The Megyn Kelly Show - 20230104_mccarthys-speaker-fail-and-alarming-decline-in-spe

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Jan. 4, 2023 - The Megyn Kelly Show

01:35:43

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Why We Hold Onto Jordan 00:14:50
	Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
	Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
	Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
	Coming up, a fascinating, deep dive into the declining fertility among young men and women worldwide.
	Men are losing their sperm, the sperm count, the sperm strength, and their testosterone is going down.
	And I will be speaking to one of the world's leading environmental and reproductive epidemiologists.
	This is the woman whose study has been revered since 2017 on why this is happening and how we can stop it.
	She has spent decades studying the impact things like household products, the food that you eat.
	And we'll get into the specifics pharmaceuticals have on our reproductive health.
	And the numbers are not good.
	They're not good.
	We've got to reverse this trend.
	Just reading up on her research and advice was fascinating and alarming.
	And if you have children and would like to have grandchildren, pay attention.
	All right.
	First, though, new round of voting set to take place this hour, maybe for the next speaker of the house.
	This morning, former President Trump weighed in robustly for the first time, telling Republican holdouts to quote, vote for Kevin, close the deal, take the victory, and watch crazy Nancy Pelosi fly back home to a very broken California.
	End quote.
	We will soon find out if that statement matters at all.
	Joining me now, Eric Boling, the host of The Balance on Newsmax.
	Eric, my God, what a mess.
	So they did three votes yesterday.
	19 Republicans voted against McCarthy on the first vote.
	19 voted against him on the second vote.
	20 voted against him on the third vote.
	Now, people who we both respect, like our former colleague at Fox, Chad Pergram, who's, you know, with respect to Chad, super smart, a little nerdy, been covering Capitol Hill forever, saying, I don't think he's ever going to be, I don't think he can do it.
	Like, it's extremely in doubt whether Kevin McCarthy can ever become the speaker now.
	And Trump is telling these holdouts on the GOP side, who are all very Trumpy, people like Lauren Boebert, vote for Kevin McCarthy.
	You know, just my daughter, she always says, take the L, take the L. Trump's saying, take the W, just take it.
	And we get a statement from Matt Gates, who's one of the holdouts this morning, who says to Fox Digital, I have no intention to fall in line behind Kevin McCarthy, notwithstanding what Trump says, and responds to that Trump statement with the following: sad exclamation point.
	This changes neither my view of McCarthy, nor Trump, nor my vote.
	And you have everyone from President Biden to former President Trump to Karl Rove to just, I mean, Republicans up and down the line saying this is an absurd embarrassment.
	That's what Biden said.
	This is embarrassing.
	It's not a good look on the world stage.
	It's also not my problem, he said.
	So, where do you stand on it?
	And how are people supposed to be thinking about this right now?
	Well, first of all, happy new year, Megan.
	And yeah, what a way to kick off the new year with some infighting on the GOP side.
	And the damns just licking their chops, saying, ha ha, look at them.
	They can't even get their act together.
	My comment to the CNNs, Anderson Cooper, and Don Lemon, they're just loving it and making kind of fun of the GOP.
	Let's get it right on the right rather than doing it first.
	You and I used to work for a guy who said it's very important to be first, but it's more important to be right, even if it risks being first.
	And I think what happens is I feel McCarthy doesn't represent the MAGDA wing.
	and I'm not saying the Trump wing, I'm saying the MAGA or the America First wing, because I'm not sure what's going on with Trump in Trump world right now.
	So you have Boebert, you have five Gates, Boebert, Bishop, Chip Roy, there's like five originals who said there are never Keviners, and then there are nine additional.
	So the vote, as you point out actually, was first vote was 19, second vote was 19.
	Then someone nominated Jim Jordan.
	Jim Jordan got 20.
	So it's going in the wrong direction.
	Here's the thing.
	I don't think Kevin McCarthy is going to be the speaker.
	I just don't think it's going to happen, especially since Gates, after Trump came out and said, vote for Kevin, he is probably going to be a great speaker.
	And Gates said, no way, it doesn't matter.
	I'm still not voting.
	If those coalition of five don't vote, which I think they're poised not to vote for McCarthy, it's gone beyond politics.
	Now it's personal.
	McCarthy's going to have to step away at some point, whether it's vote four or 40.
	At some point, he's going to have to say, I'm not going to get it.
	And then there has to be some horse trading, some compromising on who it's going to be.
	My fear of what usually happens in DC, Megan, I wrote a book called The Swamp because it is a swamp.
	And my fear is that all the backdoor horse trading, the smoky back rooms where the guys are getting back there.
	Now the guys and the gals are back there.
	Oh, what do you want?
	What chairmanship do you want?
	What kind of budget can I give you for that committee to make you vote for me, Kevin McCarthy?
	I mean, if there's no other indication of why the man should not be the speaker of the house, he moved his stuff in the day before the vote or the day of the vote.
	And I think that is just an absolute F you to the caucus that says we want change.
	I'm the boy, I like these people.
	I like the disruptors, the holdouts, and not because they're Trump, because I can't figure out what Trump's doing.
	Don Trump Jr. says vote for Kevin.
	Trump says vote for Kevin.
	Wait, the people who are holding out kind of represent what you were, Mr. Trump, a disruptor, change of the guard draining the swamp.
	So regardless, I agree with Gates.
	It doesn't matter what Trump wants right now.
	It's not about him right now.
	It's about getting the best speaker.
	And right now, one final thought.
	What happens if he is the speaker?
	What did he have to do to get the speakership?
	Will we ever trust this guy as having the best interest of the country at hand or the best interest of Kevin McCarthy?
	Because right now, this is the first time in 100 years.
	We're going to 150 years now.
	If we go another vote or two, this has never happened before.
	Time to move on, Kevin.
	I feel like they're all like that.
	I don't just feel like politicians always do ultimately what's in their best interests.
	You know, that's why he flip-flops and goes where the wind blows.
	It's like it's self-preservation in the role that he's chosen.
	I think the nine holdouts also are beholden to their constituents who put them in office and their biggest donors who have an agenda.
	That's why it's so cynical for people like you and me who are on the outside, but have to cover it.
	It's like, oh, all right.
	In any event, if they replace Kevin McCarthy, what's going to change, right?
	Like the name you keep hearing as a possible replacement is Steve Scalise, but he's not going to, is he really going to run the house that much differently than Kevin McCarthy?
	What I mean, the Republicans, it's not like they're suddenly going to back Democrat agendas.
	Well, all right, look at it this way.
	I know what Jim Jordan represents.
	He represents small government.
	He represents going after, you know, intel departments that are political.
	He stated, he stated it several times what he represents.
	I don't know what Kevin McCarthy is.
	I know that the last thing Kevin McCarthy did before the changing of the House guard is he helped facilitate a $1.7 trillion omnibus bill that without any pushback at all from the Republicans.
	And all of a sudden we spend another trillion, almost $2 trillion of taxpayer money on what?
	We're not really sure.
	I don't know what McCarthy represents.
	I have a hunch with the likes of Karl Rove pushing for him aggressively on Fox News and Rona McDaniel Romney pushing for him on Fox News.
	He feels to me like he represents the establishment wing of the party, what the conservative or the more right-wing conservatives would call the rhinos of the party.
	But wait, let me ask you.
	Let me jump in and ask you that.
	So Marjorie Taylor Greene is, she's Trumpy.
	She's supporting Kevin.
	Trump.
	Trump is Trumpy.
	He's supporting Kevin McCarthy.
	As you point out, Don Jr.
	And then Elise Stefanik, she's supporting Trump.
	Even Kevin McCarthy is pretty Trumpy at times, right?
	He came out, for example, after January 6th and completely condemned Trump, but then within weeks was down there with his arm around Trump like, Trump, So I don't know.
	But the point is, there are a lot of, oh, and Jim Jordan.
	Jim Jordan's supporting Kevin.
	Jim Jordan says, I don't want these votes.
	And I support.
	And he's the one who made the speech introducing Kevin McCarthy as the speaker candidate.
	Think for a second, Megan Kelly and Eric Bowling, friends for life and forever.
	Do you think for a second any of those, Steve Scalise, Elise Stefanik or Jim Jordan, or do you think for a second they wouldn't love to be the speaker of the house?
	I mean, this is a major position.
	So very powerful position.
	You lead the party.
	You meet with the president regularly.
	You have the cushy office overlooking the national mall.
	You have the higher paycheck.
	I think they all do.
	And they just, listen, Jordan's brilliant.
	He didn't look thirsty.
	I mean, if the biggest drawback for me with McCarthy, if I were one of them, the guy's, he's too, he wants it so much.
	He's willing to compromise everything to get it.
	It's just creepy to me.
	I don't like it.
	It's just another version of a presidential candidate.
	I mean, they're like that too.
	They're all narcissistic, self-aggrandizing.
	They say what they need to say to get elected.
	They all lie.
	I'm sorry, that is the truth.
	It's a sad truth of American society.
	So he's a mini version of that seeking an executive.
	Does Nancy Pelosi not fit that bill?
	Hello?
	I don't know.
	You're right.
	Jim Jordan is probably playing the game correctly by looking like he doesn't want it.
	Could he get the support of the more moderate Republicans?
	I mean, he had a scandal of his own with his wrestling team at his university.
	Kind of fell out of the news cycle because he kind of fell out of the news cycle.
	But I don't know.
	Could he get those?
	He might get those nine votes, but is he going to lose too many in the middle?
	Yeah, almost to a person.
	You talk to Republican congresspeople and they respect Jim Jordan.
	They like what he does.
	They like his aggressive.
