Andrew Huberman· PhD
Now, a very important consideration in terms of understanding and predicting fertility and fecundability, this word that describes the probability of getting pregnant on a given try and over time, is trying to address how, quote, unquote, "fertile" a woman is and, importantly, how, quote, unquote, "fertile" a male is. And we'll talk about the male side in a moment. But when trying to address how fertile a woman is, of course, age is going to be one of the major factors, but just one factor. We already talked about how age determines the likelihood of a successful pregnancy if the intercourse and ejaculation is being carried out at the correct times and with viable sperm capable of fertilizing eggs. And then, of course, there's the issue of egg quality. But in general, most women would like to know how fertile they are as a function of their age. And I actually think this is one of the most important topics in this whole space around fertility that isn't often discussed or at least isn't often discussed until women are in their late 30s or 40s, when oftentimes they will look back and wish that either they had frozen their eggs or they had frozen fertilized embryos, which is a whole thing unto itself. And we can talk about that when we have an episode on in-vitro fertilization in more depth. But there is a fairly straightforward way or set of ways that women can determine their basic level of fertility. Leaving aside a lot of the detailed issues about the quality of eggs and so forth, one thing that you already learned is that there's this vault, there's this reserve, that we call the ovarian reserve, and that each month a certain number of follicles leave that reserve, and there's the opportunity, based on the ovulation of a single egg, to fertilize that egg and