The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1282 - Adam Conover

00:00:03.000 Is it good?

00:00:03.000 Yeah.

00:00:08.000 All right.

00:00:09.000 Cut all this out.

00:00:09.000 Right, right, right.

00:00:11.000 Hello, Adam.

00:00:12.000 Hey, thanks for having me, Joe.

00:00:13.000 Hey, thanks for being here, man.

00:00:14.000 I appreciate it.

00:00:14.000 I'm a giant fan of your show.

00:00:16.000 I really appreciate that.

00:00:17.000 I love the fact that it annoys people, too.

00:00:19.000 It really pisses people off.

00:00:21.000 That's the goal, pretty much.

00:00:22.000 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.

00:00:27.000 There's some truth to that.

00:00:28.000 And also the way you structured the name.

00:00:30.000 I mean, I don't know if you came up with the name of it, but Adam ruins everything.

00:00:32.000 Yeah.

00:00:33.000 I think I might have to give that to my former boss, Sam Raich, a college humor.

00:00:37.000 I think we came up with the name together.

00:00:40.000 He might have been the first person to say it.

00:00:42.000 It's perfect.

00:00:43.000 Thank you.

00:00:44.000 It lets you know that, hey, this is going to annoy you a little bit. 0.97

00:00:48.000 I'm going to be telling you shit that you don't want to hear that's going to make everything a little bit worse. 0.98

00:00:52.000 But at the end of the day, it makes it better. 0.99

00:00:54.000 It's an optimistic show at the end of the day.

00:00:55.000 Sure.

00:00:56.000 Yeah, you give them the truth.

00:00:58.000 I think that, yeah, I mean, the thesis of the show is that it's always better to know the truth, that 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 that, ah, crap, you know, but then at the end,

00:01:14.000 we show you why you're actually better off knowing that thing, and you're always better off knowing the truth, in my view.

00:01:18.000 In my view as well.

00:01:19.000 Yeah.

00:01:20.000 Was there ever, was there one episode that stands out as being one that people got the most upset about?

00:01:25.000 What?

00:01:27.000 There's a bunch of them.

00:01:28.000 I mean, people get upset with us for a lot of different reasons.

00:01:33.000 We did one about how breastfeeding isn't better than formula feeding. 0.93

00:01:39.000 It's not?

00:01:40.000 No, they're both like, formula feeding is fine.

00:01:43.000 You know, and the problem is formula feeding has become stigmatized now.

00:01:47.000 And there's a lot of people who can't breastfeed or who for medical reasons, you know, and the fact is that formula is like a scientifically proven wonderful way to feed a baby.

00:01:58.000 And if, you know, someone's choice or need is to do that, there's no reason to stigmatize it.

00:02:02.000 We go through all the reasons that that's the case.

00:02:04.000 Yeah, people get a little, you know, there's a lot of people who sort of have an ideology about that, you know, and don't want to hear the truth about it.

00:02:12.000 We did one about trophy hunting animals, about how, because people get so mad, oh, look at this guy shot a lion, right?

00:02:19.000 And the truth is that in some countries, not 100% of the time, But in some countries, they are effectively using trophy hunting as a way to protect the animals because, you know, that's how they're able to sort of like monetize, you know,

00:02:34.000 in that place and, you know, 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, you know, sort of animal management, you know, strategy and it's being used to some success, you know.

00:02:49.000 And yeah, people don't want to hear that, right?

00:02:51.000 It's I feel really hard.

00:02:52.000 That's a weird one to me, and I hunt.

00:02:55.000 Yeah.

00:02:55.000 Yeah, the whole lion and elephant thing, like, ooh, that's a weird one.

00:03:02.000 Well, what they can do is they can say, okay, well, we've got these elephants.

00:03:06.000 One of these elephants is an old male that's, like, killing the other elephants, right?

00:03:10.000 And if we organize these hunts where you've got to pay half a million dollars for the right to even go in there, right?

00:03:16.000 Does that happen with old male elephants?

00:03:18.000 I know that was the issue with that giraffe, that...

00:03:20.000 Remember that woman that got in trouble? 1.00

00:03:22.000 I actually don't know that specific case.

00:03:24.000 Yeah, there was a woman who got in trouble because she shot this really beautiful giraffe.

00:03:28.000 It was really dark and unusually colored, and it was dark because it was very old.

00:03:32.000 The older the giraffe, apparently the males get really dark.

00:03:35.000 It was really cool looking.

00:03:37.000 But she shot it, and everybody went crazy on the internet because she was posing and smiling with this little giraffe. 0.98

00:03:43.000 But apparently that giraffe... 0.73

00:03:57.000 Yeah.

00:04:04.000 Yeah, that's sort of the idea, you know?

00:04:06.000 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?

00:04:18.000 If it's just like, hey, the elephants are going to roam free, well, you've got people there who are like, alright, fine, so I'm living near some elephants, occasionally they eat my crops and shit, and that annoys me. 0.81

00:04:25.000 Not just occasionally. 0.86

00:04:26.000 Yeah, exactly. 0.99

00:04:27.000 I don't give a shit about that. 0.99

00:04:28.000 And what that allows to happen is it allows poachers to come in and kill them wantonly, right? 0.99

00:04:31.000 But if instead, okay, we're protecting them, we have a revenue stream, right?

00:04:36.000 We get money when hunters come in and pay a lot of money to go kill one animal, right?

00:04:41.000 Now we've got a way to hire guards.

00:04:44.000 This is now a resource that we're protecting, right?

00:04:47.000 And that sounds a little cynical, but it is working in some places.

00:04:50.000 It's both.

00:04:50.000 It's cynical and effective.

00:04:52.000 And effective.

00:04:52.000 And we had a woman on from the IUCN, International Thinking Union for Conservation of Nature, big conservation group, talking about how this is effective.

00:05:00.000 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?

00:05:04.000 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 of the situation.

00:05:14.000 And that's hard for animal lovers to hear.

00:05:15.000 Animal lovers don't like to hear that.

00:05:18.000 Yeah, they don't.

00:05:19.000 Like I said, I don't like to hear it.

00:05:21.000 I don't like to hear it either!

00:05:26.000 What freaks me out more than anything is that there's no other options.

00:05:32.000 It's not like a bunch of people are donating a bunch of money to keep these areas clean and free of poachers.

00:05:38.000 The amount would be massive, right?

00:05:40.000 We can donate money.

00:05:41.000 Yeah, that's the – when you've got a problem that big and intractable as how do you save these animals, you know, against habitat encroachment, right?

00:05:51.000 Again, you know, people want to farm on that land.

00:05:54.000 People, you know, people have lives, right?

00:05:56.000 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. 0.96

00:06:02.000 They, like, fucking live there, right? 0.96

00:06:04.000 And so how do you get those people in that society to really protect those animals? 0.99

00:06:09.000 That's a hard question to answer.

00:06:10.000 And some places are having success with that strategy.

00:06:13.000 And that's something that we can understand.

00:06:15.000 We don't have to approve of it in every single case.

00:06:17.000 And we can say, that's really tough for us as animal lovers.

00:06:19.000 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?

00:06:25.000 And I say, yeah, so do I. We try to dramatize that emotional resistance on the show, like that emotional reaction that we have.

00:06:32.000 I also don't like the idea of an animal being killed brutally.

00:06:36.000 I think I'm uncomfortable with the idea.

00:06:38.000 But if my main goal is to preserve the population of these animals overall and stop them from going extinct, maybe I need to accept that this tough truth that once in a while one's got to be shot through the head with a rifle, maybe I need to accept that.

00:06:55.000 That's what I chose about.

00:06:56.000 It's really weird when it comes to things that people don't eat.

00:06:58.000 Like lions and stuff.

00:07:00.000 I don't understand the psychology.

00:07:02.000 You're like Michael Douglas in the, what was that movie?

00:07:05.000 With Val Kilmer?

00:07:06.000 The Ghost in the Darkness.

00:07:08.000 The lions that decided to kill those dudes.

00:07:10.000 I've never heard of this movie.

00:07:11.000 It's a great movie, man.

00:07:21.000 Wow.

00:07:35.000 It's a great movie.

00:07:36.000 It's really good.

00:07:37.000 It sounds odd, and they have to go after the lions. 0.99

00:07:39.000 Yeah, they have to go kill these lions.

00:07:41.000 Yeah, there it is. 0.98

00:07:42.000 Ghost in the Darkness. 0.98

00:07:43.000 Oh, holy crap. 0.98

00:07:43.000 Hail-biting tension. 0.98

00:07:44.000 That is a great...

00:07:45.000 Pray for the hunters.

00:07:46.000 Val Kilmer is looking good there.

00:07:47.000 Yeah, that was pre-fatso Val Kilmer.

00:07:51.000 Pre when he went off the deck.

00:07:52.000 It was too handsome.

00:07:53.000 He couldn't handle it anymore.

00:07:53.000 Really good-looking guy.

00:07:55.000 Too handsome.

00:07:55.000 That's the problem.

00:07:56.000 He had to just go off the deep end.

00:07:58.000 Another one people got really mad about.

