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

32:17Is he's gonna be staying at home and not playing around for a while? Oh, yes, of course. Ments testosterone goes down when they get into a relationship, when they get married and then when they have children, we know less risky behavior. That wouldn't, so that mechanism works. Okay, so we understand that the mechanism of being around an unfertile female mediates it. What we don't know is how much is this happening on mass? How much is another one that I haven't even thought about until now? 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.

33:07So yeah, we just have, it's this huge cocktail of social, hormonal, psychological, physical, environmental, lifestyle impact 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 languages. You can do that. You can do that. But I 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 bodies hormones. Let's get into the, let's get into the chemicals. Tell us, tell us what we need to know.

34:02Okay. 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. He was a chemist, wonderful chemist. And he works for CDC. And CDC centers for disease control. They have just figured out how to measure There are a whole lot of chemicals in a lot of people for not a lot of money. 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 ask you, I can ask you how much you smoke, I can ask you how much drugs you took, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, I can't ask you how much bisfinolios in your body, BPA.

34:54Right? I can't ask you. So the only way I can know that is to look inside your body and 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 are 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 can't drop blood. 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.

35:35And he says, Shana, you should study salads, okay? And I said, as you might, if you didn't know better, what salads, right? And because I had never heard of them. And by the way, my background is in mathematics. And you know, I'm not chemist. So, you know, this is like, that lights were the elevator. So he told me and he told me something about where they're found, which I can tell you in a minute. And but he also said they're in everybody. So that's fact, what? Valids are measurable in everybody's urine in the United States in the sample, representors sample they looked at. And then he told me the kicker, which is that at the National Tox College program, scientists had fed these same fallets that we have in our bodies to rats, pregnant rats, early in pregnancy.

36:29And 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? right? 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 rats. Right. So I said, well, okay. So then if we want to ask that question of humans, what do we need?

37:16So 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 OK, 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.

38:00It's always good to save urine because it's cheap and it's easy to get. And I always tell my students to save the urine, save the urine if you can't, 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 thalates in the urine. And we found them, tons of them. Okay, so then to finish this, I had it of the second half, which was look at the offspring, right? So to do that, I had to contact the mother and say, would you bring your baby in so we can measure its genitals?

38:42Kind 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 thallide 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 in, you know, name after chemical. So here's the phallic 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.

39:37They have been using AGD, intergeneral 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 the female, in offspring of a female human? So, designing that protocol, that exam was, you know, different, 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.

40:25So we did that and published and it was a, it was a ground breaker. It was huge. And it led to legislation to keep the elites out of certain things, not quite the right things. Because they took them out of children's toys, which is not related to mothers and exposure. But anyway, they were on the right track, limit the elite exposure. And then other people started seeing that there were other chemicals that could do this. So it's not just the elites that lower testosterone. drone. There are other and the class of chemicals that lower testosterone are called anti -androgens. Okay. And then at the same time, a researcher in Washington state discovered that there was an estrogen influencing chemical and that was bisfinalic.

41:30So you know, bisfinalic makes plastic border bottles hard and so gradually people start to say, 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 into current disrupting chemicals because 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.

42:19Our entire function in health is governed hormonally. So it's extremely important and it plays a big role in this. Sparrow 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 at least so far, But, 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 thalates 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?

43:13What 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. 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 about it, right? It's over the other side of the room still. Right, right. Then I can hurt you.

44:02But unless it's in your air doctor's mind, so the three ways you get the stuff in your body is you eat it or drink it. That's suggestion. You breathe it, respiration, or it's germally exposed through your skin. And it turns out that several of these chemicals are designed to increase absorption. They're put into products. That likes particular put into products. So they'll go into your skin. That's what the thing, 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. Right. Fantastic. All right. When it comes to, when it comes to foods, what do you mean when you say foods?

44:43Is it the content of foods? Is it the packaging of foods? How so? How can we avoid it? all of the above. So, um, the, um, go back to the growth of the food. So, 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 salads, to increase the absorption of the pesticide into the plant. So even, you know, the pesticide will be harmful on its own, and it will also be harmful because fallids are entering that lightest or that asparagus and because they're put in deliberately to increase absorption. So in the growth process, you have the concern about endocrine disruption.

45:31And 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. So, and I went, I was at a farmer's market. I talked to the farmer and he's very proud of his milk. He said, this is organic, or you know, 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 say you're smiling, you got it. So milk, that's hand -milked, has no fallates and other chemicals in it. If the farm was organic. Milk that's collected through a milking machine, which has lots and tubes.

46:24You've seen those pictures of the milking machines with all the tubes. Those are conveying the fallate 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 phallic goes into the milk, 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.

47:06It'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 and blast it, right? I mean, no, no, no, that's the biggest now. And 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.

47:53Well, maybe someone will have to this. Presumably as well, the increasing shelf life that we have of produce 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 kind of round out that from a lifestyle perspective, what are the principles that you try to follow yourself or what are the biggest move as people can do to try and avoid this stuff, presumably eating organic trying to get the, I mean, there's someone that wraps the tomatoes in a paper bag.

