In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, we talk to environmental chemist and author, Dr. Michael Brown, about his new book, Countdown: The Threat to our Human Future. Dr. Brown talks about the dangers of plastics and other chemicals in the modern world, and how they can affect our reproductive health. We also talk about phthalates and their impact on male and female reproductive health, and the impact they could have on the future of the human race. Joe also talks about how food could be contaminated with them, and what we can do about it, and why we should all be worried about it. If you like the show and want to check it out, check out the show by day, and Joe's podcast by night, all day. Check it out! The Joe Rogans Experience is a podcast by day and The J.R. Rogan Podcast by night. All day long. It's a show about what's going on in the world and how it affects us and how we should be worried. I'm very concerned with what's happening around us, and I'm here to talk about it! I hope you do too! Thank you so much for listening, and if you like it, please share it on your social media and tell a friend about it and tell me what you think about it :) I'll be looking out for you in the comments section below! Cheers, Cheers. Cheers! Cheers - Joe and Rory! - Caitie! Caitie Sarah - Sarah - Jon -- Tim Emily - Sarah John . Evan , Amy Mike Rachel Michael Joe Ben Brian Matt ( ) Adam Andrew David Jack Chris Matthew Jake Caitlyn James Julian Paul Sam Kevin Justin Jordan Will Daniel Dan Brad Cheep Can I have a coffee Is it all about it? Thanks for listening to this episode? Can you help me help you out with your thoughts on this podcast? , and I'll tell you more about it & your thoughts about it?? can I help you?
00:00:19.000I'm very concerned with what you're saying.
00:00:21.000Your book, Countdown, says that the modern world is threatening sperm counts, altering male and female reproductive development, and imperiling the future of the human race.
00:00:34.000That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
00:00:49.000But what I write about in this book is the problem with the decline of our reproductive health and the chemicals in the environment that we're surrounded with every day, all the time, that are playing a big part in it.
00:01:05.000Not the only part, but a big part in it.
00:01:07.000And so they're playing a part in affecting our hormonal production?
00:01:14.000Yes, that's actually a good part of what they do.
00:01:19.000They interfere with our hormonal systems in various ways.
00:01:23.000So they could increase production of a hormone, like a pro-estrogen.
00:01:29.000They could decrease, say, an antiandrogen, decrease testosterone.
00:01:33.000They could mess with our thyroid hormone, and so on and so forth.
00:01:36.000So, they change levels, but they also change how they're transported and they interfere with making them available to other parts of the body, basically.
00:01:49.000I mean, that doesn't sound so scary to people, but the consequences sound really scary, which is that we're, you know, by every measure, our sperm count, Our miscarriage rates, our fertility rates, our testosterone levels,
00:02:05.000they're all going south, if you will, at the rate of about 1% per year.
00:02:11.000And specifically, which chemicals are responsible for this alteration?
00:02:58.000And they sound weird, but they're very, very common.
00:03:01.000And if you gave a urine sample today, And send it off to the Centers for Disease Control, you would see that you have, you know, not only phthalates, but other chemicals and plastics and other chemicals in your body right now.
00:04:06.000And the tubes are soft, squishy plastic.
00:04:13.000Okay, so as the food nutrients comes through the tubes, goes into the baby, the baby metabolizes them, goes into the urine because they're water-soluble, and then we get the urine, we measure, and we can see what's in it.
00:04:28.000And the amount of phthalate that's in that urine is exactly proportional to the number of lines coming into the baby.
00:04:37.000So if you understand that, you understand how food could be contaminated with phthalates, because milking machines have this, and all kinds of processing machines have this soft plastic.
00:04:49.000So this stuff is coming into the food somewhere between the time it's picked.
00:04:56.000And by the way, phthalates could be in pesticides as well.
00:05:22.000Hops into the food, gets into us, gets into a pregnant woman's womb, affects the offspring.
00:05:29.000And I hope to be able to tell you how it does that.
00:05:32.000But that's what I've been studying for about 20 years.
00:05:36.000So these plastic covers, like if you buy food and it's wrapped, like if you buy peppers or something like that, and they're wrapped in plastic, that plastic is leaching onto your food, a certain amount of these phthalates,
00:05:53.000Different plastics are different, and I can't speak to all plastics, and some people take a lot of care to wrap their food in safe plastics.
