The Joe Rogan Experience - #1282 - Adam Conover

Episode Date: April 17, 2019

Adam Conover is a stand up comedian, writer, and television host. He is the creator and host of the show "Adam Ruins Everything" on truTV.

Yes. Is it good? Yeah. It's good. All right. Cut all this out. Right, right, right, right. Hello, Adam.

Hey, thanks for having me, Joe. Hey, thanks for being here, man. I appreciate it. I'm a giant fan of your show. I really appreciate that. I love the fact that it annoys people, too. It really pisses people off. That's the goal, pretty much.

I mean, I'm not the kind of person where I'm like, if you're pissing people off you're doing something right but there's some truth to that there's some truth to that and also the way you structured the name i mean i don't know if you came up with the name of it but adam ruins everything i think i might have to give that to my to my uh former boss sam raisha college humor might have might have uh i think we we came up with the name together he might have been the first person to say it but uh yeah thank you i'm really yeah it like lets you know it lets you know that hey this is gonna annoy you a little bit that like i'm gonna be telling you shit that you don't want to hear that's gonna make everything a little bit worse you know but at the end of the day it makes it better it's an optimistic show at the end of the

day where sure yeah yeah you you give them the truth i think that yeah i mean the the the thesis of the show is that it's always better to know the truth and it's momentarily uncomfortable but hopefully for most people 99 of people who watch the show it grinds your gears a little bit to find out something like oh i thought that was true with the ah crap you know but then at the end we show you why you're actually better off knowing that thing and you're always better off knowing the truth in my view yeah in my view as well yeah is was there ever and was there one episode that stands out as being one that people got the most upset about? There's a bunch of them.

I mean, people get upset with us for a lot of different reasons. We did one about how breastfeeding isn't better than formula feeding. It's not? No, they're both. Formula feeding is fine. And the problem is formula feeding has become a stigma stigmatized now and there's a lot of people who can't breastfeed or about that you know and uh don't want to hear the truth about it um we did one about uh trophy hunting uh animals about how because people you know people get so mad oh look at this guy shot a lion right and the truth is that uh in some, not 100% of the time, but in some countries, they are effectively using trophy hunting as a way to protect the animals.

Because that's how they're able to sort of monetize in that place and get money coming in in order to protect the animals. And they're very specific and strategic about it. And it can be part of a good sort of animal, sort of animal management, you know, strategy. And it's being used to some success, you know. And, yeah, people don't want to hear that, right? It's still really hard. That's a weird one to me. And I hunt.

Yeah. Yeah. The whole lion and elephant thing. Right. Ooh, that's a weird one. Well, what they can do is they can say okay well we've got these elephants one of these elephants is an old male that's like killing the other elephants right and if we organize these hunts where you got to pay half a million dollars for the right

to even go in there does that happen with old male elephants i know that was the issue with that giraffe that remember that woman that got i actually don't know that specific case yeah there was a there was a woman who got in trouble because she shot this really beautiful giraffe it was really dark and unusually colored and it was dark because it was very old the older the giraffe apparently the males get really dark it was really cool looking um but she shot it and everybody went crazy on the internet because you know she was posing and smiling with this giraffe but apparently that giraffe had to be killed because it had killed at least two maybe three young males and it was no longer of a viable breeding age so they they were in this situation where they didn't have the money to take it and bring it to a zoo somewhere yeah and they would have gotten money

from having this woman come in and shoot it yeah that. That's what they did. Yeah. That's sort of, that's sort of the idea, you know? Um, I mean, one of the issues is if you've got an area where, you know, one of the problems is you need to have a reason for the people who live in

the place to care about the animals. You know what I mean? If it's just like, Hey, the elephants are going to roam free. Well, you've got people there who are like, all right,

fine. So I'm living near some elephants. Occasionally they eat my crops and shit. And that annoys me. I don't really give that. Occasionally. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

I don't give a shit about that. And what that allows to happen is allows poachers to come in and kill them wantonly. Right. But if instead, okay, we're protecting them. We have a revenue stream. Right. We get money when, you know, hunters come in and pay a lot of money to go kill one animal. Right.

Now we've got a way to hire guards. We've got a way. This is now a resource that we're protecting right and that sounds a little cynical but it is working in some places and it's both it's cynical and effective and effective and we have a we had a woman on from um uh the iucn international thinking union for conservation of nature big conservation group talking about how this is effective now in some places if you've got a corrupt government where they're just going to pocket the bunny yeah that's bad right but the point is just because the mere idea

of someone going overseas and killing an animal is not necessarily the worst thing in the world we have to look at the details the situation and that's hard for animal lovers to hear animal lovers don't like to hear that uh yeah they don't they don't and i like i said i don't like to hear it i wish i don't like to hear it either i wish people would just it just what freaks me out more than anything is that there's no other options it's not like a bunch of people are donating a bunch of money to keep these areas clean and and free of poachers and the amount would be massive right we can we can donate money but yeah yeah that that's the when you've got a problem that big and intractable as how do you save these animals, you know, and against habitat encroachment, right?

Again, you know, people want to farm on that land. People, you know, people have, people have lives, right? They're not sitting around going, the people in those countries are not sitting around going, oh, I love the cute elephant. Like we have the luxury to do. They like fucking live there. Right. And so how do you get, how do you get those people in that society to to really protect those animals that's

a hard question to answer and some places are having success with that strategy and that's something that we can understand we don't have to approve of it in every single case and we can say that's really tough for us as animal lovers and in fact the character who i'm talking to on the show says i still just hate the idea of an animal being killed. Right. And I say, yes, so do I. Right. We try to dramatize that emotional, you know, resistance on the show, like that emotional reaction that we have. I also don't like the idea of an animal being killed brutally. You know, I think I'm uncomfortable with the idea. Right. But if my main goal is to preserve the population of these animals overall to stop them from going extinct maybe i need to accept that this tough truth that once in a time once in a while

one's got to be shot through the head with a rifle maybe i need to accept that it's weird that's what i chose about it's really weird when it comes to things that people don't eat like lions yeah i don't understand the psychology you're like michael douglas in the what was that movie with the val kilmer the ghost in the darkness that the lions that decided to kill those dudes i've never heard of this movie it's a great movie man it's a great movie the ghost in the darkness yeah i feel like it's from the 90s but it's a really good movie about a true story about this guy that they brought they brought this michael douglas character was brought in to hunt these lions that were systematically targeting and killing these workers that worked on this railroad this team of lions worked together and started eating people wow it's a

great movie and it's really good it sounds odd and they have to they have to go after the lions yeah they have to go kill these lions yeah there it is ghost in the darkness oh holy hell biting tension that is a great hunter fel kilmer is looking good there you know that was pre fatso I have to go kill these lions. Yeah, there it is. Ghost in the Darkness. Oh, holy crap. Hail-biting tension. That is a great... Pray for the hunters. Val Kilmer is looking good there. Yeah, that was pre-Fatso Val Kilmer. Pre-when he went off the... It was too handsome.

He couldn't handle it anymore. Really good-looking guy. Too handsome. That's the problem. He had to just go off the deep end. Another one people got really mad about. This is weirdly the one we got the biggest reaction to. And to the extent that I'm a little hesitant talking about it,

because it always starts a shit storm every time I do. Vaccines? No, actually, we've not done a whole one on vaccines, but we really should because it's coming back. I used to think that vaccines was like kind of done as a topic and like we've gone through it. It is really back and it is big. But no, we did one on alpha males.

We had an episode about dating. And we did one on how the idea of the alpha male doesn't exist in humans. Like if you talk to any anthropologist, any biologist, any sociologist, right? And be like, are humans organized in a social relationship where there's alphas and betas? They'll be like, no, what are you talking about? This is an unscientific idea. Right? And we just did something laying that out and in the context of like people who are oh my type is i like alphas right well there's no such thing actually you know humans are some you're dominant in some situations not in others right um it's an overly simplistic way of looking at human relationships and i thought that was a pretty simple straightforward thing i was like this is a bit of pseudoscience that you hear people tossing out and people went ballistic on the internet because people have sort of like built a edifice of ideology in their minds about like there's alphas there's betas i'm an alpha this is what an alpha is like this is what a beta is like you know um and uh let's take away the

words yeah they're they're clearly men who are more aggressive and athletic and dominant and more confident and and then men who are introverted and shy and more nervous and anxious and there's a scale in some in some situations you know um social situations yeah and that's what we're talking about right in social well yeah but your social situation could change based on what situation you're in you know what i mean like but a like an athletic confident male is always going to be an athletic confident male and an introverted anxious male who has problems with social anxiety is going to be the same that's that that's who that person well i don't think so necessarily um but so when we're talking about alpha when you're talking about

alphas right um in animals what is that it's a social hierarchy right um when we're talking about al when you're talking about alphas right um in animals what is that it's a social hierarchy right um when you're doing animals in so let's take away that word i mean what but what people are using to describe when they're saying alphas and betas they're saying like confident strong secure people and people that are anxious and not so if you're so if you're trying to say hey like it's good to be confident it's not so great to be anxious like that's that that's fine right but when people talk about alpha males and beta males right they're specifically bringing in the language of like evolution of biology of zoology of evolutionary psychology you know and they'll start saying stuff like well

there's alphas and there's betas and women are hardwired to be attracted to the alpha you know because that's what it's like in nature. Like they'll be using that language, right? And so what we're pointing out is that's not scientific, right? It's not scientific, but it is true that women are hardwired to be attracted to confident athletic men. Well, I don't know if I agree with that. Really? Yeah.

You don't think that women look at like pro athletes and like big, strong athletic men, and you don't think they're drawn at like pro athletes and like big strong athletic men and you don't think they're drawn to that for evolutionary reasons i no i don't actually i think that do you think that men are drawn to women with small waists and big hips and large breasts for evolutionary reasons uh you know i think that's an easy i think what that is is that's an easy intuition to come to if you're like looking at the way people behave. Right. But one of the things about evolutionary psychology is it's the most common mistake to look at the way that people do behave and say the reason we behave that way is because evolution says that's the best way. Right.

That's their argument. For instance, I'll give you an example. That's the argument that was arguments like that were used, for instance, to justify slavery. Right. That like, oh, because, you know, whites and blacks have this hierarchical relationship in american society that's the way it was intended that's how nature intended it to be right but um we can't we can't that's a giant leap we can't make that about like the shapes of bodies like men universally are attracted to a certain shape of bodies there's men that are attracted to different ones and i don't think men are universally attracted people vary but that hourglass shape has been throughout time something that men are attracted to.

I think that hourglass shape is something throughout our recent cultural memory that we tell each other that men are attracted to, right? That's what we're told from an early age, that this is the sort of women that men are attracted to. And so a lot of men end up adopting that, right right but i don't think that deep down that's how men naturally are you know really yeah i read this so that but that doesn't make any sense to me that's so non-intuitive because i'm all about things that are not where do you think well where do you think it started where do you think this this narrative of men being attracted to women with large breasts and a small waist and a big ass where do you think this narrative of men being attracted to women with large breasts and a small waist and a big ass, where do you think that started? Because this is like evolutionary biology is pretty much settled on the idea that the reason why is the large hips would indicate that the woman would be easier to give birth.

Having large breasts and a large ass would indicate that she's fertile and then she has ample fat storage in the right places if she's going to be pregnant and carry children. There's all these evolutionary biology reasons why people are attracted to certain things. Why a woman would be attracted to a tall, muscular, handsome man. Good genetics, very strong and confident, can take care of her. All these things are based on evolutionary biology. So I don't understand why you think these are learned sort of cultural artifacts so my my question is this is an assumption that we the public make about how evolutionary biology works right it's more of a thing that we sort of agree on well we we is the like there's a there's an idea among the public

that this is true i don't know if it's a scientific idea that's that's my you have i've had conversations with evolutionary biologists who explain the reason why men are attracted to certain shapes and why women are attracted to certain shapes this is this is sort of i mean this is science i mean in in a way this the reason why they're attracted to tall men that are muscular and confident is because that is what's always saved you throughout history. I mean, it only makes sense, doesn't it? It, it, well, just because it makes the, the point of our show, right? Is that just because something makes intuitive sense doesn't mean that it's necessarily true,

right? But don't you think that in this case, that this is a varied argument? Like, I don't think that's something that you can dismiss. that this is a varied argument like i don't think that's something that you can dismiss i don't i don't dismiss it but i don't assume the truth of it simply because that's what you know everybody agrees upon right but if you ask girls like what are you into and you say if you are you into tall muscular confident men who are also nice to do jesus christ it's going to be off the charts it's going to be like most of them i'm you know i'm really not sure that's the case really yeah i think you you had like a survey of women and if the men were equally kind and equally intelligent and friendly you

don't think that more women would be sexually attracted to these tall handsome men with great bodies i mean look i'm not gonna'm not going to say that, like, first of all, you're positing, like, a value judgment in it that the bodies are great, right? So, like, are women attracted to attractive bodies, if that's the question, then I would say, of course. Dad bods are more attractive to women, study finds. Some fucking guy with a dad bod made that.

Look, here's something that I was really influenced by. What do you think of that, what I just said, though? That doesn't make sense to you, that women would be attracted to someone who's fit? Look, I mean, it's a hypothetical, right? Like, certainly athleticism, right, is something that is attractive, right? That's something that many people find attractive, right? Not everybody finds that attractive. And I don't think that we can necessarily reason backwards to like a specific evolutionary relationship.

Right. Because the truth of what those evolutionary relationships are is like often a lot more complicated than, you know, our immediate intuition about it. And what we're specifically pushing back against in that segment is like the really sort of unscientific, you know. Use of alpha and beta yeah exactly where it's like you know you've got people you know just on internet forums like sort of doing amateur pseudoscience right saying like this is how the relationships between men and women are like designed evolutionarily um and we were just pointing out on a very very simple level like the alpha and beta social hierarchy theory, right? That like, humans are organized in a social hierarchy and alphas are above betas. Not true, right?

Even someone who is the person who you posited, right? The person who is athletic and confident, right? The, you know, the high school football quarterback, right? Versus the high school football nerd, right? Well, take those two people and then put them in a different situation, right? If those two people are like in gym class together, right? Of course, the high school quarterback is like on the top of that social interaction, right? Looking at the sort of, you know, classic Wolfpack model, they're the one who's sort of running the show, right? And the other guy is like hanging out in the bleachers talking to his friends, right? Or talking to nobody because he's a beta in that situation, right? If you then take that kid and then you you know send that kid to like nationals

right or whatever uh you know and that kid sorry take the the quarterback character um and you know he's suddenly like you know from the little podunk town right he's not from the big school um he's like way down in the totem pole right that person is no longer going to be in that high social hierarchy right um and if you take that nerd and you put that you know take that kid maybe he's the dungeon master of his you know dungeon dragons group right um uh that that kid is going to be the alpha in that situation right that's how humans work you know humans aren't organized in sort of like little pods that stay together for life and there's one person who's dominant the whole time right and that's the simple point that we were making uh uh in that piece right um and people got upset yeah people got upset because there are so many people who

we talked about this later on the show there's this idea called the backfire effect right where when people are told something that they don't agree with um that when they when they someone has told somebody a fact when somebody is told a fact that that contradicts a really deeply held belief, it can often cause them to disbelieve it even when it's true and fight back even harder. One of the reasons that happens is because of an idea called identity protective cognition. If the fact that is being debunked is literally part of your identity, like if it's something that you believe really, really deeply, it's incredibly hard for you to disbelieve it. Right. The classic example of this is like, you know,

Sean Hannity, Sean Hannity doesn't believe in climate change. Right. Really? Well, you know what? I actually don't know that specifically what Sean, Sean Hannity thinks about climate change.

Let's just say somebody who's made their whole career on climate change doesn't exist. Right. All their friends are in the anti-climate change community. Right. They met their wife at an anti-climate change fundraiser you know what i mean they make their money they write a new anti-climate change book every year right now climate change is real right there's no evidence i could present that person with that is going to make them take the social risk of ending all their relationships changing their whole life right uh because if they were to say, okay, you know what?

Actually, I'm convinced climate change is real. They would lose all their friends. Their wife would leave them. They would lose their revenue stream. They can't possibly come to that conclusion, right? And so they fight back so super hard, right? And so that's what ended up happening with that segment. There's a whole group of people who have built their whole lives on the idea.

There's alphas and betas. I'm an alpha. I'm not going to be a beta right um and so and and maybe that meant something positive to them you know maybe they had we're in a bad place in their life and through this model of alpha versus beta they started working out or they started you know improving themselves a little bit right um and maybe they started acting a little bit more confidently and now they're in a relationship right all those things can be true with the idea of alphas and betas

and humans not being scientific, right? But so when I tell them that, they fight back really hard. They're like, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is real. This is real, you know? And so that video, which again, I had no idea that would be controversial.

It got the most YouTube response videos, got the most, you know, furious things. And the weirdest thing was people started to say, this is political. Like, why is Adam Roon's everything getting political? I'm like, I don't know what the hell they're talking about. say this is political like why is adam ruins everything getting political i'm like i don't know what the hell they're talking about this is i have no idea i have no idea how it's political alphas and betas are now political i mean that's what people were saying i guess uh i guess you know for some people it's become that but because

they see it as part of like i don't know their whatever argument they're in their head they're having about feminism or something like that but to me i'm just like guys in dating right in life like this is not a real concept if you want to say i'm going to be confident tomorrow i'm not going to tell you that's not going to help you out you know um uh and you know i'm a little bit reticent to make like a broad conclusion about evolutionary psychology right but i can tell you again go talk to any anthropologist any biologist any you know uh sociologist is there such a thing as alpha males in humans and the strictest scientific sense of the word in the industry yeah exactly um and i think they're looking at in terms of like winners and losers pushovers and people who get the job done you know confident people versus people who are not confident but i think you're correct and

i think obviously humans operate on a giant spectrum. And if you start going around saying alpha and beta and the, the idea that all alphas are the same or all betas are the same, it's just as ridiculous as the idea of saying all Democrats are the same or Republicans. It becomes an ideology. Exactly. It's a pro male ideology. And I,

I have the biggest problem with like overconfident men's rights guys. Yeah. Cause i'm like listen we have all the rights yeah like fucking settled now yeah we got enough of them i had a whole bit about it it was like this is like divorce laws and that's it yeah everything else is stacked in our favor yeah just fucking chill out you're making us look bad and the problems that men have are different than the problems those guys think men have. Right. So, for instance, we did a segment on a stereotype.