48:47Like, what are the things people can do? Beyond, do not microwave your food in plastic. This podcast you call 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 film bad and that's another story. But it's really interesting to do that and take close attention to how much plastic there is in our supermarket and how unavoidable it is. It's not completely unavoidable.

49:31If 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 and it's so refreshing to see that and I did a little experiment with some friends I was going around with and I said, oh, go let's weigh these and 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 you know and that's true of fish that's already been in filet or meat that's already been cut up or whatever. That's always gonna be more exposure and more cost. So it's really to people's advantage not to, to get as simply as possible.

50:18And 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... This area is kind of underserved, I would say, by industry, but I think it's growing, it's getting more options. There are bags that are more safer. From my perspective, one of the biggest changes I made less long ago than I would like right to have known, but as soon as I kind of found out, there's a number Pyrex do quite a few of glass tupperware containers.

51:10Now, 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. Yeah, I'm gonna 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 liter or above. One liter sounds like a ton of food, but when you actually look at the size of a piece of tupperware that's only a liter, it's not actually that big. So go two liters 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.

51:47I'm gonna guess you're okay with glass glasses, all right? Absolutely, the best. I love one. 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 farm as 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 are resemble plastic and they are safer. They are not, I understand for my packaging friends, they are not ideal, but they are certainly better than they are not going to contain salads.

52:34They are not going to contain the best phenols. We didn't talk much about best phenols, but the best phenols BPA, BPF, BPS, BPFS, and 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're 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 hasn't been - They don't know about it. Yeah, they don't yet know about them.

53:15So anyway, yeah, if you can silicone is is preferable glass like I said is perfect so China you know any anything that's You know pottery Not lid pottery without lid And I I buy a lot of things in glass and then I wash out the jars and I just saved them and I have a couple of jars full of glass I just used those to do so. 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 ascribed that anymore myself. I don't, I believe that recycling is not going solve the problem for us and the purpose of those numbers is to get you to recycle, to buy recyclable and you know to increase recycling.

54:23But 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 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, ten, 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, 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?

55:09Many 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 much. It's a proof in others. Right, okay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And 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 you have you heard of these micro nanoplastics? Presumably that happens. Okay. So this is kind of a new development in the field and people are realizing that the breakdown products of recycled products and and disposed of plastic products are not actually leaving us.

55:58They're re -entering in various forms. So they're re -entering, for example, in our water and in our air, and they've now been found alarmingly in many cells in the body. And the scarier thing about these is they're very, very tiny and they have two possible adverse effects and this is just under in a research stage now. So grain of salt but they're 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.

56:46So, you know, 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, it's, I would say this is the, for the last couple of years, this is the most important new development in this field, that these chemicals that are put out there, you know, in the plastics that we think we've gotten rid of, they're here. They're back, you know, it's like Yeah. I mean, on that, you know, and so 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, a bitter filter, you know, like a classic desktop style filter.

57:26I then kind of got red -pilled 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 our alternative, which is what I happen to use, which is a desktop or tabletop distiller.

58:07So 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, 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. But 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. The brand that I use is Aquatru. They're great. I do need to look at what pipes are internal to the system. But I certainly know that the the crack that it fills at the front is glass.

58:52And my solution is I have this is a 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 it's sometimes is sold out sometimes isn't called a burky. 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. I know I don't own one, but I'll ask my friends about that. A bunch of my friends have got those.

59:33So those are the two that I know, at least from my experience and what my friends are talking about, Burke and Aquatru. 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 say hydrated, but there is a world in which you increase your hydration at the cost of increasing the amount of thalates and microplastics and BPA and stuff 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 and bottles of Evion.

1:00:08You 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 that. 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. So just as the genitals need hormones to develop and to differentiate between males and females, they're different. That's also true of the brain. And this is kind of a controversial topic in some political circles that people don't like to say that the brain is sexually demographic, but it's There's no question you can see.

1:00:59This is the safe space for you here. And

1:01:07so the changes In the brain are influenced by testosterone own just as the generals are. And not quite the same time, it's later in pre, it's also in pregnancy, but it's later in pregnancy. Okay, so there's a lot of things you can see on MRIs, by the way, you know, you can see those differences between males and females in different parts of the brain. I think you're referring, by the way, I, you've read my book, right? Countdown? Is that How do you know? Yes. So I want to put an applaud for countdown. Maybe. But yes, in countdown, this is one of things we discussed, but it's not the main focus because the book is largely focused on reproduction function.

1:01:54But I have a colleague had a colleague who said, Shana, the brain is the biggest sex organ in the body.

1:02:07And it's true that the brain is influenced by sex hormones just as the generals 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. And so, yeah, so how do males and females differ? One way they differ is that, and this is going to sound very, you know, there'll be people although only like this again politically, but females have better, earlier language development. And they know, if you have a child, you know, you see, you know, how quickly they acquire words and, and men on the other hand, have a better spatial ability.

1:02:56That's the joke about the, you know, a woman will never ask, 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 Thalate levels were related to the number of words the child knew or understood at age four. That, particularly in females, it wasn't much in males, but in females it was pretty much. The other study that you're referring to I think is the play behavior.