	I mean, he's no holds barred in the hearings, in the committee hearings.
	He's amazing on the House Judicial Committee chairs.
	He's the best cross-examiner.
	The best.
	And you know, some of the pushback that I have been talking about Jordan for a long time, the pushback I get is, yeah, but we don't want to lose him as a chairman, chairman of the House Judicial, especially when they're going to go after Hunter Biden and Joe Biden and this huge agenda.
	But I think the speakership is so, I'm just thinking how many times you've talked about Nancy Pelosi over the years.
	That would be whoever ends up being the speaker for the Republicans.
	That'll be the Nancy Pelosi going forward.
	The power is incredible.
	You're meeting with the Senate majority leaders.
	You're meeting with the president.
	You're making decisions that affect the country.
	And the Congress has the checkbook.
	So you want to talk about rolling back some massive spending initiatives that Biden's signing away with executive order.
	The speaker starts that.
	The speaker decides what the agenda is going to be.
	I just would like the best person as a conservative.
	I'd like the best person.
	I don't think Kevin McCarthy is it.
	I think Jim Jordan could be it.
	I think Steve Scalise may be it.
	I don't know.
	Maybe there are others.
	At least Stephanie has a lot of, a lot of, checks a lot of boxes for me because she's smart.
	She's in New York.
	He's fiscally conservative.
	I have to say, it'd be kind of cool to see a young female Republican speaker of the House.
	I mean, we've never had that before.
	So, you know, the Democrats are obsessed with identity politics.
	Maybe some of them would cross over and vote for Elise Stefanik.
	I doubt it.
	But it's kind of getting crazy here.
	I will say this.
	There's a reason that there's a vote.
	You have to see if the votes are there.
	And the votes are not there for this guy.
	So I don't really understand the this is embarrassing.
	I don't really understand.
	Like I'm not as close to it as a lot of these politicos.
	I don't, you know, I'm not neck deep in that process, but I don't find it embarrassing.
	There's a reason we have a vote.
	He's not getting the votes.
	They're going to keep redoing it.
	By the way, the latest news, just as we came to air, was they may try to postpone the vote today to tomorrow, which means he hasn't shorn up his numbers any.
	So I don't know what's going to happen, but I can see the media just absolutely relishing this.
	And you're right.
	Some of sort of the more established Republicans.
	Little sidebars, it could happen.
	And it'll be terrible that Democrats could vote for McCarthy.
	And we saw that little, there's some video of AOC talking to Gates and then talking to Gosar, who are two holdouts, not Never Kevin people.
	And she allegedly, and the word is that the videos of her talking back and forth rather aggressively saying McCarthy has tried to cut a deal with the Democrats to peel off a few Democrats so that if they don't vote, the threshold for him becoming speaker goes from 218 down to, let's say, I don't know, 205, and then he would have the votes, right?
	So she said, we're not on board with that.
	Even worse would be if McCarthy cut a deal for a Democrat to vote for him than as a conservative, as a Republican, if you're dealing with Democrats already, I mean, you've basically handed them the keys to the kingdom.
	Right.
	Like, what power is he seeding in order to get the role?
	By the way, this just hitting now.
	They're on the way to the floor.
	And McCarthy now says we will have another vote today.
	My gosh, the drama, the drama.
	Okay, but no matter what happens in the House, no one's going to jail, at least not yet.
	Contrast that with Sam Bankman-Freed, who is facing a massive, massive shitstorm of trouble.
	I mean, this guy, Andy McCarthy had a great piece just talking about how bad it is.
	If you look at the federal sentencing guidelines and the charges against him, just how bad it is.
	And how if this guy gets convicted, he's probably going to prison for life, for life, given the federal sentencing guidelines on fraud, on people who are in a fiduciary role, meaning one of trust and, you know, where you're supposed to be looking out for people.
	And he was arraigned in Manhattan federal court before U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, pleaded not guilty to eight counts of fraud and conspiracy.
	They have set October 2nd as the tentative trial date.
	So there's speedy justice for you.
	That's actually pretty fast.
	And he's out now.
	He's out on $250 million bail, but somehow he managed to post it.
	What we're reading is that he was ultimately released on something closer to his own recognizance because while the prosecutors demanded his parents post their homeless collateral and co-sign the bail deal, he didn't actually have to put up the cold hard cash.
SBF's $250 Million Bail 00:05:08
	And now this guy who's alleged to have defrauded people to the tune of over $2 billion at least, that's the low end, is roaming about.
	I guess we're banking on the fact that he doesn't want to screw over his parents and have them lose their home.
	Who knows whether he's got other cash stashed elsewhere and whether that's a real, you know, concern.
	But what do you make of it?
	Because we now know that those two top executives have cut a deal.
	They've pleaded guilty.
	Carolyn Ellison, the ex-girlfriend, Eric, 28, she cut a deal.
	So did Gary Wang, 29, who co-founded FTX, this crypto exchange.
	They pleaded guilty to charges including wire fraud, securities fraud, and commodities fraud.
	They have turned state's evidence and he is up a creek.
	That's a legal term.
	He's up a creek, Eric Bowling.
	He's up a creek.
	He's doing 25 to Upper Creek.
	Look, I don't get this sympathy.
	You're not showing it, but others are.
	My wife's like, oh, I feel so bad, feel bad for him.
	He has this sympathetic look to him.
	But folks, if you rob a car, if you're a minority and you steal a car, you're going to go to jail for 25 years.
	If you, you know, smash and grab, you're going to jail.
	For some reason, it's almost like this guy's a white collar criminal.
	He stole $2 billion.
	And we're going, oh, well, it could have been $32 billion.
	It wasn't Baz Madoff and stole $64 billion from friends.
	He defrauded people who trusted him with his money.
	He should go to jail.
	He should go to jail, as McCarthy points out, for a very long time.
	I saw Gasperino on Fox day before yesterday during the plea or right before the plea.
	He said, oh, you know, I don't know if he's going to go to jail.
	Are you kidding me?
	Send him away for a long time.
	He's rocking the trust in the financial system.
	He crushed trust in cryptocurrency single-handedly.
	I think he's got to go.
	One of the things that no one's really pointing out, he gave, he gave that 28-year-old Carolyn Ellison, who's been with him for three years with FTX, he gave her Alameda Trading.
	It's a wing.
	He threw $2 billion and said, trade this.
	Now, I know what this is.
	I come from that trading world.
	That's Sam Bankman-Fried laundering $2 billion.
	It's not her trading.
	She's a rookie trader.
	You don't give someone, a rookie trader, that kind of money to try and trade and make money with.
	She's never going to do it.
	It was a vehicle for Sam to run customer money through a trading vehicle, Alameda Trading, and come back and turn it into laundered money that he can loan to friends to buy real estate, that he could buy his $40 million.
	Oh, wait, let me stop you there because I don't understand.
	I don't understand laundry.
	I don't understand laundry in my own home and I don't understand laundry at the crypto scene.
	So explain why would he need to use Alameda, the hedge fund, to quote launder the $2 billion.
	Why couldn't he just kind of steal it from the FTX exchange and start going out and spending it?
	You know, he took it from the FTF exchange.
	Why not just use it then?
	How does it get laundered over at the hedge fund?
	It's easier tracked when you just steal it.
	It's like the why, you know, if you've ever been to Vegas, I spent a lot of time in Vegas.
	Sometimes you see some very shady looking characters, you know, putting $20,030, $40,000 on a wheel on black or on red or at a blackjack table.
	And all they're doing is they're laundering the money because they're taking cash, illicit, probably drug money or prostitution money.
	Cash comes in big piles.
	They'll go to Vegas.
	They'll put it down.
	They'll turn it into chips.
	They'll risk it.
	They'll lose 2% or 3% because the casino takes 2% or 3% on some of the games.
	And they'll get back their chips and they'll turn it back into casino cash.
	You can't track the money.
	That's exactly what Sam Bankman-Free did with customer money.
	He took it from FTX, deposited customer accounts, ran it and said, oh, we're going to trade your money in Alameda Trading.
	She trades, she loses.
	It comes back with whatever's left over after her losses.
	And then it's not necessarily going back into FTX.
	He broke the rules, broke the law, and turned it into his own slush fund and borrowed and loaned it to friends and bought stuff with it and spent lavishly on parties.
	Every employee at FTX had a $200 food, you know, Uber Eats allowance every single day.
	Every employee.
	Every day.
	Classic thief.
	He was just a fun thief.
	Wow.
	Okay.
	So this is very interesting because I will say in reading Andy's piece, he makes the point that you just made.
	He says, the guidelines are severe.
	And he says, I've always believed the fraud guidelines are too harsh.
	Sam Bankman-Fried may be a terrible person, but he didn't commit murders.
	Yeah, that's how a lot of people are looking at it.
	He didn't murder anybody.
	So, how could he be going to jail for life?
	But murder, like you can ruin somebody's life by taking their life and you can also ruin it by taking away their fortune, their reputation, their life savings.
	I mean, just look at all the people who killed themselves after the financial crisis in 1929, in 2008.
	You know, this is a severe and very risky business stealing people's life fortunes.
Athletes vs. Cardiac Arrest 00:14:44
	Yeah.
	I mean, Madoff's going away for life and other, you know, you need a reason not to do this.
	You need to show the world, hey, if he gets 10 years and walks away with the 250, you know, whatever, whatever he's got stashed somewhere, if he's able to lose $2 billion somewhere, I'm sure he can put 50 million somewhere else.
	The guy's really smart.
	He figured out a way around all the bells and whistles, all the financial regulatory things he was supposed to be doing.
	He figured a way around it the way Madoff did for a long time.