00:06:02.000Yeah, so it's a changing landscape as new things are introduced, but there's an old saying, which I think is pretty much still true, which is four, five, one, and two, all the rest are bad for you.
00:08:44.000And then at a certain time, and in mice and rats it's 15 to 18 days of gestation, the testicles start making testosterone.
00:08:55.000And then that gives the signal to produce the male typical genitals.
00:09:03.000So If they don't have the testosterone, there will be ovaries and if there is testosterone, there'll be testicles and so on and so forth, right?
00:09:13.000And that migration requires testosterone at exactly the right time and the right amount.
00:09:20.000It's very delicately programmed, okay?
00:09:24.000If that happens, if everything goes well, then the penis will develop, it'll have a certain size, and then there's something which is very key to my research, which is something you might know by the name of the taint.
00:09:38.000That taint, or we call it anagenital distance...
00:09:42.000Yeah, it's not a real, it's not really a technical term, is it?
00:11:34.000So, you know, the females are masculinized, so they have a longer AGD, right?
00:11:40.000But for most mammals, it's this way, okay, including humans.
00:11:46.000So here's this Little pup that's born and if he's unexposed, he'll have a good, you know, standard penal size and AGD and he won't have any malformations of his penis and so on.
00:12:23.000So we say that that pup is incompletely masculinized.
00:12:28.000Now, the amount of phthalates that get into the pup system in utero, is that possible to achieve those levels in the modern world with human beings?
00:14:03.000Are you measuring the blood of the people that are having children that have issues with development issues in the way the children look when they're born?
00:14:47.000Then, rather than looking at kids with problems, what I did was I just took a whole population of pregnant women and I got their urine, measured their phthalates, got their kids, measured their kids.
00:15:03.000So then I had the problem of what to measure in the kids because nobody had made this translation from an animal genital developmental system to a human.
00:15:17.000And so that was kind of a challenge, you know, figuring out how to do that.
00:16:24.000So now there's no question, I don't think anyone questions, that at least this class of chemicals, which we know lower testosterone, alter the development of these boys.
00:16:39.000And then I asked, well, what does that have to do with sperm count?
00:16:44.000Because actually for a long time, we haven't talked yet about sperm count, but I've been studying, tracing, you know, what's happening with sperm count I'll tell you the history of that in a minute.
00:16:54.000So then I thought, well, is this related to sperm count?
00:17:00.000But in rats, it looked like the AGD was permanent.
00:17:05.000So if you had a short, just like if you have a small hand, you know, your stature is set at birth, right?
00:17:12.000So the AGD, if you're born small, and my friend Earl Gray, who was a toxicologist, said AGD is forever.
00:17:20.000We don't know that for sure about humans, by the way, because we haven't had the 20 years yet.
00:17:25.000But if you believe that, then a sensible thing to do was to take a group of adult men who could give you a sperm count and measure their AGD, right?
00:17:37.000And then you could see whether those with a shorter AGD Had a lower sperm count.
00:17:43.000And then you would have one pretty solid piece of evidence that chemicals in the environment lower sperm count.
00:20:07.000If it was less than two, men who had less than two inches were seven times more likely to have a sperm count in the subfertile range, I can tell you what that is, as men who had an AGD longer than two inches.
00:20:28.000It certainly is related to sperm count.
00:20:31.000And then another study in California showed that infertile men in an infertility clinic versus men who had born a child had smaller taint length.
00:20:43.000When did this stuff start getting into our food supply?
00:20:52.000So the growth of these chemicals tracks with the growth of the petrochemical industry because they're made from petrochemical byproducts.
00:21:07.000So if you look at a curve, it starts around 1950. So back in 1950 you have people loving science, jumping on the science bandwagon, There's this better living through chemistry that everyone's talking about.
00:21:24.000And everybody is just wanting everything made of plastic.
00:21:44.000We're not sure, but I did look at the decline in sperm count over time, so we could look at that as an indication that This is not the only thing that's affecting sperm count, by the way, these phthalates.
00:21:57.000But that's one where I feel I can say this with confidence because I measured those babies and I did it.
00:23:21.000The first study was 2005. That was the first one.
00:23:26.000The animal studies were earlier, but that was the first human one, and they've been going on ever since.
00:23:32.000The problem is that we don't talk about the consequences of this.