00:08:00.000 This is weirdly the one we got the biggest reaction to.

00:08:03.000 And to the extent that I'm a little hesitant talking about it because it always starts to shift storm every time I do.

00:08:08.000 Vaccines?

00:08:09.000 No, actually we've not done a whole lot on vaccines, but we really should because it's coming back.

00:08:13.000 I used to think that vaccines was kind of done as a topic and we've gone through it.

00:08:17.000 It is really back and it is big.

00:08:20.000 But no, we did one on alpha males.

00:08:22.000 We did an episode about dating.

00:08:24.000 And we did one on how the idea of the alpha male doesn't exist in humans.

00:08:29.000 Like, if you talk to any anthropologist, any biologist, any sociologist, and be like, are humans organized in a social relationship where there's alphas and betas?

00:08:39.000 They'll be like, no, what are you talking about?

00:08:40.000 This is an unscientific idea.

00:08:42.000 And we just did something laying that out in the context of people who are, oh, my type is I like alphas.

00:08:48.000 Well, there's no such thing, actually.

00:08:50.000 Humans are your dominant in some situations, not in others.

00:08:53.000 It's an overly simplistic way of looking at human relationships.

00:08:56.000 And I thought that was a pretty simple, straightforward thing.

00:08:58.000 I was like, this is just a bit of pseudoscience that you hear people tossing out.

00:09:01.000 And people went ballistic on the internet because people have sort of like...

00:09:06.000 Built an edifice of ideology in their minds about, like, there's alphas, there's betas, I'm an alpha, this is what an alpha's like, this is what a beta's like, you know?

00:09:16.000 Well, let's take away the words.

00:09:18.000 There are clearly men who are more aggressive and athletic and dominant and more confident, and then men who are introverted and shy and more nervous and anxious.

00:09:30.000 And there's a scale.

00:09:31.000 In some situations, you know?

00:09:34.000 Social situations.

00:09:35.000 Yeah.

00:09:36.000 And that's what we're talking about, right?

00:09:37.000 Well, yeah, but your social situation could change based on what situation you're in.

00:09:41.000 You know what I mean?

00:09:42.000 It could, but an athletic, confident male is always going to be an athletic, confident male.

00:09:48.000 And an introverted, anxious male who has problems with social anxiety is going to be the same.

00:09:57.000 That's who that person is.

00:09:58.000 I don't think so necessarily.

00:10:01.000 So when we're talking about alphas, right?

00:10:04.000 In animals, what is that?

00:10:06.000 It's a social hierarchy, right?

00:10:08.000 In animals.

00:10:09.000 So let's take away that word.

00:10:10.000 I mean, what people are using to describe when they're saying alphas and betas, they're saying, like, confident...

00:10:17.000 Strong, secure people and people that are anxious and not confident.

00:10:21.000 So if you're trying to say, hey, it's good to be confident, it's not so great to be anxious.

00:10:26.000 That's fine.

00:10:28.000 But when people talk about alpha males and beta males, they're specifically bringing in the language of evolution, of biology, of zoology, of evolutionary psychology.

00:10:37.000 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. 1.00

00:10:45.000 Like, they'll be using that language, right?

00:10:46.000 And so what we're pointing out is, that's not scientific, right?

00:10:49.000 It's not scientific, but it is true that women are hardwired to be attracted to confident, athletic men.

00:10:54.000 Well, I don't know if I agree with that, but...

00:10:58.000 Really?

00:10:58.000 Yeah.

00:10:59.000 You don't think that women look at, like, pro athletes and, like, big, strong, athletic men...

00:11:05.000 And you don't think they're drawn to that for evolutionary reasons?

00:11:09.000 No, I don't actually.

00:11:10.000 Do you think that men are drawn to women with small waists and big hips and large breasts for evolutionary reasons?

00:11:17.000 You know, I think that's an easy intuition to come to if you're looking at the way people behave, right?

00:11:25.000 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?

00:11:36.000 That's their argument, for instance, I'll give you an example.

00:11:38.000 That's the argument that was, arguments like that were used, for instance, to justify slavery, right?

00:11:42.000 That like, oh, because, you know, whites and blacks have this hierarchical relationship in American society, that's the way it was intended. 0.62

00:11:50.000 That's how nature intended it to be, right?

00:11:52.000 But we can't make that leap.

00:11:54.000 We can't make that leap.

00:11:56.000 Yeah.

00:11:56.000 Men universally are attracted to a certain shape of bodies.

00:11:59.000 There's men that are attracted to different ones.

00:12:02.000 I don't think men are universally attracted to the same body.

00:12:04.000 People vary, but that hourglass shape has been throughout time something that men are attracted to.

00:12:09.000 I think that hourglass shape is something throughout our recent cultural memory.

00:12:15.000 That we tell each other that men are attracted to, right?

00:12:17.000 That's what we're told from an early age, that this is the sort of women that men are attracted to.

00:12:24.000 And so a lot of men end up adopting that, right?

00:12:26.000 But I don't think that deep down, that's how men naturally are.

00:12:29.000 Really?

00:12:30.000 Yeah.

00:12:31.000 But that doesn't make any sense to me.

00:12:33.000 That's so non-intuitive.

00:12:36.000 I'm all about things that are non-intuitive.

00:12:38.000 Where do you think it started? 0.99

00:12:39.000 Where do you think this narrative of men being attracted to the woman with large breasts and a small waist and a big ass, where do you think that started? 0.96

00:12:47.000 Because this is like, evolutionary biology has pretty much settled on the idea that the reason why is that the large hips would indicate that the woman would be easier to give birth. 1.00

00:12:56.000 Having large breasts and a large ass would indicate that she has She's fertile, and then she has ample fat storage in the right places if she's going to be pregnant and carry children. 1.00

00:13:07.000 There's all these evolutionary biology reasons why people are attracted to certain things. 0.96

00:13:13.000 Why a woman would be attracted to a tall, muscular, handsome man, good genetics, very strong and confident, can take care of her.

00:13:21.000 All these things are based on evolutionary biology.

00:13:23.000 So I don't understand why you think these are learned sort of cultural artifacts.

00:13:27.000 So my question is, this is an assumption that we, the public, make about how evolutionary biology works, right?

00:13:34.000 Well, it's more of a thing that we sort of agree on.

00:13:37.000 Well, we as the, like, there's an idea among the public that this is true.

00:13:41.000 I don't know if it's a scientific idea.

00:13:43.000 That's my point.

00:13:44.000 But 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.

00:13:52.000 This is sort of, I mean, this is science, in a way.

00:13:56.000 I mean, this...

00:13:57.000 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.

00:14:06.000 I mean...

00:14:07.000 It totally makes sense, doesn't it?

00:14:09.000 Well, just because it makes...

00:14:11.000 The point of our show, right?

00:14:13.000 Is that just because something makes intuitive sense doesn't mean that it's necessarily true, right?

00:14:18.000 But don't you think that in this case, that this is a varied argument?

00:14:22.000 Like, I don't think that's something that you can dismiss.

00:14:26.000 I don't dismiss it, but I don't assume the truth of it simply because that's what everybody agrees upon, right?

00:14:33.000 But if you ask girls, like, what are you into?

00:14:36.000 And you say, are you into tall, muscular, confident men who are also nice to do?

00:14:41.000 Jesus Christ, it's going to be off the charts.

00:14:43.000 It's going to be like most of them.

00:14:45.000 I'm really not sure that's the case.

00:14:48.000 Really?

00:14:48.000 Yeah.

00:14:49.000 You think you had 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?

00:15:04.000 I mean, look, I'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?

00:15:11.000 So, like, are women attracted to attractive bodies? 0.98

00:15:13.000 If that's the question, then I would say, of course.

00:15:15.000 Dad bods are more attractive to women's study finds. 1.00

00:15:18.000 Some fucking guy with a dad bod made that. 1.00

00:15:21.000 Look, here's something that I was really influenced by. 0.99

00:15:23.000 What do you think of that, what I just said, though?

00:15:25.000 That doesn't make sense to you, that women would be attracted to someone who's fit?

00:15:29.000 Yeah.

00:15:30.000 Look, I mean, it's a hypothetical, right?

00:15:32.000 Certainly, athleticism, right, is something that is attractive, right?

00:15:37.000 That's something that many people find attractive, right?

00:15:40.000 Not everybody finds that attractive.

00:15:42.000 And I don't think that we can necessarily reason backwards to, like, a specific evolutionary relationship, right?

00:15:49.000 Because the truth of what those evolutionary relationships are is, like, often a lot more complicated than, you know, our immediate intuition about it.

00:15:58.000 I think we're good to go.

00:16:30.000 Even someone who is the person who you posited, the person who is athletic and confident, the high school football quarterback versus the high school football nerd.

00:16:43.000 Right?

00:16:44.000 Well, take those two people and then put them in a different situation, right?

00:16:46.000 If those two people are like in gym class together, right?

00:16:49.000 Of course, the high school quarterback is like on the top of that social interaction, right?

00:16:54.000 Looking at the sort of, you know, classic Wolfpack model.