We had an episode on stereotypes called Adam Runza sitcom, where we talked about different, you know, we talked about stereotypes via, you know, sort of a cheesy 80s sitcom that had a lot of stereotypes in it. So you got the stereotypical black kid. You got the stereotypical Asian kid. Do you have a gay neighbor? What did you say? Do you have a gay neighbor? No, we have a gay neighbor no we didn't do that well there's only three acts on the show you know what i mean i wish we could have done that and and women and all sorts of things but we and we had a stereotypical dad you know like a home improvement

type dad you know and uh what we talked about is like those uh there are ways that men are being harmed by the sort of narrow idea of what a man is you know um for instance uh men have a very high uh suicide rate right um and uh specifically uh loneliness is a health problem for men for like older men like take my dad right my dad's uh about 65 he doesn't have a friend you know i hope he doesn't hear this but um you know yeah like he he doesn't hear this, but, you know, yeah, like he has like work colleagues. He's got my mom, you know, he's got me. He's got, I'm sure he's got people he's friendly with, you know what I mean? But he doesn't have a best friend, you know, who doesn't, who comes over to watch, you

know, the Red Sox with him. That's terrifying to me. Yeah. And the thing is, loneliness is associated with early death, you know, and with disease, right? is associated with early death, you know, and with disease, right? And like when you look at the way that we bring up men, men are socialized to not have close relationships with each other.

Wow, really? Yeah. How so? Well, like we talk about from an early age, we talk about this so briefly on the show, but we could have gone into a whole episode on it. From an early age, researchers have found this, that little boys, when they're very young uh are very close with form very close friendships that are physical friendships they hug you know they'll kiss they'll you know kiss on the cheek you know what i mean

they'll have physical close friendships like that and then they reach an age where that starts to become not okay right um where it becomes oh that's not how boys act right and girls are still doing that with their friends they're still holding hands with their friends. They're still having close relationships like that. And boys start to build a little bit of distance. And it's easy to say, well, when you're a teenager, that's because of the stigma against being gay, and we don't want to appear gay.

But it happens even younger than kids would even have a notion of that. So it really seems to be a deep down way that we bring up boys of like, hey, don't get too close to each other. You know what I mean? That's a little weird. It's just a little weird for boys to do that, you know? And we do that from a young age. It's very subtle.

It's very subtle, but it's universal? I mean, in America, it seems to be. And, you know, I've even felt that myself. Like I've often had an easier time having close, close relationships with women rather than men. Really? As friendships. Yeah. As friendships.

Yeah. Man, I don't have that at all. Just in terms of who I talk with about my relationships and stuff. I have good friendships with women, mostly that are comics. But almost all my good friends are guys. I have a lot of good friends. I mean, you're lucky if that's the case I certainly am

There's that phenomenon of having a little bit of distance From your male friends Of not getting really into it emotionally If you don't feel that way That's fine I've felt that myself And that results in Some people feel it

You've felt it, some people feel it I'm sure. I don't experience that. And most of my friends that I know have good male friends. And they're pretty tight with people. Well, the point is that there is a trend, especially in older age, right? Well, it's a bad scene for anybody, whether it's a male or a female. When you get older and you don't have any friends, that's bad scene well so demographically we know that that happens to men

more than women right that the man my dad's age is more likely to have less friends than a woman my mom's age do we know why um i mean i think that's one of those things where i would hesitate to make a big conclusion but i mean i would say i think we can draw a link between that and you know that men are sort of like socialized to not have these close friendships. But so that is a serious problem that men have that men face. Right. Another one we talk about is stuff like, you know, drinking and smoking, for instance. Those are behaviors that are much more pushed on men. You know, those are much more advertised towards men. Right.

And those are dangerous. Right. Those are like hurt you physically and can lead to an early death. Right. Those are those can lead to bad health outcomes. And so those are things that men face that are different than the challenges that women face and can result in bad health outcomes for us, you know? And it's so funny how the sort of like men's rights people, you know, they don't talk about that stuff quite as much. They talk about, you know, violence and, you know, people being hurt at work and stuff like that, like men having dangerous occupations. And that stuff is true as well. But these are the more subtle ways that men are hurt by the sort of narrow expectations of what a man is that we put on men.

Hey, men are like this. You should be like this. And some of those things hurt men. Do you think we still do that, though? Do you think people still put narrow expectations of what men should be? I totally do. I think we might be lucky here in L.A. Because we can sort of live any way that we choose.

I mean, you clearly live exactly how you want to live, which is great. And I get to as well. But I think that we're lucky in that we're so self-actualized, you know what I mean, that maybe we face a little bit less pressure than your average Joe across the country. Yeah. But I don't know of anyone who's putting pressure on men to not be friendly with other men. That seems so ridiculous to me, to deny camaraderie. to deny camaraderie obviously in the military it's a huge aspect of military service is the brotherhood yeah that these guys form with each other and that's about you know if you want to talk about traditional male values that's about as manly a thing as a person can do right serve

their country very much so um but are like men for instance encouraged to you know be emotionally vulnerable with uh with their friends for instance like i to, you know, be emotionally vulnerable with their friends, for instance. Like, I think that's something that's like tougher. Don't do it. They're going to bring it up when you argue. Yeah. And so that's the thing. There's a level of intimacy that we're like.

And that sort of intimacy is what leads to long friendships, you know, that really, really last, right? It's a balancing act, I think, because I think there is intimacy, and then there's also guys who are just being a bitch, and they need to learn how to man up. Both things are real. Both things are real. It is real to be intimate and to be vulnerable and to explain how you feel, but then sometimes you shouldn't be just fucking complaining about things.

You should figure your life out and man the fuck up and go do something, and it's not necessarily you being emotionally vulnerable, as you like to say it in such a normalizing way. It might just be you being a bitch. That's possible too. Well, you don't think

that when you say that you put a little pressure on men at all? Yes, I put pressure on men. Yeah, well, maybe you're the one putting a little pressure on you. Yes, they need some pressure.

I think most men need just a little bit of a motivational shove in the general direction of success and happiness and a lot of that is overcoming laziness and implying or uh applying some discipline to your life i think those things are very manly attributes that turn out to actually be good for you uh you know i think there's a lot of i don't disagree with you about about some of those actually be good for you uh you know i think there's a lot of i don't disagree with you about about some of those aspects being good for you um let me just give one other example um and i'm blanking on the name of this podcast um i can i can look it up if you want but um a very wonderful podcast about philosophy um philosophize this uh no i love

philosophize this it's a different one here i'll look up what it was um as i'm talking to you about it but um really wonderful podcast uh where uh they were talking to uh this guy who was in the military um and uh has ptsd right and he was talking about how the idea of of be a man right was just a phrase that he would hear a lot in the military right um and oh it's called hi-fi nation is the name of the podcast um and there's an episode called be a man hi-fi nation really wonderful podcast about philosophy um and uh it's talking about that idea of be a man right what does that mean in in the military and and look i'm just repeating what says in the podcast i have no military experience myself i don't want to claim to but um uh and you know that means sort of like overcome adversity right don't complain too much, right?

If you have a problem, solve it yourself kind of thing, right? And he talked about, and they also talked with medical professionals who said the same thing, that that idea can, doesn't give men the tools they need to deal with PTSD, right? And can actually exacerbate PTSD because it means that they're not trained how to reach out for help for those problems. No, I couldn't agree more. That's a different situation, I think. Oh, yeah. It different example of of of just a way that that sort of narrow idea be a man being a man means this a real man would do this right that does that works in some situations maybe that works when you're you know in a foxhole right um it doesn't work so well when you're out of it right and so that's a narrow idea that can lead to a bad outcome sure but that's

basically what we were just saying that you know you should be emotionally vulnerable and know how to express yourself with your friends and be honest and true about how you feel about things but you also should know when you're being a bitch both of those things are real fair enough fair enough if you're on a hike with a friend and he has to stop every five minutes because his foot hurts like come on man my foot hurts too just fucking walk you're walking fine i completely i completely agree with you i just don't think this is worth it i mean this is not what i had in mind when we started hiking that guy's being a bitch right yeah yeah he needs to man the fuck up right but let me but uh you're

hesitant to say man the fuck up because if it was a woman what would you say you'd say toughen up just soldier on what would you say well i don't think that the reason i'm hesitant to use that word is i don't think that being tough is uh exclusively a male right that's why i said if you're a woman what would you say would you say tough enough if it was a woman in the same situation you got to toughen up you deal with it yeah yeah press on yeah but men like to we like to equate that to one of our best attributes being a fucking man yeah because i'm a fucking man but the problem is what if there's a guy what what if you're what if you're uh on that walk with on that hike with a friend right you know and your friend is legit afraid of hikes i've been on a friend on a hikes with oh sorry i haven't said hikes heights right

i was like damn you can't be hiking with that dude i went on a hike i went on a hike with a friend my friend had we were in zion national park um which has some very narrow that's utah right utah yeah my friend had had a panic attack right because because of the hike and it was and it was you know um and that's legit sure right and thank god he was able he felt able to share it with me. Right. But if we, you know, so that's, so that's the balancing act of creating an environment where you're not, Hey, yeah, don't complain about your foot, but Hey, if you're really in distress, like you can share that with me. And some men feel that they can't do that.

And I remember when I was younger, you know, feeling, well, I want to, I really have this problem, but I can't express that to my friends because they're going to make fun of me. Right. Um, and that sucks. And so my goal is to to and what that segment that we did about manliness was about um was saying hey if you uh if you're a man and being a man to you means you know being confident being assertive and stuff like that great qualities not bad qualities at all right but we want to expand the notion of manliness so it includes all the different ways that one can be a man right um uh that that is it's as wide as possible right

because otherwise you don't shut it down the expression manliness right that's the problem because manliness like instantly becomes handsome aggressive you know muscular that's our cultural idea yeah of a man and womanliness is more like soft and kind yeah you know you don't think of it sexually right when you see you think of womanliness isn't really a word that's used but if it was yeah womanly that that those are their cultural ideas that we associate with those things right but i so so let me just give you my example i uh personally i love taking care of other people right with me and my me and my girlfriend we've been together 10 years um one of the main things i love to do in our relationship is i really like cooking for her

you know what i mean i like taking care of her that's like something that i enjoy right um uh that's the part of my manliness that's like how i am a man you know what i mean provide it feels good to get food and you can sit down and yeah do something for and cook for you can associate it with yeah providing goes back to that you know classic sort of uh man you know manly value you can take away that word i'm not even saying in in that sense yeah there's nothing wrong with that word but in that sense you you want to give yeah exactly and that's not a value that i was brought up with of like that's a manly thing to do right is to like be kind and be nurturing you know what i mean um but uh it's something that i really that that really means a lot to me yeah

it wasn't what i was brought up with um and uh uh so to me it's important to like expand you know my notion of what it was really a big deal for me to like realize that that was part of what being a man was to me um and i noticed that like you know uh for instance um like let's just take the example of like you know kids entertainment like growing up you know like kids cartoons and stuff like that like the female characters are the ones who are taking care of other people and the male characters are the ones who are kicking ass right and i like kicking ass sometimes too but i realized uh at one point i was like oh i didn't have like models of that as a kid of like here's a man who takes care of other people emotionally or in a caring way. Like Dr. Phil.

Dr. Phil, he does it a little bit. He does. He does. He does. I see what you're saying. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, whenever you have a label, especially a narrow label, it's a problem.

And I think the idea of manliness or what it entails and the problems that people would have about that on the outside, it's almost always problems that are being imposed on them or the ideas that are being imposed on them by people who don't like the way they live or don't like who they are or want to mock who they are or how they live. So if someone's too emotional emotional if someone's too introverted instead of celebrating that oh that guy's different cool yeah instead of that it's the bully uh mocking and and shitting on them the jock type behavior yeah we associated with being the negative aspect of masculinity total toxic masculinity is which is the phrase that gets tossed around yeah but i think this is um

you know this is just shitty humans i agree you know i mean that's really where the problem and it's not specific to it's not specific to men oh it's definitely not it's everybody but let me give you one more example just to get back to what you're talking about body type and what people are attracted to i read this wonderful uh advice column um uh it's this guy who this guy does an advice it's got a kind of silly name it's dr nerd love um but he does a really good advice column and this dude wrote in and said hey i'm with a woman she's um you know a little bit bigger of a gal you know than i've dated in the past i really am into her she's so cool but she's not my type i'm not normally into women like this and that bothers me that she's not my type right even though i'm into her so much she's not my type what do i do

about this she's not my type and i loved this guy's answer he wrote back and he said dude she's your fucking type you like her right you're into her you think she's a sexy woman right the problem is you were brought up in a world where it's not okay for men to like women like that it's not okay to to like women who are her size and you've you've ingested that your whole life and now you're hating yourself because you were told something that about what's okay for you to like and what's not okay for you to like and i really related to that you know because i remember feeling that way about girls i dated like hold on a sec, I'm into her so much, but oh wait, is she not, is she not like attractive? Right? Am I wrong to be dating her

because she doesn't fit what I, you know, the sort of like set of parameters for what an attractive woman is. Right? And so when you talk about what people say, what people say they're attracted to,

if you ask any woman, wouldn't she say she's attracted to this kind of man? If you ask any man, wouldn't she say she's attracted to that kind of woman? Yeah, they might say that. Right?

But deep down, do they maybe have a desire that is not being you know that they that they've been told is wrong their whole lives right um i really related to that i was like man that is really a good point i have been told that my whole life and it has i've allowed it to control who i'm attracted to to to a certain extent, you know, and that's a mental prison that I want to get out of, you know, and, you know, now I have the benefit, I'm a little bit older, you know, and I feel like I'm in less mental prisons than I used to be. I feel like you're in no mental prisons at all, at all. I feel like a lot of your listeners, you know, have broken out of them, you know, but especially

I think back about like when I was 16 years old and yeah, I, you know, you're swimming in that shit and you don't know to question it yet a lot of the time. And that's what our show is about is getting people to question those assumptions and those things that you're being told without even realizing you're being told them. But there is a problem with young men and their identities, like them wanting other people to think them as cool.

Yeah. Them as cool. Think of them as someone who's successful or someone who's doing well that's a weird thing to say you know i'm i'm really into her but she's not my type but you know the problem there seems to in my mind in my estimation seems this guy's worried too much about his identity yeah and instead of just being who he is exactly he's worried about his identity and and that's a really tough thing to get over and that's what we were trying to help people get over in that

episode but you know when i think about in my you know when i was getting started in comedy in my in my 20s you know um the amount of time i spent worrying before i went on stage about how what i was going to say was going to come off it was if it was going to be cool or if i get made fun of by the other guys in my comedy group or by like the other people at the open mic you know no really like i did i did just come up in alt rooms yeah the meanest motherfuckers they sure fucking are those super nerds trying to like oh super progressive fucking mean dude so goddamn socially vicious yeah no especially just at the open mics in new york city you know it was a real la too same deal yeah because there there's no like organization i didn't i never set

foot in a club because i was like i don't want to deal with anybody at the club thinking oh i'm trying to get a spot or whatever i was like i'm just doing bar shows open mic stuff like that and yeah there's no rules so it's just social enforcement and it's just people being like i'm the big dog like yeah and people would like cross their arms during other people's sets or like say shit and like it really fucking sucked and the only way i got past it by saying i don't give a shit about what any of these motherfuckers think yeah you know and i know i'm gonna identify the people who i think are doing good work and who i think are funny and then hopefully they laugh at me too i'm gonna focus on that. But you should look

at the people that are crossing their arms with amusement because all those people are fools. You're fools. I know what you're doing. You're just throwing poison

at people for no reason. Totally. You know, especially in open mic nights and those kind of shows, those bar shows, people are just developing. You know,

you're watching little babies run around a nursery home i mean that's really what it is yeah what they're trying to do with comedy babies what those people are trying to do is they're trying to say well i know the difference between good and bad and that's one of the reasons i'm good and so i'm going to say that you're bad exactly but that's bullshit it's bullshit yeah and a lot of them aren't funny that's a real part of the problem they're trying to enforce a narrow band of comedy because they think they can operate inside those parameters yeah but if they wanted to go on stage at the comedy store after joey diaz they'd burst into flames it's not really that good it's not

that good yeah what you're doing is not that good i know you think you have a point but what you're saying is not your art is not that well i know you listen to the bill burr podcast and you think that makes you better than everybody but uh the number of people who'd be like, well, Bill Burr wouldn't do it like that or whatever, like that kind of thing is like so, so off the, off the charts. It's a waste of energy. You know, it really is. And the best, the best energy in these small groups, the best way to use your energy is to appreciate good work and recognize bad work and recognize maybe you have

some of that aspect totally in yourself some some aspects of bad work in your own act and maybe you should trim it out and look at yourself objectively the way you're looking at this person but the whole cross your arms and unless someone's stealing or doing something racist or or or clearly fucked up socially you know like, like, what do you care? What do you care? They just suck. You suck too, bro. Yeah.

