You're listenings KFI AM six forty. The bill handles show on demand on the iHeartRadio f It is a Thursday Morning, December.
The Fifth.
Life continues on Oh just to quick pastapon numbers. Oh, you know what, I'm gonna do that at seven twenty with Michelle and I'll give you our pasta fon numbers. I want to talk about a topic that Neil and I bring up and talk about all the time, and that's the cell by dates on food. In California has now banned sell by.
Dates on food.
Silver You're not going to see cell by anymore because sell by dates, well, those dates don't indicate, for example, when your milk goes bad.
I drink milk all.
The time a week, week and a half after sell by because is still good. I mean, that's fine to look at milk. You just you taste in. If it's still reasonably sweet, you're okay. Now, with the exception of infant formula, these date labels on food not federally regulated or required. It's up to the manufactures or the state to determine what labels are necessary. There's an old California state law suggesting putting dated labels on foods help consumers
know when their food has gone bad. Well, it's confusing, it's grosser focused, and it's not true. A new California law requires, in an effort to reduce food waste, we waste food at six million tons a year in California, and this Assembly Bills six sixty, which was passed, is law, although it doesn't go into effect until July one, twenty six,
so it's a year and a half out. And it's designed to bring uniformity and common sense dated food labels for consumers because there's so many different days and there's so many different there are acronyms and sell by used by best buy, and so putting these two definitions, that's it. Now into that labeling will require grocery retailers and manufacturers to make all kinds of changes. They're going to have to develop new inventory systems, retrain employees, figure out what
labels that are going to be used. Except there's only going to be two, so that part is easy.
You know, there are more than fifty.
Different phrases in food packaging, which makes it almost impossible for consumers to tell exactly what each label means. There's one that's kind of fun that's out there. I haven't seen this, but it is out there. One is called PEB with a date which is either please enjoy by or people experiencing barfing.
I don't know which one.
This is a nonsensical phrase, probably the barfing part. A policy associate at Californias Against Weights a waste. She said, it's out there, and those fifty phrases are not even used consistently among manufacturers. There's enjoy buy, and that might indicate the best date for quality on one product, and it can meet something completely different on another product. So how the hell do you know? So the new law
bans food items from carrying cell by. You're not going to see cell by starting July first, twenty twenty six because sell by dates don't indicate freshness or safety. They're used by grossers to ensure inventory is rotated properly, especially on dairy products, meats. Perishable items have no indication on when your food might be spoiled. Ever, buy milk, I go to Costco and buy an elk. Always reached to the back of that the little line they put it in there, the what do they call that?
You have? The different levels? You know you put God, I see it.
I know it when I see it. I happened a hard time describing it. Okay, there's a bunch of milk bottles in front of you. You want to go to the back one. Yeah, okay, yeah, we'll figure this out. The back one where the date, the cell by date is way way pressure because the fur you know up at the front, it's a it's the cell by date is newer used by is happens? You got to use it now? Well, none of that works. It doesn't matter. So the law boy, did I do a good job explaining that?
One?
Didn't I and I knew exactly what I was talking about. It's just saying it. And I get paid for this, by the way, I want to point that out. So there'll be a couple of emaals. So the new California law limits most labels to only two options. A quality label best if used by because there's plenty of food that loses quality but it's perfectly safe. For example, you go to the supermarket and the ground meat is gray. It's not that fresh red meat, and then it's sold at.
A huge discount. That's perfectly safe. It just oxidizes and it turns gray.
You can eat that, which of course is way past the used by date or the sell by date. And so there's only two labels that will be allowed quality, best if used by and safety used by. I mean that one boom. You got to use it, and you know what it's I think it's going to work out for us because that used by, sell buy, best used by and enjoy buy.
That's really for the grossers, nothing else.
Also, it might help well, it will help nonprofits like food banks, except more non perishables because the law is there.
Now the dates should not be or should.
Only be used as guidelines. We're being told that over and over again, only guidelines. There are some states, or for example, in Pennsylvania there's a milk labeling law that requires the sell by date no more than seventeen days after the milk is pasteurized straight out.
Not California. You know, we're making it open.
This makes a lot of sense, by the way, because Neil when he does.
This show, when he does his Foody, when he has.
The fork report, probably the number one question he gets is that question, sell by used by?
What's the difference?
Is it okay for me to continue using the product? I, for example, had and I asked this of Neil. I had some sour cream that expired us by October two and I pulled it out the other day and we're talking six seven weeks and it looked fine.
I mean, there's no mold or anything.