00:23:39.000We as a society, we don't talk about sperm counts are going down, testosterone is going down, you know, we're having more and more children by assisted reproduction.
00:23:51.000I don't know about you, but do you know anybody who's had trouble having a child?
00:23:58.000It's quite a few people, but in general, I notice it's usually older people that have had a career, and then when they get into their late 30s or their 40s, then they decide to have children.
00:24:51.000Yeah, I was reading something about lowered testosterone counts and that lowered sperm counts is happening with people and they were trying to figure out why, but they had not made the connection to your work.
00:25:02.000It was just an article about trying to recognize what's causing this trend.
00:25:12.000That's terrifying because I'm thinking about how many people this affects and how many people consume things that are either wrapped in plastic or they microwave things in plastic or they drink bottled water.
00:25:26.000We stopped drinking bottled water here a while back just because it was wasteful.
00:25:30.000And I'd heard about plastic leaching into waters and how it could do something, add estrogen to your body or something like that.
00:25:38.000I'm like, well, it just seems like a bad idea to just...
00:26:54.000However, if the man smokes himself, his parents didn't, he did, He might have a 20% reduction and then he goes off and then he's good to go.
00:27:06.000So it's very different if the exposure occurs In utero or postnatally or in childhood or in adulthood.
00:27:15.000So it's the unborn child that we really need to protect the most.
00:27:24.000This is really scary information and I'm wondering why this is not more popular.
00:27:31.000Why is this not on the news first story?
00:27:36.000This is affecting the development cycle of how many children?
00:28:56.000It is a significant issue and hopefully more people are recognizing.
00:29:00.000But look, people don't, if you have a problem with your cholesterol, I'm sure you don't, but suppose you had your cholesterol checked, you go to a cocktail party, you say, I went to the doctor, I had a high cholesterol, I'm going to not eat this and this.
00:29:14.000You wouldn't say, I went to my doctor and have a low sperm count.
00:29:56.000And longevity, vitality, just everything has to suffer.
00:30:00.000I mean, have you made a connection with this and depression or with anxiety or any other things that are affecting people to disproportionate amount?
00:30:11.000I haven't looked at that but I can tell you it affects libido.
00:30:16.000But that is why I asked because there's a gentleman that's a friend of mine named Dr. Mark Gordon and he's worked with a lot of people with traumatic brain injuries and one of the things that happens with damage to the pituitary gland is a decrease in the amount of testosterone that's produced by the brain.
00:30:31.000And the testes and then what happens after that is severe depression and this connection between severe depression and lower testosterone is pretty significant.
00:30:40.000He's done a lot of work with this group called the Warrior Angel Foundation with another friend of mine Andrew Marr and they have worked with these soldiers and now he's also done some work with football players and fighters and a lot of other people with head injuries and he's shown this direct correlation between severe depression and lower testosterone.
00:31:01.000Anxiety, a lot of mental health issues.
00:31:04.000I would imagine that these kids that are born with this disruption in their developmental cycle and they have lowered sperm count, I bet everything is decreased.
00:32:26.000Have they measured this in different countries, like countries in the developmental world and the countries where they use less plastic versus countries where they use more plastics?
00:32:37.000No, I don't know of a study like ours in a developing country, but we have studies in other countries for sure in Europe.
00:32:48.000But one measure of where it's a problem, I would say, is where is sperm count declining?
00:32:58.000I mean, the kickoff for this book, Countdown, was a paper that we wrote in 2017 in which we showed that sperm count in Western countries had declined kind of catastrophically.
00:36:15.000But if this is real, the children that are being born today, if they have this issue, and then we're looking at them 20 years from now, the reproductive cycle starts kicking in in terms of them having babies and raising families,
00:36:40.000And here, another thing to think about, So a mother is exposed to some phthalates, other chemicals, the phenols, the line tin cans, and the flame retardants, and the pesticides.
00:39:36.000In Europe, they're many steps ahead of us because they have instituted something called reach.
00:39:44.000Now, under reach, if a guy manufacturer wants to put a chemical into commerce, into a plastic bottle, into a Personal care product, where they are also, by the way.
00:39:57.000He has to show that it's not harmful before he does that.
00:40:41.000So, you know, what we have to think about is how do we get angry enough and concerned enough to change the regulations so that we're protected?
00:41:09.000So this delicate testosterone balance that I talked about can go the other way for females, but that's not through something like phthalates.