You remember what it was like when you were- You were at the open mic at 11 p.m. You both have been waiting three hours to do three minutes. You know, so- You know what it was like your first couple of years on stage? It was terrible. I want to go back and hug everyone who's ever in the audience and say, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to put you through whatever the fuck I did up there, that 10 minutes of

nonsense. I'm sorry. You know, one time when I was doing open mics, I was doing three open mics a night in New York, you know, and I kind of missed that. It was like really fun. It was like going to the gym. You know, it's like bouncing around, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. But, you know, you really get used to it.

And there was one night, I can't remember why the hell this happened, but my girlfriend and her friend, and they're both cartoonists my girl my girlfriend is a uh incredible uh cartoonist uh on her name's lisa hannah walt um uh and so she's funny you know these are funny people for some reason they're like we want to come to the open mic at the creaking cave in new york and i was like you do okay here we go and they sat there and they were like we sat in the front row and they were like their their hands in the front row and they were like, their, their hands were like covering their eyes. They were like,

Oh, I can't believe like every single person. What is he doing? Why did he say that? Oh my God, this person, what were they thinking? Like they were, they was just like the worst freak show to them.

And I was like, yeah, I do this every single night. Like everything that every shitty mistake or every weird thing that every person did that i was totally like blank to that i had seen a million times they were like shocked by what was going on on that stage um and it made me really enjoy going to those mics again because it made me see for the first time you know like it made me fresh again to like how fucking weird i miss open mic so much because it's such a beautiful disaster right because you're right every single person that goes up on an open mic is sweating basically they're

doing like they're like endurance training like they're doing something that is physically uncomfortable even socially terrible and they're bad at it and they're just doing it over and over again until they get used to it um so that they can just go up on stage without flop sweating you know that like everyone you're just watching a hundred people in a row have panic attacks basically and people are just being their weird fucking selves and you see a lot of nonsense and then you see a lot of people where you're like god damn that person is there is a core there and they're gonna be really fucking funny and i love the fact that i know so many people from those days we've just all grown up together and now they're all writing sitcoms or they're doing you know i met michelle wolf our first week doing open mics um it was so cool we

met like i was like my second open mic and it was like her third open mic and we saw each other at her and a couple friends i was like you guys are funny you're funny and she was like yeah we're going this other mic you want to come yep let's go and then i've known her ever since and then like to see her do that white horse core white house correspondence dinner was like i just felt all that history all at once i was like this is fucking amazing you know i was so what did you think when the president was tweeting at her i was like damn she got him on the hook i was like this is the way that's what a comic's supposed to do you know like the way that she pissed people off that was such a beautiful that was such a beautiful moment i loved it she was so fucking funny and it's great writing too

it was great funny shit yeah she wrote it a bunch of our friends from those days anthony devito greg stone dan saint germain i believe helped to write jokes and yeah they were really funny and guess what like the crowd didn't want comedy apparently but they got one of the best comics in the country you know who's like on that she's in her prime right now and she fucking tore it up she did her job better than they wanted and they got pissed off about it and it was beautiful they got so did you forget it was like a three-day news cycle of how much everybody hated her? Yeah, but people that were there didn't get pissed off. Some of them, they were tweeting like Maggie Haberman from the New York Times was tweeting like, oh, I feel bad for Sarah Huckabee, for the light jab that she got about her eye makeup.

Give me a break. It was nothing. It was so nothing. And they were talking about, what did they say? They appearance shamed? She appearance shamed her? No, she didn't. What was the word they were looking at. And they were talking about, what did they say? They appearance shamed? She appearance shamed her? No, she didn't. What was the word they were looking at?

Yeah, yeah. I forget what it was. Listen, she got off light. Everybody got off light. Yeah. She was great. It was fun. And people forget when Colbert did that 10 years earlier and he was applauded for it,

the people in the room hated that too. If you go back and watch that video, he gets no laughs when he's making fun of Bush. It's one of the most famous comedy appearances ever, ever right and he got zero laughs in the room it's dead quiet it's bizarre if you watch it and then a year later it was like oh colbert he's the master he did it that was one of the big moments for comedy getting serious and like satire getting that was a breakout for him and like the political hacks in the room can't take it because they don't i don't know why they book comics because they do not want comedy right and that's why they i guess they're you know they're not going to book comedy anymore but there's an interesting cat man yeah he's a

bunch of things rolled up into one because he's a he's a legitimate catholic like he's really catholic yeah despite all the scandals and kid fucking and all the craziness and then on top of that he's this character but now he's not the character anymore no now he's like a guy who's not totally playing the character but the character comes in and out like little shadows yes it does it's like what are you what's your real thoughts on things because i know you as colbert yeah i know you from the colbert report, this hilarious fake Republican guy. And now I'm seeing him.

I'm not, I'm not sure what's going on here, man. Yeah. I mean, he's well, and when you're, when you're in late night,

you know, I play a character on my show too. That's like a heightened version of myself. That's developed. It's like a very extra nerdy. It's almost like me as Peewee Herman a little bit. Like it's, it's a,

or it's me as my younger self. It's like very socially i'm a little oh sorry like it's a lot of up there you know yeah and it's different than what i do on stage uh and uh you know i can only imagine even though he's still he's like his big thing for late night was like i'm gonna be myself i'm not the character anymore you still build a little bit of a character for yourself you know yeah well also with him it's like that's what brought him to the dance yeah the reason why you're there is like what what kind of meetings that they have with him yeah like what are we gonna do here we're gonna play this straight i heard him say once he only said this in one interview but he was like we're basically creating

a new character for late night and so he had the same writers from from the colbert report and so uh he was like we're sort of like creating a new character how does this character work but i gotta say the old show i mean he's he's great the old show was probably the best performance ever made by a single late night comic because the way that he when i watch it now if i go back and watch clips i'm like the way he would do like three or four fast little turns you know in a single line where it would like mean one thing but there'd be some subtext and he would flip around and he would do like three or four fast little turns you know in a single line where it would like mean one thing but there'd be some subtext and he would flip around and he would do it like it was like watching um like a figure skater do triple axles you know like watching him do that it was it was

really impressive i like the guy don't get me wrong but i like him more on the colbert report than i like him as a late night talk show host but i do have to agree i think that's also my prejudice against that format. I'm like, you guys just saw what Jack Parr did and kept going. Totally. It's the same goddamn thing.

But I understand why he couldn't do the Colbert. He did that show for like 10 years. Of course. You know, like you can't do, that was a limited thing for him. You know, like he had that character

and so he could only do what was in the box, that character. And so he's looking to do more and I get it. I also feel like, man, that Colbert report is more interesting than the late night show to me as a comic and as a comedy writing fan. was in the box that character and so he's looking to do more and and i get it i also feel like man that colbert report is more interesting than the late night show to me as a comic and as a comedy

writing fan well for sure because the late night shows are just promotion shows that's all they are all they are is hey adam here you have a book out hey mike tell us about your new show here's our 10 minutes of comedy before that and then we do that it's like it's it's basically like a version of a commercial and the and the nightly thing is a prison you know because you can only talk about what happened that day so the smartest thing that you know john oliver right he was up for the daily show he wanted to do the daily show he was john stewart's pick for the daily show they said this in the oral history book of the daily show um and then comedy central didn't close the deal with oliver and hbo came and said you want to do a show instead you know and john stewart was like all right go with god and

that's what john oliver did instead so we're living in that alternate reality from john oliver hosting the daily show right and so the smartest thing oliver did was do weekly and not daily because it lets him go wider right if he was doing daily he would have to just talk about what happened that day you don't have that much you. Guess what? You can't have as much of a complete thought in 24 hours or in realistically the six hours you have between when you show up and when you tape the show. You can't say as much. It's harder.

And so being on that weekly schedule, and he's only doing 30-something shows a year because they have hiatuses, that's what allows them to have those big, long, complete thoughts that everyone likes so much. Yes know his rants and his intelligent takes on news issues and pointing out hypocrisy yeah it's great our show it takes us we it takes us like three or four months to write an episode like we're writing 16 at once but like you know that's how long we have to think about it and so we're able to take twists and turns you know

we we go into it thinking this is going to be our angle. And then we're, we're diving into the research. We have a wonderful research staff and they say, actually, this is the more interesting part of the story. And then we are, have the time to go chase it that way instead. Right. Whereas if we were on a daily schedule, oh shit, well, we don't have time to pivot because we got a show to make. Right.

Do you ever feel time constraints? Like in terms of like the subject matter, the matter is like very very involved yeah i mean we try to do the most difficult topics we can't you know we don't hold back from anything um but the only constraint that we have is that the show we've got 21 minutes and then in but we've got commercials so we can only talk about something for six minutes before we have to move on right and so? And so that's the only limitation that we have. Like the network will let us do anything. We've been on the network for four years. The only time they've ever killed the show

was we wanted to do something about the NCAA, about how the NCAA shouldn't kill, sorry, how it should pay athletes, right? Well, in the case of football, it is killing them. They should pay athletes, thank you. We talk about that all the time. I think it is one of the craziest fucking scams in all of money that college sports are- It's unbelievable.

They're making so much money off those kids. When you watch those things, every single person's getting paid. Everyone. Everybody's getting paid. Except the best players in the world. They're bringing water to the announcers are getting paid, except for the players, right? It's so crazy. The guy who literally, I'm blanking on his name, but the guy who are getting paid, except for the players, right? It's so crazy. And the guy who literally,

I'm blanking on his name, but the guy who created the system, right? Who like formed the NCAA. Later when he left, he compared it to plantation slavery. He was like, this is like slavery what I invented. There's no justification for it at all.

It is bananas. We want to do that topic for a college episode. We pitched that to TruTV. You know what airs on TruTV every march march madness they said no they said they said and here's here's how i live with myself i i say look i will never take a no until it's the only absolute answer i can get so they said no i say i really want to do it tell me no again you know they told me no again i was like if the president of the network tells me no then I'm not doing it

and the president of the network told me no because that's the guy who I could write it and he could kill the episode yeah but why it's true it doesn't mean you shouldn't have NCAA on your network they're worried about

they're worried about pissing off not just the NCAA those fucking thieves pissing off those money grubbing thieves stealing from those athletic kids I'm with you all these people are paying money to see those fucking kids that shit drives me crazy yeah exploiting of young athletes in in college is bonkers it is one of the ones that drives me because I got into it with Joey Diaz who explained to me because Joey used to be a bookie and he really understands gambling. He was explaining to me how much money gets donated to these schools by people who used

to go to them. He goes, it's insane. And he said, and most of it is based on the performance that the school has in college sports. Yeah. These people who are, you know, I'm a fucking, you know, blah, blah, blah. I went to school there and I'm there till I die. Fucking go team.

Yeah. These assholes throw shit tons of money and there's thousands of them all throughout history yeah years and years this guy's been donating for 25 fucking years yep and when the team wins a championship they give them a bonus donate even more right yes but who doesn't get the money is the kid right fucking people who play the game all they have to do is oh well if you get through here you get an education and then you get to go to pro sports yeah how many of them make it especially in football almost none almost no but what are the numbers what is it like i wonder what the numbers are guys who sign up for college football who make it first of all with a body

that's functional yeah after four years of 600 fucking pound dudes slamming, I guess it's not that big, but they're giant. Giant dudes slamming into you five days a week. We did an episode on football and the concussion thing.

I mean, it's not just concussions, right? It's like just the little hits, right? It's just the routine tackles. You know what I mean? What happens every single time you do that, your brain,

you got to think of it this way. Your brain is riding, your skull is the car, your brain is a passenger. Your brain doesn't have a seatbelt, right? Every time you run into somebody, boom, your brain slides forward a little bit because it's not wearing a seatbelt, bumps into the front of your skull and bounces back, right? And even if that doesn't cause a concussion, it causes a little, a little hurt every single time, right? And so you can never get a concussion, do that over and over and over again, and you're

going to end up with CTE. Yeah, subconcussive trauma. It happens in soccer players. Yeah. It's a big issue in soccer players. And those kids are hurting themselves, you know, and they're not getting paid for it. Jamie wrote here, in football, out of 73,557 NCAA participants. Approximate number who are draft eligible is down to 16,346. And now down to draft picks, it's 256.

So we're talking. 256 out of 73,000 make it to draft picks. 1.6% make it from the NCAA to the majors. 1.6%. Ridiculous. From NCAA to the majors? 1.6%. Ridiculous. From NCAA to major pro, 1.6%. That is fucking crazy.

And let's be honest, these kids are not getting a full education. Look how high baseball is. Baseball's almost 10%. Way more teams with like minors and all that kind of stuff. Isn't that crazy though?

That's wild. It's almost 10%. That's weird. Oh, that's 10% of from draft eligible to drafted though major that's not even the participants because look that's that's uh 35k 7 7k are draft eligible and then seven joint seven are drafted right but look how low the number is in terms of uh baseball participants versus football it's half less than half and yet they

have way higher percentage this This is our writing process. We look at charts. Also, the thing is like with baseball, you don't get hit, right? Yeah. Unless you get hit by a ball. Most of the time, your injuries are just from running or- Sliding and stuff like that. Yeah, you're not going to hit each other.

Well, you can get hit in the head with a baseball. Yeah, but it's so much safer. Yeah. If I had a kid and the kid was thinking Like baseball Football Or basketball I'd be like Well take that football Out of the fucking equation You got two choices

Yeah Don't do it Just don't do it You're not gonna make it The very few people That make it out of there Without like serious injury It's like it's not worth it

Yeah It's just not Especially if you look at That 75,000 number If you look at For how many kids Are playing in the NCAA Now think about how many kids Are playing in the NCAA Now think about

How many kids Are playing high school football I don't know the number But it's gotta be 10 times that right What are you showing us Jamie This kid is gonna be

He's the Heisman Trophy winner And he already Has been drafted To the Major League Baseball But he's also projected To potentially be In the top 5 NFL picks Whoa

That's cool So there's like A big discussion On what should he do It's up to him obviously But players like Deion Sanders Who have been in both leagues and have done both at the same time is like, play baseball. Wow.

Play baseball, man. Yeah. Well, that's better for your life because you're less likely to have brain damage. Do you ever talk to a fucking baseball player that's retired? It's like talking to a regular person. He still doesn't win. He still wants to be the quarterback, though. Yeah, well, he's a bad motherfucker. I mean, it's too It's like talking to a regular person. He still doesn't win. He still wants to be the quarterback though.

Yeah, well, he's a bad motherfucker. I mean, it's too bad he can't be a basketball player. Those guys clearly have the best of it. Like,

out of all the major sports, basketball players, because they... I don't know about that because it's a much more grueling schedule physically. That's true. you're running and shooting

every night. You're sprinting. You're doing all these different things. Baseball is so much more leisurely. But the celebrity aspect of basketball is so huge and like a baseball baseball gigantic yeah a rod and it's still there's yeah but five ten max ten guys on the court and if you do anything cameras right on your face yeah immediately versus like here's

the crazy thing about baseball this was pointed out to me the website deadspin did this thing where they were like pointing out the problem with baseball. They went around and they asked people, Hey, can you name, what's the most famous baseball player that you could name? And people were like Derek Jeter, A-Rod, Big Poppy, Manny Ramirez. Retired guys. And if you ask people, if they're a baseball fan, they'd say someone from my team. Or maybe they'd say Mike Trout.

Or they'd say one of the guys in the Yankees. But there is no A-Rod Jeter like level celebrity right now. What happened? I don't know exactly. Steroids. Give him back the steroids. It's a goofy game. No one's getting hurt. What the fuck is the problem? We're not talking about fighting. We're talking about

baseball. Give him the steroids. The best part about that stupid game is when someone hits the ball. Does the steroids make him hit the ball better? Yes. Okay, well, give it to them. What the fuck are you guys doing testing for that? Performance enhancing drugs, man, are the craziest. The debate about that.

We've never done this on the show, so I'm not fully boned up. I would like to. I've thought about it in the past. Because the divisions, it's like the rest of the drug war, right? The divisions we make between the things that are acceptable and not acceptable are so arbitrary right so the example i always use is like okay why don't why don't we like performance enhancing drugs not everyone has access to them so they're unfair right they're bad for your health and we think they're unnatural right okay so cheating too yeah they're yeah they're cheating yeah well that's not the reasons why we think

they're cheating right but well it's also but there's some drugs you can take that aren't cheating right like you could take advantage is the reason why it's cheating that's the primary reason so here so let me give you a counter example um uh for runners right uh for endurance athletes like i like running i'm a shitty runner but i like it i think it's a fun sport um so i follow it a little bit uh so runners endurance you know the big thing is like how much your, how much oxygen your blood can hold, right? If you train at a high altitude, then you can increase that, right? So there are these runners, the American runners, right?

They live at a high altitude. They live super high up, you know, in Colorado or whatever, right? And then when they're not there, they train there all year round, they buy a place there. And then when they're not there, when they're competing somewhere else, they sleep in a chamber that simulates low altitude, right? How is that not the same thing as taking a performance enhancing drug? It's not illegal to do that, right? It's unnatural, right?

It is an unfair advantage because not everybody can afford one of those chambers. And I'm not going to say it's bad for your health. I don't know. But it's certainly as weird for your body as taking a drug i would think right so why it's not why do we draw the line because it's only like living at altitude it's really just simulates low altitude it's not like taking i'm just saying epo which would be the drug that would simulate that which i've got recent uh experience with not personally but because the ufc just had one of its champions stripped because of testing positive for EPO.

And then we're just finding out now they don't test for EPO in everybody, that it's very expensive. And so they do it based on the athlete's biological passport and what they think are changing variables that, you know, for whatever reason, it triggers their interest when they start testing additionally. It's a big deal it's a it's a it's a serious drug i mean it's a serious endurance drug that also has like some serious health complications people have died from taking it uh young guys in their 20s in cycling have gotten strokes and died from epo that's serious but there's no health negative effects of sleeping at altitude. It's just, can you afford to live there?

