So if the pill might not be the right choice for you, what do you say is the right choice,
right? I mean this is this is a really tricky issue. But I mean it's getting out what you're saying. I mean it's like when you have hormonal contraception right when he had the birth control pill you're rewriting women, right? You're just rewriting for they are in the service of making this one small change which is you know, suppressing ovulation and so is that the best way to do it?
is the best way to prevent pregnancy to totally rewrite everything, you know that sort of creates the experience of being home woman is
Bulletproof radio state of high performance you're listening to bulletproof radio with Dave asprey.
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Today's cool fact of the day is that hormonal contraceptives can affect a woman's anxiety psychologists in Germany at the University was named. I'm not even going to try to pronounce but it probably rhymes with bottom have studied in what way hormonal contraceptives affect anxiety therapy and they found in a pretty good study that women who were on the pill benefited less from exposure therapy than women who didn't use oral contraceptives. They looked at 20
eight women who had contraceptives least though hormone contraceptives and 26 who didn't use any oral contraceptives. All of them have the same kind of anxiety and took part in the same treatments and the hypothesis from the study. They're saying these results might be caused by the fact that oral contraceptives affect Central learning and memory processes in exposure therapy and exposure therapy. If you don't know about that is called Extinction learning where previously learned associations between stimuli and your phobias are
Unlearned so you expose yourself in small amounts to something that scares you until you learn not to be scared. But if you're on the pill, apparently you stay scared that's not a good sign and there are other studies on animals and humans that show Extinction learning itself is impaired by Oral contraceptives. They think it might be because of the reduced estradiol level from the contraceptives themselves. And if you read my very very very first book from 2011 the better baby book,
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Today's guest is Sarah a hill a PhD and a leading researcher in the field of evolutionary psychology and she wrote a book that made me actually do a little dance. Trust me. You don't want to see that and her book is called. This is your brain on birth control the surprising science of women hormones and the law of unintended consequences and Sarah's a quote real scientists because she has 50 scientific Publications in some of them in multiple prestigious research.
Pause and multiple grants to regret it. So she's really an authority on applying evolutionary thinking to human behavior and psychology. You'll see quote summer and I don't know Scientific American The Economist New York Times is little little magazines newspapers like that. So she's a big deal. So Sarah Hill big deal. Welcome to the show.
Hey, thanks for having me.
Now that was probably the most fun introduction I've had and at least a year, but I'm just I'm genuinely happy that you read about this because it's a it's a controversial topic. I mean birth control is a fundamental thing that allows women to have control their own biology. That's at the core of biohacking and here you are standing up there as a woman going. Maybe the way we're doing it isn't so good for us. Have you just taken a lot of flack for
this? You know, I was actually expecting to take a lot more flak than I've gotten so far, you know knock on wood.
I you know, whenever people raised questions about birth control for women. There's a reflex that happens. If you're a woman where you you sort of, you know, your first stands on end and you're ready to attack because you know, especially in this current political climate, there's a lot of people, you know, trying to attack women's ability to regulate their fertility and our ability to choose and all these things but this book is really
about giving us all the information that we need to be able to think about birth control and a in an informed way and in ways that women just haven't been told about until now, you know, most of the conversations that women have about the birth control pill over the last 60 years, since it came on the market have been about how it makes them feel psychologically and you know, like the experiences that they have in these sort of experiential things and their doctors aren't talking to them about that. And so this is really fun.
Like giving him women the information that they need to just really think about like is this the best way for me to be regulating my fertility and if it is, how do I sort of troubleshoot? And yeah, how do I pack my birth control prescription and if it's not then what else can I be doing?
My wife dr. Lana Carolyn's good trained physician, you know real MD and she does exclusively work with women who are trying to get pregnant now she does all over Skype and a lot of them have been on the pill. They're having a hard time when they go off the pill or a takes 6 months or a year to get things mostly normal before they can have kids and they didn't know what when they went on it when there are 16 or or 18 because they had
You know PCOS or endometriosis or they just decided it was the right time and so your idea of a law of unintended consequences. It's a real deal. What what are the big things that happen aside from your anxiety therapy might not work with a big things that happen in women's bodies. They might not know about from birth control pills.
I mean the thing is, you know, the first of all it's just this idea that you know, our sex hormones are part of the signaling architecture that our brain uses.
Like to create the experience of being the person that we are and so when we change women's sex hormones, which is what we do with the birth control pill. It's going to change all sorts of, you know, like activities in terms of psychological functioning. And so what the research shows is that when women are on the birth control pill, it does influence everything ranging from their ability to learn and remember things it influences potentially who they're attracted to who they choose is romantic partners.
and influences the nature of the stress response and influences their tendency toward things like anxiety and depression and it also influences a whole host of other, you know, bodily systems ranging from thyroid function to Auto, you know to the immune system and so like changing, you know, it's like when women go on the pill they always just think about what it's doing to their ovaries, but hormones just can't work that way because hormones go and they travel everywhere in the body that blood goes and
So when you take a hormone, it's going to influence every single cell in your body that has receptors for those hormones and for women, you know, because reproduction and pregnancy is something that requires almost all of women's bodily systems to have a workaround right because you can't work the same way if you're a circulatory system when you have to humans instead of one you can't work the same way when you're a digestive system. If you're like trying to feed two humans instead of one the immune system has to change.
What it's doing, I mean every single one of the body's systems has to change what it's doing in response to pregnancy and because of this almost all of the systems in women's bodies are sensitive to sex hormones. And so when you change that and you blunt the activities of woman's own naturally cycling sex hormones and replace it with this daily dose, you know of these relatively low levels of estrogen and then these relatively high levels of synthetic progesterone or progestin. It's going to have pervasive changes on the body.
See from top to bottom including the brain that's where like there's so many receptors for sex hormones in the brain. And so that was really what I was interested in is what is you know, what does it mean for women and the way that they think the way that they feel the way they experience the world to have this this change in sex hormones.
The very first book that really brought my attention to this came out. I think in 2001 it was by this Renegade researcher named TS Wiley and it was called Sex Lies and menopause and very well-researched. Lots of little links in the back of the book that said hey, there's a downside particularly cancer and heart disease and things like that from the birth control pill and since then based on a pretty good body of evidence. I've been telling the women that I
About okay. This is not how you prevent pregnancy in a way that serves you and you should get pregnant when you're ready to get pregnant and not before then and you know, you deserve and have a right to all the support necessary to do that. But if you could do without self harm that would be better for you and better for everyone but it's you know, the people who are my friends if their vendors and with us coming from but a lot of people when especially that
It came out this was you know, almost 20 years ago man. It was like it was super unpopular like an assault on your own fundamental freedoms, right?
How do you how do you
tell women? Okay, so if the pill might not be the right choice for you, what do you say is the right
choice, right? I mean this is this is a really tricky issue. But I mean, it's getting out what you're saying. I mean it's like when you have hormonal contraception right when he had the birth control pill you're rewriting women, right? You're just rewriting who they are.