00:41:18.000It's through other chemicals possibly.
00:41:22.000We just published a paper that, and this is early, I'm not going to, you know, this is not the same weight of evidence at all as I have for the phthalates, but we just published two papers in which we showed that when Mothers were exposed to higher levels of a certain pesticide,
00:41:39.000which is in Roundup, which is—have you heard of Roundup?
00:43:51.000So there are, you know, there's the chemicals that are in coatings, just to say, you know, coatings of teflon frying pans, coatings of your jacket that you wear in the rain,
00:44:45.000Anything that puts a barrier, any barrier, a chemical barrier, they're called the PFOS. Sometimes they're called PFOS and PFOA. They're different classes of chemicals, but perfluorinated compounds.
00:44:58.000Then there are the phenols, the bisphenols.
00:45:02.000Which, by the way, you probably, did you ever try to buy a BPA-free bottle?
00:45:24.000But what happened was, and this happens over and over and over again in chemical cycles, they put something else in.
00:45:31.000They put in BPF like Frank and S like Sam.
00:45:36.000And BPF and BPS are, particularly BPF is equally if not more risky than BPA. And the bottle says BPA-free, that's true, but it doesn't say bisphenol-free,
00:46:28.000Think about walking through your kitchen and looking for plastics and trying to swap out ceramic and glass or metal, not for the microwave, of course, and in your bathroom to look at your personal care products.
00:46:47.000They won't say phthalates, by and large.
00:47:43.000Maybe this cow is on a wonderful farm with You know, the picture of the farmer and the grass and it's an organic farm and everybody's happy.
00:47:52.000And then he milks the cow or she milks the cow through a milking machine that has tubes.
00:48:04.000So I actually am hoping to do a systematic study, which I'm calling Farm to Fork, where we take a bunch of products See what's in them at the farm.
00:48:29.000And that would be if you're trying to eat organic.
00:48:33.000Even in that sense, if you're having milk and it's coming through tubes, if you're having anything that's wrapped in plastic, even if it's grass-fed, organic, you're wrapping it in a plastic.
00:49:28.000I don't think most people have any idea that this is that big of an issue.
00:49:31.000And when you're saying all this stuff, and I'm terrified of this because I feel like, and I'm glad you wrote this book, and I'm glad you did these studies, but I feel like this has caught people completely off guard.
00:49:44.000And then I'm picturing a supermarket and just going down the road looking at, like, packages of lettuce and things wrapped in plastic and meat wrapped in plastic and chicken and, like, wow.
00:50:29.000That will definitely not introduce anything into the product.
00:50:34.000What happens to fully developed people that encounter phthalates if they encounter them in large doses?
00:50:40.000Like someone like yourself, if you started eating microwaved food and you've got a large dose of phthalates in your diet, what would happen?
00:50:50.000We haven't studied the effect of adult exposures of somebody my age, but if it's a couple who's grown up but wants to go to, say, assisted reproduction, a beautiful series of studies at Harvard showed that the amount of chemicals in their urine and blood when they come in for their assisted reproductive procedure influences how that procedure comes out.
00:51:16.000So how many eggs can be retrieved, How many are implanted?
00:51:20.000How many actually progress to a live birth?
00:51:23.000Is related to the chemicals in their body at the time they start the procedure.
00:51:28.000So that's an effect of an adult, to an adult, of an adult exposure, you know, that I know of for sure.
00:51:36.000I don't It's very possible that these are related to aging and diseases of aging.
00:52:03.000And you also have a lot of companies that have a vested interest in continuing business as usual and they want to deny as much responsibility for having these chemicals in our bodies as they can.
00:52:17.000Yes, and not to swap out ones we put the finger on with other ones that we haven't tested yet.
00:52:23.000And what you're talking about too is that to turn this around, in general, you're talking about multiple generations in order to bring the developmental cycle back to normal.
00:53:02.000In general, what has the response been when people find out about this and when people read the data and see your book and read the information in it?
00:53:14.000Many people have a reaction like yours.
00:54:00.000I mean, but really that has been the response that some people have, that this is probably...
00:54:05.000Maybe they look at it in terms of, like, nature has a way of working itself out, whether or not it's voluntary or whether or not it's just an incidental part of the system.
00:54:34.000Do you know that many, many species on the planet have the same problem?