Can you uproot your life? No. If you can't, yeah, it's an advantage for that person over you. So I'm just saying, we have sort of an arbitrary, where we're drawing the lines is not consistent. And it's kind of random. That's a big one. That is a big one. That, in terms of the impact on endurance, it is a big one.

That is a big one That in terms of The impact on endurance It is a big one They're actually saying now That they think the best Best course of strategy Is to train at low altitude And then sleep at high altitude

They think that when you train At low altitude You have more output So you're putting in more repetitions Because you get more oxygen So you have more work And then you get the same effect By living at altitude So you get more oxygen so you have more work yeah and then you get the same effect by living at

altitude so you get you get up there and sleep and you don't have to train up there and if you train up there it's actually slightly less valuable than training at low altitude and staying up there damn because whenever i'm whenever whenever i'm staying somewhere high altitude like i just had a weekend in denver yeah and i was like going on a run up there and it was like obviously torture compared to like being here in la but i was like oh i'm getting strong because i'm running at high altitude that's not true that really fucks with me well you just ruined something for me thank you it's work and it will help you yeah but it's if you are an athlete like athletes are literally working for one or two percent of an advantage occasionally yeah on many occasions when you are living at high altitude and training

at sea level they think that that gives you a slight advantage yeah because you can put more work in especially for fighters they think that skill work and repetitions and drilling is one of the most important aspects of it and you can just simply get in more repetitions yeah you can get in more drills yeah but they you know again though you're right because this is sort of a performance enhancing thing you're not just living and just being yourself and then showing up and competing yeah you are engaging in this activity that significantly raises your red blood cells significantly raises your oxygen capacity changes your cardio yeah your vo2 max changes yeah here's here's the weird thing it's just this there's this weird idea in sports and look uh you know a shitload more about athletics than i do it's not my it's not my real forte but i do you know i do enjoy and the thing that's always weird

to me is that we have this idea that like there's some kind of level playing field that there's this like baseline human that we can just say well you got to be at the baseline right and humans are so variable you're always going to find these weird cases and when you try to adjudicate it gets really weird like do you know about you know castor simania do you know who she is no uh oh no i do know this story tell the story this story pisses me off so much so she's a uh marathon she's not a marathoner she's a middle distance runner i believe she's south south african um she's uh like the best in the world at the 200 meters you know i actually got to see her because uh my uh uh i went to the um pre-fontaine classic in eugene oregon with my dad to like watch the big track meet you know best in the world people this is

like a olympics you know not qualifier but it's like the olympics caliber athletes saw her she's incredible just like one of the best in the world she's got um a uh uh she her whole life has faced accusations that she uh that her that she's a man basically um because she has like an elevated level of testosterone right this is her natural body right and so she's had to deal with people saying oh we gotta we gotta do a do a sex check on you which is humiliating and like also completely unscientific you know like what what are they gonna do um and uh like a sex check they want to look at her genitals well here's the weird thing man is that yeah they want to look at her genitals first of all which is humiliating to have that happen if you're an athlete you're like how many people have to be in the room? Yeah. This is, this is the problem,

right? How do you adjudicate that? Right. And also there's such a thing. I don't know anything about her personal situation, right? There's such a thing as intersex people, right?

Where when you look at the generals, you can't tell. It's not like, Hey, just look at their junk and you can tell, right? This is a real phenomenon. Like 1% of people are intersex,

right? Is it really that high? Uh, I was speaking off the top of my head, but it's higher than you think, you know, it's definitely higher it's a non-zero number of people right intersex people are a real thing it's a real thing um and so uh so but so she got past that right they stopped challenging whether she was like a man or a woman they did a chromosome test on her uh i i think you might be right yeah um but so she's she's at a deal with that that's

not fair right she's just an outlier she's a physical outlier she's a physical outlier and now the iaaf which is the organization that runs all it's like fifa for track right they run all track they have tried to put forward a rule i don't know what the status is right now because it's being challenged but um they've tried to put forward a rule that says if you have a testosterone level over a certain amount you have to take a hormone changing drug to change your hormones and she's gonna fall under that and so they literally want to change the body that she was born with because they're saying your body is unfair to her how fucked up is that right that's crazy it's really really fucked up and and so the thing is when we make those decisions about what's fair and what's not fair there's no baseline human it's always a value judgment and when we're excluding some

people that's almost all we always need to look at that and say are we discriminating they're definitely discriminating against castrosomania and is this the ioc that's what is doing this no it's the iaaf which is the ioc is the olympics iaf the olympics aren't doing this so they don't have an issue with her i don't know what the olympic policy is the olympics is fucked up we did a whole episode on the olympics the olympics is fucked up in a lot of ways too it's another dirty dirty dirty business oh incredibly billions of dollars off those athletes who work for free we had this dude on a shot put guy who uh gold medalist in the shot put he was like the year i had a gold medal i was not able to pay my bills you know um and he is literally

trying to like unionize the athletes which is very hard right because there's new athletes every four years but yeah those athletes

are not paid plus no one's going to listen to the guy who throws the heavy rock what do you do dude did you win the 100 meters yeah

I got a gold medal for the hockey team do you hook a cannonball oh you throw a rock weird that you can't make a living throwing rocks, dude. Sorry. It's fucked up, though, because people watch those sports.

The most fucked up thing is when they let the NBA play. When they let the NBA play against those fucking poor Eastern Bloc nations. And you've got these fucking super athletes who are professional American basketball players. For the biggest ones, Michael Phelps can get a sponsorship. super athletes who are professional american and they literally like players for the for the biggest ones they can um uh you know get spot michael phelps can get a sponsorship right for the biggest for the biggest ones but the the lower ones can't get sponsorships and like the shot put people can't get sponsorships and they're also not even allowed to promote themselves using the olympics they can't be like hey pizza place you know i'll be i'll be an olympic athlete me you

know at the pizza place. Because if they use the word Olympics, the IOC will sue them. Jesus. So, yeah. Dirty people. It's really, really, really not fair. But it's so prestigious. If you can win a gold medal in the Olympics, I mean, you basically can, you have a fitness

career for life. Yeah, but well, you could- If you can figure it out. You could be a high school coach for the rest of your life. Depending on the sport life Depending on the sport Depending on the sport, right? Like, shot put Shot put, I don't know

What your prospects are, right? You're fucked, bro You're throwing rocks Should've picked something Something that people enjoy watching I like track and field Which sucks because It's one of the dirtiest

Of all the sports But it's my favorite one to watch But why is that a part Of track and field? The rock throwing part How the fuck Just history, I guess Where's that? Track or field? What rock throwing part? How the fuck? Just history, I guess. Where's that?

Track or field? What are you doing? Are you a human catapult? Are you the dude that they put on the top of the bridge to throw rocks at people that I like the sports where someone has to ride a horse, then shoot a gun, then go for a swim. Old timey shit. Yeah, there's some stupid fucking sports in the Olympics. Sorry, my Canadian friends, but curling.

Curling is the top of the heap. Curling is getting bigger and bigger every year. That shit's preposterous. They don't have jujitsu in the Olympics. They don't? No. Okay, that's fucked up. Yeah, a retired NFL guy is currently trying to make the curling team,

just based off of a bet that he made with his drunk buddies. I bet I could do it. I bet he could do it for sure. They're having a tough time, actually. Fuck that they are. They're sure. They're having a tough time, actually. Fuck that, they are. They're drunk. They're not even trying. It's just that the systems we use to organize these things

are so important. Here's a really good example of this. I thought this was fascinating. India, a country of over a billion people, huge number of people, has almost no Olympic athletes. Do they have wrestlers? Don't they something of wrestlers i'm not sure but the i remember this because a couple olympics ago the first individual gold medalist ever from india won a gold medal and he wanted

an air pistol which is like a shooting that's my shit shooting oh yeah no okay i'd never heard of it before right he's into air pist out he's independently wealthy and had just practiced and practiced and practiced, right? What they don't have is India is, it's a great country. It's not a very organized country. They don't have a lot of infrastructure in terms of, you know, we've got teams, right? Whereas in the U.S., we devote tons of money, government money, private money to like, you know, the swimming, U.S. swimming, billions of dollars, people training, science, da-da-da-da. In India, they don't have that, right? So despite the fact that they have so many people,

they got a billion people, they must have every type, they must have one of the world's strongest people, they must have one of the world's fastest people because they got a billion people, right? What they don't have is that training infrastructure, right? So if you look at it that way, you're like, okay, hold on a second.

We don't like performance enhancing drugs because unearned unfair advantage. Well, what else is training infrastructure than an unfair advantage? If you're born in the U.S., you have a way better chance of making it to the Olympics and becoming that greatest athlete in the world than someone in India. How is that fair? How is that not an unfair advantage? That's true.

But to play devil's advocate, if you are a state-sponsored athlete from Russia or China, you have a much better advantage than you do if you're an american and you're some shot put dude who doesn't have a way to make a living you totally do bills while you're working for the olympics you totally do so my point is there's no baseline human like there's no there's no way to eliminate all advantages and never you know and just say oh no it's just what you came it's just what you were born with right you know doesn't exist there's no such thing those women who are running with that, I'm sorry, what's her name again? Castor Semenya. Castor Semenya.

Those women who are running with her, they just, shit happens, bro. You know, if you're a heavyweight boxer and you grew up in the era of Mike Tyson, I'm sorry, but this is just what you're stuck with. Yeah. This is what's going on. And some people are just, they just have advantages. Yeah. They just have advantages physically mentally and there's

outliers you found it sorry you got an outlier might want to do something else yeah yeah or find out what race is that lady's gonna run and don't run those races yeah run a different run a different race that's always been how do you feel about trans athletes you know uh it's a good it's a good question i think it's we're really to go through like a cultural change on how we think about that, you know, it's morphing so quickly, you know what I mean? I'm very much because I am of

this opinion that there is no such thing as like perfect fairness and when we make those distinctions, we're always choosing who to allow and because I think we should choose to allow like trans people to participate in society. I'm for an inclusive approach where you know we're able to like find a find like a model that allows those folks to compete fairly in a way that everybody's happy with i think that's the i think that's what we should do you know um and that to me is like

that's what makes me like sports more, you know, is those comparisons. Like, you know, another thing that pissed me off so much was like, fuck, what's his name? The disabled runner who then killed his girlfriend. Oh, yeah. Oscar Pistorius. Pistorius, right. And people were saying about this guy that his prosthetic gave him an advantage. Now, first of all, there's no fucking way That's true Because he doesn't have muscles

Muscles convert food into Yeah but I actually think It does give you an advantage You do think so? Yeah I think mechanically It does Because they're springs They

Essentially the way His leg works With those things Is You put You've seen them right They don't even look remotely Like feet

No yeah I've seen them Yeah the cheetah things Yeah Yeah it's a crazy Like But dude The Seasaw type thing but hold on a second that's not an advantage because how mechanics work right is that a spring you put energy into it and you get a little bit less energy out right so because that's the laws of thermodynamics right you can't get more out than you put in

except a muscle does give you more than you put in because a muscle converts food into energy for a brief period right um and so he does he has spring he doesn't have springs sorry he has springs he doesn't have a machine in his leg the way the rest of us do that creates force out of food well the real question is whether or not the lower half of his legs which is what he's missing could make up for the the advantage the mechanical advantage of the shape of those things which applies all sorts of really unusual leverage when you're running totally you're not yeah i mean i don't i don't know if it's i mean i don't know if you took him with full legs and took him with those things if they'd run the same amount of time but the thing is we can run fast as fuck with those

things you've seen those guys well he could right but where's all the other double amputees who are like you know coming in track and field how many of them are trying to i mean the paralympics is huge there's like a ton of paralympic athletes you know like i've been told that it has a mechanical advantage by someone who actually should know what they're talking about but i want to i would like to look it up do Do those legs, Pistorius' legs, are they hard? I remember reading stuff at the time from, you know, whatever, athletic scientists, I forget what it's called, who said that it didn't, right? That it didn't?

Yeah. But so that's a debate that we could have, right? Right. But the point that I was trying to make was, looking at that Olympics, God, that's a better event with that guy in it. You know, I'm so happy he was in it. Right.

I see what you're saying. But if it does give you an advantage, there's someone who comes in second place. You know. Well, so the point is, when we make the rules of a game, right, and this is the point of our episode about games, which is about the Olympics, actually, when we make the rules of a game, we are, there's no such thing as a perfectly fair competition that would be designed by God to be perfect and be perfectly fair right we're always making choices about what kind of competition we want to have and who we want to allow into it and what sort of outcome we want

to have you know what i mean right just like in baseball too many home runs move the mound up or down you know how they change the rules a little bit because they want more home runs same thing with same thing with track and field we change the rules a little bit to allow this person and not allow this person right i think that when we're talking about people we should always try to include more people not less we should you know like if and if hey if you're a double amputee and you can get your way into the olympics you can make a plausible case i think we should try to entertain that notion and we should try to find a way to get that guy in there right as far as trans athletes go you know we could have we could sit here and talk

for three hours about like all the different ways that hormones might affect your body it might not affect your body and i'm not an expert on that and i don't want to claim to be right but a sports with uh trans athletes who are uh you know competing with the you know with their gender right that's uh that is a sporting world that I'm more interested in, right? And I think we should find a way to make that happen. I know it's going to be really complicated and messy, right? And there's going to be a lot of debate about it, and it's going to be uncomfortable, you know,

and there's going to be a lot of arguments. But, you know, I hope that that's the world that we've moved forward to. That's my point of view. My point of view is that there's a reason there's a distinction uh there's a reason why we make the distinction to have male athletics versus female athletics the reason is that males have a physiological physiological advantage over women so in most sports most physical sports we do not have males compete with females the question becomes when someone who is male transitions and becomes female, do those same physiological advantages apply? And what is the evidence? power-heavy sports that favor larger people, stronger bodies, males that transition to females have a significant advantage in their breaking world records. So if you're a woman and you're

a natural woman and you don't take any extra hormones or male hormones, you're not taking steroids or any sort of performance-enhancing drugs, you're doing your very best to compete and you're at the top of the heap. But then someone comes along that was a man for 30 years and decides they're going to be a woman and this has happened and literally transitioned a few months ago and competes as a woman and destroys records and dominates you in that sport that's bullshit and that's not competing on a level playing field that's a person who's biologically a male and who is a male for 30 plus years of having testosterone run through their body and affect their tendon strength and affect the shape of their bones and the mechanical advantages of the male hips versus the female hips. And then they're competing with smaller people who have been a woman their whole life. It's not fair.

people who have been a woman their whole life it's not fair it's it's is as much cheating as taking steroids when the other person doesn't or taking performance enhancing drugs when the other person doesn't maybe even more so maybe even more so because you also have there's a bunch of advantages in terms of reaction time that males enjoy it's like it's some significant difference in reaction time between males and even untrained males versus female professional athletes well i i disagree and and i what do you disagree about i've already well the my main point being the one that i already made right that like i don't think that there is such a thing as a perfectly level playing field i think we decide what kind of playing field we want to have sure but we do make the distinction where we don't allow men to compete in women's divisions and i think that that

distinction may be breaking down a bit right and i think it may be time to break down that distinction so you think that males should be able to compete in the women's division of weightlifting uh no i don't necessarily um but they can if they transition uh well first of all uh uh the there's there's a lot of stuff to break down right and i'm not an expert on the subject right so it's just sort of my off the top of my head um one thing is you know you're postulating uh a particular person who decided to transition uh at the age of 30 right and they were very big and strong before right and they decided to transition now that is a type of person that exists, right? I think over the next certainly 30 years, we're going to see, you know, now that people are starting to understand that being trans is just a way that people are, right?

They're just people who are trans, you know, and this is something that we're going to accept and support, right? You're seeing folks transition much, much earlier age, you know. right you're seeing folks transition much much earlier age you know um uh there's but then and and so if someone is if someone is you know transitioning from the age of like you know seven years old right um and uh you know working with those hormones you know uh from that age right they're not gonna have you know their body situation can be very different than the one that you that you postulated right uh i also know from my trans friends that the uh the effects that the hormones have on your body are like really profound you know like really really profound like we're not like um uh to a surprising degree right uh and so

uh you know i have look if the question is how does you know how does a person who starts taking hormones at a particular age, how does their body change and how does that affect vis-a-vis athletic performance? I don't know. We're in such new territory here. We certainly are. And we particularly, we just scratched upon the idea of kids transitioning at a very early age. I mean, there's been more scientific evidence that points that if kids don't do that, then when they wanted to be trans at an early age, they just become gay men, and that there's nothing wrong with that either. There's no reason to give kids hormones, and there's no reason to decide before a person's

frontal lobe is completely fully developed, which doesn't even take place until they're like 25. People don't know who they are. A seven-year-old, you won't even, people don't even give their seven-year-old phones you don't let them vote you're going to let them decide what sex they're going to be for the rest of their life the the research that i've seen and again i'm not an expert on this and and you know i'd love to this is a conversation this is something i'd love to talk about on our show and i'd specifically love you know this is before this is the kind of topic where i really want to make sure that i know the research and that I'm also speaking to trans folks in this conversation.