00:16:57.000 They're the one who's sort of running the show, right?

00:16:59.000 And the other guy's like hanging out in the bleachers talking to his friends, right?

00:17:01.000 Or talking to nobody because he's a beta in that situation, right?

00:17:05.000 I think?

00:17:27.000 And if you take that nerd and you take that kid, maybe he's the dungeon master of his Dungeons& Dragons group, that kid is going to be the alpha in that situation.

00:17:38.000 That's how humans work.

00:17:39.000 Humans aren't organized in little pods that stay together for life and there's one person who's dominant the whole time.

00:17:45.000 And that's the simple point that we were making in that piece.

00:17:50.000 And people get upset.

00:17:51.000 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?

00:17:57.000 Where when people are told something that they don't agree with, that when someone has told somebody a fact, when somebody is told a fact that contradicts like a really deeply held belief.

00:18:15.000 Really?

00:18:25.000 Yeah.

00:18:34.000 I actually don't know that specifically what Sean Hannity thinks about climate change.

00:18:38.000 Let's just say somebody who's made their whole career on climate change doesn't exist.

00:18:42.000 All their friends are in the anti-climate change community.

00:18:45.000 They met their wife at an anti-climate change fundraiser.

00:18:48.000 They make their money.

00:18:49.000 They write a new anti-climate change book every year.

00:18:52.000 Now, climate change is real.

00:18:55.000 Right.

00:19:16.000 And so that's what ended up happening with that segment.

00:19:17.000 There's a whole group of people who have built their whole lives on the idea.

00:19:23.000 There's alphas and betas.

00:19:24.000 I'm an alpha.

00:19:24.000 I'm not going to be a beta.

00:19:26.000 And maybe that meant something positive to them.

00:19:29.000 Maybe they were in a bad place in their life, and through this model of alpha versus beta, they started working out, or they started improving themselves a little bit.

00:19:38.000 And maybe they started acting a little bit more confidently, and now they're in a relationship.

00:19:42.000 All those things can be true with The idea of alphas and betas and humans not being scientific, right?

00:19:46.000 But so when I tell them that, they fight back really hard.

00:19:49.000 They're like, no, no, no, no, no, this is real, this is real, you know?

00:19:52.000 And so that video, which again, I had no idea that would be controversial, got the most YouTube response videos, got the most, you know, furious things.

00:20:01.000 And the weirdest thing was, people started to say, this is political.

00:20:04.000 Like, why is Adam Ruins everything getting political?

00:20:05.000 I'm like, I don't know what the hell they're talking about.

00:20:07.000 How is that political?

00:20:08.000 I have no idea.

00:20:09.000 I have no idea how it's political.

00:20:10.000 Alphas and betas are now political?

00:20:12.000 I mean, that's what people were saying.

00:20:14.000 I guess, you know, for some people it's become that.

00:20:17.000 But because they see it as part of, like, I don't know, whatever argument in their head they're having about feminism or something like that.

00:20:22.000 But to me, I'm just like, guys, in dating, right, in life, like, this is not a real concept.

00:20:27.000 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.

00:20:34.000 I'm a little bit reticent to make a broad conclusion about evolutionary psychology.

00:20:38.000 But I can tell you, again, go talk to any anthropologist, any biologist, any sociologist.

00:20:43.000 Is there such a thing as alpha males in humans?

00:20:45.000 In the strictest scientific sense of the word, no.

00:20:48.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:20:50.000 I think they're looking at it in terms of winners and losers, pushovers in people who get the job done, confident people versus people who are not confident.

00:20:59.000 I think you're correct.

00:21:01.000 And I think, obviously, humans operate on a giant spectrum.

00:21:04.000 And if you start going around saying alpha and beta and 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 all republicans.

00:21:15.000 It becomes an ideology.

00:21:16.000 Exactly.

00:21:16.000 It's a pro-male ideology.

00:21:18.000 Which I have the biggest problem with, like, overconfident men's rights guys.

00:21:24.000 Yeah.

00:21:25.000 Because I'm like, listen, we have all the rights.

00:21:28.000 Yeah.

00:21:28.000 Like...

00:21:29.000 Fucking settle down. 1.00

00:21:31.000 Yeah, we got enough of them. 0.99

00:21:32.000 I had a whole bit about it.

00:21:33.000 It was like divorce laws and that's it. 0.99

00:21:36.000 Everything else is stacked in our favor. 0.99

00:21:37.000 Just fucking chill out. 0.99

00:21:39.000 You're making us look bad. 0.99

00:21:40.000 And the problems that men have are different than the problems those guys think men have.

00:21:45.000 Yes.

00:21:47.000 So, for instance, we did an episode on stereotypes called Adam Runes a Sitcom, where we talked about stereotypes via a cheesy 80s sitcom that had a lot of stereotypes in it.

00:22:00.000 So you've got the stereotypical black kid, you've got the stereotypical Asian kid. 0.86

00:22:03.000 Do you have a gay neighbor? 0.95

00:22:04.000 What do you say? 0.92

00:22:04.000 Do you have a gay neighbor? 0.92

00:22:05.000 No, we didn't do that. 0.77

00:22:06.000 Well, there's only three acts on the show.

00:22:07.000 I wish we could have done that, and women, and all sorts of things. 0.97

00:22:10.000 And we had a stereotypical dad.

00:22:12.000 You know, like a home improvement type dad, you know?

00:22:14.000 And what we talked about is like those – there are ways that men are being harmed by the sort of narrow idea of what a man is, you know?

00:22:26.000 For instance, men have a very high suicide rate, right?

00:22:31.000 And specifically – Loneliness is a health problem for men, for older men.

00:22:37.000 Take my dad.

00:22:38.000 My dad's about 65. He doesn't have a friend.

00:22:43.000 I hope he doesn't hear this.

00:22:45.000 He has work colleagues.

00:22:48.000 He's got my mom.

00:22:49.000 He's got me.

00:22:50.000 I'm sure he's got people he's friendly with.

00:22:52.000 But he doesn't have a best friend who comes over to watch the Red Sox with him.

00:22:57.000 That's terrible.

00:22:57.000 It's terrifying to me.

00:22:58.000 Yeah.

00:22:58.000 And the thing is, loneliness is associated with early death, you know, and with disease, right?

00:23:04.000 And, like, when you look at the way that we bring up men, men are socialized to not have close relationships with each other, you know?

00:23:12.000 Really?

00:23:12.000 Yeah.

00:23:13.000 I mean, like...

00:23:14.000 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.

00:23:20.000 From an early age, researchers have found this, that little boys, when they're very young, are very close, form very close friendships.

00:23:30.000 That are physical friendships.

00:23:31.000 They hug, you know, they'll kiss, they'll, you know what I mean?

00:23:34.000 They'll have physical close friendships like that.

00:23:36.000 And then they reach an age where that starts to become not okay.

00:23:39.000 Right.

00:23:40.000 Where it becomes, oh, that's not how boys act.

00:23:42.000 And girls are still doing that with their friends. 1.00

00:23:44.000 They're still holding hands with their friends.

00:23:45.000 They're still having close relationships like that.

00:23:49.000 And boys start to build a little bit of distance.

00:23:53.000 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.

00:23:58.000 But it happens even younger than kids would even have a notion of that.

00:24:02.000 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.

00:24:07.000 You know what I mean?

00:24:07.000 That's a little weird.

00:24:08.000 It's just a little weird for boys to do that, you know?

00:24:10.000 And we do that from a young age.

00:24:12.000 It's very subtle.

00:24:14.000 It's very subtle, but it's universal?

00:24:17.000 I mean, in America, it seems to be.

00:24:23.000 I've even felt that myself.

00:24:24.000 I've often had an easier time having close, close relationships with women rather than men.

00:24:30.000 Really?

00:24:30.000 As friendships, yeah.

00:24:31.000 As friendships, yeah.

00:24:32.000 Man, I don't have that at all.

00:24:34.000 Just in terms of who I talk with about my relationships and stuff.

00:24:36.000 I have good friendships with women, mostly that are comics, but almost all my good friends are guys.

00:24:42.000 I have a lot of good friends.

00:24:44.000 I mean, you're lucky if that's the case.

00:24:45.000 Yeah, I certainly am.

00:24:47.000 There's that phenomenon of having a little bit of distance from your male friends, of not getting really into it emotionally.

00:24:55.000 If you don't feel that way, that's fine.

00:24:58.000 I've felt that myself, and that results in health outcomes.

00:25:01.000 Some people feel it.

00:25:02.000 You've felt it.

00:25:03.000 Some people feel it.

00:25:04.000 I'm sure.

00:25:05.000 I don't experience that.

00:25:07.000 Most of my friends that I know have good male friends, and they're pretty tight with people.

00:25:12.000 Well, the point is that there is a trend, especially in older age, right?

00:25:19.000 It's a bad scene for anybody, whether it's a male or a female.

00:25:23.000 When you get older and you don't have any friends, that's a bad scene.

00:25:25.000 Well, so demographically, we know that that happens to men more than women, right?

