Club Random with Bill Maher - Listen Now | The Sage Steele Show with RFK's VP: Nicole Shanahan

Episode Date: May 2, 2024

Sage Steele and RFK running mate Nicole Shanahan on how Nicole was chosen by RFK to run with him, how a third party candidate is NOT a spoiler, Nicole’s commitment to service not celebrity, the DNC roadblocks to third party candidates, balancing being a mom with running a campaign, Nicole’s A.I. company, her journey from growing up poor to where she is today, how Nicole gained strength from her father’s mental health struggles, the good and the bad of certain social justice movements, the after effects of the lockdowns on the American population, US proxy wars, the hot button issue of politicizing women’s reproductive rights, and much, much more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The number of women who want to get pregnant and have a baby and cannot is higher than it has ever been in this country. The number of women suffering from miscarriages, the number of women who are giving birth to kids that then develop chronic illness. It's astronomical. It is a national security issue in my opinion. It is a moral issue. How is it a national security issue? When you have a shrinking population and that population has so many sick kids who cannot work, who are going to need assistance for their life. And we are going to have to put in government dollars.

I mean, just some of these chronic diseases are going to amount to adding five to ten trillions of dollars to our national health care budget in the next 20 years if we do not stop this chronic health issue. It's already one of our largest budget items, $4.6 trillion a year in government spending in healthcare. We cannot sustain it as a country on this course. So what I have noticed is that the issue of fertility in general has had a ton of corporate involvement. I've been criticized for being anti-IVF. That couldn't be further from the truth.

I'm critical of IVF because it was designed out of cancer research dollars, and I learned through my own experience that the funding into women's reproductive health virtually doesn't exist. So how do you keep a healthy woman healthy longer? How do you look at ovarian function through a scientific lens, foundational sciences? Never really been funded. So this idea of women's reproductive longevity, health and equality, I'm like the first funder in the space.

I created the field. And it had been so neglected. And as a result, you have these very savvy, private equity-owned IVF clinics coming in and saying, this is an amazing opportunity. Yes. Right? This is $15,000 a cycle cash, right? All cash. It is one of

the fastest growing industries in the world today. Industry. That's the key word there too. It's an industry. Yeah, business. So anytime I look at an issue, I look at it as where the money is going, how it got there, and what is actually being neglected. Right.

So that's how I look at all issues of women's reproductive health, including this issue of abortion.