So to touch on just my own experience and the research I've seen, the research I've seen is that trans kids from a young age, they are incredibly consistent when they're expressing their gender identity. Okay, but that's a big generalization you're talking about a lot of human beings yeah yeah but that's that's fits this narrative by saying they're incredibly consistent but if you polled these people like what are you talking about like if you i mean that's uh i look i i don't have the research in front of me that i saw so i can't like go into the details on it but like yeah it was I mean it was you know it was uh research that was surveying and tracking like trans kids who declared their identity from a young age did it change the answer was uh generally no it really didn't um and uh you know I have a

friend who has a who has a trans kid um don't know the kid's exact age but you know in the age range that we're talking about and you know he's explained that like well you know my child from a very young age consistently like said i am a girl like and has never contradicted themselves never changed their mind and so the humane thing and the thing that he felt was going to do as a parent was to like embrace that choice on his child's part right um and yeah that's embrace that choice meaning hormonally i shouldn't even phrase it as a choice like like embrace that identity um but it is a choice right i mean if you're choosing to add hormones to a child's body that's a choice uh it's a it's a choice on that it's it's the it's a choice on the on the part of the parent um it's not a choice in the on the uh on the part of the

child to like in the same way that being in the same way that being gay isn not a choice in the on the uh on the part of the child to like in the same way that being in the same way that being gay isn't a choice yeah okay but if that's who they are if they think that they're a girl why do you have to give them hormones to make them more of a girl uh because i'm sorry can you expand on the question what's a simple question if you say that the child thinks it's a girl so you're going to give the child hormones. If the child thinks it's a girl, let it be a girl. Why are you adding hormones? If you're shooting hormones into a child and you're affecting the child's development,

you're saying that's not a choice. That's nonsense. Of course it's a choice. You're choosing to chemically change this child's body. You're choosing to chemically change this child's body you're choosing to inject things into this child's body on a regular basis that are going to radically affect the physical development of their body yeah and you're saying that this isn't a choice what's definitely a choice to do that so so what trans people express um and again i'm not an expert this is from me talking to my trans friends and and you

know uh seeing what other trans folks say um is that the you know experience of being trans and not receiving hormones right and not uh having the body that you identify with the feeling of dysphoria right is um extremely like painful um and is a condition unto itself right um and uh the the feeling of not belonging with the body that you have of that mismatch right that seems to be in the broad variety of humanity the way that some people are born right where their inner self right the self that they are they're like i am a you know not they're not thinking they are a woman they're like this is the person that i am doesn't match the body that they have right and that gives them extreme distress right and that leads to you know suicide that leads to uh you know uh other damaging behaviors right

and the best treatment for that that we know exists is to uh you know have do gender confirmation via uh hormones um and you know that that doesn't affect the suicide rate the suicide rate for trans people is very high post op and pre-op really doesn't get affected by whether or not you treat them well the operation you know the question could be why is that is that because they're not accepted by society and we're not more loving could it be underlying issues that are causing them to feel this way in the first place like what is it we don't know and i'm sure it varies widely look so i all i can do is uh defer to the experts that that i know about this right so um uh you know for instance there's a author named brin tannahill who's a uh former uh uh former

military helicopter pilot i just interviewed her for my new podcast uh that's coming out soon called uh factually i'm doing it on earwolf and it's like a long-form interview podcast um and so she's one of the people who's affected by uh the uh trump uh uh military ban on trans service people you know so that's why you brought her she's trans she's trans. Because she's trans, yeah. And she wrote a fantastic book called Everything You Need to Know About Trans that she's now a researcher, right? And she went into really deep detail

about here is all of the medical science, here is all the science about it. And so at this point in the conversation, I would say, hey man, I just got to bone up on that particular, because I don't want to speak to suicide rates my entire concern is with children my concern is not with young adults deciding to take steps to confirm their gender identity who they feel they really are i'm all for you doing whatever you want to do when you're an adult when

your mind is formed but people change their mind they change their opinion they change their thoughts there's nothing wrong with just deciding to be a gay man there's nothing wrong with your body uh you know as you grow and mature and develop you growing out of these ideas some will in some world and the ones who won't they always have the option to do something later on in life but if you do something to hormonally block a child very very early on there's no turning back from that well let me say let me say a few things to that. First of all, it's not wrong to be concerned about children, and there's a reason this is the most intense part of this conversation,

and I think it's correct, right? Because we're all very concerned about children, right? But I do want to say, first of all, I don't think it's correct that trans people, if they don't receive hormones from a young age, they simply become gay men. Because I know – It happens very often. I know trans people – See if you can find that, because there was a big article that was written about that recently,

where they were talking about whether or not gender confirmation surgery and hormone blockers on young children is ethical because of this fact. And this was what they were talking about, where people at one point in time wanted to be trans and they listed several famous examples and then as they became older just decided to be gay including women who wanted to be men who just became gay women and i think what's that girl's name that was in john wick ruby rose she was one of those she wanted to be trans when she was younger and now she's just a gay woman so look i i i know i know quite a few uh trans folks right um and i have to be honest none of the ones that i know were i don't know any trans women personally who were gay men up until they transitioned right um i know quite a few trans women who were straight men right um or who you know lived their lives as presented as straight men right and then transitioned right

um as an author become lesbians uh very odd yeah i mean that's that that's one of the ways that people can be i i really recommend that um oh the other thing i was going to say is that i do know also among the trans folks that i know are the trans people who speak about this that i've heard so many of them say i wish i had access i knew this about myself at a very young age and i wish to god that i had that we had i had had the ability to receive you know these hormones at a young age my life would be so much better and i'm not going to argue with those folks you know i wouldn't argue with those folks either but you have to address the fact that there are people that have gone through

transition surgery and said i wish to god that i never did this there's a lot of those people too so if you're looking for anecdotal evidence and you want to be objective, you kind of have to look at both sides of it. I'm sure we can find the anecdotes. I'm very curious, and this is what I'd go consult my friend or my recent interview subject, Brent Tannehill's work on this,

to see how many are in each group, right? Which sets of these folks are the outliers? I think the folks that you're talking about are probably the outliers, but I can't confirm that. All surgeries have potential costs, however, according to a Swedish study of 324 patients, 3, 41% of whom were born female. Surgery was associated with considerably higher risk for mortality, suicidal behavior, and psychiatric morbidity than the general population.

So that's people who got the surgery i am curious wait 3.41 of them i mean the the devil of this is in the details right um because how much is the is the higher risk what does it mean 3.1 of the who were born female well some of them were born female and the other ones were born male the males that transition to females is what it's saying it's only saying a small percentage of them were born female that transitioned to male. But the larger percentage was males who transitioned to female and that the surgery that they received was associated with considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behavior, and psychiatric morbidity than the general population. So that's not healing them. population sure that's not healing them that's saying that having that surgery is associated with higher risk of mortality suicidal behavior and psychiatric morbidity but it also says above

following surgery patients report lower gender dysphoria and improved sexual relationships right so we're talking about everything's awesome well this isn't saying that people are killing themselves you know you're looking for you're looking for something that confirms previously established opinion and as are you you know i mean we're looking at this we should be you know we should always be careful of drawing too much from you know a single study and like look at it widely right um but uh uh what was the point i was about to make um it fled my head uh i i'm sort of at the oh here's what it was um surgery another thing i know from from speaking with trans folks is that surgery is overemphasized right and that and that uh surgery for for those folks is not the you know we as sort

of straight cis people tend to put too much emphasis on like oh did you get the surgery yet or not you know and really it's more about what are you living as and what is you know what sort of set of hormones do you have right um but i would really uh one of the i've sort of reached the limit of like my facility with this topic i really want to shout out um uh videos made by a friend of mine her videos are called contra points her name's natalie win and she does these she's a former philosopher former philosophy phd and she does these she's a former philosopher former philosophy PhD and she does these incredibly funny videos about not just about trans issues

about all types of things she had a really great one about comedy recently but she really breaks down like a lot of these a lot of misconceptions right and has really changed

every time I watch one of her videos I'm like learning new things and like new ideas are like pop pop pop in my head you know and I think you should check them out and I might enjoy talking to her on the on the show

She's like a really fascinating person. It's a points. It's an incredibly complex subject It really had really is Buck Angel on the podcast before who transitioned from female to male Which is also a different and interesting thing Yeah um You know and he said that his whole life just felt like he was a boy and he didn't understand why he didn't have a penis. He didn't understand, like, it didn't make sense.

And then once he transitioned to being a male, then he felt complete. You know, I don't deny that. My entire concern is that you're making decisions for children. Yeah. And that this is a completely new thing with no historical precedent. We've never done this before. Yeah. Let them live as a girl. But you don't have to hormonally engage with their body with chemicals. It just seems crazy. It seems ill-advised. It seems like this movement of acceptance and progressive thinking in many ways is a fantastic thing.

It's a fantastic movement. But this seems to me to be a leap. And that you're making this leap to confirm your ideology and to confirm that you know you're 100% cool with trans people and you're 100% cool and you you're going to recognize this child is trans but you're doing something you're you're doing something to this child's body that you can't turn around and if this child decides at whatever age we decide that you can make rational decisions to transition as trans let them fully develop first let them be a person let them make these decisions but if you want to identify as a woman

you and you want to keep your penis that should be fine too there's nothing wrong with that if you want to keep a functional penis you want to identify as a woman and not even take hormones who cares do that do that but when you're stepping in to a developing baby that's only been alive for six years and you're shooting chemicals into its body to change the way it develops show me the research show me the decades of peer-reviewed studies on one of the most important things that we know of the development of a human being where you're going to home more hormonally interact with their body in some sort of a random dr frankenstein sort of way like how much what evidence do we know what evidence do we have that this is a powerful absolute like intelligent smart way to

handle a child's life over the long term like when these kids grow to be 60 as opposed to kids who don't get over the long term. Like when these kids grow to be 60, as opposed to kids who don't get the hormone shots when they're six, these people are 15% more happy. There's nothing like that. But yet people are jumping into it because it seems like the thing to do, because it seems like the tide of society is moving in that direction. Well, I don't jump into it for that reason. I do think that when we're talking about an issue that affects those people right the first thing we should do is listen to those people right listen to the children listen to the children and listen to the adults right who said i used to be that child okay you

know but they are not that child and you know to you said look everyone's different so for them to say i was that child that's nonsense you were a similar child in a similar situation you were not that child they're not literally saying they're that child but they don't know how that child is feeling they don't know how much that child's being influenced by its environment they don't know how much their thoughts and their expressions are being encouraged by their parents they don't know that child sure so my point is when we're taught when you and i are talking about this right now, we're speaking pretty hypothetically, right? We're talking about a child that is not in the room that we don't have. We're talking about a fictional child, right? So what we really care about are the actual people, right? and talk to, you know, say, hey, what do you think?

You know, how do you feel? And, you know, include them in the conversation. I think we have a different conversation about it, you know? We do have a different conversation, but we also have a different conversation. We talk to people that have regret from transition surgery because there's a lot of those. Sure, but we're not, we don't have either of those folks in the room. Right, but we have to acknowledge that they're real as well. Yeah, I don't, I'm not dismissing that those people are real right but when we say if you talk to trans folks you get this impression that's not necessarily true you get a wide range of impressions i wasn't

just i wasn't talking about specifically the impression that i wasn't saying we should reason from anecdotal evidence right i'm saying that look, the last conversation I had with a person about this was a trans military veteran who is a researcher who wrote a book on these issues, right? at the research and told me that the research shows uh that the evidence that you're asking for um exists maybe not on a 30-year timeline but there have been studies of this and here's what we know about them right about children uh uh yeah i mean that's that is my understanding of the i have not looked at the research myself you know i don't think i've done this topic on my show the positive benefits of children transitioning i don't think that exists well we can't solve that in this conversation right here um but so that my point is look i'm not going to go out on a limb and tell you more than i can i can say off the top of my head right because i'm not an expert on the subject uh uh

this is something that you know if i if this were something we had done on our show and i had dived into the research more i could tell you more i know it exists but i can tell you what i have been told exists by people who have made it their business to know you know um so uh so you know that would be my next step in the conversation um uh but you know that's what i'm saying is uh those are you know including those folks in this conversation is a really critical part of it for me sure um so yeah uh but it's a conversation the world needs to have for sure yeah and i think it's one that we will have and you know again just to bring it back to athletics right um i think that the uh undeniable existence of trans you know

children to teenagers to adults right who want to compete right um and who make a compelling case to that that they should be able to compete right um is going to be something that we're going to have to grapple with you know i don't think there's going to be easy answers to it um and we're grappling with it right now yeah i mean i think the real the legitimate solution is a trans league or a trans division to have a male division a female division and trans division if you want to compete athletically that's fair to me that makes sense well i hope that there's you know like say with the you got the paralympics right and the paralympics is really like it's divided you do you know how they do it where they do like they've got all the different levels for you've

got this much amputated or you're this mobile and you can compete in this way you know and so that's really great to make a way that you know know, those folks can compete on as level as a playing field as we can be, you know, given the manifold variations in human bodies, right? But the fact that Oscar Pistorius, which by the way, we should bring up again, he killed his girlfriend, which is a very weird part of the story. And he said he thought she was a robber, right? Bizarre, completely bizarre.

But the fact that he was able to compete in the Olympics, right? Not just in the Paralympics. I think it's such a wonderful thing, you know? And so I would hope that whatever organization we come up with, you know, allows for humans and all their variations to compete in the main league as well, right? I disagree. Because I think if they come up with bionic legs like Steve Austin from the six million dollar man dude there's some people

out there that'll cut their fucking legs off to run faster and that's real there are people that want to win so bad they would cut the bottom

of their legs off to get bionic prosthesis they would really? for sure 100% would you? no I wouldn't

but I'm not crazy look there's people that amputate their hands just cause they it's a little bit do you know that people have that feeling that they crazy. Look, there's people that amputate their hands just because they are. It's a little bit. Do you know that people have that feeling that they're supposed to be disabled? Yes.

So they amputate their hands? Yes. There's people with all sorts of psychological disorders, but the need to win is so insanely strong in some people. And if they found out that, hey, man, who gives a fuck about your feet and your calves, man? They're going to look just like feet and calves, except they allow you to run 45 miles an hour. You don't think people would do it isn't that a little similar to the argument where people say oh trans bathrooms it's just so men are just gonna lie about it so they can go in the bathroom and peep at women and then when you actually expand that right and you're like hold on a second you're telling me a dude is going to tell the entire world i am i'm not a man i'm a woman

they're gonna start dressing differently they're gonna take hormones they're gonna like live with the stigma. One of the most stigmatized type of people you can be in America today as a trans person. They're going to live with that stigma. They're going to change their whole lives and they're going to do all of that just so they can peep at women in the bathroom.

That doesn't make any sense. Highly unlikely and it doesn't make any sense. But it also, that's not entirely what could happen. What also could happen is you could get some creep who dresses up like a woman and goes to the women's bathroom. You can get that. I mean, I'm all for trans people. Listen, but you can have it now. I'm all for, but if you have a bathroom that allows trans people and you get some creep who says, I'm just going to pretend to be trans.

If you don't think that's real, then you're crazy. Of course people do that. Of course there's, and people have been arrested. There's not a, there, no, no, no, there is. There's people have been arrested, men who were sex offenders who dressed up as women and went into the women's room and harassed women. There's already been arrests. This is, but it's not because, but Lisa, these aren't trans people.

But here's the thing. They're not trans people. They're people that are taking advantage of a loophole and they're creeps. And they, they probably wanted to go into the female bathroom anyway but they just couldn't do it before and now that there's trans exclusive inclusive bathrooms some creeps have been arrested doing that they're not trans people the real problem is the creeps the real problem is not the trans people using the women's room they should of course be able to use yeah but the creeps can go like you don't need a law for like so if they're not trans people right they are not supposed to be in the bathroom right right

they're pretending to be trans people and this is what people were worried about but they have arrested people doing that but so they could also do that even if it was not a gender inclusive bathroom right because they would be breaking the rules of the bathroom in exactly the same way but everybody would know that they're a man in a dress versus them being trans see if you see a trans person oftentimes trans people look very masculine there's no need if you're just going to pretend to be trans there's no need to hide well we have to ask our dress all we have to ask ourselves is if the hypothetical or if the extremely extremely rare situation that you're discussing right is so horrifying to us and such a uh such a big problem that it's worth disenfranchising millions of people from the ability to simply go to the bathroom when they need to you know

if if that extreme edge case or hypothetical case. Right. Are we really going to are we really going to, you know, hurt all all of these actual people who actually exist and say, I just need to goddamn go to the bathroom, you know, in a in a place that is, you know, safe for me. Right. And I don't think I don't think it is you know like we we can talk about that one edge case all day long you know but at the end of the day there's been more than one case but i think here's the question what where what are there more of are there more trans people or they're more sexual predators a hundred percent more trans people than sexual predators who are specifically going to put on a dress and in order to go into a bathroom specifically yeah a hundred percent

there's more trans people like by a factor of a million well i don't know about a factor of a million i mean how many people are trans uh what's the what's the numbers on that you know i don't know but i would i would consult my uh consult my friend brin's book to find out because i'm sure it's in i guess she she wrote a book that breaks down all these statistics called this is such everything you need to know about trans mind field of a subject you know as soon as you start bringing this shit up people go crazy because it's uh it's complicated and and people they dig their heels in the ground on both sides you know and you know i i try to have i'm you know i'm happy we're able to have a conversation but i try to have a conversation that's based on you know i i try to have i'm you know i'm happy we're able to have a conversation about i try to have a conversation that's based on you know what i try not to say more than i than i think i can say

uh that with you know with surety um and uh you know but my basic principle is man i just want to defer to the humanity of the people that i'm talking about you know what i mean and rather than say oh well here's my idea here's my concern what about the what what if uh you know what what if a space alien were to come down to xyz you know what i mean rather than try to come up with thought experiments about it you know it's like hey there's some people in america they're making a polite request can we use the bathroom please go ahead you know um that's that that's my that's what i default to right i just kill the perverts problem. You kill the perverts and you don't have any issues. I think there's a way with sports again.