	He got caught.
	So he's got money probably stashed everywhere.
	So we're going to allow someone to go spend 10 years at a club Fed and then get out and be a billionaire on the wrong way.
	We need to have a reason to tell criminals, you don't want to do this.
	Are you going to end up like Madoff and many Madoff?
	Yeah, I tend to agree with you.
	All right, let's shift gears and talk football because one of your many hobbies is sports and football.
	And co-sided a podcast with Brett Favre and talked all about sports and life.
	And now in the news is this horrific injury that happened on the Buffalo Bills.
	And the latest involves blowback on, forgive me, it's Skip Bayless of Fox Sports.
	Trying to find the exact, hold on, hold on, I'll find it.
	The exact tweet.
	Okay, here it is.
	Skip Bayless is under fire because on his Fox Sports show that he co-hosts with Shannon Sharp after it, I guess, he tweeted in the middle of this debacle that after DeMar Hamlin got hurt and had a cardiac arrest.
	And now we know, by the way, that he was resuscitated not once, but twice, had to be resuscitated, not once, but twice, according to a family member, once on the field, once in the hospital.
	Not good.
	Though the family member says his intubation is now only 50% necessary.
	Not exactly sure I understand that, but they're saying 50% of the breathing may be coming from him, him now and not all from the breathing tube.
	So they were marking that as a positive sign in his recovery.
	You know, we have no idea whether the recovery is robust or not.
	In any event, Skip Bayless tweeted out, no doubt the NFL is considering postponing the rest of this game.
	But how?
	This late in the season, a game of this magnitude is crucial to the regular season outcome.
	That is a true statement of fact, by the way.
	Then he says, which suddenly seems so irrelevant, the regular season outcome, which suddenly seems so irrelevant.
	Well, I got to tell you, I saw him like, okay, I don't, I'm not offended.
	I see what he's trying to say.
	He's like, he's saying they must be considering postponing it.
	This is a critical game, but it seems so irrelevant.
	Like that's, how is that controversial?
	Well, it is.
	My God.
	NFL players, NBA players, retired pro athletes calling for him to be fired regarding that tweet.
	Free agent NBA point guard Isaiah Thomas replied saying, I hope they fire you, bro.
	For you to even think of the game is very sad.
	ESPN NBA analyst Kendrick Perkins, you're a sick individual.
	Real talk.
	Hall of Fame wide receiver Terrell Owens, even I know that name, reposted his tweet to Instagram that says, this is the most despicable tweet ever, adding, I hope you lose your job.
	Former NBA champion Matt Barnes commented under that post, writing, someone going to slap the best out of Skip one of these days.
	And then today, Skip Bayless and his co-host Shannon Sharp got back into it.
	Keep in mind, Skip Bayless kind of apologized for that tweet already.
	He tweeted out afterward, saying nothing's more important than the young man's health.
	That was the point of my last tweet.
	I am sorry if that was misunderstood, but his health is all that matters.
	Again, everything else is irrelevant.
	I prayed for him and will continue to.
	Did not appease the mob.
	Here they are discussing it on their show today.
	Skip tweeted something, and although I disagree with the tweet, and hopefully Skip would take it down, but I didn't want it.
	Time out.
	Time out.
	I'm not going to take it down because I stand by what I tweeted.
	Skip, let me finish.
	Go ahead.
	No, you go.
	Go ahead.
	Let's go, Jan.
	Okay.
	I mean, I cannot even get through a monologue without you interrupting.
	You could have came back.
	Well, I thought, Skip, just let me.
	I was going to bring it up.
	No, I was just going to say, Skip, I didn't want to yesterday to get into a situation where DeMar Hamlin was the issue.
	We should have been talking about him and not get into your, not get into your tweet.
	That's what I was going to do.
	But you can't even let me finish my opening monologue without you interrupting.
	Okay.
	I was under the impression you weren't going to bring this up because nobody here had a problem with that tweet.
	No.
	Clearly, the bosses wanted you to offer explanations.
	So clearly, somebody.
	No, they did not.
	Nobody.
	Let's go, Jan.
	Thoughts and prayers remain with DeMar Hamlin.
	That's where the focus should have been and not on the football game.
	Yes.
	Let's go, Jim.
	Thank you.
	Oh, boy.
	I didn't know who Jan was.
	I thought Jan was the producer until, I guess, a reporter named Jan popped up.
	What do you make of this whole thing, Eric?
	So when he tweeted that, Megan, it was live.
	I was watching.
	I watched the game and he tweeted in my Twitter album because I was trying to see what was happening.
	DeMar Hamlin was still on the ground, on the field.
	He was on the turf, on his back.
	They were administering CPR.
	Basically, he was dead.
	They were playing God when Skip Bayless tweeted that.
	I immediately tweeted, I said, wow, you're really going to regret this, brother, soon.
	Big.
	And he did.
	I thought it was disgusting.
	I thought it was horrible.
	Wait, why?
	Why is it disgusting?
	Why is it disgusting?
	Because honestly, I'm happy to find Skip Bayless disgusting if disgusting behavior comes.
	But he's saying, as a sports analyst to the audience, they're going to consider postponing this game.
	But how can they do it given that the season's about to end and the season suddenly seems so irrelevant?
	I get it.
	It's not what he said.
	It's when he said it.
	The young man, the 24-year-old is fighting for his life.
	And here's a guy, Skip Bayless, with a decent size audience, a nice size audience, if you like you and I, making a comment because he wants to be first.
	He wants to get to the record first that he's going to make a comment on whether this game should go on or not.
	Okay.
	I did a whole monologue on this yesterday.
	I think Skip Bayless was being an opportunist for doing it when this young man is trying to survive.
	I think the people on the right, some of my friends, some people I used to work with tweeting, questioning whether the vaccine, the NFL mandate on the vaccine had something to do with this young man laying dead on the field.
	I thought that was a political opportunism.
	I think Skip was a sports opportunism.
	They all were doing it for their own good, not for the good of a young man dying on the field.
	Dying.
	And he did.
	He's flatlined twice, as he pointed out.
	He was brought back.
	So he is alive.
	Speculating and having conversations about what the NFL should or shouldn't do or whether or not he should or should not have had a vaccine or not.
	But just don't do it when his family is watching him from the stands, dead on the field, and they're administering CPR.
	And that was happening simultaneously.
	And that's why I had a problem with Baylor.
	Okay, I get it.
	I get the timing makes it more insensitive in your view.
	I mean, I will say on the vaccine questions, like I talked to Dr. Drew about this yesterday on his show, and he is one of the people who tweeted out something to the effect of, I don't want to misstate his tweet, but it was something to the effect of many athletes are dropping.
	And like, I do think it's okay.
	Again, timing is another question.
	I think it's okay to say what could have caused this because we don't know whether it was that sudden cardiac death where you get struck in the heart.
	That's speculation too.
	You know, we have to wait to hear from the doctors would actually come, but like, it could have been that.
	What else could it have been?
	You know, could it have been, did he have some latent heart condition that we don't know about?
	Like, obviously people ask questions about the vaccines because we know that they cause myocarditis and people have been dying as a result, even though the mainstream media won't talk about it.
	And in some cases, we've seen that affect athletes.
	So I like, I get uncomfortable when it's like, you're not allowed to raise any of those questions.
	You can only go into the lane of that he got hit in the heart and that's what caused it.
	We don't, we don't know that either.
	That's also speculation.
	You and I both have an opinion on whether or not the NFL should have started the game or not and whether or not the NFL should complete the game or not, or whether or not the NFL should mandate vaccines for their players or not.
	My point is and should always be, if someone's life is hanging in the balance and there are tens of millions of eyeballs watching the young man struggle for his life, let's put all that other stuff aside just for a heartbeat and literally no pun intended or pun intended until he survives or doesn't.
	And then we can go and jump into it.
	My problem is that the media tends to be such vultures just to go at and pick the target as it's laying there and see what we can do for our own respective side while someone's life is laying in the balance.
	But there's opportunism.
	There's opportunism in these commentaries is what you're suggesting.
	Yeah, that was it.
	That was all.
	So what do you make of it?
	Because some people have taken it to football.
	It's dangerous.
	You know, speaking of vultures, we're vultures for watching it, for taking in, you know, sort of the abuse of these young men for money and for our own pleasure.
	I, you know, I just don't see this one injury the same at all as like the Tua concussion injury where they put him right back out there after he was clearly hurt the week before or days before.
	Like this is, this just seems like a once in a lifetime.
	Like this is not an injury if it is the sudden heart injury that comes with a blunt force impact at just the right moment when your heart's beating.
	That doesn't really happen in football.
	I'm not sure we can extrapolate anything from this situation to football writ large, but what do you think?
	Yeah, I don't think you blame football for it.
	It's a violent sport.
	If you ask any one of those athletes, if, you know, if you make them sign the document that says, hey, you might in a rare instance have this situation where, you know, a helmet could hit you as your heart in the middle of a heartbeat and it could kill you.
	Would you still want to play this game?
	Do you still want to try and be a superstar athlete?
	Of course, they're going to all say yes.
	They all know the risk of that.
	They also all know the risk of major brain injury.
	And that's far more common, as you point out.
	So it's a violent sport.
	It's a dangerous sport.
	It's getting safer every single year.
	They're taking precautions.
	Personally, I think they can soften the helmets.
	I think shoulder pads and helmets could be soft.
	You don't hear the hits like they love on TV, but it'll be a heck of a lot safer.
	I can't blame the NFL for this one.
	And I don't think anyone should.
	You're a big baseball player.
	That's the sport in which this normally happens, they say, like where the baseball hits your heart.