Are in the service of making this one small change which is you know, suppressing ovulation. And so is that the best way to do it is the best way to prevent pregnancy to totally rewrite everything, you know, that sort of creates the experience of being who woman is and you know, I don't you know know right like that's a
really nice everything that makes a woman who she
is. Well it is I mean because when you when you understand the
Roll that hormones play in terms of influencing the activities of the brain and when we like remember the fact that we are biological creatures and that the experience of being the person that we are is the result of chemical and electrical signaling going on in our brain Chief among which is directed by our sex hormones. I mean, that's really what we're doing. We're rewriting women and so, you know hormonal contraception it may make sense at some points in your life, even you know,
All of this being is aside but are there other options? Yeah, there's other options and I think that in particular, you know, there is non hormonal iuds. So the non-hormonal intrauterine devices those are well tolerated by a lot of women and they're not tolerated well by everybody because those do cause a local inflammatory response and inflammation just like just like hormones it they influence with the brain does and so
or some women, even though you know, the non-hormonal IUD is supposed to you know not have any psychological side effects it can and it's because inflammation is known to influence anxiety levels influence depression influence, you know, sleeping patterns and other things and so even the copper IUD, which if women tolerate it well because some women don't really they're not very sensitive to changes in like small changes in inflammation other women are and for women, who are
It's not going to be a good choice. And then the question becomes are a you know, what what then and you know, there's a cycle tracking and you know, the fertility awareness method where women are able to keep track of where they are in terms of their their fertility across the cycle and then using barrier methods during times in the cycle when conception is possible or just using barrier methods all the time. I mean really
we were
we were indoctrinated at least when I was in Middle School and all like, you know, you can't rely on on fertility awareness and you know other other related methods, but the the science is very clear When a Woman's Health is reasonably. Okay, not even great and you have a relatively regular cycle, you know, and it's not that hard to learn the apps can be really helpful Jolene brightens been on and talked about her perspective and her book on second.
Sinking and things like that. What ends up happening is you know, and yeah, okay. I better not have sex and that's the five day window without a barrier method because well then there's a risk and you actually know and the rest of the time you can say with a hundred percent certain date. I'm not going to get pregnant here. And if you're just coming off the pill and your Cycles are regular you don't have a hundred percent certainty, but it it's one of the things about just taking responsibility for learning how your body feels and work.
And I can say this as a guy who doesn't have to deal with that but how you know being married to a woman who focuses on fertility is a doctor and knows when she's fertile and she'll tell me I'm fertile now and the the thing that most people don't talk about though is when a woman's fertile. What is she most likely to do?
Yeah, she wants that
stupid Evolution.
Yes stupid Evolution. It's like Evolution would have it. No other way like no other way. Yeah. So this is the time when women want to be having sex
I mean in fact, like that's that's usually how like I'm reminded of where I am in my cycle if I'm not looking directly on my phone. It's like if I'm like really wanting sex. I'm like, yeah. No, I'm guessing that. Oh, yeah, lo and behold. Look what look where I'm at right now.
And if you're if you're ovulating and you walk into a room full of guys what happens
right? They also want to have sex with a mean woman.
Yeah, their heads all turned. They don't know why their heads her and they don't know why you look so hot that day, but it's because you're ovulating and their body knows and your body knows.
Right. Exactly. And so yeah, it's the time when when sex is most likely to happen is the time when men are most likely to be attracted to women it like men prefer the smell of women when they're at high fertility. They prefer the appearance of them and they flirt with them or they get a big rise in testosterone just from interacting with ovulating women and they think that it's because of picking up on the scent related cues, and the thing that another thing that kind of sucks about the birth control pill is like
Because it's keeping estrogen really low because the moneymaker and all of this stuff in terms of women being really attractive and desirable in the way that they smell the way that they look to men and their own feelings of being sort of feeling sexy and alive and like they want to have sex all of those things are linked with estrogen. I mean those are like driven by estrogen and so when you take the birth control pill and you killed fertility and you kill estrogen and the the amount that you get
In the pill are so low. It's like you're never getting any of these benefits. And so what happens a lot of times with women when they're on the birth control pill is they kind of feel like, you know, blah blah blah version of themselves. They don't feel sexy and vibrant and they sort of lose touch with those sorts of, you know parts of who they are and what I've heard from a lot of women coming off the pill and I had this I had this experience myself is that once I transitioned off of
I just felt like whoa, like hello like I forgot about this like I forgot that I was a sexual creature and I forgot that I really liked noticing men. And I forgot that I like to have sex and I like to think about it. And because I wasn't doing any of that when I was on the pill and I mean I was having sex but I wasn't like thinking about it. It was like something I was doing like, you know going to the grocery store or like like, you know check
Mark have sex check mark empty the dishwasher. It wasn't something that was like a part of who I was was like, you know, being feminine and being you know female and then once I went off of it, I was able to experience all of that again, and it really it really can make your life feel kind of flat and and it kind of kills your vibrancy to go so long without it without without you.
Pick up fertility
John Gray at the author of the Mars Venus series and a dear friend. It's been on the show a couple times and he talks a lot about how what really raises testosterone in men is actually doing things for women during certain parts of the cycle like so right I would argue that there's other unintended consequences even beyond what is in your book and this is your brain on birth control. It's that when
women suppress those Cycles men who respond very handily to those Cycles. We will also change and response to that,
right? Yeah. No for sure. And I mean there is research showing just even men smelling the scent of women and they took armpit swabs, but they also took vaginal swabs of these women and men they love the smell of women when they're at high fertility. They just like the way they smell all over
Place and it increases their testosterone all over the place. And so imagine if you're partnered with a woman who's not having these sort of estrogen surges and you're not getting the benefit of having this partner that just smells and tastes and just seemed so delicious and yummy to you that can't be good for the relationship and it can't be good for ya how men feel about their partners and and the degree to which men are motivated to please their partners. And so I mean, I think that
the the sort of ricocheting effects of the birth control pill, you know on you know, what women's Brains are doing and what the rest of their body is doing and then their relationships with their partners and then you know, just the World At Large is something that we we've just begun to scratch the surface and to looking at
I have an unsubstantiated theory that I am betting will be substantiated.
I love it. Let's hear it.
Let's have look at mitochondrial biology and systems biology in a pretty heavy.
Vote from the perspective of a computer hacker have a see a concentration in one of my degrees is and form of artificial intelligence. So I think like like that and I looked at where you find mitochondria in the human body in our brain neurons 15,000 mitochondria in your heart neurons 15,000 mitochondria. That's about as big as it gets except a few cells in the ovaries have a hundred thousand mitochondria. Wow, and the role of meadow. Kandra.