I took a little spoon, took a taste, and it was perfectly fine. But having listened to the Fork report, I called Neil knowing that he's going to go go ahead as long as it's good. And he said, and I'm not kidding you. Seven weeks for sour cream? Are you nuts? So I guess seven weeks for sour cream
passed used by is not a good thing. All right, coming up, I'm going to bring Michelle in here because I want to talk a little bit of the numbers of what we've done for Pastathon, and since Michelle really puts Pastathon together every year and she has for fourteen years, I want to bring in a little side baseball and something that you don't know but will not surprise you. And i'll talk about that coming up.
All right, you're listening to Bill Handle on demand from KFI AM six forty.
It is a Thursday morning, December fifth, and I want to point out that our annual pastapon the day is over, except you can still donate and I'll explain.
To you or Michelle will.
So Michelle is here, who was my producer for twenty six years before she was promoted to executive producer, and the entire station Good Morning and Pastafon happens every year and it's a big deal. We broadcast at the Anaheim White House, the entire station all day, every day part and Michelle puts all of it together, and without her
it wouldn't have happened. So before we get into how this works, because I want to give a little inside baseball to people, Okay, and I want to tell you a story that you probably haven't heard.
What are our numb right now?
Our numbers as of six am this morning, one million, two thousand and sixty, so.
We're at a million dollars? Yeah, all right?
Does that include the numbers from Smart and Final and Wendy's.
It includes the Smart and Final numbers up until yesterday, and it includes some, not all, of the Wendy's numbers. So you know, every day between now and Sunday, I'll get numbers from Smart and Final and Wendy's and include them daily.
Okay, so last year we just went past one point three million dollars.
Yes, do I think we're going to get past that? Ye?
Are we pacing We're pacing ahead.
We've been pacing ahead all since yesterday, every hour, we've been pacing ahead.
So okay, we're ahead of where we were. All right.
So a conversation you probably aren't aware of is Chris Berry, who is one of the real high end management people who I know is yeah, who I'm explaining who deal to everybody else. Chris Berry happens to be a guy who runs news talk stations across the country for iHeart, who is in town, and I was having a conversation with him, and I talked about the urpasta fon extravaganza and.
How much money we raise.
Now, whenever a station anywhere in the country doing a charity can reach two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, that is considered a home run.
Beyond home runs.
He has never heard of a local station having raised one point three million dollars.
He was absolutely stunned.
Yeah, he came out and saw a little bit of it early yesterday. He didn't. I was telling him to follow the Instagram because he didn't see the full impact of like the whole day, but it is. It's pretty incredible.
And I mean we the first year we did.
This, we did eighty thousand dollars and three thousand pounds of pasta in size.
Right that was fourteen years ago.
Yeah. Now we are right now at forty tons of pasta and sauce and over a million dollars and we're on pacing and real quickly. Before I get into another question for Michelle, you can still donate. Go to any smart and final donate right there at the counter, or you can buy postaen sauce right there and then tell them this is for Pastathon. You go to any Wendy's five dollars or more donation, you get a coupon book worth a lot more.
And that's through Sunday night. Yeah, through Sunday night.
You can also go to kfiam six forty dot com slash Pastathon and you still donate and please do all right, Michelle not only put this together, she came up with this charity.
So how did that happen?
How does an organization like Katarina's Club become part of kay?
So this is how it happened in nineteen ninety nine on this show. We did a thing with Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky when we had the deposition that Bill Clinton was doing Remember we did a play. We were looking for a place to do it, and we wanted to do at the Anaheim White House. So that was our first introduction into the Anaheim.
The Anaheim White House looks like the White House.
So it was ten years later. Was in twenty ten. I saw Bruno being interviewed on TV about how he mortgaged his home to continue feeding these three hundred kids a night from the Boys and Girls Club, and I couldn't figure out why he sounded familiar. And when I brought it home to my husband, Tim, who wrote the play in ninety nine, he said, that's the guy that who owns that restaurant. And so I called Bruno and I said, hey, do you remember us from this event?
And he goes, of course I remember you. And I said, well, we heard about what you did. We would like to talk to you. I'd like to bring you on the air with Bill. And so we had him on with you for one segment that that year in twenty ten, and at the end of the segment. You kind of just said, hey, if you want to help Chef Bruno, if you send us a check, we'll make sure he
gets it. And in I think it was six weeks, we got eighty thousand dollars and we sent it to him and that's when I said to Bruno, we got to do something bigger. And at the time, our boss Robin was looking for a charity, a local charity to support, and I brought it to her and I said, here's what we'd like to do. We should do an event out there, and she agreed, and that's how we started connecting with you know, Katerina stuff, been making it an all day thing.
It's uh, well, we're fifty percent of the entire income.
Yes, and that's not just due to us and our amazing listeners, but over the years, I've built this relationship with Smart and Final.
Yeah, it's terrific. You've done it.
You've done a hell of a job. I mean this, that's going to be your legacy for sure. And since we raised one point three million dollars for Katerina's Club, the charity, if you happen to have a charity and you would like to get KFI involved, it is not going to happen because we already have a charity and it's Katerina's Club.