00:25:29.000 A man my dad's age is more likely to have less friends than a woman my mom's age.

00:25:34.000 Do we know why?

00:25:36.000 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.

00:25:46.000 So that is a serious problem that men have, that men face, right?

00:25:51.000 Another one we talk about is stuff like, you know, drinking and smoking, for instance.

00:25:55.000 Those are behaviors that are much more pushed on men.

00:25:57.000 You know, those are much more advertised towards men, right?

00:25:59.000 And those are dangerous, right?

00:26:01.000 Those will like hurt you physically and can lead to an early death, right?

00:26:04.000 Those are those 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?

00:26:13.000 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.

00:26:18.000 They talk about, you know, violence.

00:26:20.000 And, you know, people being hurt at work and stuff like that, like men having dangerous occupations, and that stuff is true as well.

00:26:27.000 But, like, these are the more subtle ways that, you know, men are hurt by the sort of narrow expectations of what a man is that we put on men.

00:26:38.000 Hey, men are like this, you should be like this, you know?

00:26:40.000 And some of those things hurt men.

00:26:41.000 Do you think we still do that, though?

00:26:43.000 Yeah.

00:26:43.000 Do you think people still put narrow expectations of what men should be?

00:26:47.000 I totally think they do.

00:26:48.000 I think we might be lucky here in LA, you know, because we can sort of, like, live any way that we choose.

00:26:53.000 I mean, you clearly live exactly how you want to live, which is great, you know, and I get to as well.

00:27:00.000 But I think that, you know, 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, you know, your average Joe across the country.

00:27:10.000 Yeah, but I don't know of anyone who's putting pressure on men to not be friendly with other men.

00:27:17.000 That seems so ridiculous to me, to deny camaraderie.

00:27:23.000 Obviously, in the military, it's a huge aspect of military service, is the brotherhood that these guys form with each other.

00:27:30.000 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?

00:27:37.000 Serve their country. 0.99

00:27:38.000 Yeah.

00:27:38.000 Very much so.

00:27:39.000 But are men, for instance, encouraged to be emotionally vulnerable with their friends, for instance?

00:27:47.000 I think that's something that's tougher.

00:27:48.000 Don't do it.

00:27:49.000 They're going to bring it up when you argue.

00:27:50.000 Yeah.

00:27:52.000 Yeah, and so that's the thing.

00:27:54.000 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? 0.98

00:28:03.000 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. 0.97

00:28:11.000 Both things are real. 0.98

00:28:13.000 Both things are real.

00:28:14.000 It is real to be intimate and to be vulnerable and to explain how you feel. 0.97

00:28:18.000 But then sometimes you shouldn't be just fucking complaining about things. 0.99

00:28:21.000 You should figure your life out and man the fuck up and go do something. 0.99

00:28:24.000 And it's not necessarily you being emotionally vulnerable, as you like to say it in such a normalizing way. 1.00

00:28:30.000 It might just be you being a bitch. 1.00

00:28:32.000 That's possible too. 1.00

00:28:33.000 You don't think that when you say that you put a little pressure on men at all?

00:28:37.000 Yes, I put pressure on men.

00:28:38.000 Maybe you're the one putting a little pressure on you.

00:28:41.000 Yes, they need some pressure.

00:28:42.000 I think most men need just a little bit of a motivational shove in the general direction of success and happiness.

00:28:50.000 And a lot of that is overcoming laziness and applying some discipline to your life.

00:28:57.000 I think those things are very manly attributes that turn out to actually be good for you.

00:29:02.000 You know, I think there's a lot of – I don't disagree with you about some of those aspects being good for you.

00:29:08.000 Let me just give one other example.

00:29:10.000 And I'm blanking on the name of this podcast.

00:29:12.000 I can look it up if you want.

00:29:14.000 But a very wonderful podcast about philosophy.

00:29:17.000 Philosophize this?

00:29:19.000 No, I love Philosophize This.

00:29:21.000 It's a different one here.

00:29:21.000 I'll look up what it was as I'm talking to you about it.

00:29:23.000 But really wonderful podcast where they were talking to this guy who was in the military and has PTSD, right?

00:29:34.000 I think?

00:29:41.000 I think?

00:29:51.000 I think?

00:30:08.000 And he talked about, and they also talked with medical professionals who said the same thing, that that idea doesn't give men the tools they need to deal with PTSD, right?

00:30:17.000 And can actually exacerbate PTSD because it means that they're not trained how to reach out for help for those problems.

00:30:22.000 No, I couldn't agree more.

00:30:23.000 That's a different situation, I think.

00:30:25.000 Oh yeah, it's a different example 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?

00:30:33.000 That works in some situations, maybe that works when you're in a foxhole, right?

00:30:38.000 It doesn't work so well when you're out of it, right?

00:30:40.000 And so that's a narrow idea that can lead to a bad outcome.

00:30:43.000 Sure, but that's basically what we were just saying, that 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. 0.99

00:30:53.000 But you also should know when you're being a bitch. 1.00

00:30:56.000 Both of those things are real. 0.99

00:30:57.000 Fair enough.

00:30:58.000 If you're on a hike with a friend and he has to stop every five minutes because his foot hurts, you're like, come on, man.

00:31:04.000 My foot hurts, too. 0.99

00:31:05.000 Just fucking walk. 0.99

00:31:06.000 You're walking fine. 1.00

00:31:07.000 I completely agree with you.

00:31:09.000 I just don't think this is worth it.

00:31:11.000 This is not what I had in mind when we started hiking. 0.99

00:31:13.000 That guy's being a bitch, right? 1.00

00:31:14.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:31:15.000 He needs to man the fuck up, right? 0.85

00:31:17.000 But let me... 0.98

00:31:17.000 You're hesitant to say man the fuck up. 0.98

00:31:20.000 Because if it was a woman, what would you say? 0.98

00:31:22.000 You'd say toughen up?

00:31:23.000 Just soldier on?

00:31:25.000 What would you say?

00:31:25.000 Well, I don't think that...

00:31:26.000 The reason I'm hesitant to use that word is I don't think that being tough is exclusively a male characteristic.

00:31:31.000 Right.

00:31:32.000 That's why I said if you're a woman, what would you say? 1.00

00:31:33.000 Would you say toughen up?

00:31:34.000 Yeah, I guess I would.

00:31:35.000 If it was a woman in the same situation, you got to toughen up. 1.00

00:31:37.000 You got to deal with it.

00:31:38.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:31:38.000 Press on.

00:31:39.000 Yeah.

00:31:40.000 Yeah.

00:31:40.000 But men, we like to equate that to one of our best attributes.

00:31:46.000 Being a fucking man. 1.00

00:31:47.000 Because I'm a fucking man. 1.00

00:31:48.000 But the problem is, what if you're on that hike with a friend? 1.00

00:31:56.000 And your friend is legit afraid of hikes.

00:31:58.000 I've been on hikes with...

00:32:00.000 Sorry, I didn't say hikes.

00:32:01.000 Heights. 0.99

00:32:02.000 I was like, damn, you can't be hiking with that dude anymore. 0.98

00:32:05.000 I went on a hike with a friend. 0.99

00:32:08.000 My friend had, we were in Zion National Park, which has some very narrow bridges.

00:32:13.000 That's Utah, right?

00:32:13.000 Utah, yeah.

00:32:14.000 My friend had a panic attack, right?

00:32:16.000 Because of the hike.

00:32:17.000 And it was, you know, and that's legit, right?

00:32:20.000 And thank God he was able, he felt able to share it with me, right?

00:32:23.000 But if we...

00:32:24.000 So that's the balancing act of creating an environment where you're not...

00:32:29.000 Hey, yeah, don't complain about your foot.

00:32:30.000 But hey, if you're really in distress, you can share that with me.

00:32:33.000 And some men feel that they can't do that.

00:32:36.000 And I remember when I was younger, feeling, well, I really have this problem, but I can't express that to my friends because they're going to make fun of me. 0.97

00:32:44.000 And that sucks.

00:32:45.000 And so my goal is to... 0.97

00:32:47.000 And what that segment that we did about manliness was about was saying, hey, if you...

00:32:53.000 If you're a man and being a man to you means, you know, being confident, being assertive and stuff like that.

00:32:58.000 Great qualities.

00:32:59.000 Not bad qualities at all, right?

00:33:01.000 But we want to expand the notion of manliness so it includes all the different ways that one can be a man, right?

00:33:08.000 That it's as wide as possible, right?

00:33:10.000 Because otherwise you don't shut it down.

00:33:12.000 The expression manliness, right?

00:33:14.000 That's the problem.

00:33:15.000 Because manliness, like, instantly becomes handsome, aggressive...

00:33:20.000 You know, muscular.

00:33:21.000 That's our cultural idea of a man.

00:33:24.000 But womanliness is more like soft and kind.

00:33:28.000 Yeah.

00:33:28.000 You know, you don't think of it sexually, right?

00:33:31.000 When you think of womanliness isn't really a word that's used, but if it was.

00:33:36.000 Yeah.

00:33:36.000 Womanly sexually.