It is not the power plants are the cells. That's one of the roles. They actually make hormones their resume their receptive of and responsive to hormones. But what they're doing is they're sensing the environment around you and then doing what they think as individual little tiny processing nodes. There's a quadrillion of them that drive a lot of your behaviors including that I must have sex now Behavior, but I think that what they're doing is they're sensing the environment around you and saying you know what this is the right egg for you right now to have
The most optimal chance of surviving because some mechanism we don't know decides which egg gets dropped. I think it's maybe Andhra because that's what they do and that's why there's so many of them there. Otherwise, why would Mother Nature put so many of those expensive little power plants right by the
ovaries? Right? Right. Does that make sense? Yeah, okay, if that's true
and may or may not be we don't know then if you take the pill and it changes
The way you respond to the environment around you and it messes up that system. It's going to mess up the way people smell and we know there are studies like that women think they're mate is smells sexy and then they go off the pill like oh my God, he's stinks. I can't have sex with them. How big of a deal is that?
Right? No, that's a big deal. I mean, this is a really big deal. I mean, these are women's lives right? I mean, these are women's Life Choices that they're making and the idea that that were, you know sort of
Setting up this situation where we can have women making major decisions about their lives, whether it's like who their partner is or the degree to which they want to be investing in their work versus life at times. When a lot of them are on the birth control pill like and then what happens to women and how they feel about their choices after they stopped taking it and the same thing with yeah. I mean, it's like the same thing with the rest of the body. I mean, who knows what's going on?
With with fertility, you know, you were talking about the fact that your wife like interacts with women who are having challenges with fertility after being on the birth control pill for so long and there isn't currently there's not, you know, a lot of research that suggests that being on the pill does anything to harm fertility, but I keep hearing this reported but you know such frequency that I think that we probably just don't really know what the full picture is.
Anyway,
yeah now in your book you say straight up pill taking women exhibit and unwavering preference for the types of relatively less masculine faces invoices preferred by naturally cycling women. Yes. So remember I said earlier about how guys respond to women Daniel Amen a dear friend has been on the show several times the change Your Brain Change Your Life a big deal in Psychiatry. He just interviewed me.
This morning about my new book and he said Dave. Do you have any thoughts about why teenage males and young males are having an epidemic of low testosterone. I've never seen anything like it in my career. And do you think it's possible that guys are like, oh, wow the women around me aren't you know aren't right doing what they normally do hormonal e I'm going to tweak my own testosterone production in order to do that because guys were pretty much slaves to women like
biologically, absolutely, you know,
That's fascinating know. I think that I think that that absolutely could be the case and that just really that just made the little hairs on my neck stand on end because I think that that is that could be absolutely spot-on me. One of the things that I talk about in the book is even like because that's just an I mean that's obviously an unconscious, you know, sort of biological shift that's going on with men where obviously, you know, there's no like conscious level awareness that's going on in terms of
Of men's, you know sort of thinking and calculating, you know, gosh there doesn't seem to be any estrogen in the air and therefore I'm going to down regulate my testosterone production. So vegan right now the yeah, exactly exactly. That'll do the trick. It always does the trick. Yeah, but even like at the at the sort of larger like conscious level like one of the things I talk about in the book is, you know, another epidemic that we currently have in and you've probably seen the effects of this firsthand. Is that like, dude
Are just like not doing a lot like, you know, I mean like in terms of like in my college classrooms. It's like overwhelmingly female the females are graduating at higher rates, you know, there's like more female valedictorians now females are entering Fields like medicine and and law and all these other areas like these in getting these Advanced degrees and not only are women doing better, but men are doing worse. So men are applying to post graduate programs at the rate that they used to they're not going.
In a managerial positions at the rate that they used to and I you know, I've always sort of thought that impart there's a motivational shift that's also going on because you know when it could be in part because like men are like actually like they're not sensing that there's any estrogen in the air. Yeah, right. And so they're just like not motivated to really do anything. But also even the the behavioral changes that go on with the pill with women sort of being more willing to have sex with men.
Achieved less I think also yeah. Well, I think that it was because you know, we don't have to worry about getting pregnant anymore. And so women now we'll have sex with men that like, our great-grandmother's wouldn't have dreamed of having sex with because you know, he lives in his mom's basement and plays video games all day. But like if he's cute, you know now like women because we can feel all but completely certain that we're not going to end up pregnant women have sort of lowered their standards for a sexual partners.
I think that also has played a role in sort of demotivating men to achieve anything because if you can get laid like without doing anything, why would you do anything for God?
Hey, don't tell people how guys think yeah, that's not nice.
Yeah. Well, it's like this is the quote from from Aristotle Onassis. It says without women all the power and money in the world would be meaningless.
Is true
it speaking from a guy's perspective. There's a lot of wisdom to that and even Napoleon Hill Think and Grow Rich. There's a whole chapter in there and I put a chapter in Game Changers about this he calls it sexual sublimation and he wrote thinking Grow Rich mostly for men because of the time it was written in the 30s or 40s when every was and and he was like look, you know don't don't waste all that energy like that that desire to procreate is the same as the desire to create and
You're creating a company a career writing a great book. Whatever it is. If you waste it and you get guys where we're not getting environmental, you know, feminine cues the way we would have and there's an abundance of porn and distractions and bad sleep and all that. And no wonder you just want to live in your grandmother's basement.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly video games. That's really fascinating. Like I'm I don't know that I'm going to get that out of my brain that idea of superior not getting the normal.
Use that historically men have used to sort of gauge what the level of sort of, you know, like quality of women as in the environment if they're not getting any of the typical cues. And yeah, why invest in testosterone production when it's physiologically and metabolically costly to do so and why invest in an advanced degree to get you access to women when there aren't really any worth fighting for anyway, I don't know what it is.
It's fascinating.
There's a lot of probably put upon guys right now. Okay, wait we care about more than women. If course we do like we're mission-driven and all that at a bottom line though is and you know this because you look at evolutionary psychology, but for listeners, is it look a huge number of your behaviors are unconscious and designed to keep you alive. I am a hundred percent hundred percent certain that those behaviors all 100% come from mitochondrial rules in a distributed operating system in the body. I
Could be wrong. I'm just not so
how's that for a yeah, exactly. Yeah, they always I'm so used to like I talk about these things and they sort of flip and offhand ways. And of course, there's like more to it than that, but I mean ultimately, you know traits that promote survival and traits that promote reproduction get inherited right and and and traits that get inherited are those that have led to sex and so our brains are just like absolutely wired.
Top to bottom for sex and then and then carrying of course for our children so that way they can go and have sex and then their children can have sex and so it's really at the heart of a lot of what it means to be human even some of the most like profound beautiful acts of you know, kindness are can ultimately sort of they have a sex has a hand in them.