Go to another radio station.
Yeah, and you know it's it's it's a twenty hour day for me. Yeah, I have a pasthon. But I start I don't know if you know this, but I start planning this in June. June is when I start planning everything. And then August is when it really kind of ramps up and it goes.
Yeah, the logistics are astounding, and Michelle, you do it. So not only thank you for this on this behalf on those of those kids, but also I just you know, just blown away.
But then you happen to be very organized. That's that's who you are. That's who I am.
That's who you are, all right, coming up an infertility crisis. This is my wheelhouse. By the way, go to KFI AM six forty dot com slash pastathon and we will come back with this great story about infertility and is it a real problem in the United States? Matter of fact, the rest of the world. That my wheelhouse. So of course I have stories about infertility. I made well, I did it for thirty years long time. My kids are part of that story, I mean all of it.
You're listening to Bill Handle on demand from KFI AM six forty.
The police are searching for that gunman. Gunman who killed United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, and what looks like a targeted assassination came up behind him that when he was walking into a meeting at a hotel, an investor meeting, and stunman just came up with a silence er, I mean, right out of a movie, and popped him in the head and ran away.
And they're still looking for him. It's really really crazy.
And if you happen to own some bitcoin and you bought it at under a penny a bitcoin, it's now one hundred thousand dollars.
It just hit one hundred thousand. That is a good investment.
Now, there is an article came out of New York Times and it's I've shared this with you before, but I want to throw some figures at you. And I'm not going to get too wonky here. But the question is does the US have an infertility crisis?
The answer is absolutely, And the rest of the world.
The the first world countries all do the developed countries, and there are several reasons for it, and the reason I love to talk about this is this is my wheelhouse. When I started in nineteen eighty doing surrogacy, which deals with infertile couples where women cannot conceive and cannot conceive or carry someone else carries for them a surrogate, and it had to do with women being infertile, also to some extent men being infertile, and even then we were
talking about the problem of infertility. Now, in my case, I like infertility because the more infertile there people were out there, the more business I got. And I love the idea of women being paid to carry children for couples. By the way, with the kidding aside, you have no idea of the kind of trouble I was in and what we were looking at.
I was talking to the Attorney.
General in the DA of la as to whether I'm going I was going to jail paying women they under the law that's called slavery. You can't buy people and paying for custody of a child. That's exactly what we did. And so I had no problem with surrogacy, obviously to the point where I would go past pregnant women on the sidewalk and I go, are you getting paid for that? And if they said no, I got upset. You know,
how dare you not get paid for being pregnant? So the issue of infertility goes way back, and I got into it in nineteen eighty and it actually started back I think in the sixties. Robert Kennedy, the nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, hopefully not asked in a September post on X and he asked a doctor who was in fact consulting to him, why are so many couples infertile?
And there are a whole bunch of reasons why that would be.
Trump has made a big deal saying that of infertility that he would task Kennedy with investigating this decades long increase in chronic health problems, including infertility and infertility for many years was not considered a legitimate health problem. IVF, for example, was not covered by insurance. To this day, surrogacy, which is absolutely necessary for some couples to create a family, is not allowed in certain states or the contract is unenforceable.
And this is where I kind of take credit.
I usually don't, but California became the first state in the United States to enforce surrogacy contract and I was involved with that. That was my contract that was arguing in front of the California's Supreme Court, so that was kind of neat. So how do scientists track fertility? And this is the question. The CDC measures fertility rate and you'll hear this as because there's so many different ways
of doing this. The number of live births in a year per one thousand women between the ages of fifteen and forty four they're considered child bearing years. In twenty twenty three, and that was the most recent numbers available. The fertility rate, the number of live births in a year per one thousand women between those ages, the fertility rate was around fifty four births per thousand women of reproductive age.
That's a historic low.
That number keeps on decreasing, decreasing, decreasing. Another way researchers look at fertility is something called the total fertility rate, so it's looking at it both in terms of infertility and fertility.
It's two sides of the same coin.
For total fertility rate estimates the average number of children that a woman is expected to have.
During her reproductive years.
And you hear about one point six one point four two point eight per thousand.
That's the total fertility rate.
In twenty twenty three, the total fertility rate in the US was a little bit over one point six berths per woman, roughly two births per woman that were documented in two thousand and one, So it went from two thousand and one that was two down to one point six. By the way, in order to maintain a population, people have to have men women as a total number of people still being maintained at about two point two. And the reason population grows is because of immigrant population, not
the birth rate. If you just look at the birth rate, our population is decreasing and decreasing pretty rapidly. I want to come back and talk about the birth rate, which is different as we look at infertility, and then maybe.
A story or two of Yeah, I'm gonna give you some fun stories about.