I genuinely think, hey, my default is, I understand this problem. I understand you're going to have female athletes who say, hey, wait a second, is this fair? I think we can go forward with good faith and find a way. Let's find a model that works for everybody. I think we can do it in a way that respects the humanity of the trans athletes and the cis athletes i think that we can do that um and that's that that'll always be my i think it's easy to say as an outsider if you're a female athlete that's being forced to compete with trans women who used to be men for most of their lives i think you'd have a different opinion because i think they have a distinct physiological advantage

that's been expressed many times i mean there's a lot of records have been broken by trans women who are now weightlifters and there's that one who's the fucking dirt biker who's was a professional dirt bike professional rider before as a man and then transitioned over to a woman it's just dominating these things it's just i don't necessarily think it's. I think just like it's not fair for a man to compete as a woman, I don't think that all those disadvantages or those advantages rather go away when you transition, especially in a short time period. I just don't think they do. And I don't think there's any evidence that shows they do. There's a diminishing amount, but how much so? And in fact, there's a doctor, a board-certified endocrinologist, Dr. Ramona Krutzik, I think is her name, who did a whole article on this about fighters, about turn them into a woman or turn them into female,

so their hormonal profile is similar to females, but it also preserves their masculine bone density because one of the reasons why women lose bone density as they get older is a lack of estrogen. That's part of the reason why osteoporosis kicks in. That stops it in its tracks when you're injecting female hormones into a male's frame, so they maintain this male bone density. Now, there's also arguments that African-American female bone density

is in many cases similar to white European male bone density. So that's the argument about the outliers and about whether or not it's a level playing field, because it most certainly is not. Yeah, I mean, so that's where i get back to the idea that look could someone show that a athlete who a trans athlete who wants to compete is going to have a physiological advantage because of their history of transition right could that be the case sometimes probably so you know i'm not gonna i'm not gonna argue that well let's how about this

because i actually don't want to know one way or the other because i have not looked at any research on this so i don't want to make any claim um so let's just let's just grant that for the sake of this thought experiment right okay um so that being said let's compare that against every single other advantage that every other competitor could have socioeconomic advantage right country of origin um you know whether or not they live in denver if they live below sea level you know like all those different things right um do is it humane to draw a line around that one unearned advantage right against all those other unearned advantages you know at what point does our uh fantasy of having a level of having a true level playing field end up hurting people, end up excluding people?

And that's the conversation that I think we could have. I heard a really great – this is just the beginning of a thought, right? But it came up just somewhere. I was talking to some people about this uh and in sports one of the things our assumption that men have an advantage over women right in sports in sports yeah our assumption yeah yeah well yeah let me let me expand on our assumption that men have an advantage over women in sports um is partially based on the fact that so many of the sports were designed for male bodies right they're optimized for male bodies right um basketball for example right um uh how is that

optimized for male bodies it's like the uh the uh the height of the basket you know the um uh the way that the ball moves around you know like like if the ball moves around. You know, like... The way the ball moves around? If we're going to say that... If we're going to say that men and women have physiological differences, right? And then we're creating sports, and the sports are sort of tuned to the physiological differences of men rather than women. We're talking about power, speed, athleticism, all those. There's an advantage that males enjoy.

Okay, so when you look at, you look at say gymnastics right yes um i would say that like women for the events that are in a women's gymnastic competition right have an advantage over men right um women uh they're lighter women don't compete on the ring hold thing you know what i mean right uh men don't compete at some of that crazy uh you know bar shit you know what I mean? Right. It's larger. It's height. It's flexibility.

It's like there's a lot going on, right? So that's a rare case where women's gymnastics, we've actually created events in that and competitions that only women can do, right? And so we sort of optimized that sport more for a female body, right? What if we did that with a lot more sports? Right. And how about this? What if we were able to develop? Because, again, the rules of the game are not absolute.

The rules of the game are things that humans create. And so why do we like maybe part of our assumption that men are better at sports than women or men have an advantage on sports than women are that we have constructed. Most of the games that we've constructed are actually sort of biased towards a male type of body right that sounds ridiculous first of all the reason why gymnastics is like why women are good at gymnastics first of all their their flexibility their lightness all those things also they're not competing against men in a one-on-one type of situation like Like one's trying to defend, the other one's trying to attack, like a game of basketball or a game of football or any other sort of team sport game.

I think if you take any male gymnast and try to have them compete against the female gymnast, they're not going to be able to do those things. It's a physical event as opposed to a sport. So a physical event is you have to do this thing. It's very athletic. It's an athletic endeavor. You do it, you bounce, you land. No one's trying to stop you from doing it.

When you're shooting basketballs, you're not just shooting basketballs. You're trying to shoot a basketball while people are trying to defend. You're trying to juke left and then go right. You're trying to be sneaky. You're trying to shoot from the outside. There's all this shit going on, and a lot of it involves your ability to move fast to close distance to have the physical strength to leap up in the air and there's a huge physical advantage that men enjoy and this is not because the sport's designed this way it's because the

sport is very simple there's a basket on one side a basket on the other side you got to get it in here he's they got to get it in there ready go if you're faster and you're stronger you'll be able to accomplish that better males are faster and stronger there's a reason why there's a male and a female division it's not that these sports were designed for males is that men are physically bigger and stronger and faster these are physiological advantages yeah you can have a thing like a gymnastics balance beam event where women are going to shine because they're lighter and more flexible and they could do things with their body that men can't because of the shape of them all the mass all the different things but that's rare that's the outlier yeah yeah i don't i don't think we actually disagree that much um the reason

it's rare is because historically we've created most of our sports around things that men have the advantage in you're you're not wrong but sports are most sports involve speed and power most sports but why men have an advantage in speed and power i know but we created those sports right what would we possibly be able to create where women would have an advantage that is an athletic event where a man's speed and power does not give him an advantage i mean look look man this this is not again like i said this is the beginning of a thought right i'm trying i'm trying to use this as a thought experiment as sort of like a a possibility opening device right but so you you postulate hey now you you make a fair point that there's a difference between individual athletic events like gymnastics and competitive one-on-one or events like you know grappling or or basketball

or something like that right and so um and again i'm thinking this through myself as i'm talking about it right but um like i don't think it's impossible that you could come up with a a one-on-one competition that uh privileges that that is that is designed around the same athletic qualities that make a women make a woman uh give her an advantage in a certain gymnastics event i don't think there's any reason you couldn't do the same thing for a find a one-on-one competition that did the same thing right um there's also uh what could it be uh i mean well here's an example uh for instance uh I believe, I'm not sure, I'm not 100% sure, but I believe in, like, shooting events, right? For example, that women and men are on a level playing field, correct?

Or that, like, you know, sort of air rifle sort of thing. That, like, there are events, right? There do exist athletic events where you can have men and women in direct competition with each other. Right. Where that where that event is not designed around a particular facet of a male or female body. Right. So my point is, look, men have you. Do you agree that men have run the country and the world for like most of civilization? Like almost every country. OK, great. So men have been the country and the world for like most of civilization? Almost every country. Okay, great.

So men have been the ones setting up the sports. So the fact that, as you say, it's rare that we have sports that are sort of more designed around a female, you know, the differences between women as opposed to men, right? I think that might be because men have been setting up all the sports, right? And so my point is… But there's a lot of sports that women gravitate towards. How do you mean? There's sports that women gravitate towards that they really enjoy. There's, I mean, like women's volleyball.

It's huge, right? Oh, no. They exist. There's many sports that women have traditionally gravitated towards. Gymnastics, as you said earlier, is a perfect example. Probably way more women involved in gymnastics than men. Oh, absolutely. But those are the sports that get the less attention right and we have huge amounts it sure does it's

one of the rare examples of like ones where you know that is a real female forward you know female first sport right you know what one bothers me the most is the volleyball why is that because the girls have to dress like hoes like even in the olympics they wear thongs imagine the fucking basketball players had a dress like that Yeah That's fucked up man Well I think they can choose What they're wearing

I think that Well they can What's her name The Egyptian team The Muslim Egyptian team They dress in Traditional garb

What's the name of the Volleyball player Who has the black tape on Very famous You know The two women From the US They're very famous

Volleyball players His name's I can't remember They probably aren't Complaining about what they're wearing. They're probably choosing what they're wearing. I don't know. I don't think anyone's forcing them to wear that stuff. But, I mean, when I tune into Olympic volleyball, I'm like, damn, look at these girls in their underwear pretending they're at the beach.

They're not even at the beach. It's a choice, apparently. They want to wear it. They want to wear it. Good move. Okay, but is that a choice for the men basketball players? Can they wear thongs? They can wear short shorts

If they want to Can you imagine If they decided to wear They could wear Like a cut off With a midriff showing And little booty shorts They might be allowed to

If they wanted to Well speaking back to Speaking of the narrow masculinity They might get shit In the locker room You know what I mean Maybe not Maybe they make a point

I like the short shorts That they used to wear A couple decades ago Oh okay Like yeah Larry Bird style You know one of the things i love about baseball when i started watching baseball is uh you get to choose your own baseball pants you ever notice that like they get to choose when you look at them some of them wear really tight baseball pants and then some of them wear really baggy baseball pants and i just love imagining i like clothes i imagine them going

to like the baseball tailor and being like dude dude, I want to like sag my pants. I want to, you know, show a little swag, but you don't want to impede your performance. So I think the tight would be better as you're running. Like if swimmers shave their bodies to be more aerodynamic, I mean, how much really if you're just running to first base, how much does like baggy pants, the wind catching the baggy pants? Could that for real? Well, you look at like Manny Ramirez had like the baggiest pants i remember and like you had to imagine that guy was like a little bit suboptimal with his baseball pants you know maybe maybe because he was pulling them up and stuff

yeah maybe had big ass thighs and they only feel good with uh baggy pants let me just put a bow on on what i was trying to get earlier right because i know i was i was sort of like getting to a pretty spacey place um my point is just what our show is about so much is about showing how the things that we take for granted in our world like the way the world is so much of the time is just something that we built right and we can question it and so when we say men are men have advantages in women over sports i'm like well hold on a second let's look at how we set the sports up and is it possible that we could set up set it up in a different way right that would allow more people to compete in sports, right? It might not be the same sports.

I'm not going to say that women should play in the NFL against men, right? I don't think that would be safe. I don't think anyone should play in the NFL, frankly. I think it's way too dangerous. It's very bad for people. But is it like – is our assumption just based on, hey, these are the sports that we invented. We happened to invent sports that where men have the advantage. just based on hey these are the sports that we invented we happen to invent sports that where men have the advantage can we imagine a world where 90 of sports are ones where women have an

advantage or would we be having a different conversation and if that's the case could we come up with some sports that like everybody could you know that where there's no uh it would have to be non-physical sports i think um but i think yeah you could come out with competitions where women and female traditional female characteristics would have an, yeah, you could come out with competitions where women and female, traditional female characteristics would have an advantage. For sure you could. I mean, it could definitely be done. You know, it's just the ones that exist now that involve running and lifting things and

moving fast, physiologically, males have an advantage. Yeah. That's why we have these distinctions. And that's why we have men's divisions and women's divisions. Over hundreds and hundreds of years ago, you what this is not fair it's not fair you know but you know i i mean is is it the like that's the that's the notion of fairness we have now you know i think the interesting thing about the question trans athletes is it's going to challenge that notion it's going to lead to conversations like this one you know i think

that's really cool and that's what i think we're sort of we should be down to have as a society right well talking about things especially when there's a disagreement is the only way to solve them yeah but you know i think um these conversations oftentimes become these shouting matches and i you know everybody digs their heels and as you were talking about before about how people's identities get really locked into ideas that they've held strong to, whether it's identities about religion or identities about politics. I mean, that's why when you were talking about alphas and betas, people were like, why is this show getting political?

This is how dorky people get. There's nothing political about that. But you think it's political because it represents these rigid ideologies. Exactly. We stumbled across something that was like a really deep, those men's rights activist types, and then they connect that to their national politics

and to their gender politics and everything. And it was just like, just the idea of questioning that really set them off, right? But what I'm about is questioning all these things. This conversation that we had, this disagreement to the extent that we were disagreeing, um, I think is a really good one to have,

you know, and I'm always testing what I think I know and trying to sort of undermine it and say like, do I know this for sure? I mean, dude, on our show, we have done more than one segment.

We have another one coming out later this year where we like go back and we correct our own mistakes. We correct the things that we've done wrong on our show. was a big one um let's see a really big one uh that we have uh coming out um i'll give you a preview um we did one about uh uh there was uh we did a topic about sugar and fat about how you know americans were like obsessed with uh uh cutting fat the low fat craze right um and a lot of that was uh uh there there was an early research there was early research uh by this one researcher who showed that uh sugar caused a lot of heart disease you know and obesity and stuff like that um and. And basically the sugar lobby shut him down, you know,

and, you know, were sort of funding research that really showed that fat was the problem. And that research sort of took over and that really led to the sort of anti-fat craze, right? We did a story on that topic. We later found out that like sort of the way that we had characterized the story of that happening was not accurate. You know, was or does that make sense?

Like the the narrative part of it. Like, it's true. This guy's research existed. Right. It's true that the sugar lobby hated it, you know, but the research that showed that fat is bad, you know, that fat causes heart disease as well. It wasn't like totally shitty research. And like this sort of narrative isn't the only reason that that other research fell out of favor does that make sense and so uh we talked about that as a way that like the story of there was this good guy researcher who was sort

of like stifled by the bad guy researcher in the lobby uh sort of misled us down that down that path too simplistic it's more complicated than that exactly and that's what happens when you're doing a show that has you-minute segments, right? Yeah, that's what I was getting at. It's like when we were talking about earlier, like the time constraints on some subjects. Think about how much time we spent just talking about trans people and trans athletes. Yeah, a good hour at least. Two cis males talking about something you have no personal experience in.

And that's one of the reasons we've wanted to do that topic on the show, but we're like, man, we really want to do justice to it, and it's really hard to do in six minutes. That's why I'm looking to go longer in my career. I'm looking to find ways to go longer. Well, why can't you do it online? Say if that NCAA thing doesn't pay as well, but do you

have a clause in your contract to take some issues that you would like to talk about and that the network wouldn't let you talk about, like NCAA? Couldn't you do like your own version of it yeah totally i mean i'd have to find a way to fund it you know just call it definitely not adam ruins everything yeah i totally could do that show i mean so far i've talked about it here right um and uh i i do want to say by the way we talk about the the thing that we have a very cool network they that was the one time they ever killed the topic and what they did allow us to do was in an episode we have coming out later this

year we talk about on the show the fact that they killed that topic and we we talked about how ad you know we're on advertising supported tv and occasionally we we tear into advertisers you know and occasionally we have to have a conversation with the network where the network says uh actually gatorade kind of sponsors the network and you're talking about gatorade and then we have to have a conversation with the network where the network says, actually Gatorade kind of sponsors the network and you're talking about Gatorade. And then we have to have a conversation. We still did our Gatorade topic, but we had to have a talk or two. Can you say sugary sports drinks? We said, okay,

all of the sports drinks overemphasize hydration as a problem. And so we did a whole segment examining how much does advertising affect the show, right? And as a result of the NCAA, we had to kill that segment. And the network let us say that on TV.

So that was really cool that they allowed us to, like, bring up that conflict on the show. But, yeah, no, there's nothing stopping me from going on the Internet. It just so happens that, you know, I'm a comic. And, you know, I had the wonderful opportunity. I've always wanted to have my own TV show and I had the wonderful opportunity to create one. If I hadn't had that chance four or five years ago, I would have,

I would probably be on YouTube right now doing like, you know, hour long explainer videos with me doing jokes straight to camera. And I love folks who do that. Like, like, uh, uh,

and you know, maybe I'll, maybe I'll find myself doing that again someday. But right now I'm just like too busy making, it's hard enough doing 16 episodes of TV a year to also figure out how to write and research a thing that's straight to camera. I can only imagine. You did start out doing that, right?

You started out on YouTube? Yeah, on College Humor. I was a writer there, and I developed Adam Ruins Everything while I was there, and then we sold it to TruTV. I will say on my live shows now, I've just been on tour with my new show mind parasites which is like me trying to figure out how what i do how to do what i do in a stand-up context right and so uh i took that all across the country i'm hoping to set up some more dates soon um it's this really cool show about how these biological parasites that control like their host minds,

like this fungus that takes control of an ant and like, let's see, a lot, a lot of weird things. Like it's like literally their minds become controlled by this parasite that infects them. And I use that a way to talk about, I use that as a way to talk about the cultural parasites that are controlling our minds,

like advertising, like the social media algorithm, like alcohol. In my case, I quit drinking recently. How long ago? About a year ago. Did you miss it?

No, not at all. Right now? Not at all? Not at all, man. I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. I know you'd love to get me in a Musk moment and show me all my... I know it would make a lot less news, but... You look very happy not drinking. I don't want you to drink. I lost a ton of weight right away. Did you? Well, yeah yeah alcohol's bad for you uh but yeah so that's that show is me going longer right and and i'm up on stage for like it's a theme it's a theme yeah it's like got a title it's got a it's got sections and i'm right

it out as a theme like in initially as you like have a framework for it yeah i did i did and and that was so hard to write because as a comic you're used to going up and just like well i'm just gonna riff on a new idea oh that's a chunk and then i'll combine it with that other chunk and then that's my special right but i was like hey i want to figure out a way to do what i do which is like come up with an argument and uh and some information and put it in a framework so i was like all right mind parasites i'll talk about these biological parasites i also want to talk about advertising time to write some jokes and that was hard as hell to it felt like doing it backwards but i worked it out a lot on stage and eventually found it and and the show's really uh really

clicking now i'm really uh ari shafi and i were just talking about that because ari shafir is doing that with his most recent hour his his most recent recent hour is entirely about his uh history uh in uh orthodox judaism like he was a serious orthodox jew spent a lot of time in uh in israel like living in one of those religious commune type deals what do they call those yeshivas oh yeah is that what they call it yeah yeah i think i think that's what it's called i mean he, he studied the Talmud and the Torah. He studied it all day long. I didn't know that. Yeah, I mean, he's 12 hours a day reading.