Well, I mean, there's the stereotypical in fact read Robert Greene's The Art of Seduction
He talks about the stupid things that guys will do for a woman and there's actually five categories and how you can use those to woo a woman and it's fascinating but you get near the guy who will make it a total ass of himself to prove himself to a woman and you know, Helen of Troy inspired Wars people would go to war and die for a woman and I think that's actually how guys are wired at a very base level and of course if you meditate if you're conscious and you've done your work you realize okay, I have these urges. I have these desires
Hers and I own them and I shape them and I control them and I use them for the higher good and if you're a douchebag, you probably walked around acting like a jerk all the time. We all know those kinds of people but if we turn down the volume for both men and women through the environment which includes the pill but isn't just the pill but I think the pills a major issue the way you've called out in your book. I love it that you're willing to go out there and do it and I also like it that it's not a guy writing the book,
right? Yeah exactly.
I mean, you know what? It's like
yeah. Well I do and I also don't I don't know that I could actually do it. You know, I mean, it's this isn't this is a really nuanced conversation to have with women and it's nuanced because you know, this is this is a really big deal for women the, you know, just the ability to regulate our fertility and having some guy telling us, you know, like well, here's all these things that you you know.
Didn't think about the pill and you know, and that sort of thing. I think that a lot of women would have a harder time with the message and even as it is like, you know, I was very careful when I was writing the book just to make sure that women were like aware that I'm not like trying to scare you off pill and I don't think anything in the book is like scary and it's not a lot, you know, alarmingly like, you know, you know house is on fire house is on fire but rather it's just like hey, we probably haven't thought about this. I think we've been really Cavalier with how
we've treated women's hormones and we treat them as being this, you know thing that influences what our ovaries are doing and nothing else and so it's just really about you know, giving giving women of the paradigm shift that they need in order to really think carefully about about hormonal contraception.
I think that the pill is is very disrespectful of women's health and biology and even just the very
I said what it means to be feminine, right you're turning off core valuable systems and it's almost a continuation of this mindset that was there in my parents generation one before then. Oh, you're done with kids hysterectomy. What does pull that stuff that you don't need that anymore. It turns out you might have one or two and it's extremely patriarchal. Right? Right. So I would just for all the women listening. In fact, there's slightly more women than men who lives in a bulletproof radio, but it's pretty well.
Ernst but all the guys listening have women friends or Partners who are also affected by this and so it's just worth talking about and I love it that you just came out there and you did it. I'm I'm curious about pheromones though. What effect does the pill have on pheromones and how important our
pheromones? Okay. Well, so pheromones, you know, this is one of those things where research doesn't yet quite have a handle on pheromones and like what they are and what they do, but
Presumably right there are sent based cues. We know from research that when estrogen is high again, you know right near Peak fertility when women are found maximally desirable and sort of sexy to men that women, you know are smelling better to men so surely there's some pheromonal involvement right where women are sort of having a different types of pheromones at high fertility compared.
To low fertility and that that's influencing how desirable they are. But on the other side of things. We also know that one thing that estrogen does is it increases that are the sensitivity of our neurons and our ability to pick up on fine-tuned differences between important stimuli in the environment including sent so there's been research showing like when you compare sensory acuity based on scent so smell
Taking women it takes them longer. You basically have to clobber them over the head with the smell in order for them to detect differences in between one smell and another smell whereas when women are at high fertility and the cycle their threshold for being able to detect sense is very it's very low they can they can detect really small differences between different types of sense and in particular male related sense. So what they found is that women at high fertility are particularly.
Early sort of astute at distinguishing differences between different levels of a draw Stone which is a metabolite of testosterone. So women are able to like detect really small differences and in levels of that compound and also like a musk related scent which is like a just sort of a guy smell that you know, sort of approximates what like differences in male body odor and so in addition to women themselves,
Having a different pheromonal profile right when they're on the pill versus off the pill and in a way that isn't helping their own desirability women might also be less able to discriminate between high and low Quality Partners because they're their senses just aren't very keen. They're not really you can't smell the good ones. Yeah, you can smell good when you can't smell the difference. Yeah, you can smell the difference between them and you know, there's been a lot of because there's been research showing that, you know women
who are on the pill choose Partners who are less masculine, right? They have less masculine faces, then then women then partners that are chosen by women who are naturally cycling and and it could be right that the women who are on the pill. I mean, it could be just a facial preference, but it also could be that they're not really tuned into the sent based cues that are linked with that are linked with testosterone presence, but there's also been research showing that
Women who are on the birth control pill also don't seem to be sensitive to differences in MHC compatibility. Do you know about what MHC genes are but I think a lot of laughs at your the stairs. Yeah, I was gonna say like the listeners I was asking the listeners day that you like and you didn't you interrupted me. I'll speak. No, you don't know. Okay, perfect. No so our major histocompatibility genes are some of the genes that help code for genes related to our immune.
System and the idea is that generally people prefer the scent of people whose MHC genes or different than theirs. And the reason for this is that when you partner with somebody whose MHC genes are different than yours. It's going to allow your children to recognize a greater diversity of pathogens. And the reason for this if you want to nerd out for a minute is that an MHC genes are codominant Lee expressed. And so if you have different genes in your partner, everybody's
It's again expressed. Your partner's chains give expressed and yours get expressed because usually there's a thing where it's like Whoever has the dominant genes. Those are the ones that like sort of do their thing but in the case of this everybody's genes get expressed. And so the more diversity you get in MHC these immune genes the greater the ability to detect bad guys, like germs and pathogens in the environment. So it makes for healthier kids and what the research shows is generally people prefer the
Scent of people who have different immune genes in themselves. So whose MHC genes are different with pill taking women. They don't find this at all. They don't seem to be able to distinguish because some Studies have found that women who are on the pill prefer Partners whose MHC genes are more similar like that are similar to themselves others find that there's really no relationship like women who are on the pill just don't really seem to have a preference for partners based on their MHC genes. My guess is that
What's going on? Is that women are again, just given everything that we know that estrogen does to the brain estrogens like Miracle-Gro on neurons and makes these little dendritic spines burst out from neurons making them super sensitive to you know, the stimuli in the environment and given that the pill keeps estrogen so low all the time and so you're not getting these like little, you know, birth of these dendritic spines that allow you to be able to detect fine.
In tune differences between individuals. I don't think that pill taking women are able to detect differences in you know, Partners based on their scent in terms of MHC compatibility or based on I'm just AA strong presence in the way that I'm not until takers are and like to what if act right and there's been some correlational studies. Now, these are very like early stage like one study with maybe like two thousand families, but there was a study that was done where
Researchers compared the health of children by women who like had chosen their Partners when they were on the birth control pill or off of the birth control pill and what this research this like sort of first crack into this research found was that women who chose their Partners on the birth control pill they reported that their children were having more health problems and had to go to the doctor more frequently. And then the children that were had by women who chose their Partners when they're not on the broken.