00:33:37.000 Those are the cultural ideas that we associate with those things.

00:33:41.000 Let me just give you my example.

00:33:44.000 Personally, I love taking care of other people.

00:33:48.000 Me and my girlfriend, we've been together 10 years.

00:33:52.000 One of the main things I love to do in our relationship is I really like cooking for her.

00:33:56.000 You know what I mean?

00:33:57.000 I like taking care of her.

00:33:58.000 That's something that I enjoy.

00:34:02.000 That's the part of my manliness.

00:34:05.000 That's how I am a man.

00:34:06.000 You know what I mean?

00:34:07.000 To provide.

00:34:08.000 It feels good to give food and to sit down and do something for and cook for.

00:34:14.000 You can associate it with, yeah, providing goes back to that classic sort of manly value.

00:34:21.000 Okay, we'll take away that word.

00:34:22.000 I'm not even saying in that sense.

00:34:24.000 There's nothing wrong with that word.

00:34:25.000 But in that sense, you want to give.

00:34:28.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:34:29.000 You're trying to give.

00:34:29.000 And that's not a value that I was brought up with of, like, that's a manly thing to do, right?

00:34:35.000 Is to, like, be kind and be nurturing.

00:34:37.000 You know what I mean?

00:34:38.000 Really?

00:34:38.000 But it's something that really means a lot to me.

00:34:42.000 Yeah, it wasn't what I was brought up with.

00:34:44.000 And so to me, it's important to, like, expand, you know, my notion of what...

00:34:50.000 It was really a big deal for me to, like, realize that that was part of what being a man was to me.

00:34:55.000 And I noticed that, like...

00:34:57.000 You know, for instance, 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.

00:35:06.000 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?

00:35:11.000 And I like kicking ass sometimes, too, but I realized 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, you know, or in a caring way.

00:35:25.000 Like Dr. Phil. 0.96

00:35:28.000 Dr. Phil, he does it a little bit.

00:35:30.000 He does.

00:35:31.000 He does.

00:35:32.000 I see what you're saying.

00:35:34.000 Whenever you have a label, especially a narrow label, it's a problem.

00:35:39.000 And I think the idea of Manliness or like 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 like are the ideas that are being opposed on them for people who don't like the way they live you don't like who they are or Want to mock who they are how they live so someone's too emotional if someone's too introverted instead of celebrating that or that guy's different and Cool.

00:36:09.000 Instead of that, it's the bully, mocking and shitting on them, the jock-type behavior that we associated with being the negative aspect of masculinity.

00:36:20.000 Totally. 0.99

00:36:20.000 Toxic masculinity, which is the phrase that gets tossed around a lot. 0.99

00:36:24.000 But I think this is just shitty humans. 0.99

00:36:28.000 I agree. 0.99

00:36:28.000 You know, I mean, that's really where the problem is. 0.99

00:36:31.000 And it's not specific to men, right?

00:36:34.000 Oh, it's definitely not.

00:36:35.000 It's everybody.

00:36:35.000 But let me give you one more example, just to get back to what you're talking about, about body type and what people are attracted to.

00:36:40.000 I read this wonderful advice column.

00:36:44.000 It's this guy who, this guy does an advice, it's got a kind of silly name, it's Dr. Nerd Love.

00:36:49.000 But he does a really good advice column.

00:36:51.000 And this dude wrote in and said, hey, I'm with a woman, she's, you know, a little bit bigger of a gal. 0.99

00:37:07.000 I love this guy's answer. 1.00

00:37:11.000 He wrote back and he said, dude, she's your fucking type. 1.00

00:37:15.000 We're good to go. 0.99

00:37:36.000 And I really related to that, you know, because I remember feeling that way about girls I dated.

00:37:41.000 Like, hold on a sec, oh, I'm into her so much, but, oh, wait, is she not, like, attractive, right?

00:37:47.000 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? 0.95

00:37:55.000 And so when you talk about what people say they're attracted to, if you ask any woman, wouldn't she say she's attracted to this kind of man?

00:38:00.000 If you ask any man, wouldn't she say she's attracted to that kind of woman? 0.99

00:38:03.000 Yeah, they might say that, right?

00:38:04.000 But deep down, do they maybe have a desire that they've been told is wrong their whole lives, right?

00:38:13.000 And I really related to that.

00:38:14.000 I was like, man, that is really a good point.

00:38:16.000 I have been told that my whole life, and I've allowed it to control who I'm attracted to, to a certain extent, you know?

00:38:24.000 And that's a mental prison that I want to get out of, you know?

00:38:28.000 And, you know...

00:38:29.000 Now I have the benefit I'm a little bit older, and I feel like I'm in less mental prisons than I used to be.

00:38:33.000 I feel like you're in no mental prisons at all.

00:38:36.000 I feel like a lot of your listeners have broken out of them. 0.99

00:38:40.000 But especially, I think back about when I was 16 years old, and yeah, you're swimming in that shit, and you don't know to question it yet a lot of the time. 0.96

00:38:47.000 And that's what our show's about, is getting people to question those assumptions and those things that you're being told without even realizing you're being told them. 0.97

00:38:55.000 But there is a problem with young men and their identities, like them wanting other people to think of them as cool, think of them as someone who's successful or someone who's doing well.

00:39:07.000 That's a weird thing to say.

00:39:09.000 I'm really into her, but she's not my type. 0.70

00:39:13.000 But, you know, the problem there seems to, in my mind, in my estimation, seems this guy's worried too much about his identity.

00:39:20.000 Yeah.

00:39:21.000 Instead of just being who he is...

00:39:22.000 Exactly.

00:39:23.000 He's worried about his identity.

00:39:24.000 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.

00:39:28.000 But, you know, when I think about...

00:39:31.000 When I was getting started in comedy in my 20s, 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, if it was going to be cool, or if I'd get made fun of by the other guys in my comedy group or by the other people at the open mic.

00:39:48.000 Really?

00:39:49.000 Did you just come up in alt rooms?

00:39:52.000 Yeah.

00:39:52.000 They're the meanest motherfuckers.

00:39:54.000 They sure fucking are. 1.00

00:39:54.000 Those super nerds. 1.00

00:39:56.000 Like, oh, super progressive. 1.00

00:39:58.000 Fucking mean. 0.99

00:40:00.000 Dude. 1.00

00:40:00.000 So goddamn socially vicious. 1.00

00:40:02.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:40:03.000 No, especially just at the open mics in New York City, you know?

00:40:06.000 It was a real...

00:40:07.000 L.A. too.

00:40:08.000 Same deal.

00:40:08.000 Yeah, because there's no organization.

00:40:11.000 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.

00:40:17.000 I was like, I'm just doing bar shows, open mics, stuff like that.

00:40:20.000 And yeah, there's no rules.

00:40:21.000 So it's just social enforcement and it's just people being like, I'm the big dog. 1.00

00:40:25.000 And people would cross their arms during other people's sets or say shit. 1.00

00:40:29.000 And it really fucking sucked. 1.00

00:40:31.000 And the only way I got past it, I was saying, I don't give a shit about what any of these motherfuckers think. 0.99

00:40:36.000 I'm going to identify the people who I think are doing good work and who I think are funny and then hopefully they laugh at me too. 0.99

00:40:43.000 I'm going to focus on that. 0.98

00:40:44.000 But you should look at the people that are crossing their arms with amusement because all those people are fools. 1.00

00:40:49.000 You're fools. 1.00

00:40:50.000 I know what you're doing. 1.00

00:40:51.000 You're just throwing poison at people for no reason.

00:40:54.000 Totally.

00:40:55.000 Especially in open mic nights and those kind of shows, those bar shows, people are just developing.

00:41:01.000 Yeah.

00:41:02.000 You know, you're watching little babies run around in nursery homes.

00:41:05.000 I mean, that's really what it is.

00:41:06.000 Yeah, and what they're trying to do- They're comedy babies.

00:41:08.000 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, right?

00:41:16.000 Exactly, yeah. 0.99

00:41:16.000 But that's bullshit, you know? 0.99

00:41:18.000 It's bullshit. 1.00

00:41:19.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:41:19.000 And a lot of them aren't funny. 1.00

00:41:20.000 Yeah.

00:41:20.000 That's the real part of the problem.

00:41:22.000 They're trying to enforce a narrow band of comedy because they think they can operate inside those parameters. 0.52

00:41:27.000 Yeah.

00:41:27.000 But if they wanted to go on stage at the Comedy Store after Joey Diaz, they'd burst into flames.

00:41:31.000 Yeah.

00:41:31.000 It's not really that good.

00:41:33.000 It's not that good.

00:41:34.000 What you're doing is not that good.

00:41:36.000 I know you think you have a point, but what you're saying is your art is not that well thought out.

00:41:40.000 I know you listen to the Bill Burr podcast and you think that makes you better than everybody, but the number of people who'd be like, well, Bill Burr wouldn't do it like that, or whatever, that kind of thing, is so off the charts.

00:41:51.000 It's a waste of energy.

00:41:52.000 Yeah.