00:54:39.000And we can cause these problems in animals with these chemicals in the laboratory.
00:54:44.000So when you say it's nature's way of working things out, well, is that working its way out for the species that are becoming in danger?
00:54:53.000Well, I think they're just a side effect of nature working its things out with us.
00:54:58.000You know, if our production of food and packaging of food somehow or another gets to these other animals, that's just an accidental accident.
00:55:13.000But it's really the responsibility of the people that are packaging food.
00:55:16.000It's really the responsibility of the people that are involved in getting the stuff to us and how are they getting it to us and how are the phthalates getting to us.
00:55:24.000If there was any other thing that someone was doing that turned out was affecting the entire human race because of their business, just fill in the blank, like if we found out that, you know, whatever it is, cell phone use or driving a car, looking at your dashboard was somehow or another affecting the reproductive cycle of the human race,
00:57:00.000But, you know, you can find a female cause about a third of the time, a male cause about a third of the time, and a third of the time, it could be both, or you don't know.
00:57:39.000I studied chemicals in water at one point.
00:57:41.000I studied solvents in water and showed they were related to miscarriages.
00:57:47.000Man-made chemicals are not great for our reproductive health.
00:57:52.000What chemicals are associated with miscarriages?
00:57:57.000Well, I can't say that off the top of my head, all of them, but the ones that I've studied, when I studied that, those were the chlorination byproducts.
00:58:06.000So when you chlorinate water, the high levels of certain chlorination byproducts, and also solvents that are used to clean chips and other, you know, certain high...
00:58:14.000So chlorination meaning tap water or also meaning swimming in pools that are chlorinated and getting it through your skin?
00:58:23.000My study was on homes, tap water in homes.
00:58:27.000But probably there's some risk from pool.
00:58:31.000Has anybody studied the miscarriage rate of active swimmers?
00:58:40.000It seems like that would be a big one, right?
00:58:42.000Because you're most certainly, if you're training in a swimming pool or swimming on a daily basis, you're getting dosed with chlorine every day.
00:58:54.000So here, the big picture is that we have these thousands of chemicals that we can't get a handle on.
00:59:04.000There was a law, it was called the Toxic Substances Control Act, and it was published in 76. And at that point, when they put that in, they said, okay, here are thousands of chemicals that have been out there for a long time.
00:59:25.000We have that legacy on top of the lack of testing of new chemicals.
00:59:30.000So there's very little regulation of all of these chemicals that are circling in our environment and entering our bodies.
00:59:38.000And I and my colleagues, you know, are few compared to the problem and we need more resources and we need more people worrying about this.
00:59:48.000And I think the first step is to just have people like you and your listeners and people I talk to on all these shows I've gone on, you know, recognizing, thinking about it, just thinking about it, you know.
01:00:15.000There's a decrease in lifespan that's associated with large population centers, whether it's Los Angeles or New York, but living in urban areas, there's a decrease in lifespan.
01:00:27.000They think it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 years.
01:00:30.000And they don't know if it's because of breakdust or pollutants or particulates in the atmosphere.
01:00:36.000But has there been a study on, well, I'm sure there probably hasn't, on sperm counts in rural areas as opposed to sperm counts in high population areas?
01:02:06.000Is it like we're talking about enormous cornfields and glyphosate and all these other different chemicals, or they work their way into the air itself because they spray?
01:04:00.000But I don't know, when you talk about monocrop agriculture on large scale, like these enormous cornfields, I don't know how they do that without pesticides.
01:04:12.000Yeah, I honestly don't know, but I hope there's a way.
01:04:17.000And I think there are people that are working on that, you know, regenerative farming and so on.
01:04:52.000When you see the amount of manipulation that's required to grow a thousand acres of corn or whatever in one spot, you don't see that anywhere in nature.
01:05:27.000So in 200 years, we've completely ruined the ground.
01:05:31.000We've completely changed the way we cultivate food.
01:05:36.000We've added all these chemicals to our environment, to our water, to our air, changed sperm counts, changed reproductive cycles and reproductive quantity.
01:07:48.000What's your fertility IQ? Many men and women feel fairly confident about their fertility intel, but research shows a surprisingly high percentage of people don't know as much as they think they do.
01:08:43.000Answer D. Aside from a total absence of sperm, total bummer we know, no single sperm parameter can predict that a man will be completely infertile.
