Western Europe has been experiencing its hottest temperatures in the history of humanity this week, so it felt like a good time to resurface this episode I recorded way back with my old co-host Andrew Lewis, and our guest Eric Dean Wilson, author of After Cooling: On Freon, Global Warming, and the Terrible Cost of Comfort.

We take a look back at the history of air conditioning (it’s weird and wild), and try to understand how we almost managed to destroy all life on earth in our quest for personal comfort. And don’t miss Eric’s journey into the shady underworld of used refrigerant sales to understand just why dudes are so attached to their Freon.

This episode is part of the Non-Toxic Performative Male Book Club. It’s a series of all the author interviews I’ve done over the years, featuring some of the smartest writers, journalists, and academics I know. If you’re into Non-Toxic book coverage, click on any episode with the tag “Performative Male Book Club” to find more good books for guys who read, or pretend to.

To listen to the second part of this conversation, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid subscription to Non-Toxic.

Lastly, if your A/C is busted and you need to get rid of it, read the EPA’s advice on how to safely dispose of it first. Because letting that stuff escape into the atmosphere is not good!

 I’m bringing you the first episode of a series I’m doing called “Just Keep Swimming.” It’s a Non-Toxic miniseries about male infertility and chemical exposure, exploring how chemicals in our environment (or chemicals we choose to inject into our bodies) can have an enormous impact on our individual health and even the future of humanity.

This episode is a conversation that I had with the Dutch looksmaxxer, Felix van der Heiden, when I was visiting the offices of the biotech startup, Sperm Racing. For the full story there, you can read my article in The New York Times Magazine about the week I spent with those boys. Felix, I thought, was a super interesting character, and he shows up in the piece, but I didn't really get to go as deep in the article as I wanted to. I had some amazing tape that just was sitting around, and I thought, “People need to really hear his full story.”

What follows is a selection from the scene when Felix first looked at his sperm under a microscope with his friend Manu, and then a conversation that Felix and I had afterwards, where he talks to me a bit about the different enhancements that he’s using and his thoughts about the effects on his fertility and why he’s decided to pursue chemical enhancement at such a young age. I think you’ll enjoy it.

A fifth of the world’s oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz, a sliver of ocean between Iran and the Gulf States. Since the beginning of the US Israeli war in Iran, that traffic has slowed to a trickle, which has sent the price of oil skyward. Countries around the world are doing everything they can to accelerate the transition because whether they care about the climate crisis or not, they recognize that there is no choke point on the sun.