Don't film right was he's consistent with this idea that there may be it may be a sort of influencing our picker right like our mate Choice picker and that it might be leading us to prefer partners that you know aren't compatible and it could also be related to these fertility problems that you were talking about because there's no research indicating so far and again, like I said, I just don't think that they've studied this well enough yet. There's no research that has like conclusively.
Demonstrated that the birth control pill has any impact on subsequent fertility just in terms of you know, hpg, or hypothalamic pituitary gonadal function, right? So the functioning of your ovaries, but it could be that if you have women who are on the pill for XYZ number of years and they chose their partner when they were on the birth control pill, they show somebody that they're not genetically compatible with and there's a lot of research indicating that when women
choose partners that have very similar MHC genes that there's a greater rate of spontaneous abortion relative to what you find in in couples that have MHC dissimilar
genes that is profound. So what's coming out of this if you were to just play the odds and you're a woman and you're saying, you know, I think I'd like to meet the right guy and settle down and I've had lots of my women friends say
In fact, some of them get almost a bit desperate like I just need to do this and it's just not happening. It sounds like it might be good advice to go off the pill. Yeah, because it because like what you just said, you're going to pick the right guy and you're going to feel more sexy and you're going to appear more sexy. So you'll be able to attract the right guy.
Yeah. No, absolutely. I mean the way the way I look at it if I you know, if I had to redo everything that I've done in my life, I would never have
Have been on the birth control pill when I wasn't partnered because I what I did I did what so many women do and that is that I went on it when I was in you know, like sort of my first long-term sexual relationship and I was like 17 or 18 and and then I was on it and then I just you know, and that relationship lasted maybe a year, you know, I was good 7900. Can I say it's like yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was yeah it was it was a long and strong.
but then I we broke up and I stayed on the pill and so then you know, I'd have boyfriends I would come and go but I was just constantly on the pill and so because I just never went off except thought well, why do that because it's easy to take and it cleared up my skin and all these things and so I was like, I wouldn't do that knowing everything that I know now, you know, it's like I may still have made the choice to be on the pill the when I was on it because I My Cycles
not regular and I was a hot disaster. I mean like like I couldn't be counted on to do anything let alone, you know, keep track of my Cycles or remember to have condoms somewhere. And so I may have still made the choice to be on it, but I would not be on it when I wasn't in a relationship because there's just like there's no reason there was no reason to be I mean except for clearing my skin, but it was like not you know, like who knows how that was interfering with?
My ability to attract as good of a partner as I might have been able to or two to be able to discriminate between different partners and choose the right
partner.
So are you married or do you have a partner now? Do you have
kids? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I am married and have kids and I'm and that was a choice that that I made not on the birth control pill and you know, so that like was you know fortuitous but it was like a blip in the radar screen, you know, and thank you know here but but by the great whatever they say here, but by the grace of God go I right right.
So you you lucked out on that one.
I
I mean, you know it and knowing everything that I know now, I would have been much more strategic about it and intentional just because you really do miss out on not only your own sort of apex of attractiveness and desire and sort of, you know feelings of vibrancy and Attunement to men and and feelings of sexiness. But just also just your ability to discriminate between different between partners and then and then
He's the right one.
I want to ask a really dark question.
All right, let's hear
it. I hope it doesn't piss a lot of people off. So there's been this long standing throughout the ages ill-conceived inappropriate perception that you know, the man owns the woman and controls the women and if another man looks at your woman the wrong way, you have to go get in a fight with him or start a war or whatever, you know, all the all the negative sides of masculinity. All right, and
If your wife is unattractive because she's on the pill. I mean, it feels been over 60 years 60 years ago. A lot of people looked at women that way like was this thing? Is there some dark angle here around you know, controlling women in a way that maybe was on purpose or maybe wasn't on purpose. I don't know. I'm just looking about it. But like what would the benefit to anyone be of women at something in the book that made me think of this you talked about how when women are on the
He'll when they look at pictures of the partners. They have the same biological response as if they're looking at a stranger, but when you're off the pill and you'll get a picture of your partner your reward centers of the brain light up like like this is this just seems really scary to be perfectly honest. Do you think there's any validity I just made up that idea but I'm sort of like like this is dark and this is not serving women, right? So if it's not something women and pretty much men did this to women like men invented the pill right, right?
So I kind of wonder if you think there's a little dark angle to it there or am I just a conspiracy theorist today?
Well, I do think that you're a conspiracy there is there's no question about that. No, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. No, but I that's actually like a really interesting question. Right? Because you know for I mean women are veiled women have had their feet bound. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's like they're trying to control women's sexuality like yeah clitoridectomy is yeah.
Like men have been trying to curtail women's sexuality and sort of keep them chased and away from other men since the dawn of time. So pretty bad
track record there over the centuries. I got to say.
Yeah, no kidding. Right? It's like now that I'm saying all this stuff out loud. I'm like pissed off my husband and I'm like and Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow is going to be you know, really love the turkey George. I see what your I see the way you're trying to keep down Aunt Matilda over there.
But I mean, it's like we've been veiling women and doing all of these things and as a means of curtailing female sexuality and so is there a dark angle to this? Yeah, it may be there could be right and even if it's like unconscious, yeah, you know, who knows because if you notice that your partner isn't, you know, sort of as sort of sexy and doing all these, you know, they're noticing men like I would certainly be in any man.
Us interest, you know, if his partner is not sort of toying with the idea of other men and yeah, like could this be a means of controlling women's sexuality? Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely really interesting angle on that.
It's a little dark there that you know for the record. I think that we're all better off when women are free to be women even hormone Ali and also like having trust in my own relationship. I think it's pretty cool when other guys look at me.
A wife because I'm like, I have an attractive wife. Like if they're gonna go, you know, you know be rude or something that's a different conversation. But all right, you know, it's okay to have a really feminine attractive partner and it's okay of other people know that you know, you're together with something like that as from a guy's
perspective. Well, so in this reminds me of this study and I talked about it in my book. It's kind of a throwaway study where it's like, you know, there was this study where researchers were looking at mate guarding within romantic couples and
Guarding is sort of a psychologist way of saying like the things that you do to keep your partner from straying and this can be like sort of things like just sending texts. Like hey, how's it going? You know, what are you up to like that sort of thing. But also things like like trying to actualize your partner's desires right like like doing sweet things and being loving and caring and you know, it's just like yeah doing the dishes and what the research found.
Found was that when when men are partnered to women who are on the birth control pill they don't do as much of that as as men who are partnered naturally cycling women and it's probably getting at this exact issue right where it's like if a woman's sort of empty womb isn't at stake, right and so she's not like she's not conceptive right? So she her fertility is low and you know, she's probably not all that.
Sort of letting off all these cues associated with you know, femininity and sexuality that men does it justice D motivating to them and again like they're not going to you know conquer Rome if they don't have to and so it's like if you know men's wives aren't like sort of giving off these cues. It seems like men are less inspired to need to guard their mate both in positive and negative ways.
