safe plastics. They might be safe because they won't melt or explode or whatever,

but they might also leach. And if it's not 4, 5, 1, or 2, then definitely don't do it. Drink reverse osmosis water. These are not super expensive. I realize you might be renting an apartment like I'm not installing a filter, but you can also get some of these things that attach to the faucet. Reverse osmosis is the best kind. It's better than just a regular charcoal type filter. It will get out a lot of the stuff that we talked about, the birth control runoff, so to speak. The water we shower or bathe in is less important, but if you have the means, go ahead and grab at least a charcoal filter for your bathtub, your shower. We're thinking about installing something like that as well. The book has a lot of general rules for buying cosmetics and things we put on our skin, but I won't go

into all those here. Avoid vinyl shower curtains. You know the ones that reek when you open them and smell like plastic death? Surprise, those are bad for you. Don't use air fresheners. Those are loaded with chemicals that diffuse into the air. Cheap carpets and rugs, same thing. Water or stainproofing on carpets and fabrics is also bad. I grew up just spraying scotch gar all over the place, probably all over my skin and everything. Not great. Definitely not ideal. You should have indoor and outdoor shoes. Now, I grew up in Michigan as a middle class white dude, so we wore our shoes all through the house, it was disgusting. And now that I'm older and I'm married to an Asian woman, she's like, let me get this straight. You wore your shoes from outside into your home and then

put them on furniture and carpet, and I'm like, yeah. So we don't do that anymore. Have some indoor and outdoor shoes. You are tracking in some gross toxic stuff just by walking in the door with your shoes. Put those things by the door, or better yet, keep them outside. Hang dry, clean clothes. This is for you, corporate, still in the office types. Hang your dry, clean clothes in the garage overnight outside of the plastic so that they can air out. Don't let them air out in the house. You know when you open your closet after you've got a bunch of clean clothes and it smells kind of funny? That's bad for you. Don't use mothballs either. And by the way, if you're under 80 years old, you probably don't use mothballs anyway. And if you're under 30, you probably don't

even know what those are. So don't worry about that. But yeah, if you get something cleaned with chemicals, air it out outside in the garage. It's just not worth letting that crap in your house. There is a kit. We'll link to it in the show notes. It's called Detox Me. And it's a It will show you what kind of chemicals you have in your body to urine tests. It's not a blood thing. And what you can do to get rid of those harmful chemicals. Detox Me will link it in the show notes as well. Big thank you to Dr. Shanna Swan.

Links to all things Dr. Swan will be in the website in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com. Please use our website links if you buy books from guests. It does help support the show. Transcripts are in the show notes. Videos are on YouTube, advertisers, deals, and discount codes, all at Jordan Harbinger. slash deals, please do consider supporting those who support this show. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram, or just hit me on LinkedIn. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using the same

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This show is created an association with Podcast 1. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogart, Millie Ocampo, Ian Baird, Josh Ballard, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. If you know somebody who's into health or the environmental stuff or maybe has little kids and should know about all the weird crap that's in their house, share this episode with them. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about.

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