	I mean, this is a known and identified risk now these days in sports like baseball, hockey, where there's a puck and certain other sports, but not football.
	Yeah, because the projectile in baseball and hockey is smaller and it hits you in the right spot at the right time in the heart.
	It creates this commodeo, whatever it's called.
	And it's a rare, but can be fatal injury.
	The helmet is what hit her shoulder.
	Helmet is what hit DeMar Hamlin.
	It's a bigger projectile, maybe not as fast as a baseball or a hockey puck coming at you, but hit him at the right or the wrong time exactly.
	So yeah, in baseball, little leaguers are now, some leagues are having their little leaguers wear a chest plate because of the risk of this.
	So again, it's not an uncommon, or it's not an unknown.
	It wasn't.
	Well, and there's so many other risks that are known that these world-class athletes accept.
	And it's not because they want to entertain us or be our little playthings.
	It's because that drive to succeed at sport in athletics is intense.
	It's cultivated by oneself, by one's society, whatever, by one's family from a very early age.
	And I think you either have it or you don't.
	Brett, speaking of Brett, you know him well.
	I interviewed him while on NBC about his CTE, which he's been very outspoken about.
	He's had, who knows?
	It could be he said thousands of concussions while playing in the NFL.
	I don't think he wants a do-over.
	You know, I think most of the, like, look at Brady.
	He's a quarterback.
	He knows very well the risks.
	You're the one everybody wants to hit on every single play.
	All these very strong guys wearing all those pads and helmets.
	He continues to play because now he doesn't need any more money.
	He lost his marriage reportedly over it.
	They do it because there's a drive inside of that, a love of the game, of athletics, of winning, right?
	It's like, I don't think the blame for whether it's this injury of DeMar Hamlin or what happened to Brett or what happens to any athlete who happens to get hurt in the sport goes on the American people for being, you know, too, for being vulturesque in their intake of sports.
	Yeah, and we don't, you know, there are probably more people who die in construction accidents than football or baseball or any other sport.
	And we're not saying let's stop construction.
	Look, every Tua, you mentioned Tua, great example, has probably had five high profile concussions in the last two years.
	I mean, that's a lot.
	That's crazy to the point where he'll seize up, his finger seize up or he staggers and falls.
	Ask Tua if he wants to get back on the field.
	I'll bet your dinner, you'll say yes, knowing that the risk is that down the road, he may have severe brain damage and he may not be able to remember his own name or feed himself.
	I mean, look at Muhammad Ali after getting hit so many times, later on in life, couldn't even feed himself.
	So, but these people knew what the risks were, knew what the future may be like, but that drive and it's choice.
	It's personal choice.
	And again, give these young men the choice to lead.
	And I'd say 99.9% would choose not to, even knowing the risks of a DeMar Hamlin or a Tua or Muhammad Ali or Brett Farr for that matter.
	And honestly, look, we, just to remind the audience, we don't know what happened to DeMar Hamlin.
	We don't know.
	That's a speculation that it was this event where if you get hit hard in the heart at just the right moment in the beat cycle, this thing, this sudden cardiac arrest could follow.
Canadian Debbie on the Job 00:03:44
	Who knows?
	It could have been a cardiac arrest due to something else.
	We just don't know yet.
	So hopefully the hospital, the doctors will be in a position where they are able to and have the permission of the family to share more soon.
	And hopefully it's knowable.
	Yeah, I saw his uncle saying that he's breathing 50% on his own.
	He had lung injuries because of the two, the two times he flatlined.
	And he's back to 50%.
	But just because he's breathing on his own, it doesn't mean to be negative.
	It's how long his brain went without oxygen.
	How long did it take them to administer CPR and get oxygen into his brain?
	And how much damage did that do to see?
	He may be able to breathe on his own, but we don't know if he'll ever regain consciousness or to a level that he's functional.
	Well, that's an important flag.
	That's an important flag because while he was very lucky in that the paramedics were right there with a defibrillator, thank God.
	Thank God.
	One never knows because sometimes one's body is so compromised that even once there's been a defibrillator and a doctor doing CPR, the body's not able to receive that input of oxygen in the way it used to be able to prior to the catastrophic event.
	So this is why we need to hear her from the hospital.
	Again, when the family's ready, when the doctors are ready, we're just hoping that'll be sooner rather than later because everybody's rooting for DeMar Halen to do to get better and to be 100% after this.
	Eric Bowling, such a pleasure.
	Such an interesting conversation.
	Love seeing you.
	Love seeing you too, Megan.
	Happy New Year to you and the audience.
	And Danny, who's amazing.
	Our booker, Danny, is amazing.
	Say thank you very much.
	All right.
	We are going to be right back with another fascinating guest talking about a very important topic, the decline in sperm counts and testosterone worldwide.
	Don't miss this.
	Oh, Canadian Debbie is upset.
	She is upset.
	She does not agree with our pal, Eric Bowling.
	She does not think the timing mattered on the Skip Bayless tweet.
	And her point is, and she's, you know, she's like the Holly Hunter character in broadcast news.
	She's a ball buster.
	She's a balls to the wall, you know, television news producer.
	And she has been for many years.
	And her point is, we can't be this sensitive in covering a massive breaking news event.
	And it's literally Skip Bayless's job to ask questions like that, like what will happen with the game?
	I asked that question of Clay Travis yesterday.
	I think even Eric Bowling would say that was fine because it was after the event.
	And I was saying to her, I can understand though, as an on-air person, how you have to be somewhat sensitive when the person may be dying.
	You know, the audience may be experiencing the death of a beloved player.
	And you can see the distress on the faces of the other players.
	And her point was that's not an excuse for you not to do your job, that the NFL officials would have been speculating about what to do.
	They would have had a decision to make.
	And I said, well, that's their job.
	And she said, well, it's also Skip Bayless's job to comment on the sporting event and what its consequences are.
	So we had a very robust discussion.
	I wanted to do it on the air, but she's worried her hair doesn't look good.
	No, no, no.
	She doesn't like to be on the air.
	Only some of us enjoy that kind of weird abusive position.
	She's not one of them.
	In any event, you all know Canadian Debbie and love her.
	So I would love to hear your thoughts on it.
	You can email me.
	Email me at Megan, M-E-G-Y-N, at MeganKelly.com.
	We're taking emails there.
	While you're there, you can sign up for my American News Minute.
	I just submitted my latest Stradwick story to Meg Storm, who produces it for me.
Halving of Global Sperm Counts 00:07:19
	And it's just terrible.
	She's so naughty.
	My dog is so sweet, but so bad.
	Okay, now we're going to switch gears to discuss a very important topic, and that is sperm counts plummeting around the world.
	Maybe you've heard about this, but it's not just sperm counts either.
	Testosterone, too.
	And what is that causing?
	What is that doing?
	What does it mean for your children and the prospect of your grandchildren?
	The birth rate has been cut in half.
	These trends are not getting any better.
	And why is that?
	Is there something you can do about it and I can do about it?
	Here to answer some of these questions is the world's leading environmental and reproductive epidemiologist, Dr. Shauna Swan.
	She's author of Countdown: How Our Modern World is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race.
	Doctor, welcome to the show.
	Thank you so much for being here.
	So this was, correct me if I'm wrong, but this is really the seminal study in 2017 that you did taking like a comprehensive look at all the studies that had been done and the data as we knew it to determine what.
	Hi, Megan.
	First of all, thanks for having me.
	And so what we were doing in 2017 was looking at all the world's data that's been published in English, actually, is what we were able to look at.
	And what we were looking for is what's happened to sperm counts over the close to 40 years that we looked at as we can evaluate it in the published literature.
	And that came out a while ago and it actually went kind of viral because what we were reporting was that sperm counts have been going down consistently and that they've been basically cut in half over this say 40 year period.
	And it has lots and lots of ramifications.
	As you pointed out, other things go down too with it.
	Testosterone is going down, fertility is going down.
	And there are effects on the female side as well.
	So yeah, these are kind of very dramatic changes that we have to pay attention to and ask why.
	Now, as I understand it, for the last 70 years, fertility rates have decreased worldwide with a total of 50% decline.
	As you say, it's been cut in half.
	Up to 1965, the average woman in the world had more than five children.
	That's amazing up to 1965.
	Globally, the average per woman is now below 2.5 children.
	And what you're concluding is that's not by choice.
	There is a lot of choice involved.
	I won't deny that.
	Okay.
	So there are many factors such as economic factors, the availability of contraception, education, women going into the workforce.
	But there are also other influences that we don't have control over.
	And one of the things I like to think about is humans are one species.
	There's lots of species on the planet.
	And there are many, many, many that are declining.
	Everyone knows about populations being endangered and diminishing and so on.
	And the non-human populations don't have the choice that we have.
	They're not looking to the availability of contraception or wanting to go back into the workforce, right?
	They're not just not reproducing.
	And so we have to recognize that we too will have a component of this trend, which is not our choice.
	And that's the one that I'm most concerned about.
	Okay, right.
	Because right around there, in the late 1960s, early 1970s, we had birth control become protected by as a constitutional right, abortion protected as a constitutional right, and all those things might potentially lead to a decrease in the number of children one decides to have.
	But you're saying the animals were not using birth control and they were not taking advantage of abortion.
	And so this goes well beyond choice.
	You found that between 1973 and 2011, sperm concentration, meaning the number of sperm per million per milliliter of semen, dropped more than 52% among random men in Western countries.
	That's crazy.
	That's like, that's a huge drop.
	And then you took another look in November of 2022.
	So very recently, 38 studies of men from South, Central America, Asia, Africa, and found that sperm decline, what, it had gone down even more?