I guess part of mate guarding is bringing home a big
paycheck. Right? I mean there's a lot of things right make guarding, you know, it can kind of run the gamut from really positive behaviors to really negative behaviors to of course because like sometimes men when they're make guarding will you know, do things like not, you know, threaten their partner not to leave the house and you know, all those those sorts of things and so I guess on the one side it could be have some positive effects that way but most mate guarding with like decent human beings.
we aren't desperate sand take the form of like trying to actualize their Partners desires and like trying to make their partner happy so that way they can maintain the Integrity of the relationship and so like to what degree the birth control pill might be harming our relationships that way is also something that's sort of you know, potentially problematic I think for women
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It sounds like mate guarding all in all in healthy people is something that we want to encourage which is showing attentiveness being kind that that sort of thing. Yeah, and if you're one of the other kind of guys you need to go to a therapist and all that stuff and get your shit together. Yeah. Exactly. Let's talk about stress response in the pill because you called at all kinds of I didn't know I kind of have a roster of why I share with friends and followers, you know, the pill is not
Your best path to being a high-performance human, but you taught me something this book about stress response. What is the pill due to cortisol in women?
Okay, so normally when a person's feeling stressed out, like if you are I had to go give a big presentation in front of a group of people within a couple of minutes of doing that stressful thing. We would get a big rise in the stress hormone cortisol and cortisol is kind of a kind of a redheaded stepchild of hormones like people tend to think of
Of it as being a bad guy but of cortisol, actually, you know isn't what causes stress like cortisol isn't bad cortisol is a hormone that helps our body actually cope with stressful things. And so when we experience something stressful, we got this big rise in stress hormones because that's basically changing everything that our body is doing to increase its ability to cope with the stress. So for example, one thing that cortisol does is it dumps fat and sugar into your bloodstream?
In so that way if you're being chased by a hungry bear, you can make a fast getaway, right? Another thing that it does. Is it Prime's the birth of new neurons in the hippocampus? And this is what allows our brain to encode information as memories, right? Because when we're in a stressful situation, we should remember what's going on so that we have something similar happens later on in the future. We're better able to deal with it. And so, you know cortisol does a lot of these sort of Stress Management types of activities it
Distributes energy away from everything else. Our body is doing and focus has everything on stress. Now what happens with pill taking women is that they don't get a rise in cortisol in response to stressful situations. So when you and I go up and give a presentation and a talk, like we get the surgeon stress hormones. It allows our body to be able to manage the stressor. We remember things better, you know, we sort of absorb the experience that we're having and for
For the pill takers, they don't get this and this is something that it might sound like it's an amazing side effects of the pill like wow. So are you trying to tell me that if I you know, if I'm on the birth control pill that I won't experience stress, but that's not at all the way that it works. Like you're still feeling really stressed out. You're just not able to cope with it. So the the part of the stress response that makes our mouth go dry in our heart go fast and you know makes our voice.
Over that part of the stress response is totally intact and pill taking women. This is cortisol response. That's not and this is you know Pretend This is problematic for a lot of reasons. One of them is that of course like we have the cortisol response for a reason it helps our body manage and cope with the stressor and that is something that you know means that pill taking women are probably less able to cope with stress and there's a lot of research that indicates that that might be the case.
but the other thing that's potentially even more troubling than that about this and what it means is that the type of pattern that we see in terms of the stress hormone cortisol and pill taking women looks very similar to the types of stress responses that we find in people who have post-traumatic stress disorder and also people who have experienced any sort of like childhood or like chronic trauma and pill taking and this is
is obviously something that's a little army and it suggests that the reason that pill taking women aren't getting a stress response in response to stressful things is because their stress response is shut itself off from overuse and there's been some research now looking at whether or not women were on the pill have other sort of biological markers of having experienced chronic stress, and they have
Several markers of like chronic stress that looks like that of chronic stress victim. So for example, they have higher levels of tried the triglycerides which is what happens and you have when you have a cortisol like sort of over signaling there's the changes in the risk for depression and anxiety that we tend to find him pill taking women compared to non pill taking women and their hippocampi. So the hippocampus is an area of the brain
and that's responsible for learning and memory that's as big thing and what you find in people who have experienced chronic stress and also in women who are on the birth control pill is that they have smaller hippocampi relative to their non pill taking counterparts. And the reason that you see this the reason that you see a shrunken hippocampus in the context of chronic stress is because
Actually start to die because that area of the brain is so sensitive to the presence of stress hormones. And so when you get too much cortisol signaling the the neurons in the hippocampus begin to die which can cause problems with learning and memory and
OK I got to step in there for a second. Okay, just wrote this anti-aging book superhuman and I talked specifically about hippocampal volume as something that you Monitor and manage as you age. I'm in the 87th percentile.
I'll and my hippocampal volume when you look at the structures inside the brain and I probably wasn't there when I was younger because of all the toxins. I've been exposed to and all just the environmental stressors and frankly the emotional stressors that I have dealt with and so if you want to look at how are you going to be when you're 80 if you're on the pill now and you shrink your hippocampus and it continues shrinking as you age doesn't that increase the risk for CNL cognitive dementia Alzheimer's and all the other bad things that can happen to an old.
And that's not well cared
for ya know probably. I mean that's that's the thing. That's really potentially alarming about this is that you know, having a shrunken hippocampus is not a good thing and it is something that's associated with neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's disease and we know that Alzheimer's disease is and you know overwhelmingly female problem, you know, many more females are many more women are diagnosed.
with it than men and and there is especially given what the research shows in terms of hippocampal volume and also everything that we know about what estrogen does to the brain and like how good our sex hormones are in terms of, you know, promoting, you know brain sort of Maintenance and like allowing these dendritic spines to sprout and it's I don't think that it's probably the best thing for brain health
Having long-term exposure to the birth control pill just because you are keeping levels of estrogen so low and we know that estrogen is neuroprotective. And so what does that mean, you know, and there's just not enough research out there into especially the effects of long-term birth control pill use on women and on their brains, and so this is like one of the next big pushes. I hope to see in research.
H is going to be better understanding these processes.
Wow. Okay. So brain aging not a good idea. What about anxiety depression and suicide of women are going the pill. I did not know this data in your book. It was pretty damning. What did you
find? Yeah. I know. I think that this is really this was really damning to and and some new research is actually come out since the time the book came out. That's even more that way I think.
And so first of all the research I present in the book suggests and it's a really compelling case is made for the birth control pill and all of its, you know hormonal analog. So like the you know, there's a birth control vaginal ring. There's a hormonal IUD any form of hormonal contraception seems to increase a woman's risk for subsequently developing anxiety or depression, right? And it also there's really
Really good evidence suggesting that being on hormonal contraceptives. And again, I include in this list everything ranging from the pill all the way down to the the hormonal IUD, which by the way, some people's doctors some women's doctors tell them that the effects of those hormones only act locally, right? And so these are
on an IUD so you can basic code AS IUD in birth control pills and stick it in
right? Yeah. Well, yeah well, so there's an IUD in
In the u.s. It goes by the name of Marina the Mirena IUD and it's got sex form. Its it releases sex hormones. It releases progestins and which of course travel everywhere in the body because that's what hormones do they go into the bloodstream and they travel from top to bottom. Wait a minute women's doctors.