And then said, this is nonsense. The fuck am I doing? And then became Ari. And so his most recent special that he's in the middle of creating right now is called Jew. And it's the first time that he's ever done a total special from top to bottom on one subject and he's piecing it together like sort of in many ways it was influenced by some of the hours that he saw when he went to edinburgh yeah and saw the festival but he'd said that he wanted to do it american style whereas they had these themes but they didn't necessarily emphasize the punch lines yeah and the stand-up

and the left that's the same problem i that's the same problem i had because when you're writing that way you need to make a point and it's often hard like you're like all right that joke was pretty good but i need i could juice it more but i need to get to the next point you know yeah and so that's a challenge with writing that way but i've just been doing it enough on stage that i've been able to like you know like it's it's look i'm not gonna say i'm the funniest guy on the funniest motherfucker ever but like it's got the punch lines i wanted to have you know that's awesome yeah it's cool the punchlines I want it to have, you know? That's awesome.

Yeah. It's cool to think about it that way too as a framework and then start from there. I know Chris Titus does it that way too. Yeah. A lot of guys do it that way where they'll try to make a framework and then have all their ideas fit inside of that framework. Yeah. I mean, the thing that I found out is the reason people ask me how I got into this,

you know, and I was just a comic in new york just going up on stage and you know after a while you learn how to make people laugh but you don't know how to make people give a shit about you right like okay greg i'm forcing audience to make a noise all at once you know what i mean but i can't make them remember me right and so when i started talking about the stuff that i've learned you know i'm just an information sponge i just pick up shit like this you know and i started talking about you know oh do you know that the diamond engagement ring was a scam on the part of the beers corporation in the 30s and everyone just forgot now we think it's tradition right that was the first bit i ever did that with as my most sort of famous signature bit

people start paying more attention you know and uh like oh my god i didn't realize that you know and now i'm in this weird niche no one else does what I do I do like educational investigative comedy right when you watch me you laugh and then also you learn some mind-blowing shit that you're going to remember a year from now you know and no one else is doing it and so the cool thing about it is when I go up there I'm not running in this you said earlier make your own race you know or like don't run the same race as everybody else every every other comic I'm like every other comics trying to win the a hundred meter dash. And maybe Usain Bolt's in the race with them, right?

That's Bill Burr or whoever, you know what I mean? Usain Bolt's trying to beat him. And they're like, fuck, I can be pretty fast, but I'm never gonna be number one. You know,

I'm running a race. I'm the only person doing this, you know, like I'm, I'm just doing a race off to the side where like my show, if you go to see Bill Burr, there's more punchlines per second, per sure,

for sure. You're going to, you're, but at my show my show you're gonna learn about some weird bugs and you're gonna think differently about social media you know you're gonna you're gonna come away with a new idea and so that's what i have to offer this yeah yeah i've engineered it that way and and so that's what i try to tell other comics when they're just talking you know when people see my show and they're like how'd you write this i'm like dude just figure out what you can give people that other people aren't giving them you know and when people see my show and they're like, how'd you write this? I'm like, dude, just figure out what you can give people that other people

aren't giving them, you know, and like, it's possible to write in a different, in a different way, you know? I miss doing straight,

like I have my straight stand-up hour where I just go and I tell you my stupid observations about shit, you know? And I love doing that material,

but that material is not gonna get me a Netflix special, you know, because it's not different enough, you know? I see what you're saying. So you've kind of like, you have a strategy. For a Netflix special, you know, because it's not different enough, you know? I see what you're saying.

So you've kind of like, you have a strategy. For a little bit, yeah. Yeah. That's also what I want to talk about, you know, it's not just cynical,

but yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not like you're being disingenuous. Yeah. This is who you are. Yeah.

Yeah, it's cool that you found a niche like that. You found this little groove that you could cut into. And I'm just working on it. I have a few bits that I do that are scientific reality that people don't believe in that or that people wouldn't imagine until you hear about it particularly biological stuff but but mind parasites is one we've brought up in this podcast a fucking thousand times yeah we

had sapolsky on um who's that uh robert sapolsky from stanford who's the top researcher and one of the top researchers is toxoplasma. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I talk about that a little bit in my show, yeah. Listen to his lectures on it. It's crazy. No, that stuff is nuts. Crazy.

The toxoplasmosis is wild. 50 million Americans have it. Yeah. Probably me. Yeah. I think I have it. In your brain, the cat parasite.

You know, in my understanding, I want you to check out this guy's research. The research that I saw was like not quite definitive enough to be able to say this affects your behavior. Right. It's like they think maybe the research that i saw was like not quite definitive enough to be able to say this affects your behavior right it's like they think maybe probably so i was like

that's not enough for me for my show but like so you know i talk about but you know what i talk about is the way that like the social media algorithm right um is designed it's just like evolution right it's like it's just testing on you every single second you're online instead of trying to see whether the genes perpetuate themselves this test is saying can i get you to click right are you interested are you upset are you gonna engage exactly and the best way to get you engaged to piss you off exactly and if i can get you to click all they do is they just reproduce that same stimuli with little changes just like evolution and by doing that they're able to control our behavior in a real fucking way and And people know this, you know, but it really is happening to you. Do you listen to Sam Harris's podcast?

I've heard it a couple times, yeah. He's got a great one. I'm pulling it up right now that I just recommend yesterday, but I'm going to recommend it again because it's that fucking good. And it's about Facebook and about how this is all set up. It's called The Trouble with Facebook. And the guy's name is Roger McNamecnamee mc n e m e but it's uh episode 152 yeah but it's really fascinating because one of the things they take

into consideration is that this company facebook makes their money off of collecting your data the best way to collect your data is to get you to engage the best way to get you to engage is put things in your news feed they're going to piss you off yeah and it's like this division that's that's rising in this country is coincides yeah with social media and it's not coincidentally and here's the thing they don't even the really fucked up part is the people who created these algorithms that is not their intent they're not trying to piss you off and they're not trying to create division all they're doing is they're like look we just want people to spend as much time on the site as possible yep algorithm watch what they're doing and give them more like that right

and then so it's happening accidentally and so then when we're all looking at facebook going like look what facebook's doing they're like what are you talking about right it's just about we don't need to change anything you know um we just we just have an algorithm that rewards engagement yeah i know i know that you i know that you had uh jack dorsey on i did not hear that interview i just know you had him on had him a couple times i know that people are pissed off at you know like um and my own personal piss off with them is that like they don't they don't take enough ownership of it you know like and and that's not just i don't want enough ownership of it. And that's not just, I don't want to just focus on Dorsey. Zuckerberg is the worst with it. That these algorithms are causing these behaviors and then they're saying,

oh, that's not, no, we're not doing that. We're just trying to get people to be on the site more. It's not that bad. We're trying to connect people. And so they don't change it. But what if they had no algorithm? What if they just allowed it to exist

as just a virtual message board you know twitter no moderators twitter well that's that's a problem itself right because like that's like okay a virtual message board with no moderators is like um like let's just talk about fighting for instance right like okay when you've got a ufc fight right you've got a referee right you've got a situation you've created. You've got, you've got a ring, you know, you've set things up.

So, Hey, people are going to get hurt, but not more than you want them to. Right. Yeah. No moderators. That's like,

Hey, let's have a street fight with nobody watching. Right. No one's, there's no rules. There's an unlimited number of people in there. It's just people wailing on each other. Well,

people are going to get hurt, you know? So like, I think when you are uh creating the platform you're creating the place where the discussion is happening you have a responsibility for what kind of discussion happens in that place you know because you're the one who set up the ground rules you know they were trying to do that with youtube for a while they were trying to say that like if you have a youtube page and your comments are filled with anti-semitic hate that

you can get in trouble for that that you were supposed to clean up your comments are filled with anti-Semitic hate that you can get in trouble for that. That you were supposed to clean up your comments. And then people went, what the fuck are you talking about? And YouTube was like, ah, forget it. Yeah, so I think that should be on YouTube, right? That's YouTube. YouTube is the one that allowed that to happen in the comments. YouTube is the one saying that we're not going to moderate anything. How could they?

How can they? I mean, you literally need physical moderators. Yeah, I know. And you have so many people. literally need physical moderators. Yeah, I know. And you have so many people. There's so many people. Yeah. And this is the issue with Facebook.

This is the issue with Twitter. The real question is like, who gets to decide what is offensive, what is not? I'm sure you're aware of the learn to code fiasco. Oh, I kind of heard about this. People are of heard for saying learn to code and it was really mocking this idea that people were telling coal miners who are losing their jobs you know hey there's jobs in computer programming i tuned this out you should learn to code and so people started mocking people by saying learn to code and then learn to code. Apparently, according to Jack Dorsey and Vija, it got connected to, uh,

anti-Semitic remarks and hate remarks. And then I decided to tune out this level of internet, this internet nonsense, but it's fascinating because that doesn't mean anything. Like learn to code is not offensive. It's like, well, it's ridiculous to ask a 50 year old man who's a coal miner to learn to code

and doesn't have a formal education. That is ridiculous. But I mean, the fact that you get banned for life for saying that that's actually even more ridiculous yeah but then there are cases where people go and they try to create like a if someone if someone who look there are anti-semites out there right they do try to come up with like ways to indicate anti-semitism to each other that other people won't detect you know what i mean via you know slang basically inner slang right um and uh at some point someone needs to be able to say okay wait hold on a second this is we figured out this is an anti-semitic slang so we're not going to allow you to say it you know what i mean it's like shit like 88 or what isn't that a thing where you have to have yeah age age this is the

this is the problem right this is the this is the exact problem that you're talking about um so but the contra the contradiction that all of these platforms have right is the early days of the internet remember the early days it was like uh people were really concerned that people would start suing websites because of what was on the website right like um like the pirate bay the big torrent site you know like you're gonna get sued because you've got dvd screeners on there no hold on a second we're just this is just where people can upload the shit you know google getting sued because they would you know direct someone to the dvd screeners they searched for leaked dvd screener you know what i mean and so that was a big concern in the early days of the internet right

and so we established this precedent that like no no these sites don't have a responsibility for that right they're just how people are connecting to things. They're not the people doing the bad shit, right? You go after the people doing the bad shit, not the people who made it possible to find the bad shit, right? Now, though, we're in such a place where, so all these businesses built themselves on the idea of YouTube, right? We don't make anything at YouTube.

We just give you a place to upload your videos, right? So at first that's fine all right just take down the anti-semitic you know white supremacy videos all right whatever right but now there's so so many of them right and also not only that youtube's algorithm is directing people towards them and youtube is selling ads against them and making money at them right um and at the same time like you know these these videos exist right um uh and uh at the same time they're still trying to say well we have no responsibility for that happening it's like hold on a second you guys built a system where any kind of content is allowed and you are you

you've also built a system that's directing people to that content and you built a system that's making money off of that content i think you guys have a little bit of responsibility now i agree that the question of who polices it or whatever, that's an extremely complicated conversation. But that's what I'm just saying about these companies trying to have it both ways. They're trying to say, we have no responsibility for what's on the platform, but also we've allowed this kind of content to go up. I don't know if YouTube profits on anti-Semitic videos. I don't know if that's true. they have in the past i talk about in my show they have a demonetizing aspect of uh youtube that affects people whenever anything's

even remotely controversial controversial they've started they've started doing that um up until like there's a case i talk about in my show um uh like a year year or two ago where they were like running under armor brand uh under armor ads on like white supremacy youtube videos you know what like a year or two ago, where they were like running Under Armour ads on like white supremacy YouTube videos. You know what I mean? Yeah. And that was like- So their algorithm was causing this to happen?

Their algorithm was causing that to happen, right? And these are videos getting hundreds of thousands of hits and it was like major brands. And those brands found out. Oh, wow, wow. What was the title of these videos? Like what kind of- I don't-

Did they say obvious anti-Semitic things in the title? These were obvious enough that anybody would be pissed off about them, yeah. Wow. uh so that's where the demonetization thing came from right because they're like oh shit now the people who actually pay us the advertisers are pissed off right so okay let's put a band-aid on the problem and let's demonetize videos right here's the problem now they're doing that they're just doing that algorithmically right they're choosing which videos to demonetize algorithmically so sometimes they demonetize stuff that they shouldn't that's definitely happened a ton and a lot of shit is still getting through the cracks you know and again they're

saying okay we did what we did what we had to no you guys didn't solve the fucking problem because now people are pissed off again right so that is the bind that these companies are in they're based on this premise of we don't moderate anything but when you do that a lot of shit comes in and now you're in the position where sorry it's still your house the shit's happening in your house you threw the house party dude like like the vase got broken it's your fault at the end of the day you have to take some responsibility for it and then well how am i supposed to police 200 kids i don't know you're the one who threw the party you know that's a good analogy because it's the scale that's the problem it's probably more like

200 000 kids in a house totally because it's unmanageable yeah when you think about how many different people are on youtube and how many different countries are uploading videos and you know some of them are isis beheading videos yeah those those like there's a bunch of cartel videos that uh people have sent me to on youtube and they stay up for a little while yeah you know you get to watch some horrible shit for a little while before they catch on. Or like, I talk about these videos, uh,

in my show where like the, the weird nonsense kids videos on YouTube where it's like people in Spider-Man costumes doing like weird community theater. You know what I mean? And like, well, Spider-Man Elsa videos are like, those are so strange.

There's so many. If you look at kids, YouTube, it's still so full of it. Like they've tried to stamp it out. There's still tons of it. And these videos, like literally I show a video which is just total nonsense. Like looks like it was made by a computer.

It's just weird garbage. Doesn't look wrong until you actually watch it closely. And then you're like, this video is saying weird nonsense. The video has 600 million views, right? And it's just garbage, right? And I have literally spent my whole life trying to make good internet content make content the funny entertaining that people like and i can't get close to that number of hits and it's because the algorithm is controlling what people are watching

right so people are directing towards people towards nonsense so that people are watching this because it has elsa or spider-man or they're watching this they're watching it because they're a five-year-old and the video was given to them up next by youtube and the video's title and keywords and like content has managed to hack the algorithm find the weird edge case in the algorithm that put it in front of those kids over and over again you've seen the ones where they break down those videos where it's weird like there's always like a baby and alcohol yeah and someone always gets hurt from a broken bottle like over and over and over again, these things happen.

They do that because it's sort of like they've found the people who make those videos have found how to hack the out because algorithms are not that smart, right? They're not brilliant things. They're just like a little bit of code. It's just like in a video game, you know, when you're playing a video game and you like figure out, you're like, oh, the video game thinks that when X happens, I'm trying to do Y. But now that I figured that out, I can exploit that, right?

I can figure out how to freeze that guy in place. Or just like when you're a kid and you can figure out how to scroll the enemies off the screen in NES games. Go left and then right. Oh, they disappear. You figure out how to hack the algorithm. That's what the people who make these videos have done with the algorithm as well. They figure out the little hole in the way that it works. And they figure out, oh, if we just do this, the video will get shown again and again and again.

And here's the thing. 70% of all videos watched on YouTube are being served by the algorithm. And people are watching a billion hours of YouTube a day. So people are not choosing what we're watching. The algorithm is choosing, and the videos the algorithm is showing us are the ones that people are hacking, like these weird, fucked-up videos. To tap into this algorithm. that is really interesting and it's also interesting these companies have figured this thing out like uh i don't know if you ever get you see um like whenever i post something um there will always be like if i post something on instagram there will

be within the first second or two four or five of these accounts that like uh are you just going to pretend i don't have a giant booty? And you're like, what is this? And you go to it and it's some weird, sneaky sort of computer generated thing where it'll say it on with a bunch of different accounts, the exact same thing with emojis and then you

go to it and it's some ripped off pictures of some girl with a big ass. And then somehow or another they're trying to get you. But they've capitalized on this comment section to find people that have posts that get a lot of comments and get a lot of views and then they go right to it.

And then that's how they tap into it. And that's my point of how this works, right? So Instagram set up a comment system. These people have figured out how to hack the comment system to get their bullshit spam on the top. Within seconds, I mean, so fast,

they couldn't possibly have written it. Like, it has to be a program. And that's Instagram's fault for allowing that to happen. At the end of the day, you know what I mean?

Like, that's Instagram's problem to solve, you know? And that's the problem all these platforms have. That's the problem YouTube has, that's the problem Twitter has.

And so whenever they say, oh no, it's just a couple bad apples. It's like, you guys threw the party, you guys figure out how to fix it. You got a shitty orchard, son. Yeah.

Just a couple of bad apples. I mean, YouTube's amazing in that you really can be entertained with things. Like for someone who's into obscure things in particular, it's one of the best resources ever. I made my career off of YouTube. Yeah. But it's also like if you want to watch old things You want to watch interesting things I mean you can

Find almost everything On YouTube Yeah Including things that are not true This is like Where they're cracking down On certain things Like flat earth videos

It's the library of Alexandria man Like I remember There used to be Like in New York I never actually went and did this But there was like a museum That had like lots of old archival TV You know You and did this but there was like a museum that had like

lots of old archival tv you know you could go back you could watch like the first episode of johnny carson or whatever you know what i mean i was like oh that's so cool right now you don't need to go to that library you can just it's literally on youtube the first episode of johnny carson ever is on youtube who was the guest uh i don't remember um i don't think i'm exaggerating i have seen it on the web i saw like his very first appearance sure it's up there um or at least the early one you know because maybe the early ones weren't taped but it was like super super early he's got like black hair you know wow um and so like you know every episode of the daily show ever is on the internet you know and so uh and you know say you like uh

you know name uh sometimes i go sometimes i just go watch uh you know name an old jazz musician you can go watch him play live you know what i I mean? You can watch Thelonious Monk, close-ups of his hands. You know what I mean? That's incredible. That's incredible. And I still hope in my heart of hearts that that is, at the end of the day, YouTube is serving a good purpose because we still have access to all that information. My videos do pretty well on YouTube.