Reproduction and men and yeah, yeah, that's yes, Yes, that's the way it's done.
You're listening to Bill Handle on demand from KFI AM six.
Forty Bill Handle Here it is a Thursday morning, December the fifth. Coming up top of the hour, Joel Larsgard and then Moe Kelly. As we end the show. So we've got still a lot of show to do. By the way, I'm looking at this tree, this Christmas tree, and it's what seven feet eight feet tall, and listening to Dean Sharp, this comes from all dicks or all dick?
Is that it the store?
You know?
By the way, they're fighting a discrimination suit.
You understand that right now because there are no females that work there, and it is and they're giving it away.
They're giving away the tree. Boy, where am I going with all this? Huh So? In any case, I don't know how that works.
But every year they come in and this thing fills up the room in the corner.
And it's sort of an interesting tree.
It's white, and it's this picture of it somewhere. It's just it's pretty unique Christmas tree wise. Any case, Back we go to infertility. I had to do that because how can I not make a joke out of that? Give me a break?
All right?
Back we go to infertility and this is the story. It came out of New York Times. And when I see infertility stories, I jump all over them because this is what I did for thirty thirty five years. I founded and ran the Center for Story Good parenting. Actually, my partner ran it, Karen for a bunch of years. My job was just to tell the joke jokes and
that was absolutely true, and so paying attention. Infertility has always been a big part of my professional life outside of working here at KFI, and starting in nineteen eighty when I wrote my first surrogacy contract, the problem of infertility was already there and we as a as a society, Americans and other countries that developed countries world are becoming more and more infertile.
And there's a bunch of different ways.
What is infertile, Well, it's it's fertility rate is one definition.
Birth rate is one.
Infertility is another definition, for example, infertility that's in quote. The CDC looks this by assessing the number of married women between the ages of fifteen and forty nine forty nine having unprotected sex for at least a year without becoming pregnant. And these are people that want to become pregnant, and then you have impaired figunity and that's difficulty in getting pregnant. And there's a bunch of reasons for this, and I'm going to go through them. People were having
kids later in life. My kids were born when I was forty four. You know, uh, my wife was in her forties when the kids were born. In twenty twenty one, the average age which women had their first child was twenty seven point three years. I mean, that's old to have kids. Never been that old, and women over forty giving birth a steadily increased.
Age is a big factor.
The older couple is, the greater the chance they're going to struggle to conceive. Female fertility starts to decline at about age thirty two. It really falls significantly after thirty seven. Even male infertility well not as not as much. You know, you have these.
Fathers who are out there.
De Niro for example, al Pacino, and they're having kids in their seventies because sperm is still viable. Don't tell me God is not a man. When it comes to fertility, Obesity impacts ovulation in women. Sexually transmitted infections have climbed like crazy. And what do STDs have to do with fertility? Intimately connected. STDs and fertility are connected, especially chlamydia and.
Gonorrhea. By the way, that was pretty obscure joke. But let's move on. And so the harmful, harmful chemicals. The other thing is.
That's kind of a fun one that I always used to make jokes about whenever I had a client command and patient come in. And there were a couple of things. First of all, to check out whether male infertility. That's the first thing that's done is checking the male fertility the sperm specimen, because that's the easiest thing to do. And one of the things about your testicles, assuming you're a male or maybe not anymore, is that testicles have to be two degrees less than the body temperature, which
is why in the winter tremendous suck shrinkage. Your balls have to move up and during the summer it's a very low it's low hanging fruit.
You know. Do your balls hang low? Do they go to and fro? You know that? And that's true.
That's why men are told don't get in the jacuzzi, stay away from the hot tub because it gets too hot. So there are don't wear tight underwear. This is legitimate. By the way you wear briefs.
Uh.
The reason my dad was so fertile is he wore shorts and he had a gravity issue. And anyway, I don't want to talk about that because there was a whole bell ringer issue to my dad and his thing. So that's a different topic. We'll cover it another point. But it is a huge problem and people just wanting kids way later and people not having kids, because that was the thing when my parents when I was born, my parents never even thought of do we want kids?
Do we not? It's just you had to do it.
If you're a married couple, you had to have kids, and if you didn't have kids, there was something wrong. Well it's a very different animal today today. More and more couples are choosing not to have kids. Why is that because kids.
Getting your way?
You've got huge prices in terms of how has gone up, food prices have gone up. And for those of you that have kids, let me tell you, your life becomes kids.
You know. I think there's a term that's used.
In psychology in terms of having kids.
I think it's a pain in the ass.
Okay, we are done. Joel Larsgard coming right up How to Money, and he does this Sundays twelve to two pm, and we do do a segment, two segments every week right here on Thursday kf I am six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.
You've been listening to the Bill Handle Show.
Catch My Show Monday through Friday six am to nine am, and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app