00:42:12.000 Look at yourself objectively the way you're looking at this person. 0.72

00:42:15.000 But the whole cross your arms, unless someone's stealing or doing something racist or clearly fucked up socially, you know, like, what do you care? 0.83

00:42:25.000 What do you care? 1.00

00:42:25.000 They just suck. 1.00

00:42:27.000 You suck too, bro. 1.00

00:42:28.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:42:28.000 Right? 1.00

00:42:29.000 You're at the open mic at 11pm.

00:42:31.000 You both have been waiting three hours to do three minutes.

00:42:33.000 I remember what it was like your first couple of years on stage.

00:42:36.000 It was terrible.

00:42:37.000 I want to go back and hug everyone who's ever in the audience and say, I'm sorry. 0.85

00:42:42.000 I didn't mean to put you through whatever the fuck I did up there. 0.95

00:42:47.000 That 10 minutes of nonsense? 0.97

00:42:48.000 I'm sorry.

00:42:49.000 You know, one time when I was doing open mics, I was doing, you know, I was doing three open mics a night in New York, you know, and I kind of missed that.

00:42:55.000 It was like really fun.

00:42:56.000 It was like going to the gym, you know, it's like bouncing around, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum.

00:42:59.000 But, you know, you really get used to it.

00:43:00.000 And there was one night, I can't remember why the hell this happened, but my girlfriend and her friend, um, and they're both cartoonists.

00:43:06.000 My girlfriend is a, uh, incredible, uh, cartoonist, uh, on, uh, her name's Lisa Hanawalt.

00:43:11.000 Um, uh, And so she's funny.

00:43:14.000 You know, these are funny people.

00:43:15.000 For some reason, they're like, we want to come to the open mic at the Creaking Cave in New York.

00:43:18.000 I was like, you do?

00:43:19.000 Okay, here we go.

00:43:20.000 And they sat there, and they were like, we sat in the front row, and they were like, their hands were like covering their eyes.

00:43:27.000 They were like, oh!

00:43:28.000 I can't believe it.

00:43:29.000 Every single person.

00:43:30.000 What is he doing?

00:43:31.000 Why did he say that?

00:43:33.000 Oh my god, this person.

00:43:34.000 What were they thinking?

00:43:36.000 It was just the worst freak show to them.

00:43:38.000 And I was like, yeah, I do this every single night.

00:43:41.000 Every shitty mistake or every weird thing that every person did that I was totally blank to that I had seen a million times, they were shocked by what was going on on that stage. 0.92

00:43:52.000 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. 0.86

00:44:01.000 I miss open mics so much.

00:44:03.000 Because it's such a beautiful disaster, right?

00:44:04.000 Because you're right, every single person that goes up on an open mic is sweating.

00:44:09.000 Basically, they're doing, like...

00:44:11.000 They're like endurance training.

00:44:12.000 They're doing something that is physically uncomfortable, even socially terrible, and they're bad at it.

00:44:19.000 And they're just doing it over and over again until they get used to it so that they can just go up on stage without flop sweating.

00:44:26.000 You're just watching a hundred people in a row have panic attacks, basically. 0.99

00:44:31.000 And people are just being their weird fucking selves. 0.99

00:44:34.000 And you see a lot of nonsense, and then you see a lot of people where you're like, God damn, that person is... 0.99

00:44:39.000 There is a core there and they're going to be really fucking funny. 0.98

00:44:41.000 And I love the fact that I know so many people from those days.

00:44:47.000 We've just all grown up together and now they're all writing sitcoms or they're doing...

00:44:52.000 You know, I met Michelle Wolfe... 0.95

00:44:54.000 Our first week doing open mics.

00:44:56.000 It was so cool.

00:44:57.000 We met, like, I was, like, my second open mic, and it was, like, her third open mic.

00:45:01.000 And we saw each other, her and a couple friends, and I was like, you guys are funny, you're funny.

00:45:05.000 And she was like, yeah, we're going to this other mic, you want to come?

00:45:06.000 Yep, let's go.

00:45:07.000 And then I've known her ever since, and then, like, to see her do that White House Correspondents' Dinner was, like, I just felt all that history all at once. 0.94

00:45:15.000 I was like, this is fucking amazing, you know? 0.83

00:45:18.000 What did you think when the president was tweeting at her? 1.00

00:45:21.000 I was like, damn, she got him on the hook. 0.98

00:45:23.000 I was like, this is the best. 0.99

00:45:25.000 That's what a comic's supposed to do. 0.53

00:45:27.000 The way that she pissed people off, that was such a beautiful moment.

00:45:32.000 I loved it. 0.98

00:45:33.000 She was so fucking funny. 0.94

00:45:35.000 It was great writing, too. 0.99

00:45:36.000 It was great writing. 1.00

00:45:37.000 Funny shit. 1.00

00:45:37.000 Yeah, she wrote it. 1.00

00:45:38.000 A bunch of our friends from those days, Anthony DeVito, Greg Stone, Dan St. Germain, I believe, helped her write jokes.

00:45:43.000 And yeah, they were really funny.

00:45:45.000 And guess what?

00:45:46.000 The crowd didn't want comedy, apparently.

00:45:49.000 But they got one of the best comics in the country.

00:45:53.000 She's in her prime right now. 0.99

00:45:55.000 And she fucking tore it up. 1.00

00:45:56.000 She did her job better than they wanted. 0.99

00:45:58.000 And they got pissed off about it.

00:45:59.000 And it was brilliant.

00:46:00.000 Did they really get pissed off?

00:46:02.000 Did you forget it was like a three-day news cycle of how much everybody hated her?

00:46:06.000 Yeah, but people that were there didn't get pissed off.

00:46:08.000 Some of them, they were like tweeting, like Maggie Haberman from the New York Times was tweeting like, oh, I feel bad for, you know, Sarah Huckabee, like for the, you know, light jab that she got about her eye makeup.

00:46:18.000 That was so nothing.

00:46:20.000 It was nothing.

00:46:21.000 It was so nothing.

00:46:22.000 And they were talking about, what did they say, the appearance shamed?

00:46:25.000 She appearance shamed her?

00:46:26.000 What was the word they were looking at?

00:46:27.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:46:28.000 I forget what it was.

00:46:29.000 Listen, she got off light.

00:46:31.000 Everybody got off light.

00:46:33.000 She was great.

00:46:33.000 It was fun.

00:46:34.000 People forget when Colbert did that 10 years earlier and he was applauded for it, the people in the room hated that too.

00:46:40.000 If you go back and watch that video, he gets no laughs.

00:46:43.000 When he's making fun of Bush.

00:46:44.000 It's one of the most famous comedy appearances ever, right?

00:46:48.000 And he got zero laughs in the room.

00:46:50.000 It's dead quiet.

00:46:51.000 It's bizarre if you watch it.

00:46:52.000 And then a year later, it was like, oh, Colbert, he's the master, he did it, da-da-da.

00:46:56.000 That was one of the big moments for comedy getting serious and satire getting serious.

00:46:59.000 That was a breakout for him.

00:47:00.000 And the political hacks in the room can't take it because they don't...

00:47:03.000 I don't know why they book comics because they do not want comics.

00:47:05.000 We're good to go.

00:47:28.000 But now he's not the character anymore.

00:47:29.000 Now he's like a guy who's not totally playing the character, but the character comes in and out like little shadows.

00:47:36.000 Yes, it does.

00:47:37.000 It's like, what are you?

00:47:40.000 What's your real thoughts on things?

00:47:41.000 Because I know you as Colbert.

00:47:43.000 I know you from the Colbert Report, this hilarious fake Republican guy.

00:47:47.000 And now I'm not sure what's going on here, man.

00:47:51.000 Yeah, I mean, when you're in late night, Yeah.

00:48:24.000 Yeah, well, also with him, it's like, that's what brought him to the dance!

00:48:27.000 Yeah.

00:48:28.000 The reason why you're there is like, what kind of meetings did they have with him?

00:48:31.000 Yeah.

00:48:31.000 Like, what are we going to do here?

00:48:32.000 We're going to play this straight?

00:48:33.000 Are you going to be Colbert?

00:48:35.000 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.

00:48:40.000 And so he had the same writers from the Colbert Report.

00:48:43.000 And so he was like, we're sort of like creating a new character.

00:48:46.000 How does this character work?

00:48:48.000 Yeah.

00:48:48.000 I gotta say, the old show, I mean, he's great.

00:48:51.000 The old show was probably the best performance ever made by a single late night comic.

00:48:56.000 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, then he would flip around and he would do it.

00:49:08.000 Like, it was like watching, like, a figure skater do triple axles, you know, like, watching him do that.

00:49:13.000 It was really impressive.

00:49:15.000 Yeah.

00:49:15.000 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.

00:49:21.000 I do have to agree.

00:49:22.000 I think that's also my prejudice against that format.

00:49:25.000 I'm like, you guys just saw what Jack Parr did and kept going.

00:49:29.000 Totally. 0.99

00:49:29.000 It's the same goddamn thing. 0.99

00:49:30.000 But I understand why he couldn't do The Colbert. 0.99

00:49:32.000 He did that show for like 10 years.