Are you are you telling me that the testosterone palette I have just under the skin of my butt doesn't work just on my butt.
No, I know. I know. I know. I know you were just doing that like to like make your butt like
Really strong, which is exactly. It's so strong with squeezing your vocal cords to sound to sound really masculine. But no so women's doctors. Tell them that this that this IUD is acting locally and it's just influencing what's happening in there with their ovaries and their and their uterus and it's ludicrous. But anyway, I'm
Getting this making a tangent, but basically what this research finds is that all forms of hormonal contraceptives and they actually found the risk was higher with the non-oral product. So for example, vaginal Rings the shot the hormonal IUD increases not only a woman's odds of developing depression and anxiety, but also their their suicide risk and these risk factors are particularly pronounced for
Lesson women so these are women who are 19 and younger who are going on the birth control pill and this research finds that the odds ratios for them of suicide risk and then developing depression and anxiety are vastly higher than they are for non hormonal contraceptive using women of that age range and also for older women, right and because of this it's super important that we are very careful with adolescent.
and the birth control pill and it's something that I think that you know in America in particular our doctors tend to prescribe the birth control pills these young girls for everything, you know starting sometimes at ages 13 my daughter who's 12 has contemporaries at her school who are on the pill and it's not because I'm sexually active at 12 because they have their period and it's heavy and uncomfortable or their skin is starting to break out and they're feeling so
Conscious about it and their doctors are putting him on the birth control pill which I think is, you know, especially given the growing body of research linking especially young ages pill use and depression and suicide risk, but also, it's like the brain doesn't begin or doesn't stop developing until you're like 22, right and so and during post pubertal brain development during adolescence when your brain is changing into its adult form.
Like the head contractor and that remodeling project is your sex hormones. Oh my God, you're sexy. So your sex hormones are calling the shots in terms of the way that your brain is being organized. And so and then we're putting these girls on the birth control pill and we have absolutely no idea because there's really no good research on what that's actually doing in terms of the organization of the brain to me just feels Reckless and feels like a total lack of connection between you know,
Like, you know practicing medicine and then actually understanding how the body works and how development works and the idea that you would change up. Somebody's sex hormones when their brain is still developing for something as minor, as you know cycle regularity just seems outrageous to me and there is a study that I actually just got sent it was sent to me by the researcher who did the studies this guy Larry Cahill who's at UC Irvine and he's a birth control pill researcher and a really good one and he did
Study recently looking at the looking at adolescent pill use. So again looking at 19 in younger women and comparing the risk of depression developing depression in adulthood from women who are no longer on the pill just based on whether they used it during adolescence or not. So in other words is using the pill during adolescence increase your risk of depression in adulthood, even after you're off the pill and what
What they found was it does
how big of a
difference it was a pretty big difference. It was a it was like the it was almost I think it was like I remember feels twice the risk factor. I was just reading the paper and I'm actually going to be reading it like more carefully because I'm actually going to be talking about it next week. And so I'm going to like sit and like and sort of plot the differences down, but it was it was a pretty substantial increase in the risk of developing.
Depression and adulthood and what this tells us is that there's probably something developmentally that's going on when you go on the birth control pill in terms of the organization of the brain that may change a woman's risk of developing mental health problems later on in life. Even after birth control pill use is discontinued.
This is kind of a conundrum because I think your book is reasonably balanced you talked about the fact that women who are on the pill are statistically more likely to get higher education and philanthropy.
Fulfillment in fields that women often times didn't excel in like law Medicine Science business sort of things is that happening just because there are women who are not having kids at a younger age can actually have the time to end the money to go to school. Is that what's causing it or is it because of changes in the brain from the pill or do we
not know it? No, it's because it could be like we don't know for certain. I mean that my if I had to like place my money
On a bet like I would bet on women like the ability to plan right and know that I'm not going to have a baby in the next 10 years because I don't have to because I'm on the pill and and I have resources and I don't have to worry about carrying for anybody else with myself that allows women like when they're able to make plans that allows them to achieve things right because they will you know, nobody's gonna start.
School if they don't think they're going to finish right and it soon as we gave women access to the pill like what you see and in 1970 when the pill became legally available to single women what you saw is that woman's the percentage of female applicants to law medical programs PHD programs went from being about 10% to being 50% within 20 years. It was just like bam and it's because it was like it gave us the ability to plan you.
And like to feel like all right, if I start this I'm gonna be able to finish it. And so the pillow has been really amazing for women just in terms of allowing us to feel like we have control over our fertility. Right and I think that the ability to control our fertility is like the biggest women's rights issue out there and we need to really protect women's access to every mode of fertility regulation that's out there that they can that they want to be able to safely use. I think that you know, women need to have their eyes wide open when they're making choices when it comes to the Earth.
Earth control pill because it's like you can pick your poison, right and I think there's something to that but with these young girls with these adolescents whose brains are still developing that's where things were as I start to say. Well, you know, let's let's really rethink this that's
very dangerous at this point that the risk reward isn't there and I'm a human guinea pig. I try all sorts of stuff, but I look at risk report before I do it, right? So I'm a hundred percent with
Kids. I've also though I'm reminded of a guy earlier my career. I'm your friend Shiva from India and you worked on my team. He was the top of his class from one of the iits. These are kind of like the the Wharton or Harvard of of India and he said Dave, you know, things are really different in India. He said when I was in college, if a girl tried to talk to me, I would hold my book up in front of my face because I didn't want to be distracted because I had to study so okay, that's just rude but
But if that was Jesus probably like 30 something years ago when he would have been doing that but it was that idea of I'm going to stay focused. So given what you just told me about the pill and that it basically reduces your interest in men part of this might simply be okay. I went on the pill and I was able to focus because I was less just obsessed with dating and of course guys same thing. I can tell you that the vast majority of my time in college was spent thinking about women and food and not really about my studies because
Wired to do that right? Especially when your hormones are surging in your late teens early 20s, that's what we do. So maybe some of this is actually a benefit of this because look if you have a little bit less or maybe more predictable desire, you'll make better decisions and you'll stay focused on the career track that you've consciously chosen instead of letting your hormones and you know, your your mitochondria call the course of action, which is reproduced the species right now. We're will all die which is what we all believe when you go on a bad date,
right?