My videos aren't white supremacist you know spider-man nonsense they're good you know so hopefully they're doing some good in the world but at the you know i so i hope in my heart of hearts that like you know this is still a positive force for humanity i think it's a positive force but i think overall the problem that we're talking about whether it's a problem with youtube or the problem with the facebook algorithm or any of these things it's people that suck that's the the problem. Yeah. It's not people that are putting up videos of Thelonious Monk. It's not someone making something educational on vitamins or something like that. It's bullshit.

Yeah. The bullshit's the problem. The problem is people exploiting the system and using that system to stick nonsense or bad things up there. But if you're the company that's allowing that bullshit to happen and you make money off of it, right? Yeah, it's an issue but it's also it's like part of it is really interesting to me like part i don't like the fact it's all this i don't like the fact that there's some ungodly number of kids that think the fucking world is flat because they

watch a youtube video there's no one who is there while the guy was making the youtube video to go stop that's not true yeah i'll show you how this is how you do it there you go there's the data okay next keep going stop that's not true either you don't know the fuck you're talking about of course it works like that this is why it works like that and this is what it means did you see our video on the moon landing no oh this is one of my favorite videos we ever did so uh you know it's about how the moon land the thesis is the moon landing could not have been faked it would have been harder to fake the moon landing could not have been faked. It would have been harder to fake the moon landing than it would have been to actually go to the moon because the technology to fake it did not exist. Like when we talked to a forensic film guy, right?

Who's like spends, he's got like a, he's got a fucking Oscar for, you know, analyzing old films, right? And he walked us through it. He's like, look look the shadows are parallel right they're not diverging you know a close light source the shadows would would diverge right um so wait a minute you know that that's like one of the big arguments for the moon hoax is that the shadows intersect the shadows indicate multiple light sources uh well that is because uh

when that's one of the main arguments. That is a... I believe that's reflected light. Okay, I'm getting past my memory of this segment. Dude, I used to be a full-on moon hoaxer. I fully believed we never went to the moon. I shouldn't have brought this up. I watched the documentary that was on Fox TV while I was on news radio. It was like 1995 or something like that.

I was fucking convinced. Can I just say news radio is one of my favorite sitcoms ever, by the favorite sitcoms ever by the way that is a unacknowledged classic i have watched the whole series like three times um that show is so i'm sorry just go ahead i just had to say that much well anyway um back then fox news actually aired a full one hour show called called conspiracy theory did we land on the moon and it had me fully convinced yeah there was all this shit that they showed like the same background being used in multiple moon missions that were supposed to be on completely different parts of the moon like how is this possible they're supposed to be like nowhere near each other but they have the same background

and that is uh it looks like the astronauts are on wires and it looks like the light sources are, there are multiple light sources and the shadows are intersecting. Yeah. And then, you know, all the fucking astronauts when they came back, they did this Apollo 11 post-flight press conference and it looked like they're completely full of shit. I was all in, dude.

Yeah. All in. And now you're all out? No, I realize I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. That's one of the real problem. We all need to realize that. With being all in all in and now you're all out no i realize i don't know what the fuck i'm talking about that's one of the we all need to realize that with being all in with any and with anything but we also found that they did fake some things for publicity purposes photographs that were used that were photographs from tests that they did inside a warehouse with all safety equipment and then they blacked out all the safety equipment in the background and pawn those photos off as spacewalk photos but i think that's overzealous

publicist it doesn't mean no one went to space it's like making leaps as opposed like what's the simplest explanation if they did fake some footage well it's probably a bunch of simple explanations but overzealous publicist people wanting to show people video that they didn't have video of maybe the the photos didn't come out so well so they fake some of them well let me the the thing about the shadows diverging my memory of this is we don't talk about that when people say they see the shadows diverge right if you actually go outside on a sunny day when you have a single point of light like that with light reflecting you will see two shadows of yourself going in different there's one dominant shadow and then there's a there's a secondary one right yeah but if the shadow if the sun is actually far away right for the main shadow you will see the same

shadows be parallel right if you had a close light source like on a film on a film set you see the shadows diverge right so we had this film forensic guy come on and tell us look if you wanted to get perfectly straight light like that you would need lasers you would and you also, but you'd also need multicolored lasers because at the time, all that existed were red lasers, right? They had not existed. They had not invented anything other than red lasers, right? So NASA would have had to have multi, like multi-decade advanced laser light technology in order to fake this.

Another part of it is that- Would they really though if they just hired Kubrick? I think he'd figure it out? No, I mean... The same guy in 2001? This is what we demonstrate in our segment. Another part of it is

people forget the moon broadcast, the moon landing broadcast was something like a six-hour live broadcast with no cuts. You know? And at the time,

that was something you could do with TV, but you literally couldn't do it with film. There was no way to record film. Sorry, there was no way to record film. Sorry, there was no way to record TV at the time.

You had live TV and you had recorded film, right? So if they were going to record it in advance, right, and then play it back, they would have needed a six-hour long reel of tape, right? There was no commercials?

I don't believe so. And so they would have had to... What did they say? So we should probably know if there was commercials because that changes the game. But, you know, you would have needed to – what did they say? So we should probably know if there was commercials because that changes the game. But you would have needed like an enormous film canister that also didn't exist at the time. But if anybody is going to have an enormous film canister, it would be those fucking hoaxers at NASA.

Well, part of the premise of the we didn't go to the moon argument is that we didn't have the technology to go to the moon, so they faked it, right? we didn't go to the moon argument is that we didn't have the technology to go to the moon so they faked it right but it's like okay well if you have to postulate that they had decades ahead of its time filmmaking technology why can't you accept that they just went to the fucking moon you know so at the end when you go through all the things that would have to happen right in order to make it happen you really go through it and look at what is the simplest explanation the simplest explanation is that we went to the moon because it would have been fucking easier i don't know if it would have been easier if it was impossible to go to the moon it would be insanely difficult to fake no doubt but if you had an incredible budget and if you had someone who really had the very top of the

food chain knowledge in terms of special effects what kubrick did in 2001 when was when was that when did 2001 come out i want to say like 71 or some shit yeah something like that when did that come out uh let's see yeah look it up i think it was earlier than that maybe 68 68 okay so we're talking about before the moon landings kubrick had some pretty astonishing special effects in 2001 yeah but, but the, I mean, the argument is that, like, even given, again, this is like filmmakers saying this. Given the film technology of the time, the specific features that we see in the moon footage are not fakeable, you know. Another part of it is, for instance, the slow jumping, right? The slow boom, boom, you know, you're on the moon, right? The big argument that the moon truthers make is

that it was regular speed footage and it was slowed down right and there's this dude on i can't remember the name of it um but if you search he's a filmmaker on youtube right and he just breaks down why like the ability to over crank and like shoot in slow-mo like that like didn't that wasn't how film cameras worked at the time you know um uh and so you know couldn't air things in slow-mo back then um look you're good you're good at asking questions because you asked me to get into details that i don't have off the top of my head um but that's the that's the argument that that the dude makes um it's not one of the arguments that we make specifically on our show because we only had six minutes so we did the best ones it's always an interesting

argument when you're talking about the moon landing i also know about how much your audience do you think is going to be fucking furious at me for talking about this because they believe the moon landing was faked like 15 that was exactly gonna be my guess there's always a number man there's a number of people that think that vaccines cause autism you know i had dr peter hotez on here who uh is an expert in tropical diseases and autism safety and he's explaining that they've isolated five environmental factors they think contribute to autism when it's in the child's womb. They've isolated genes. They think they've got an understanding of what's causing this

or how at least it's happening, but it's happening in the womb. They don't think there's any connection to vaccines and autism. They think there's people who have autism who get vaccinated and their autism symptoms show up, but they were probably going to have those symptoms anyway. And there's a human correlation that they make. It doesn't mean that some people don't get adversely affected by vaccines because people have very strange reactions to all sorts of things because we

vary biologically. It doesn't mean that vaccines are giving people autism. And when you say that, people go fucking ballistic. And the comments fill with hate and Zionist shill and this and that. Yeah, it's wild. I get that shit a lot. But what we're doing here, you and I,

even if we disagree, this is what I think is one of the most important things of our time, is the ability to have reasonable conversation. I agree. And I try to tell people when they disagree with me, because when people come at me with a lot of heat on the internet you know a lot of times i don't have time to get into it you know but i do like to occasionally you know reply and say you know someone's like oh you're so full of shit like you lied about this and that

you know and i try to get into it say and i and i say hey thanks for watching the show you know um i don't feel that we lied this is what our evidence says you know what i try to get into it say and i and i say hey thanks for watching the show you know um i don't feel that we lied this is what our evidence says you know what what do you think you know i try to take their temperature down you know and i don't match their anger is the most important part i'm like much nicer than their anger demands you know and that usually cools them off right away and then we have a conversation you know and a lot of the time when I do that, they leave going, okay, you know what, we don't disagree that much, you know? Or, okay, thanks for talking to me, you know? But the most important thing I say to them is, even if I don't turn them around on whatever the issue was,

I say, okay, they say, I'm never going to watch your show again because you lied about this, you know, or because I disagree, you're wrong about this, I'm never watching your show again. And I say, okay, why would you never watch the show show again because you lied about this you know because i disagree you're wrong about this i'm never watching show again and i say okay why would you never watch the show again just because you disagree with me about one thing like i watch tons of stuff with people i don't disagree you know like they don't really mean that they just want you to feel bad yeah exactly you're not a child you know what they're doing they're playing childish games yeah yeah yeah absolutely unfollowed i'm never watching you again unfollowed like does anybody think it's a good idea to only consume shit that you already agree with i think it's better to challenge yourself and to watch things that you that you don't agree with all the time i watch fox news

at least one hour every week do you really yeah it's a watch yeah i get an hour and just go what the fuck are you doing what What is happening? You know? Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of, you know, like. I want to know what white people are really up to. They're scared all the time. When they're around me, they lie. I need to know.

I would love to get high with Laura Ingraham. You see how she's getting in trouble for laughing at Nipsey Hussle's funeral? That was very bizarre. Strange. It's very strange to be that. They're laughing. To be so dialed in to that. Look, I understand when you're one of those hosts, right?

You have a message. You're dialed into it. You got to say that message every single day, every single time. You're monomaniacal about it. You know what I mean? But to do that about about someone's death specifically bizarre you know and that sort of gives you sometimes i think that tv shows are

like a curse you know um like i feel for anybody who has to be on tv every day because they their life narrows down to that little camera lens and they can't have a thought outside of it you know what i mean so all those people tucker carlson rachel maddow laura ingram you know what i mean so all those people tucker carlson rachel maddow laura ingram you know what i mean like they like chambers yeah apart from me disagreeing with you know some of them on various things i disagree with all those folks on occasion um like to live your life right in that lens saying the same thing every night it must really impoverish your point of view in a way that's really a bummer and me seeing her do that was like yeah that's a great perspective impoverishing your point of view i think way that's really a bummer. And me seeing her do that was like, yeah, that's a great perspective. Impoverishing your point of view.

I think you're onto that. Thank you. I, I mean, that's when I saw, when I saw that clip of her, I was like, I can't,

I can't believe, you know, but it, it, it's T being on TV makes you a crazy person. It probably does, man. And what,

with, um, them with Laura Ingram was also, they had just played a clip of, uh, one of Nipsey Hussle's videos For one of his songs That was called Fuck Donald Trump

Yeah And they were mocking the song And laughing about it Like look It's not about the guy's art The guy's dead Yeah He was murdered in Los Angeles

And obviously You look at all the hundreds Of thousands of people That are mourning him In the streets They loved him Yeah Like why did they love him

Maybe look at that Maybe because he was giving back To the community Maybe it's because The guy became successful and still wanted to be in the community and help people out maybe because he was a positive influence on a lot of young people yeah so he had a song called fuck donald trump whatever and the word and you know the worst thing i think what's that he's on that song but it's not his oh it's not his song yeah who's on it yg what is the one that ice's got a dope song about the president?

It might be like, arrest the president. It might be called Arrest the President. It's pretty fucking good. You know, the worst thing that I think is- It's good. It's Ice Cube's new shit. The worst thing I think that people say is like, the perspective that she had was, okay, because he doesn't like donald trump

he's not worthy of respect right i'm not i'm not gonna be sad he's dead because he said something mean about donald trump right that is such a malignant version of the way that so many people feel like the most frustrating thing people say to me is um you know on on our comp you know comments page on youtube this guy's a liberal this guy's a. So I'm not going to listen to him. I'm like, okay, well, first of all, we criticize Democrats and liberals all the time on the show. So those people are like, do a response where they're like,

doesn't Adam Conover realize he's criticizing a Democrat priority? And I'm like, yeah, all the time. We do not do a political show. Look, I live in Los Angeles. I went to college. I didn't vote for Donald Trump. You know what I mean um like most people who didn't all right so i i'm gonna i'm gonna fess up to that right why does that mean that you would never listen to anything i ever had

to say or that you would treat me with disrespect right because they're trying to make you feel bad bro you're talking about it right now so they win uh oh fair enough fair enough all right yeah okay we can move off of it but you know that that that idea of someone who disagrees with me is like not a person who i'm going to listen to anymore what what a bummer i listen to people from all all perspectives and all backgrounds that's my goal even more insidious what they're doing is they're trying to say this whole life that that was just lost is this one clip that says fuck the fuck donald trump that's so stupid there's obviously a lot of things like that's so stupid there's obviously a lot of things like that's quote mining you're taking a little tiny piece of some things that he did

out of context and you're putting it on your show and then you're mocking his death and it's it's it's unfortunate but again i think it's these echo chambers these people think it's okay to do that yeah they they know that the other people that are like them are going to react the same way like what the guy had a song called fuck donald trump i mean hey fuck you yeah and then they just get they all just repeat that and they think like that's like the people that were shocked that trump won they couldn't believe anybody would vote for trump because everybody around you would not so if you get stuck in these echo chambers you don't understand how other people outside see it yeah and i think that's what's happening you know with this it's just 100 sad so the guy's fucking dead guy was murdered yeah we did a um you know we did a segment on on guns right we did an episode on guns and i always

thought that i said at the beginning of our show we'd never do an episode on guns because it's too divisive and as soon as we did the topic people everyone would fold their arms and they said are you gonna do an episode on guns well you better say what i want you to say or i'm changing the channel right and we'd uh but we'd been doing the show for four years i was like i think we can and they said, are you going to do an episode on guns? Well, you better say what I want you to say or I'm changing the channel, right? And we, but we'd been doing the show for four years. I was like, I think we can finally do it.

And here's the thing. Everybody is wrong about guns. That's the premise of our show. Everyone's wrong about everything. You know, if you think you know about something, you probably don't.

And anything, any topic that I do, I'm going to tell you something you don't know. And so we specifically did an episode that's about, you know, we had a,

you know, a gun rights rights advocate a gun control advocate i'm talking to both of them and they're both making mistakes right um about it um and uh that was the point was that like the thing that liberals i don't want to say liberals the thing that gun control advocates right often fail to do is they fail to take seriously that the gun rights advocates are like real people who live in the same country as them who they need to deal with as humans right like the nra is has a lot of i'm not going to defend the nra for a second right i think the nra is a very extreme organization that is not productive you you know, but like the average gun, the average gun owner in your community.

Right. Is a real person you have to deal with. Right. And if you're just in your echo chamber and you're not taking that person seriously, then you're not going to make any progress. Right. And so you need to, you know, gun control advocates are in just as much need of correction, you know, and just as much need of checking themselves and, you know, examining their and you know getting closer to the truth as uh uh as gun rights advocates well particularly if you want to ever resolve it or come to any sort of an agreement you can't treat the other people like they're stupid yeah like you're fucking morons don't get it okay well that's not helping anybody and that's the issue with people that also get angry at people who voted for trump they want to say they're all stupid okay you want to say that half the country's stupid that's not a good idea that's not smart yeah i want to say by the way the reason i said i i went

to college i didn't vote for donald trump not because i a lot of college a lot of people went to college did vote for donald trump the trend is that they is that they didn't vote for him you know so i was trying to say i'm in a different demographic but i don't want people to think i was implying i believe so so, yeah. I mean, that's sort of how it breaks down. Like people, you know, people with BAs or higher

tend to vote for Democrats. So I'm just like giving a nod to the demographics here. This is how it breaks down. Right, right. I got to wrap this up. Yeah, man. Listen, man,

that was a lot of fun. It's already after 3 o'clock. Can you believe it? Holy shit. It's 3 o'clock. Went for a while. Thank you. Oh, you got the,

I was wondering what time it was. Well, hey, this has been a real, I really appreciate the, we got deep on some shit. Yeah, it was fun, man. Thanks. Thanks for coming on.

I appreciate it. And tell everybody when your show is, when they can watch it. Adam Ruins Everything's on TruTV. We got episodes on Netflix. New episodes are coming out probably around August. Don't have an exact date yet,

but we're having our next run of eight coming out then. How many more years do you think you're going to do this? You know, hopefully pretty soon. Never run out of stuff. And check out my new podcast, Factually, coming out in a little bit. No, no, sorry. Hopefully pretty soon Never run out of stuff And check out my new podcast Factually

Hopefully pretty soon You'll end it No no sorry Hopefully pretty soon We'll know whether We're going to keep doing it We're between We're waiting for a pickup

Right now We have to keep doing it Yeah I love doing the show Look I'm going to be doing What I do for the rest of my life No matter where I'm doing it So Oh that's a good way

To look at it Yeah yeah yeah Okay awesome Either way Adam thank you Thank you so much man Thanks for being here Bye everybody

That was great Either way, Adam, thank you. Thank you so much, man. Thanks for being here. That was great.