1:03:45And 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 t -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 with the car and the female monkey will. And it turns out in our study, when we asked the mother about the play behavior of the child and rank their answers as male and female, the male typical behavior was less male typical in men boys who were exposed to thalates.

1:04:54So that's for what that is, it's a suggestion, I would say, that exposure to these chemicals in pregnancy during pregnancy, because it all happens in pregnancy, are going to affect the masculization of the brain. Could this change gender identity? I know you were going to ask that.

1:05:21That'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. So the rat gets, if it's a male rat, between two females, he's slightly less masculineized at birth. And that's true of his HDD too, by the way. And the female between two males is somewhat masculinized. Okay, so what that's called? Uterus environment where they're leading between each other, right?

1:06:18Exactly. And that's called the in uterine position effect and it's been known for a long time. What about humans? Well, it turns out that when this 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, pretty recent study, you look at twins, the twins that have a partner, this co -twin of the opposite sex are more likely to be gender dysphoric.

1:07:20So 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 Ploominesque style? How do you know that this isn't just sisters growing up with brothers, brothers imprinting behaviorally social roles theory type stuff, social learning theory? I, not from that study, but the, um, the brains you can look in, in MRI at the brains of the male and female. And you see, um, that reflect there. I don't have that. Less female typical brain development in the female that has that, right? Yeah. Understood. And there's a really great, I brought this up a couple of weeks ago on a podcast.

1:08:08There's 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 tiny a 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 there. David putts, he did a phenomenal bunch of work on this.

1:08:48David 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. 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, you know, like generals are very early and brain is later, but that's the sensitive period. You asked me before about sensitive periods, and I wanted to just mention some other, so there's the Inuit or a period, of course, when we talk about that a lot.

1:09:50There'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 might be, 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. So in very little study, very little studied in menopause, but that's fascinating. 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?

1:10:52It's very hard to say because so much of it is choice now.

1:11:00So women couples are postponing having children and so the natural default is that women and men's, rip it up to 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, they're going to have fertility, either through because they're going to school or because was there in the workforce or because they want to do something else for a while, you know, that's going to... So I don't know how to separate that from the biological changes in my cancer.

1:11:52Yeah, 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, most sooner. You know, there should be a volume, 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 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 I now I want to tell you the exception and that's Israel and the reason is fertility includes artificial you know assisted reproduction births it's just births it doesn't say how they got there and in Israel people are guaranteed to children by if they need it by artificial, you know, ARG, artificial root -productive technology and and their fertility is not declined.

1:13:09So you know that's pretty dramatic every other country and and the other thing is that the use of assisted root -productive 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 embryo selection for a variety of traits. So you can go in with your 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.

1:13:56Obviously, it's not a perfect science, but it's pretty predictive according to him. And that's already happening. 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. How, well, actually, even before that, let's forget 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.

1:14:42Whatever format 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. I didn't have any calls. Sorry, yeah, that's IVF, 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 and I'm pretty sure you do it, you can even do it from skin cells and stuff like that.

1:15:37Okay, yeah. Yeah, I actually think that a woman produces one egg per 28 days, 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 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.

1:16:27That's driving this desire for new technologies, right? Well, don't forget there's a decreasing desire for people to do the action that causes children to come about the old fashioned way as well. We can go even further upstream than the difficulty of the mechanism, just the desire is also being needed. Yeah, 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, 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?

1:17:12How can we, you know, combat this challenge? It's a big problem. And if we don't fix it, it's not good. And, you know, 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 2000s, you're definitely going to see it start to dip and then that could be precipitous. But here's the other thing and this is like my super hardcore red pill, which is for the anti -natalist subcultures that really don't want humans to destroy the planet and there's too many people on here in any case and so on and so forth.

1:17:55A 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 having a blues on people. And you go, well, 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.

1:18:41And yeah, another friend, here'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 Sol made it about how the clergy is good because it screens fanaticism out of the gene pool. that people that are, you know, super crazy. And I was like, well, I mean, that wasn't me. That was just a friend that was my name. But look Chris, Chris, do you have children?

1:19:26No, 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 in that plastics and products and, you know, panliders and food containers are taking away this option is terrible to me. It's on fear. It's on fear. 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.

1:20:38Because if you're poor, 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 alternative, you know, alternative, safer alternatives, you can't do that. you can't take care of yourselves that way, you're going to be more likely not to have it be able to have a child. And so it's not an equal opportunity for everybody to be deprived of that child, right? So there's this whole social issue here too. Yeah. Yeah, there are absolutely. It's a, like I say, it's just what a time to be alive and to be thinking about these problems and sort of grappling socially with what's going on.

1:21:24That'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 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 because I'm just, I just want, got to find someone. Yeah, it's, it's amazing. Look, your work is, is, is really fascinating. And it's the synthesis of a lot of different pet interests that I've got.

1:22:02Where should people go? They want to find out more the book, the, why should they go to check out more of the stuff that you do? So you can go to shaman swan .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.

1:22:54That'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, I really appreciate you. Thank you Chris, I had a lot of fun.