Jeremy Grantham
speaker
906 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 30 Jul
Jeremy Grantham’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
We got to study the data and the results came out suggesting that the decline rate was accelerating.
The decline rate this year is two and a half percent a year.
You don't have to be mathematically that literate to realize that a two and a half percent decline in your sperm count every year is a disastrous level, a non-sustainable level, right?
As far as we can tell, our best guess is that in hunter-gatherer days, we had 180 million units per milliliter of sperm.
And when the academics came in in 1970, it was down to about 100.
And today it's 35.
Also, the quality and the motility, they call it, had also declined somewhat similarly.
It turns out, luckily for us, that we were over-engineered, I like to say, like a great Victorian bridge.
Nature doesn't take any risks and you have more than you need.
And it appears, again, a good guess is about 45 million units is what you need to be able to get pregnant without any difficulty.
And that was hit about 15 to 20 years ago.
The number of young couples who needed help 15 or 20 years ago was nil, basically.
And for this reason, that none of them had a chronic lack of sperm count in round numbers.
And now the World Health says it's about 17%.
17% of young couples could use some help today.
Which means that instead of just trying for a week or two or three or four or five or six, you're trying for months and months.
And everybody knows people now who fall in that category, which is exactly what you would expect if you've gone from zero to 17%.
But this is the killer.
Shana Swan and my colleague and I kind of thought about this thing separately and independently.
And we worked out, doesn't take a great brain, that in 20 to 25 years, the average young couple will need help.
Showing 601–620 of 906 · page 31 of 46
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