	So that new study, which just came out a few weeks ago, actually, showed two things.
	One is that, yes, sperm count decline has accelerated.
	So if you look at the studies after 2000, the rate is now 2.6% decline per year, whereas before it was just a little over 1% per year.
	So that's a doubling of the rate of decline.
	Pretty alarming.
	But in addition to that, we saw that in countries for which we didn't have sufficient information in the first publication in 2017, we now had additional information enough to say that this is a worldwide trend.
	So it's not limited as the first one was to Europe and North America and Australia and New Zealand.
	We now have it including Africa and Asia and South America.
	So we have all over the world we see this decline and it's pretty alarming.
	Yeah, no, it matters because, okay, it's not ideal if no American man can produce a baby in 40 years, but there would be some comfort if we knew that other men in other parts of the world could still produce babies, thus the continuation of the human race.
	But the sperm counts are going dramatically down everywhere, which now we're talking about, you know, an existential problem potentially.
	Correct me if I'm wrong.
	I read in your research that in 1973, the average Western man had a sperm count of 99 million sperms per milliliter of semen.
	99 million, that that was the average in 1973.
	And now they're saying like normal, it could be considered like between 15 million and 40 million per milliliter of semen.
	Well, that trend, the number was right.
	You know, the initially 99 million per milliliter at the start of our study.
	And at the end of the study period, we saw only 47.
	So it was cut in half.
	Cut in half.
	47 million sperm per milliliter.
	By the way, maybe just a point of clarification.
	So in a sample, you can look at the way you count sperm is you look at the sperm on a plate under a microscope, and the plate is divided into a grid.
	And then you count in these little squares on the grid, right?
	And so what you get is a concentration.
	Number per squares is actually number per, and then you multiply it and you can say how many sperm per milliliter because you know the volume.
Understanding Semen Concentration 00:03:47
	Okay.
	You can also talk about the total sperm count, which is a different thing, which is how many sperm are in the whole sample.
	And for that, you take the concentration and you multiply it by the volume of the sample, right?
	So both of those have gone down.
	The total sperm count has gone down actually a little faster, a little more than the concentration, but they're both reflecting the same thing.
	How many milliliters in a normal production of semen?
	Oh, gosh, you got me there.
	I don't remember.
	The point I'm going for is, you know, 99 million or 99.
	I'll look it up in the break for you.
	Yeah, because the point I'm trying to get to.
	Yes.
	Okay, we have to take a break, but I do want to, the point I'm trying to get to is it's gone down, but there's still millions of little sperms.
	So a lot of us are thinking, well, it's not ideal.
	Right, but we all know like how many sperm comes out in a semen.
	It's a lot.
	It's unlike the women's egg.
	So how dire is it?
	That's the question I will leave permeating the air while I squeeze in a quick commercial break and come back to Dr. Shauna Swan.
	Thank you, ma'am.
	Be right back to you.
	And don't forget, folks, you can find the Megan Kelly Show live on SiriusXM Triumph Channel 111 every weekday at noon East and the full video show and clips at our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash Megan Kelly.
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	So much fun for you to spend time with on a long trip, on a night you can't fall asleep.
	I'm there for you.
	Update for you from the House floor just to keep you up to date on what's happening with Kevin McCarthy.
	It's equally bad for him today as it was yesterday.
	New York Times, on the fourth ballot, we are very much in the same position as we were on the first ballot.
	There are still about 20 Republicans opposed to McCarthy who appear unmoved.
	Jake Sherman, reporter for I think it's Punch Bowl News, says, tweets out as follows.
	McCarthy has not moved a single vote in his favor now.
	Vote's ongoing.
	Leadership also worried about not being able to pass an adjournment resolution.
	I'm not sure what's worse, but things have not improved for McCarthy at all.
	Talks are fruitless.
	And it looks once again like Kevin McCarthy is closer than ever to never being Speaker of the House.
	The never Kevin crowd seems to be getting its way.
	What that means for the House, for the Republicans, for presidential politics, which we'll turn to probably this spring in earnest, we don't know, but it's not a good day for Kevin McCarthy or those who think he should be the next speaker.
	We'll continue to watch it.
	Meantime, as I mentioned before the break, we have a special guest today.
	Her name is Dr. Shanna Swan.
	She's author of Countdown, How Our Modern World is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race.
	And just to bring you a couple of the good doctors' qualifications, she's one of the world's leading environmental and reproductive epidemiologists.
	She is professor of environmental medicine and public health at the Icon School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, very well respected.
	For over 20 years, she and her colleagues have been studying the dramatic decline in sperm count around the world and the impact of environmental chemicals and pharmaceuticals on the reproductive tract development and neurodevelopment.
	Her July 2017 paper, Temporal Trends in Sperm Count, ranked number 26 amongst all reference scientific papers published in the world in 2017.
	I could go on.
	So she knows of what she speaks.
Early Pregnancy and Fertility 00:15:15
	So Dr. Swan, we were talking about sperm count.
	And all along, we women have been told, you know, you only produce the one little egg a month if you're lucky, right?
	Between a certain limited number of years when you hit puberty to prior to menopause.
	And we all know it's it's well prior to menopause because, you know, from 40 to 51, 52, whatever, you're not really producing a whole ton of eggs that are capable of being fertilized.
	And so, but the guys, I mean, 99 million per milliliter of sperm, even if it's fallen to 40, even it's 15 milliliter per milliliter of sperm.
	Seems like they're golden.
	Why is it a problem?
	It's true that we have humans an excess of sperm.
	And how many, let's go back to that question, what's the volume of a sample?
	So the volume of sample is between one and a half and five milliliters.
	And five milliliters is about a teaspoon.
	So we're talking about half to a teaspoon of sperm per sample, right?
	And in that, you've got maybe, you know, 50,000 in each milliliter.
	Multiplying that by three or four, you've got a lot of sperm.
	However, studies have shown that when that number shrinks to below 50, 40, it's not an exact cutoff, million per milliliter, then it gets harder.
	It takes longer to conceive a pregnancy.
	And in addition to the count, we have to remember that these guys have to swim and they have to swim in a straight line.
	Circles don't get you anywhere.
	And they have to be shaped well.
	Two heads don't make it and two tails don't make it.
	And there's lots and lots of criteria for what's a healthy shape morphology is called.
	And then there's the chromosomes in there, which are going to be so important for the next generation, right?
	And those chromosomes have to be normal.
	So there's also the question of chromosomal abnormality.
	So there's a lot of criteria, you know, that these sperm have to, you know, satisfy in order to be successful.
	And it turns out that, like I said, when the number drops below around 45 million per milliliter, which is accompanied, by the way, by drops in motility and shape and morphology and also chromosomal damage, these things go together.
	So when the number goes down, the quality goes down.
	And all of these imperil fertility.
	That's probably more than you wanted to hear, but there it is.
	It's not.
	It's not.
	I've joked, I've talked to my kids about, you know, of course, how babies are made and how, you know, there's all these sperm and like the one sperm makes it and fertilizes the egg.
	And my little guy is just so proud that like the very strongest sperm found its way to the egg.
	Like he's the product of this incredibly strong special sperm that beat out all the other sperms and found the egg against all the odds.
	And I know you've written, it actually is against the odds.
	Like conception, it is against the odds.
	We, as young women, were always told when we were, you know, when you're sort of coming of childbearing age and you're, let's say, 15, 16, 17, you're the most fertile person on earth.
	If you just look at a man the wrong way, you're going to get pregnant.
	And the truth is, even under the best circumstances, with the two most fertile people, the chances are what that you would get pregnant, you know, unprotected sex during the right time of month.
	Well, in, let's see, in a good, you know, a healthy couple, you know, about 12% of them won't do it in a year, you know, and then first, in the first month, maybe a third will do it, and that's great.
	And they'll be, you know, they'll be successful.
	And then it goes down from there.
	So, yeah, you got to keep trying.
	You got about a 30% chance of becoming pregnant.
	You got a 70% chance of not becoming pregnant.
	And that anybody who's tried to get pregnant and has failed knows how disheartening those numbers are.
	And they only go down when you get older and when the sperm count is low and when the eggs are getting affected and when the sperm quality is not ideal and all this.
	So quality and quantity.
	Can I ask, maybe this is a dumb question, but does sperm count and quality matter beyond continuation of the human race?
	Is there some other negative effect to that?
	Yes.
	There's a study just recently that showed that when a couple had to go to assisted reproduction to conceive, right?
	So there were problems without saying what the problems were.
	There were some problems.
	They had to get help, medical help to conceive the pregnancy.
	And they did.
	Their offspring will have impaired fertility.
	That's one example.
	That's not good.
	And there are, you know, basically, if things that mess up sperm mess up the entire body because they depend on hormones, which drive the development of every system in the body, including the brain.
	And so it's not just reproductive function in and of itself.
	It's, you know, it has impacts for the health of that person.
	And by the way, a man or a woman who are less fertile will, on average, die earlier.
	Oh, what?
	Why?
	Well, because it's a signal that something has gone wrong along the way to get to that point, maybe starting in pregnancy, even when they were in the womb.
	And the things that went wrong are often things with your hormones.
	Because hormones we know are very intimately tied to reproductive success, right?
	Testosterone, you need that, estrogen, and so on.
	So if you mess that up, particularly very early in pregnancy, you're going to mess up a lot of things, right?
	And it takes a good amount of testosterone at the right time in this programmed development.
	Don't forget, it's kind of like a ballet.
	You know, there's a whole script for this, which is controlled by your genetic makeup.
	And when the genes are programmed to produce testosterone or estrogen, they got to do it at that time.
