Joe Rogan: Great to see you again.
Shanna Swan: Great to see you, Joe. Happy to be here.
JR: Happy to have you here. So, you've got a documentary about essentially the same subject that you talked about last time you were here, the impact of microplastics and all these various endocrine disrupting chemicals that we're dealing with.
SS: Right. Well, it started as a movie on plastic... But let me backtrack because I want to tell you something that I never told you but was so important to me. So, you remember when I was here, you said, "Are you saying the toxins in the environment are threatening the survival of the human race?" And I said, "That's my story and I'm sticking to it." And then you said something which changed my life. You said, "Why don't people know about this?"
SS: I went home and I thought a lot about that question and that was what led me to create the program that I have now β Action Science Initiative β which is doing short impactful relatively cheap interventions to alert people to the problem and communicating this in a way that I'm hoping will reach more people than academia...
SS: I want to just make a small point which is microplastics and plastics and plasticizers are not identical. Microplastics are the actual pieces of plastic that carry the plasticizers along with them. So they kind of piggyback on. They do double damage because they carry the chemical harms and they also physically enter the cells.
JR: Let me tell you a story about a friend of mine. There's a guy named Philip Franklin Lee who is a Michelin star chef... he was experiencing fatigue, like always tired, got his hormones tested, extremely low testosterone, but then got his microplastics tested and they were off the charts. His testosterone went up to 1,200 with no testosterone replacement, no nothing β just eliminating microplastics from his life over a period of time.
SS: That's fantastic and it's what we are seeing in the film...
SS: We winnowed down to six couples. One of them dropped out for personal reasons. They had to have idiopathic infertility β no known causes. They couldn't be obese, they couldn't be smokers, they had to be staying together for the next three months and not doing IVF.
SS: Million Marker (the company that does the testing) has an education program. They talked to the couples and said, "Tell me about what you put on your face this morning. Tell me what you washed your clothes with." Once a week they talked to them. Along with that, we sent them kits to collect their semen.
SS: Beginning, middle, and end was three months. You know why 3 months? It takes 70 days to make a sperm. So we wanted to have turnover within the course of the intervention.
JR: Bruno, one of the guys in the film β he was addicted to his coffee pods. We said, "Bruno, we want you to stop using those pods." He did. They've had two babies. I'm not saying that's the reason, but it's a contribution probably.
JR: Are they using plastic with their coffee machines at places like Starbucks?
SS: I suspect that they are using plastic. When you see these big industrial machines and they slide those filters in, those filters are plastic.
JR: I got rid of my plastic coffee machine. I use a steel water boiler that heats it up to 200Β°F and then I have a steel French press. It takes 15 minutes rather than 30 seconds, but it tastes way better.
SS: Women need testosterone too for sexual arousal and libido and muscle. In our study, we asked women questions about their sexual experience β how satisfied were they, frequency β and the women who had higher levels of phthalates had less satisfaction and lower frequency.
SS: Both men and women who have lower fertility on average die younger. There have been about four or five studies that have shown this. Your life expectancy is shorter. It's a canary in the coal mine for lots of things that are going south at the same time.
SS: US fertility is down quite a bit. In South Korea it's like 0.88 children per couple. The normal shape of the population is like a pyramid β lots of people at the bottom (young) and fewer at the top (old). But now it's inverting. The ones down here are supposed to support the ones up here, but there's not enough of them.
SS: There was a wonderful scientist named Lou Gillette in Florida. He showed that alligators swimming in a lake that had a lot of runoff of pesticides β their penises were small. He went at night, wrestled them into the boat, took them to his lab, measured their penises. They had fewer eggs too.
JR (reading Perplexity): "25% smaller penis sizes compared to males from a cleaner reference lake. Males had 70% lower testosterone levels. Abnormal sex hormone patterns, altered gonads, low hatching success, various birth defects β all consistent with exposure to endocrine disrupting contaminants."
SS: Lou Gillette went to Congress and he said, "Every man in this room is half the man his grandfather was."
[Shanna gives Joe a Million Marker test kit]
JR: It looks like you pee in that.
SS: That's right. My colleague Jenna and her team will analyze it for bisphenols, phthalates, and parabens. They're going to be adding pesticides soon. Then if you want to go to phase two, I have some things here that you could swap in your kitchen. If you wanted to, we could send you another kit and you could see if your levels changed.
JR: I would love to do that.
[Discussion of Zip Top silicone bags, Bee's Wrap, food-grade silicone products, sous vide safety, distilled water, chlorinated pools, and more]
SS: Anything that's fragranced has issues. You think you're doing good if you hang that little pine tree in your car β not good. Anything where women said that was fragranced, their body burden of phthalates was higher.
JR: Are there dyes for jeans and clothes that are not toxic?
SS: Yes, but this is not my area. I can give you a name if you want to get somebody on clothing.
SS: The FDA does drugs pretty well. But compared to chemicals in our daily products, they're fantastic β because the regulatory agencies are NOT doing the job. Here in Europe, it's much better. In Europe, if you're going to put a new chemical into commerce, it has to pass certain tests to be safe. Not here. The testing is on you and me and everyone listening.
SS: These plasticizers are made from fossil fuel byproducts. So the forces against eliminating them are not only the manufacturers of the plastic, but it's also the fossil fuel industry.
JR: I don't think you're going to get the government to act. This has to be done on an individual level β people aware and taking steps to protect themselves.
JR (reading Perplexity): "Chlorinated pool water does disturb normal skin flora temporarily, but in healthy people, the microbiome usually recovers within hours to a day or so after swimming. With frequent repeated swimming β daily or high volume training β the skin may be in a more chronically perturbed state."
Jamie: A saltwater pool is still technically a chlorine pool. It just makes the chlorine on-site instead of pouring it in. Pool is ordinary salt dissolved in the water, passes through an electrically charged salt cell which uses electrolysis to convert some of that salt into active chlorine.
SS: Sports uniforms, team uniforms β they have a coating on them. Airline personnel uniforms, firefighters β big exposure to PFAS. Anything that's waterproof, stain-proofed.
JR (reading): "The worst offenders are polyester fleece jackets, recycled polyester fast fashion, tight synthetic sportswear and underwear, cheap synthetic performance or wrinkle-free fashion. Lower concern choices: undyed or lightly dyed natural fibers like cotton, linen, wool, hemp, silk without stain-resistant finishes."
[They watch the trailer for "The Plastic Detox" on Netflix]
Trailer voice: "Fertility worldwide is going down and it is tightly linked to chemicals that are commonly used in plastic. These chemicals not only affect your fertility β they also have other health consequences. These chemicals can contribute to early heart attacks and stroke, autism, as well as obesity."
JR: For everybody, one more time: The Plastic Detox β that's the name of the documentary. It's available right now on Netflix. Go check it out and fix your life, kids.
JR: I'm really so happy that you're out there because if you weren't doing this very important work, I wouldn't know about it and I think a lot of other people wouldn't either. So thank you.
SS: So, pee in the cup.
JR: I will pee in the cup. I promise you.