00:49:33.000 Of course.

00:49:33.000 I get it.

00:49:34.000 That was a limited thing for him.

00:49:36.000 Yeah.

00:49:37.000 He had that character, and so he could only do what was in the box, that character.

00:49:41.000 And so he's looking to do more, and I get it.

00:49:43.000 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.

00:49:49.000 Well, for sure, because the Late Night Shows are just promotion shows.

00:49:53.000 That's all they are.

00:49:53.000 All they are is, hey, Adam, I hear you have a book out.

00:49:57.000 Hey, Mike, tell us about your new show.

00:49:59.000 Here's our 10 minutes of comedy before that, and then we do that.

00:50:01.000 Yeah, it's basically like a version of a commercial.

00:50:05.000 And the nightly thing is a prison, you know, because you can only talk about what happened that day.

00:50:11.000 So the smartest thing that, you know, John Oliver, right?

00:50:14.000 He was up for The Daily Show.

00:50:15.000 He wanted to do The Daily Show.

00:50:17.000 He was John Stewart's pick for The Daily Show.

00:50:18.000 They said this in the oral history book of The Daily Show.

00:50:21.000 And then Comedy Central didn't close the deal with Oliver, and HBO came and said he wanted to do a show instead.

00:50:26.000 And Jon Stewart was like, alright, go with God, and that's what Jon Oliver did instead.

00:50:29.000 So we're living in that alternate reality from Jon Oliver hosting The Daily Show.

00:50:33.000 And so the smartest thing Oliver did was do weekly and not daily, because it lets him go wider.

00:50:39.000 If he was doing daily, he would have to just talk about what happened that day.

00:50:42.000 You don't have that much.

00:50:43.000 Guess what?

00:50:44.000 You can't have...

00:50:46.000 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, right?

00:50:52.000 You can't say as much.

00:50:54.000 It's harder.

00:50:55.000 And so being on that weekly schedule, and he's only doing 30-something shows a year, right, because they have hiatuses, that's what allows them to have those big, long, complete thoughts that everyone likes so much, you know?

00:51:05.000 Yes, his rants and his intelligent takes on news issues and pointing out hypocrisy.

00:51:11.000 Yeah, it's great.

00:51:12.000 Our show, it takes us three or four months to write an episode.

00:51:16.000 We're writing 16 at once, but that's how long we have to think about it.

00:51:19.000 And so we're able to take twists and turns.

00:51:21.000 We go into it thinking this is going to be our angle, and then we're diving into the research.

00:51:26.000 We have a wonderful research staff, and they say, actually, this is the more interesting part of the story.

00:51:30.000 And then we have the time to go chase it that way instead. 0.88

00:51:35.000 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.

00:51:40.000 Do you ever feel time constraints in terms of the subject matter? 0.97

00:51:44.000 Totally.

00:51:44.000 The subject matter is very involved?

00:51:47.000 Yeah, I mean, we try to do the most difficult topics we can.

00:51:51.000 We don't hold back from anything.

00:51:53.000 But the only constraint that we have is that the show, we've got 21 minutes, and then...

00:51:59.000 We've got commercials, so we can only talk about something for six minutes before we have to move on.

00:52:03.000 And so that's the only limitation that we have.

00:52:07.000 The network will let us do anything.

00:52:09.000 We've been on the network for four years.

00:52:11.000 The only time they've ever killed a show was we wanted to do something about the NCAA. About how the NCAA shouldn't pay athletes.

00:52:19.000 Well, in the case of football, it is killing them.

00:52:21.000 They should pay athletes.

00:52:22.000 Thank you.

00:52:22.000 We talk about that all the time.

00:52:24.000 I think it is one of the craziest fucking scams in all of money. 0.99

00:52:28.000 That college sports are... 0.99

00:52:30.000 It's unbelievable.

00:52:30.000 They're making so much money off those kids.

00:52:32.000 When you watch those things, every single person's getting paid.

00:52:35.000 Everyone.

00:52:36.000 Everybody's getting paid.

00:52:36.000 Except the best players in the world.

00:52:38.000 The guy bringing water to the announcers are getting paid.

00:52:42.000 Except for the players, right?

00:52:43.000 It's so crazy.

00:52:44.000 And the guy who literally...

00:52:45.000 I'm blanking on his name.

00:52:46.000 But the guy who created the system, right?

00:52:48.000 Who like...

00:52:53.000 Mm-hmm.

00:53:08.000 March Madness?

00:53:09.000 March Madness.

00:53:09.000 And they said no?

00:53:10.000 They said, and here's how I live with myself.

00:53:13.000 I say, look, I will never take a no until it's the only absolute answer I can get.

00:53:19.000 So they said no.

00:53:20.000 I say, I really want to do it.

00:53:22.000 Tell me no again.

00:53:23.000 They told me no again.

00:53:24.000 I was like, if the president of the network tells me no, then I'm not doing it.

00:53:27.000 And the president of the network told me no.

00:53:29.000 Because that's the guy who, I could write it and he could kill the episode.

00:53:31.000 Yeah, but why?

00:53:35.000 It's true!

00:53:36.000 It doesn't mean that you shouldn't have NCAA on your network.

00:53:39.000 They're worried about pissing off, not just the NCAA, but... 0.94

00:53:42.000 Pissing off those money-grubbing thieves. 0.86

00:53:45.000 I'm with you, man. 0.97

00:53:46.000 Stealing from those athletic kids.

00:53:47.000 I'm with you. 1.00

00:53:48.000 All these people are paying money to see those fucking kids. 1.00

00:53:50.000 That shit drives me crazy. 1.00

00:53:52.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:53:53.000 Exploiting of young athletes in college is- It's bonkers.

00:53:57.000 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.

00:54:04.000 He was explaining to me how much money gets donated to these schools by people who used to go to them.

00:54:09.000 He goes, it's insane.

00:54:11.000 And most of it is based on the performance that the school has in college sports. 0.99

00:54:17.000 These people who are, you know, I'm a fucking, you know, blah, blah, blah. 1.00

00:54:20.000 I went to school there and I'm there till I die. 1.00

00:54:23.000 Fucking go team. 1.00

00:54:24.000 These assholes throw shit tons of money and there's thousands of them all throughout history. 1.00

00:54:31.000 Years and years. 1.00

00:54:32.000 This guy's been donating for 25 fucking years. 0.99

00:54:34.000 Yep. 0.98

00:54:35.000 And when the team wins a championship, they give them a bonus doing it even more, right?

00:54:38.000 Yes.

00:54:38.000 But who doesn't get the money is the kid, right?

00:54:40.000 The fucking people who play the game. 0.99

00:54:42.000 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. 1.00

00:54:48.000 Yeah.

00:54:48.000 How many of them make it, especially in football?

00:54:50.000 Almost none.

00:54:51.000 Almost.

00:54:51.000 What are the numbers?

00:54:53.000 I wonder what the numbers are. 0.98

00:54:55.000 Guys who sign up for college football, who make it, first of all, with a body that's functional after four years of 600 fucking pound dudes slamming. 0.94

00:55:05.000 I guess it's not that big, but... 0.99

00:55:07.000 They're giant.

00:55:08.000 Giant dudes slamming into you, you know, five days a week.

00:55:11.000 We did an episode on football and the concussion thing.

00:55:14.000 I mean, it's not just concussions, right?

00:55:15.000 It's like just the little hits, right?

00:55:18.000 It's just the routine tackles.

00:55:19.000 You know what I mean?

00:55:20.000 What happens every single time you do that, your brain, you got to think of it this way.

00:55:24.000 Your brain is riding, your skull is the car, your brain is the passenger.

00:55:27.000 Your brain doesn't have a seatbelt.

00:55:29.000 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.

00:55:37.000 And even if that doesn't cause a concussion, it causes a little hurt every single time.

00:55:43.000 And so you can never get a concussion and do that over and over and over again and you're going to end up with CTE. Yeah, subconcussive trauma.

00:55:49.000 It happens in soccer players.

00:55:50.000 Yeah.

00:55:51.000 It's a big issue in soccer players.

00:55:52.000 And those kids are hurting themselves, you know?

00:55:55.000 So this is what Jamie wrote here.

00:55:58.000 In football, out of 73,557 NCAA participants, approximate number who are draft eligible is down to 16,346.

00:56:08.000 And now, down to draft picks, it's 256. So 256 out of 73,000 make it to draft picks.

00:56:18.000 1.6% make it from the NCAA to the majors.

00:56:23.000 1.6%. 0.97

00:56:25.000 Ridiculous. 0.97

00:56:26.000 From NCAA to major pro. 0.94

00:56:28.000 1.6%. 1.00

00:56:30.000 That is fucking crazy. 1.00

00:56:31.000 And let's be honest. 1.00

00:56:32.000 These kids are not getting a full education.

00:56:34.000 Look how high baseball is.

00:56:35.000 Baseball is almost 10%.

00:56:37.000 We're good to go.

00:56:54.000 Right, but look how low the number is in terms of baseball participants versus football.

00:56:59.000 It's half.