	Otherwise, if you will, the ballerina is not going to be caught.
	What do you say at that time?
	It's going to be an accident.
	It's going to be a problem.
	All of these things have to follow the script.
	And so when that's messed up, which I believe we can talk about why it can be messed up.
	Yeah, we'll get to that.
	Then you're going to, things will go awry.
	But don't forget, it's not just your generals that need testosterone.
	It's also your brain.
	It's also many systems in your body.
	And then other hormones can go wrong.
	Those that control appetite, those that control immune function, those that control every system in your body can be messed up.
	And when that happens, you'll get disease or you'll get dysfunction.
	And one of those ways you can get dysfunction is reproductive.
	And that's what we're talking about today.
	And when you made the reference at that time, when things go wrong at that time, the ballerina can fall.
	Do you mean when you're trying to conceive a baby, when you're pregnant with a baby, what is the relevant time?
	So for men, the relevant time is the 70 days before they conceive that pregnancy.
	So let me say why that is.
	Men make sperm all the time.
	Okay.
	They have these, what are called germ cells that are like sperm generators.
	And then throughout his adult life, he will make sperm continually.
	And it takes about 70 days to make a sperm.
	So the sperm that produced your son, the good sperm that produced your healthy son, was in development about 70 days before he was conceived.
	So things that could go wrong in that run-up, such as maybe the man smoking, the man drinking a lot, man being heavily stressed, and so on and so forth, can make changes to that sperm, right?
	Wow.
	So that's the most influential period for the man.
	For the woman, once that conception has occurred, she's starting the program, if you will.
	The band is starting playing, the script is running.
	And every aspect of development is programmed to occur at a different point in gestation.
	And so for much of what I study, the critical time is in the first trimester.
	And we don't know exactly, but it's probably weeks 10 to 12 of gestation before you're even aware maybe that you're pregnant.
	All this stuff is being laid down.
	That's like my mom.
	I always give her a hard time.
	It's just like the brain.
	It's much later and so on.
	But for that, it's really scary, isn't it?
	Oh, well, I was telling my audience not long ago, but my mom, I was born in 1970, right?
	The science wasn't really that well known, but common sense told a lot of people not to do what my mom did.
	So there's a picture of my mom smoking a cigarette.
	I mean, truly like out of a magazine and with a martini with a pregnant belly.
	And I'm in there.
	I'm like, Ma!
	She goes, well, I never did that the first trimester.
	She was onto something.
	She was onto something.
	Because the more rapidly the cells are developing, the more cells that are developing, more sensitive they are to these environments.
	And we know how quickly, you know, these cells develop in very early pregnancy.
	So she was onto something with, you know, worrying most about the first trimester.
	I wish more people did.
	The problem is that you don't know you're pregnant often, right?
	So you might not know until 10 weeks.
	And it gets a little hard to, you know, cut out everything that you shouldn't be doing.
	So, but in any case, all during pregnancy, you should be really careful.
	And then there are times later in life when cells are developing again, puberty and so on, that are also quite sensitive.
	But the prenatal period is definitely the most sensitive.
	Okay.
	All right.
	And now you mentioned testosterone.
	This is another piece of the story.
	It's not just lower sperm counts.
	It's also low, low T.
	And we've come to know that term.
	You've got lower testosterone as a man.
	Now, first, can I just ask you, what does that look like in a man?
	If a man, let's say he's born with lower testosterone and he, whatever, for whatever reason, he's got low testosterone while he's young.
	It's not just like one of these older guys who has it.
	Will he, forgive me, these may be really stupid questions, but will he appear more effeminate?
	Will he, you know, will that manifest in like a way we could see it?
	So they're not stupid questions, and they're good questions actually.
	And so testosterone, by the way, women have it also, but less.
	Okay.
	And in both men and women, testosterone is absolutely essential for healthy reproductive function, but it's also linked to muscle mass.
	It's also linked to brain function.
	It's also linked to libido, sexual desire, sexual satisfaction.
	And so it's not something that people want to go down once they're adults.
	And by the way, it isn't level across life.
	You know, it changes over time, everything does.
	So there's a peak of testosterone in utero, which we talked about in early pregnancy.
	Then there's a peak right after birth.
	And then it kind of flattens out and stays, you know, low and until puberty, and then it starts to come up again.
	And then it stays in men up their whole life, going down slowly.
	All right.
	So it's there all the time.
	And by the way, there's a cycle over the day also.
	It's highest in the morning and lowest in the evening.
	And there's other things that influence it.
	But it's very essential throughout your life.
	And it's essential for women too.
	I'll just tell you a little anecdote.
	I study pregnant women, right?
	Our studies are, you know, bring a pregnant woman in early in pregnancy and measure a lot of things in her body.
	And one of the things we measure is chemicals that make plastic soft.
	Those are called phthalates, and we'll probably talk about those because they're very important to the story.
	But it turned out that when a woman had higher levels of those chemicals in her body, she reported having less sexual satisfaction and frequency.
	Well, that makes sense if it affects testosterone.
	That's right.
	That's right.
	And in the men, it's the same thing.
	And also other chemicals that may do various things to plastics and products can affect the man's testosterone.
	So we're making these all the time, but we're also sensitive to chemicals in the environment that can affect these all the time.
	Not for nothing, but the phthalates that you mentioned, I read in your research.
	They're problematic on so many levels, you know, causing potentially low sperm count, decreasing female fertility, causing low testosterone.
	Then there's this.
	When I started looking at phthalates around 2000, phthalate syndrome had been shown experimentally in rodents, but not in humans.
	Mother rats, given phthalates, had male babies with a smaller penis and scrotum, in addition to their sperm counts being lower and so on.
	So that's another thing.
	I mean, like, you know, that is something that men worry about.
	And I didn't realize that, you know, a lot of phthalates around you, and we'll talk about what those are, can lead to all sorts of problems, including aesthetic ones.
	Yeah, I wouldn't actually call them just aesthetic.
	I think there's functional, you know, effects.
	And this phthalate syndrome, which is really important.
	And by the way, the only chemical that has a syndrome named after it is phthalates.
	You don't talk about the pesticide syndrome or the dioxin syndrome.
	You talk about the phthalate syndrome.
	It's a very big problem.
	And it affects the development and starting in early pregnancy of the male.
The Phthalate Syndrome Explained 00:06:09
	And then it will result in lower sperm count.
	So let's get into that.
	Let's get into it.
	We're talking about phthalates right now because now we're into the, what's causing this?
	This is, what the hell's causing all this low testosterone and low sperm count and decreased female fertility and the birth rate cut in half?
	What is it?
	And this is where your era of expertise comes in.
	And you've been studying, you know, this is what, well, actually, let me start with this.
	Just explain briefly, what does an epidemiologist do?
	Great.
	Well, you know, we're all familiar with COVID, and that's a kind of epidemiology I don't do.
	So epidemiology is kind of split into infectious, that's COVID and other infectious diseases, and there's chronic disease epidemiology.
	And that includes cancer and includes reproduction, and it's what I do.
	So I'm a reproductive epidemiologist.
	And what I do is actually examine reproductive function in relation to things that can affect it.
	So, and how I do that is to measure things in people, right?
	So the model that I've used for a long time now is to go into clinics where pregnant women are being seen, prenatal clinics, and ask them if they'd like to participate in a study.
	And if they agree and consent, then we recruit them.
	And then they are in the study, right?
	And we've done that in states all over the United States, and people do that all over the world.
	It's a very standard model.
	They're called pregnancy cohort studies.
	And so once the woman has agreed, she usually completes a questionnaire and she tells us about her reproductive history and her diet and her activities and her smoking and her alcohol and so on and so forth.
	And then If she's willing, we collect a urine sample from her and sometimes a blood sample.
	And then we hope to repeat that in each trimester or even more frequently because things change all the time across the pregnancy.
	So, and then once the child is born, we can examine that child.
	And that's where we see the phthalate syndrome.
	Okay.
	Okay, so let me just advance it.
	So, because we've discussed, you identified the problem and you identified it with men across the world.
	It's a legit thing and women too.
	And now the question is, as an epidemiologist, why?
	What's causing it?
	And you actually have real conclusions on that.
	I mean, correct me, but the short answer is plastics and modern chemicals.
	I mean, is that the short answer?
	I would say that is a significant piece of the short answer.
	We should also talk about lifestyle factors because, for example, your smoking isn't good for your sperm.
	Alcohol binge drinking isn't good for your sperm.
	Stress isn't.
	Bad diet isn't.
	So these other factors, which we can put in the bucket of lifestyle factors, are also really important.
	But where I've worked hardest is in these chemicals.
	So how do you know what your chemicals exposure is?
	So you can ask somebody, how much do you smoke?
	You can ask them, did you take drug A or drug B?
	That's on the questionnaire.
	But actually, the best way to know what somebody's exposed to is to measure something in their body that reflects that, right?
	And it turns out that many of these things are short-lived.
	They're called non-persistent.
	They don't stay in the body.
	They are dumped into the urine.
	And so that's good because it's easy to get a urine sample and store it safely.
	And then you can take that sample to the lab and ask the chemist, how many markers of these chemicals do you see?
	They have technically a metabolite.
	So the urine in the urine, the phthalate breaks down into these subparticles and the chemist measures them.
	And by looking at those, the chemist can tell us what the level is.
	And then we know that what the mother was exposed to.
	How long would they stay in there?
	If you see a lot in there, does it mean she, if you see a lot in there in the urine, does it mean she must have had exposure to them within the past day or within the past 40 years?
	Yeah, that's a really good question.
	So there are sort of two big buckets of chemicals.