01:08:52.000Turns out When the sperm concentration, motility, the sperm's movement or swimming ability, and morphology, the size and shape of the sperm, are measured, each one matters in identifying infertile men, but there is an additive effect.
01:09:07.000When one of these measures is in the infertile range, a man is two times more likely to be infertile as a man with none of these measures in the infertile range.
01:09:17.000When two measures are in the infertile range, a man is five to seven times more likely to be infertile.
01:09:24.000And when all three fall are subpar, his odds of being infertile are 16 times higher.
01:10:51.000In recent decades, it has become increasingly recognized that male reproductive issues can cause approximately one-half to one-third of infertility cases.
01:12:34.000This means that if a man cleans up his lifestyle, gives up cigarettes, heavy alcohol use, sugar-sweetened drinks, and couch potato habits and takes steps, literally, to slim down and be physically active, his sperm count and his sperm integrity may increase significantly.
01:13:00.000Research suggests that for men ages 40 and older, their female partners have a 60% increased risk of miscarriage compared to the aspiring dads under 30. This may be largely because with advancing age, there is an increase in the presence of abnormal genetic material Within the sperm at any age,
01:13:18.000a pregnant woman is more likely to miscarry when sperm is faulty, but neither partner may realize this.
01:13:24.000That's a miscarriage of reproductive justice.
01:13:26.000That's a big thing with men who drink heavily, correct?
01:17:14.000That actually there are physiologically the way the woman is shaped and her vagina is shaped and is to make it easier for the earlier sperm to kill off the later ones that are coming in after them.
01:17:29.000So I think there is something to that.
01:18:03.000Male masturbation is said to discard old dying sperm so that ejaculate contains younger sperm so that it will stay active inside the cervix longer with more of a chance of being present during the window of ovulation.
01:18:21.000And certainly the ones that are ejaculated are going to be the ones that are already ready and get rid of those and make room for the new ones.
01:18:58.000Yeah, I don't know that I've heard there's been a different kind, but I've heard that maybe the timing of the sperm and, you know, the place in the, you know...
01:19:09.000In the race, so to speak, might affect the survival of the later ones.
01:21:01.000Something I read recently about the immune system and muscle quality, like the amount of muscle mass a man carries on his body is a direct correlation to the health of his immune system.
01:22:07.000And you know what it means is that what people think of as, you know, that you have to get it all in one day is not correct.
01:22:14.000That also makes sense that if a woman is not ovulating, but a man has sex with her before she's ovulating, and then all of a sudden she gets pregnant, that's what it is.
01:25:30.000The government is subsidizing them having children, paying them to have children, building apartments for them to go into if they have children.
01:29:10.000That's right, to this place, in case it came up.
01:29:14.000So, some scientists suggest that it's hard to fathom, but an argument could be made that Homo sapiens already fit the standard for an endangered species based on U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's requirements,
01:31:15.000And last but not least, declines in sperm count and testosterone levels and increases in testicular cancer and miscarriage rates are all occurring at the same rate, 1% per year.
01:33:52.000I have a lot of faith that technologies that I haven't thought of You know, chemicals that haven't been designed yet will come in and take the place of these chemicals.
01:34:04.000Well, I hope so too, but it's not like BPFs.
01:34:12.000I'm just skeptical because I think so many industries would have to make a big change and it would cost them so much money that they're going to deny this as long as they can.
01:35:06.000I didn't know that it was as bad as it is.
01:35:10.000Well, I'm actually glad you're disturbed because you have a lot of followers and maybe they will listen to this and think about this and, you know, help to turn this around.
01:35:23.000By the way, I ask people to use the hashtag count me in.
01:35:57.000I think we covered pretty much everything.
01:36:00.000I think it's the next problem, you know, I just say in closing that we had Denial of climate change, and then some recognition of climate change,
01:36:16.000and then finally people saying there's things we can do about it.
01:36:19.000And I see the same pattern happening here.
01:36:22.000Initially there was a study saying sperm count had declined in 1992, which was dismissed.
01:36:30.000I was actually skeptical of it myself at first.
01:36:35.000And then when my paper came out in 2017, it went viral.
01:36:39.000It was the 27th most cited paper in the world that year.
01:36:44.000It was on the cover of Time and you name it.
01:36:48.000And then people didn't say, sperm count has not declined.