Dr. Shanna Swan on Joe Rogan: Why phthalates gut sperm count

1. SPSpeaker0:02

   Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.

2. JRJoe Rogan0:04

   The Joe Rogan Experience.

3. SPSpeaker0:06

   Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night. All day. [upbeat rock music]

4. JRJoe Rogan0:12

   Great to see you again.

5. SSShanna H. Swan0:13

   Great to see you, Joe.

6. JRJoe Rogan0:15

   Uh-

7. SSShanna H. Swan0:15

   Happy to be here.

8. JRJoe Rogan0:16

   Happy to have you here. So you've got a documentary about the, uh, uh, essentially about 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.

9. SSShanna H. Swan0:32

   Right.

10. JRJoe Rogan0:32

    Right?

11. SSShanna H. Swan0:33

    Right.

12. JRJoe Rogan0:34

    So tell me about it.

13. SSShanna H. Swan0:35

    [sighs] Well, it started as a movie on plastic, and when I met Louis, and he filmed me in New York about five years ago also, um, it wasn't the small study that we have today. Um [clears throat] but let me backtrack, 'cause I wanna tell you something-

14. JRJoe Rogan1:00

    Okay

15. SSShanna H. Swan1:01

    ... that I never told you but-

16. JRJoe Rogan1:03

    Okay

17. SSShanna H. Swan1:03

    ... 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?"

18. JRJoe Rogan1:14

    Right.

19. SSShanna H. Swan1:15

    And I said, "That's my story, and I'm sticking to it."

20. JRJoe Rogan1:19

    Yes.

21. SSShanna H. Swan1:20

    Yes? And then you said something which changed my life. You said, "Why don't people know about this?" Remember that?

22. JRJoe Rogan1:31

    Yes.

23. SSShanna H. Swan1:34

    I went home, and I thought a lot about that question, and that was what led me to s- create the program that I have now, Action Science Initiative, 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, where I was speaking before.

24. JRJoe Rogan2:06

    Mm.

25. SSShanna H. Swan2:06

    Because before I talked to you, I talked to my peers in, you know, academia and, and the ivory tower, you know, at the meetings where they all went, at the... They read the papers that we all read. But the general public didn't get this. So you really were... I-I have to tell you thank you, and you were actually very influential in my life.

26. JRJoe Rogan2:28

    Well, I'm, I'm very happy to help. When I first heard about your book, and I started going over the, the details of it and the subject matter, I was shocked. I, I, I, I couldn't imagine that something like this could not just have happened, but there's no large-scale effort to reverse course or to change course or to do something about it, or at least to make people aware of the impact that plastics are having on us. Let me tell you a story about a friend of mine. [swallows] Um, there's a, a guy named Philip Franklin Lee, who is a, uh, Michelin star chef that, uh, lives in Austin, and, um, he has, uh, this, uh, amazing sushi restaurant, Sushi by Scratch, and great chef. Anyway, um, he was, uh, experiencing fatigue, like always tired. Got his hormones tested, extremely low testosterone.

27. SSShanna H. Swan3:20

    Mm.

28. JRJoe Rogan3:20

    But then got his microplastics tested, and they were off the charts. Um, did a series of interventions to try to clean his body out from that. Um, s- stopped drinking anything out of plastic, stopped using plastic. Just by whatever he did, I'm not sure if he did the plasmapheresis thing that I just did recently.

29. SSShanna H. Swan3:44

    Yeah.

30. JRJoe Rogan3:44

    Um, his testosterone went up to 1,200 with no testosterone replacement, no nothing. Just eliminating microplastics from his life over a period of time raised his testosterone.

Episode duration: 1:50:34