	There's a persistent and the non-persistent.
	And phthalates are non-persistent.
	They leave the body very quickly.
	And so what you're seeing when you measure it is what she was exposed to in the last 12 hours, probably.
	If it is something like a pesticide that's persistent or a flame retardant or something that makes your pans non-stick, for example, these are called forever chemicals.
	So they'll stay in the body and you can measure them, but you don't know what period they're reflecting.
	That could have been exposure a long time ago, at least a couple of years ago.
	And then there are some that stay around even longer.
	Those are banned now, the dioxins and the PCBs and so on.
	So the property of the chemical, its ability to stay in the body or to stay in the environment, is a question, answers that question.
	How long has it been since she was exposed?
	And by the way, you can do that in a man too.
	So if you want to know your son, you know, healthy son, you and his dad were probably not exposed to high levels of bad things.
	But the man can, you know, you can get his urine too, and you can measure them in his urine.
	Well, how do you know?
Persistent Chemicals in Our Bodies 00:06:05
	I mean, this is one of my fears.
	But one of my fears is, you know, you grew up in the 70s.
	My husband tells a story about how down at the beach where we go, his older brother and sister used to chase the DEET truck that was blowing huge wafts of DEET all over the town.
	The chemical we're told to avoid in off, though we all use it if we get into the deep woods because it works so well.
	Like, okay, so you got that in the 70s.
	And then you come upon the microwave in or around 1980.
	And we all were putting lean cuisines in there and other things that are in plastic and heating them up and then eating them, which I know from your research is a no-no.
	Don't heat plastic in the microwave and then eat out of it.
	Right.
	And don't keep your food in plastic containers when it's like, and then eat out of it.
	And nonstick cookware, my God, everybody's got that because it works so well.
	And that stuff you say you can't get.
	So I don't know if my husband and I would test low on this.
	I'm worried.
	Well, it was not too much, evidently, for your son, right?
	So you can feel good about that.
	But we can't really avoid these things.
	And by the way, not all plastics are created equal, I should say.
	You know, if you want to sort of check it out, look at the triangle on the bottom of a bottle or a container.
	And there's a number.
	It's a recycling code.
	So there's this little ditty: four, seven, four, five, one, and two.
	All the rest are bad for you.
	And seven is not good.
	And six is not good.
	Four, five, one, and two is good.
	Four, five, one, and two is okay.
	Even one and two, you don't want, but you know, you can feel better about using one and two.
	So four, five, one, and two maybe are less pernicious than the other numbers.
	Right.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	Wow.
	So, all right.
	So let's talk about it.
	Like what things you mentioned the non-nonstick cookware.
	I know that you use, you can use stainless steel or cast iron.
	I know you like that.
	I like cast iron too.
	And it actually doesn't stick that much.
	It's actually pretty good if you put, you know, some butter and oil in there.
	So what are like the worst culprits?
	Because when I read the list, I started to feel depressed.
	It was like no shampoo and toothpaste and hairspray and makeup.
	I'm like, well, this is my whole routine.
	It's gone.
	It's overwhelming.
	And what I like to say to people, you know, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
	You know, you can't control it all.
	You can't limit it all.
	I think what you can do is kind of once in a while, just maybe take an inventory and think, do I know what's in this?
	And often you don't because things don't have to be labeled.
	There's an organization called the Environmental Working Group.
	You can go there and you can put, they have guides for different kinds of consumer products.
	So you can put in sunscreen and you can put in different kinds of cosmetics.
	And they will have tested all of these things, which is amazing because the government doesn't do it.
	So if you go there and put your product in there and you'll get a score and you can try to buy things that have a better score.
	But in general, I would say if you can eat food that's unprocessed, right?
	We can talk about processing in a minute, but buy it at the supermarket if you are living near a supermarket with fresh food, by the way, which not everybody is.
	It's an economic thing.
	And buy it unprocessed, take it home, cook it and eat it.
	That's the safest thing you can do.
	Okay.
	Once you have to store it, you're going to have to think about what your container is.
	Obviously, glass is preferable to plastic, but not all, as I say, not all plastics are created equal.
	And I would say think about your average.
	Think about what you're doing on the average.
	Try to do okay most of the time and not be too hard on yourself because I don't want to give the message that everybody should be policing everything they do and everyone around them and what they do because that gets obnoxious, right?
	You can't do that.
	But you can try to reduce your exposure by being aware that everything, including, by the way, our air, our dust, our water, contain plastics.
	And now we know microplastics, the breakdown product of those plastics, is everywhere.
	So it's kind of a hard job to avoid these.
	And I think we have to make changes much higher up rather than on the consumer level.
	We can't really shop our way out of this or, you know, do it on our own.
	We need help.
	But like the government needs to start regulating things to ban some of these destructive, dangerous chemicals.
	And right now, they're not doing really anything.
	They're not helping us at all.
	And I'm not for big government, but this really is a ubiquitous problem that every human, never mind American, is dealing with.
	And it's just the Wild West.
	Right.
	And we could do better.
	And I just want to give you one example.
	The EU does better.
	And they have much better regulations.
	They actually require that a product be tested before it's put in the market, which sounds kind of radical.
	You know, we don't do that.
	And now in the EU, something like 1,100 products are banned from cosmetics.
	In the US, 11.
	11 versus 1,100.
	Now, those numbers may have changed since the last time I read that, but the idea is that we're doing very little and it is possible to do much more.
Global Plastic Pollution Impact 00:10:14
	But is it teaspoons in the ocean?
	Is it teaspoons in the ocean?
	Like, I mean, would you guess that in 40 years, if you take the, if nothing else changes, and you take the fertility rate of American men versus European men, it will have changed because of those solutions?
	Or no, because it's teaspoons in the ocean over there in the ocean, they're still swimming in it too.
	Right.
	Both of those things, I would say.
	I think the countries that are being more careful with their plastics and with their products are probably doing better, but not well, because as you say, air is mixed globally, water is mixed globally, things are shipped globally.
	We don't know where the products in our house come from, usually.
	What country have they come from?
	What were the controls in that country?
	So it's, we don't see big geographic variations in sperm count.
	Of course, we didn't have very fine data, very, you know, enough data to say something about individual countries.
	So that's possible that there are some places in the world that are really good.
	We do know that there are some places in the world that are having more problems.
	One way to look at that is the fertility rate.
	And in East Asia, it's extremely low, extremely low.
	So do you know what?
	You say fertility rate is a demographic term and refers to the number of children that a woman or a couple can be expected to have in their lifetime.
	Okay.
	And as you started this hour, you talked about a fertility rate that had declined by 50%, where we used to have five children per woman or couple, and now that's gone down.
	That's absolutely correct.
	And so you can look at that fertility rate by country.
	And if a couple produce reproduces themselves, they'll have two children, right?
	Two people, two children, and maybe 2.1 because occasionally, sadly, a child gets lost.
	So 2.1 children.
	We're below that now.
	And in East Asia, many countries are around one.
	And the lowest I've heard is South Korea, which is 0.89.
	That means that a couple will only produce fewer than one child on the average in their lifetime.
	That's really low.
	So there are geographic differences.
	All right.
	So wait, that's a good place to pause it because I want to know why.
	Why is East Asia having that problem?
	And I know you did a study looking at the sperm count of men in a part of Missouri versus part of Minnesota and found a vast difference.
	And we'll talk about what it was and why right after this very quick break.
	Dr. Swan stays with us.
	So Doc, what explains the low fertility rate in East Asia and what happened when you compared men in rural Missouri with more urban men in Minnesota?
	So Megan, the low fertility rate in East Asia is a mystery.
	I have to say, I can speculate that they have more products.
	They produce certainly many plastic products, but I have not studied that and I haven't seen anybody who's actually looked into that in a deep way.
	So I have to say that's a mystery.
	The question of Missouri versus Minnesota, however, is less of a mystery, though there's many mysterious things going on there too.
	So we, in our studies, I told you how we did these studies of pregnant women.
	And two of the places we included were Columbia, Missouri, where I was living at the time, which is semi-which is agricultural, right?
	There's a lot of crops grown there.
	And we had another center which was in Minneapolis, which is an urban center.
	And we had other centers too.
	But let me just focus on those two.
	And what we found was that the men in central Missouri, Columbia, where I was living, had only half as many moving sperm as men in Minneapolis.
	Half, which is huge, right?
	What could do that?
	So we started thinking about what could do that.
	And of course, an obvious difference is that there is agriculture on a lot of it in Columbia, Missouri.
	And so a lot of pesticides, a lot of spring.
	And in Minneapolis, not so much.
	Different kinds of pesticides, not growing a lot of, you know, soybeans in central Minneapolis.
	So, so we looked at that.
	Unfortunately, we didn't have a lot of money to do that, but we looked at a sample which was big enough to show us that men in Missouri, first of all, that men in Missouri had more, significantly more pesticide burden in their urine.
	And again, you have to go to the urine and see what's dropped in there, you know, by these short-lived pesticides.
	And much more in, significantly more in men in Missouri.
	But even honing in on that and looking at men within Missouri, we looked at one sample of men who had excellent sperm.
	Everything was good.
	Count, motility, morphology, everything was good.
	And a sample of men there for whom everything was bad.
	And there we found that four pesticides, atrazine is a one that people may have heard of, were significantly higher in the men with the bad semen quality.
	So although the sample wasn't very big, this went a long way to showing that pesticides commonly used in our environment do lower sperm count.
	And this is not prenatal, by the way.
	These are adult men.
	You talk about how this might manifest at the grocery store for those of us as saying, if you can, and I know it's more expensive, try to buy organic, buy your fruits and vegetables organic.