Yeah, I know and I think that you're absolutely right about that. I mean, there's no question about it that when you are on the birth control pill it blunts, you know, your sort of Attunement to sex-related stimuli. So it's blunts you're tuned into your own sexuality. It blunts your Attunement to men it blunts their Attunement to you and because of this, yeah, like if you're at times in your life, when those types of distractions are counterproductive, you can use the birth control pill right as
Way to sort of help meet your life goals, right? If you want to focus on not sex take the pill like if you want to focus on yeah, like doing other things besides daydreaming about about men yet go on the pill and it'll help you it'll help you to do these things. But this is like this is like such it's really, you know, this is like really great. I mean, it's it's so important to have this information right as we can use this for a benefit because women who are
Are like hoping to find a partner like all right. Now is this time? Maybe I don't use the birth control pill women who are hoping to get their PHD knows maybe a really good time to be on the birth control pill. I mean, there's a lot that we can do with this information. Just sort of, you know, make our lives into the lives that we
want. You can also try it and then say, you know what my anxiety and depression just went through the roof. Oh now I know that those are common effects. Maybe I'll go off of it because you know staying
Gaston my studies wasn't worth it.
Right exactly. I mean, it's all about picking your poison. I mean, you know, it's like for each one of us there's there's trade-offs that were willing to make that other people wouldn't be willing to make and this is really about giving people that information. I mean, it's like I mostly eat like I need a very clean sort of healthy diet exercise and meditate I do the whole thing. Right but like I really like whiskey right and so like but I like I like won't like drink a ton of but like I'll like have a whiskey right.
Like whiskey, I know it's not great for me. Right like a like that's not good for my liver. But like I know what I'm doing I make the choice to do it. Anyway, I'll have a whiskey if I
won't, you know, there's all sorts of things that everyone does and there's a lot of people I'm going to have the cheesecake and I know it's not good for me, but I'll cope right and so I don't want to be I don't want to come out from this episode with everyone who's heard this who's going. Oh my God, I'm on the pill or my daughters on the pill. Like what have I done? You know, I'm a bad person, you know.
Can I ever forgive myself to chill? Yeah, so it's really important. You don't develop a panic response about it because and what percentage of women at least in the US are on the pill when they're in their fertile years.
Well what the research shows is that about 85% of women will be on it at some point in their
each Christ. It's the
hi. This is a
population level experiment. That's never been tested.
I know. No I know.
It's no it hasn't and it is yeah, so most women will try it. Now. Here's the thing. Is that about half of women who go on the pill go off of it right away. Okay, because that because they can't stand the way that it makes them feel and you know and think about this for a minute think about the fact that you know, 85 percent roughly and I think I think it's 85% exactly but I don't remember the figure off the top of my head. So let's say 85% of women.
Go on the birth control pill it 50% of them are going off of it because it's just the the way it makes them feel psychologically is intolerable and yet the pill has been around for 60 years and women have been given no information about what it's doing to them psychologically. I mean, it's just crazy. It's a crazy to me that that it's taken so long like actually when I came up with a sort of idea that when it sort of dawned on
on me that oh my gosh, we're doing this big experiment where we're fundamentally changing generations of women in the names, you know in the name of fertility regulation, like what does it do to the brain and then finding this research? I thought I mean I was shocked that nobody had written the book already and that was when I decided I had to write the book because I couldn't believe it didn't exist and that this information hadn't been given to women and that we had just sort of been led to believe that
All of these things that we were reporting where you know, these idiosyncratic things that are just really specific to us and we must be imagining it and you know, it's not real and so it was really time to get this information out there. So many women
I think it is time and it's also time to just say okay if you're not going to be on the pill and you want to have a degree of career or academic success
There are long-standing practices that men and women have used and they are different for men and women to tap into leverage control and use sexual desire to create amazing things in the world. Right and some of it is, you know, Community women have had their women women sewing circles and they get together and they talk about whatever the talk about. I don't know. I don't go to those and and guys get together and I don't know throw darts, whatever.
But a lot of that those times where it is, you know talking about stuff that's really specific to your hormone profile right where a lot of that has gone away and maybe there's a need for that and some of the really old traditions that have largely stopped and the last couple Generations around looking the Rites of Passage and things like that where all right, you got to own that. Yeah. You're horny all the time. What are you going to do with it? That's a part of being a young adult and to
Is it with drugs probably isn't the best way to handle that because as you just eloquently wrote in your book, there are a lot of unintended consequences here. And now we know what they are and 60 years ago. We didn't six years ago. This was actually this was Freedom.
Yeah. We're in this really weird space right now though. We're like being human is been created. Like it's we're taught that it's a problem. Right? Like it's like problematic to have sexual desire.
It is problematic to need psychological well-being right is problematic to not be able to work, you know, 65 hours a week without making it, you know, making you feel depressed. It's like all these, you know things that are really just human emotions and experiences have been like we've been trained that they're problematic and rather than coping with them. We medicate them right instead of like like wow, I'm I get really anxious around.
'well, it's like no that's like everybody is like we have to learn how to manage that, you know as a human being like if to learn how to interact with people even though you feel anxiety. You don't medicate that like, oh I feel you know sexual desire and I'm thinking about sex when I should be like, here's a medication for that. You know, it's like it's like it's like it's like we're in this weird space then
yeah. It's like, oh I feel anxiety. Okay the antidote for that is courage.
Yeah.
I'm feeling hunger. Will the antidote for that is fast a little bit longer and find out you're not going to die like own your hunger and then I feel like I'm gonna die. If I don't go on a date go on a date and don't have sex and see if you died right? You're probably won't and after a little while you get used to it, and then it's called owning your power. But man, I don't know how we teach people do that anymore. I don't know who taught me to do that. I think I had to do a lot of work, and I'm probably still doing it, but it's it's fascinating that bye.
Writing a book about what the pills doing to our brains and our Psychology by studying The evolutionary history that you've really brought some thought-provoking important things to light and the book is called. This is your brain on birth control and your website is Sarah a hill.com, but I don't want to thank you for doing that and just encourage you listening to this. I guarantee you given that 85 percent of women in the US have been on the pill or are on the pill.
This is affecting your life. And I don't care if you're a man or woman. I don't care. If you're one of the 15% who's never taken the pill the women around you were doing that and we didn't even talk about the fact that you don't think your hormones as a woman will change in response to the women around you we know that they do because if you're with a group of women not on the pill and you stay in a you know in a close proximity for well, your Cycles will all sink and they'll sink with the Moon too. So we all affect each other all the time. We all send out a hormonal.
Signal to the world around us and reading this book is going to blow you away whether or not you're thinking about going on or off the pill so check it out. This is your brain on birth control totally worth reading. It'll blow your mind Sarah. Thanks for being on the
show. Thanks so much for having me.
You probably noticed that I mentioned a lot of new biohacking and anti-aging Technologies on the show and they love it that I get to see and share almost every new thing that comes out and some of the companies that I talked about. It really upgraded my life and I walked the talk by partnering with her investing in some of the companies that I Really
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