	You don't really want them coming covered in pesticides, but most of us have no idea whether they are or they aren't.
	So for those who can't afford it or don't know or who are still worried in any event, what should they do with their fruits and veggies?
	Well, if you can, as I say, you buy organic and buy, if possible, unprocessed.
	And I'd like to talk about that in a minute.
	But if you can't, you can wash them.
	Unfortunately, you know, there are chemicals that are added to pesticides that help them go into the plant, including phthalates, by the way.
	Phthalates do this.
	This increased absorption either of the hand cream on your hand or the pesticide into the plant.
	So things are put in so that the pesticide will go up into the plant.
	And that makes it something that you can't wash off.
	So I would say for that reason, if whenever possible, you should buy organic.
	If you're about the processing.
	So it turns out a very nice experiment in Eastern Europe where they milked a cow the old-fashioned way by hand, and then they milked a cow with a milking machine.
	If you think about a milking machine, it's got lots of plastic tubes and those are soft plastic.
	And guess what?
	They contain phthalates.
	They contain bad phthalates.
	They contain phthalates that lower testosterone.
	And so this study showed that if you compared the phthalates in the milk of the hand-milked milk, if you will, and the machine-milked milk, the machine milking definitely added pesticides to the body.
	And that happens anytime you have food going through a plastic tube, right?
	Because the plastic leaves, it's not chemically bound to the plastic, and the phthalate leaves the plastic, goes into the food.
	And if the food is warm, so much the better because more of it gets absorbed.
	And then it goes into the spaghetti jar or wherever, and then it stays there until it goes into our body.
	So as I say, if you can buy organic food, clean it, process it yourself in the kitchen right away before you eat it, eat it, and then you're good to go.
	I know I have to buy a cow now, too.
	Right.
	There's so much effort.
	Okay, wait.
	Can we talk about processed versus unprocessed?
	I mean, I'll say, I'll start by saying this.
	I always use my Nana as an example.
	I know she's probably an outlier, but she lived to 101.
	She was overweight.
	She was stressed out.
	She ate nothing but processed, but processed foods.
	But her first probably 40 years on this earth from 1915 forward, probably not, right?
	And did all, she wasn't much of a drinker or a smoker, but I'm just saying, like she always said, my sister Lily smoked herself to death.
	My sister Helen drank herself to death and I'm going to eat myself to death.
	So she always processed food, right?
	She was on the New York-New Jersey border.
	All this processed food and she lived to 101.
	But the general rule is stay away from processed.
	And so why?
	What is it about the phthalate concern and all that that we're talking about in the processed foods?
	Well, these chemicals, biscuit line, by the way, is very important too, that lines, tin cans, those have to be processed.
	These chemicals are needed for the product, the tin can or the plastic container, for it to have the properties that we need for it to be hard, to be soft.
	And so they're necessary unless they can be replaced by something safer.
Hidden Chemicals in Processed Foods 00:03:50
	That's a different question.
	But they're there, but they're not, they're hard and fast, if you will.
	They're not chemically bound.
	They can come out into the food and they do.
	So, you know, floor coverings, just this is changing the subject a little bit, but if you know these floor coverings that are all shiny to begin with, and then they get dollar and dollar and dollar, that's because the plasticizers, there are many kinds in PVC and other, you know, they leave the flooring and then you have this dull-looking floor and that's gone into the air and it's, we breathed it and it's gone into our body.
	So we get these things through breathing, through our skin, through eating and drinking, every which way.
	So food and other things are giving us these products without our knowledge throughout our life.
	I want to get this in before we run out of time.
	Is there a website or a, like, where can people go who are listening to this who are like, I want to know more, I want to know what I can do, what I should eliminate.
	Is there one website where they can go for this information?
	I would say go to Countdown.
	Go to my book because we have an appendix, which contains a lot of websites.
	There's not any one that is different for different products, but we have a lot of information there.
	The book is Count Down.
	It's two words.
	It's important.
	If you put in one word, you won't get the book.
	Oh, that is important.
	Count down.
	All right, let me switch to this and I have to get this in.
	The gender confusion that we're seeing at epic numbers.
	That could be related to some of this, you say.
	I actually didn't say that right out because this is really controversial.
	And I know we're rushing, but let me say this quickly.
	We don't know whether gender confusion is increasing.
	The reason we don't know that is because we don't have a historical record.
	What we know is that reports of it are increasing.
	Awareness of it is increasing.
	But whether it is actually increasing is an open question.
	Okay.
	So I want to be really clear about that.
	Secondly, I have not said in the book or elsewhere that chemicals in the environment are related to this phenomena.
	Okay.
	What they are related to is what's called disorders of sexual development.
	So that's creatures that are born with, say, eggs and sperm in the same individual.
	That does happen and that can be caused by certain chemicals.
	And what also can be caused is homosexuality.
	But that's not to say that that's the main cause of homosexuality or the driving force.
	It's just that it can be caused in the laboratory by certain chemicals.
	Okay.
	But gender dysphoria is a different thing.
	And it's about how you feel about your body and whether you think your assignment at birth based on your genes was appropriate for the person you are.
	And whether that's affected by chemicals, we have no idea.
	We don't know.
	Okay, I want to be really clear about that because it's not the same thing.
	My God.
	It's yet another thing that we need more research on.
	You go through in the book about body weight, smoking, alcohol, stress, and so on.
	This nugget of goodness, just for people worried, moderate alcohol intake, defined as four to seven units per week, like one glass of wine, whatever, here and there.
	associated with higher semen volume and total sperm count, but high intakes, more than 25 units per week, hazardous to sperm.
	So there's just like a little silver lining there, Doc.
	I was glad to see.
	You can still have some.
Safer Alternatives for Families 00:04:16
	Remove, I'm just going to tick through a couple of your recommendations here.
	Prepare meals at home as often as possible.
	When you eat out, you don't know what's going in there.
	They got rubber gloves, whatever plastic gloves they're using.
	Filter your drinking water.
	Upgrade your cookware.
	Get rid of the nonstick in favor of stainless steel or cast iron.
	Clean up your cleaning products, carpet, shampoo, all-purpose household cleaners, window and wood cleaning products, disinfectants, and so on.
	In the bathroom, look at the labels on personal care products.
	Scan product ingredients lists.
	Avoid products that contain certain harmful chemicals like trichlosan.
	You can find this in the book.
	DBP, parabens, preservatives, and so on.
	Sunscreens, look for these ingredients.
	They're now paying some attention to that.
	Ditch the vinyl shower curtain.
	Banish air fresheners.
	Remove wall-to-wall carpet.
	Prevent dust buildup.
	Leave your shoes at the door.
	Clean out your closets.
	Say no to plastic bags.
	Can we talk about the carpet quickly?
	I have this very naughty dog.
	I just paid an exorbitant amount for plastic carpets for a couple of plastic.
	They feel like wool.
	And now I realize I've got to get rid of them.
	But can you just tell me, is it an exercise in futility?
	Because the wool carpets that are probably coming have been treated with all the fire retardant stuff that makes them just as hazardous to me as the plastic ones I now need to get rid of?
	I can't speak about your particular products, but I think there are safer floor coverings that you can use.
	So, you know, I can't, I don't know the details right now.
	I couldn't, you know, there's so many products to talk about, but there's always a range of choices.
	And so you need to explore that.
	I just wrote to a company asking them what kind of plastic they used in their product.
	You can do that.
	You can write and you can find out.
	So we shouldn't have to do that as consumers, but we do.
	So that's what I would do.
	So I read that you say, you told Axios, if you look at the curve on sperm count and projected forward, which is always risky, it reaches zero in 2045.
	Noting that the average man would have no viable sperm.
	How likely is that?
	So that actually is kind of metaphorical.
	You can't actually have a zero mean sperm count because then you'd have negative, which is not possible.
	So that's just to say that zero is, you know, as low as we can go.
	And we seem to be going closer and closer to that.
	But whether we'll actually reach it, no, we won't actually reach it because like I say, then you'd have to have negative sperm.
	Do you understand?
	Because sperm is, there's a curve and heck shit, long tail, but you have to have, if zero was at zero, if the mean was at zero, you'd have negative.
	We can't do that.
	But we can come lower and lower.
	And that seems to be what's happening.
	However, we can reproduce using assisted reproductive technologies.
	And those are getting better and being used more frequently.
	And I think that men probably should bank their sperm when they're young and when it's healthier, more likely to be healthy.
	And the question of egg freezing is more complicated.
	So expensive, but that's something that women who are concerned could consider.
	Wow.
	Okay.
	Yeah, we need to fight that.
	2045 is right around the corner, and this is not something we want to deal with.
	All right, the book again is called Countdown: How Our Modern World is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race.
	Fascinating discussion, Dr. Swan, thank you so much for your good work and your good explanations.
	We appreciate it.
	Thank you so much for having me on.
	Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show: No BS, No Agenda, and No Fear.
	At Michigan, I have some idea.
	Helps Weiverson.
	Talk for Marx Matten.

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00:00:15 Why We Hold Onto Jordan
00:15:06 SBF's $250 Million Bail
00:20:14 Athletes vs. Cardiac Arrest
00:34:58 Canadian Debbie on the Job
00:38:43 Halving of Global Sperm Counts
00:46:03 Understanding Semen Concentration
00:49:51 Early Pregnancy and Fertility
01:05:07 The Phthalate Syndrome Explained
01:11:16 Persistent Chemicals in Our Bodies
01:17:21 Global Plastic Pollution Impact
01:27:36 Hidden Chemicals in Processed Foods
01:31:26 Safer Alternatives for Families