00:57:00.000 Less than half.

00:57:01.000 And yet they have way higher percentage.

00:57:03.000 This is our writing process as we look at charts.

00:57:06.000 Also, the thing is like with baseball, you don't get hit, right?

00:57:09.000 Yeah.

00:57:10.000 Unless you get hit by a ball, most of the time your injuries are just from running or...

00:57:14.000 Sliding and stuff like that.

00:57:15.000 Colliding in each other. 0.88

00:57:16.000 Well, you can get hit in the head with a baseball.

00:57:18.000 Yeah, but it's so much safer.

00:57:20.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:57:21.000 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. 0.99

00:57:27.000 You've got two choices. 0.99

00:57:28.000 Yeah.

00:57:28.000 I'd be like, don't do it.

00:57:29.000 Just don't do it.

00:57:30.000 You're not going to make it.

00:57:32.000 The very few people that make it out of there without, like, serious injury, it's like, it's not worth it.

00:57:38.000 Yeah.

00:57:38.000 It's just not.

00:57:39.000 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 high school football.

00:57:48.000 Yeah.

00:57:48.000 I don't know the number, but it's got to be ten times that, right?

00:57:50.000 What are you showing us, Jamie?

00:57:51.000 This kid is going to 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 five NFL picks.

00:58:00.000 Whoa.

00:58:01.000 That's cool.

00:58:01.000 So there's like a big discussion on what should he do.

00:58:03.000 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, it's like, play baseball.

00:58:10.000 Wow.

00:58:11.000 I play baseball, man.

00:58:12.000 Yeah, well that's better for your life because you're less likely to have brain damage. 0.99

00:58:19.000 Do you ever talk to a fucking baseball player that's retired? 0.99

00:58:22.000 It's like talking to a regular person. 0.99

00:58:24.000 He still wants to be the quarterback though, you know what I mean?

00:58:27.000 I mean, it's too bad he can't be a basketball player.

00:58:29.000 Those guys clearly have the best of it.

00:58:31.000 Like, out of all the major sports, basketball players, because they...

00:58:34.000 I don't know about that, because it's a much more grueling schedule physically.

00:58:38.000 That's true.

00:58:38.000 First of all, you're running and shooting every night.

00:58:41.000 You're sprinting.

00:58:42.000 You're doing all these different things.

00:58:43.000 Baseball is so much more leisurely.

00:58:45.000 But the celebrity aspect of basketball is so huge.

00:58:48.000 And, like, in baseball, it's not.

00:58:49.000 The celebrity aspect of baseball is gigantic.

00:58:51.000 Yeah?

00:58:51.000 Isn't it?

00:58:52.000 A-Rod and...

00:58:52.000 Still, there's five, ten, max ten guys on the court, and if you do anything, camera's right on your face immediately.

00:58:59.000 And here's the crazy thing about baseball.

00:59:01.000 This was pointed out to me.

00:59:02.000 The website Deadspin did this thing where they were pointing out the problem with baseball.

00:59:06.000 They went around and they asked people, Hey, what's the most famous baseball player that you could name?

00:59:10.000 And people were like Derek Jeter, A-Rod, Big Poppy, Manny Ramirez.

00:59:14.000 Retired guys.

00:59:15.000 And if you ask people, if they're a baseball fan, they'd say someone from my team.

00:59:19.000 Or maybe they'd say Mike Trout.

00:59:20.000 Or they'd say one of the guys in the Yankees.

00:59:22.000 But there is no A-Rod, Jeter level celebrity right now.

00:59:26.000 What happened?

00:59:27.000 I don't know exactly.

00:59:29.000 Steroids.

00:59:30.000 Give him back the steroids. 0.84

00:59:31.000 It's a goofy game.

00:59:32.000 No one's getting hurt. 0.99

00:59:34.000 What the fuck is the problem? 0.99

00:59:35.000 We're not talking about fighting. 1.00

00:59:37.000 We're talking about baseball.

00:59:38.000 Give him the steroids. 1.00

00:59:39.000 The best part about that stupid game is when someone hits the ball. 1.00

00:59:42.000 Does the steroids make him hit the ball better? 1.00

00:59:44.000 Yes.

00:59:45.000 Okay, well give it to him. 0.99

00:59:46.000 What the fuck are you guys doing testing for that? 1.00

00:59:48.000 Performance enhancing drugs, man, are the craziest. 1.00

00:59:51.000 The debate about that, we've never done this on the show, so I'm not fully boned up.

00:59:56.000 I would like to.

00:59:57.000 I've thought about it in the past.

00:59:58.000 Because the divisions, it's like the rest of the drug war, right?

01:00:02.000 The divisions we make between the things that are acceptable and not acceptable are so arbitrary, right?

01:00:08.000 Right.

01:00:08.000 So the example I always use is like, okay, why don't we like performance-enhancing drugs?

01:00:13.000 Not everyone has access to them, so they're unfair, right?

01:00:15.000 They're bad for your health, and we think they're unnatural, right?

01:00:18.000 Yes.

01:00:19.000 Cheating, too.

01:00:20.000 They're cheating.

01:00:21.000 Well, those are the reasons why we think they're cheating, right?

01:00:23.000 But there's some drugs you can take that aren't cheating.

01:00:27.000 Unfair advantage is the reason why it's cheating.

01:00:29.000 That's the primary reason.

01:00:31.000 So let me give you a counterexample.

01:00:33.000 For runners, for endurance athletes.

01:00:36.000 I like running. 0.84

01:00:37.000 I'm a shitty runner, but I like it. 0.61

01:00:39.000 I think it's a fun sport. 0.90

01:00:39.000 So I follow it a little bit. 0.90

01:00:42.000 So runners, endurance, the big thing is how much oxygen your blood can hold.

01:00:48.000 If you train at a high altitude, then you can increase that.

01:00:51.000 So there are these runners, the American runners.

01:00:54.000 They live at a high altitude.

01:00:55.000 They live super high up in Colorado or whatever.

01:00:59.000 And then when they're not there, they train there all year round.

01:01:02.000 They buy a place there.

01:01:03.000 And then when they're not there, when they're competing somewhere else, they sleep in a chamber that simulates low altitude.

01:01:10.000 How is that not the same thing as taking a performance-enhancing drug?

01:01:14.000 It's not illegal to do that.

01:01:17.000 It's unnatural.

01:01:19.000 It is an unfair advantage because not everybody can afford one of those chambers.

01:01:22.000 And I'm not going to say it's bad for your health.

01:01:24.000 I don't know.

01:01:24.000 But it's certainly as weird for your body as taking a drug, I would think.

01:01:28.000 So why do we draw the line?

01:01:31.000 It's not as weird for your body because it's only living at altitude.

01:01:33.000 It really just simulates low altitude.

01:01:35.000 It's not like taking EPO, which would be the drug that would simulate that, which I've got recent 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.

01:01:52.000 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.

01:02:05.000 It's a big deal.

01:02:07.000 It's a serious drug.

01:02:08.000 I mean, it's a serious endurance drug that also has some serious health complications.

01:02:12.000 People have died from taking it.

01:02:14.000 Young guys in their 20s in cycling have gotten strokes and died from EPO. That's bad shit. 1.00

01:02:32.000 I think? 1.00

01:02:38.000 That's a big one.

01:02:40.000 That is a big one.

01:02:41.000 In terms of the impact on endurance, it is a big one.

01:02:44.000 They're actually saying now that they think the best course of strategy is to train at low altitude and then sleep at high altitude.

01:02:54.000 They think that when you train at low altitude, you have more output.

01:02:58.000 So you're putting in more repetitions because you get more oxygen, so you have more work.

01:03:02.000 And then you get the same effect by living at altitude.

01:03:06.000 So you get up there and sleep and you don't have to train up there.

01:03:10.000 And if you train up there, it's actually slightly less valuable than training at low altitude and staying up there. 0.99

01:03:15.000 Damn. 0.97

01:03:15.000 Because whenever I'm staying somewhere high altitude, like I just did a weekend in Denver, and I was going on a run up there, and it was obviously torture compared to being here in L.A., but I was like, oh, I'm getting strong because I'm running at high altitude. 0.97

01:03:28.000 That's not true. 0.86

01:03:29.000 That really fucks with me. 0.94

01:03:30.000 Well, you just ruined something for me. 0.97

01:03:32.000 Thank you.

01:03:32.000 No, it's work.

01:03:32.000 It's work, and it will help you.

01:03:34.000 Yeah.

01:03:35.000 But if you are an athlete, like athletes are literally working for one or two percent of an advantage occasionally.

01:03:41.000 Yeah.

01:03:41.000 On many occasions.

01:03:43.000 When you are living at high altitude and training at sea level, they think that that gives you a slight advantage because you can put more work in.

01:03:54.000 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 and get in more drills.

01:04:06.000 Again, though, you're right, because this is sort of a performance-enhancing thing.

01:04:11.000 You're not just living and just being yourself and then showing up and competing.

01:04:16.000 You're engaging in this activity that significantly raises your red blood cells, significantly raises your oxygen capacity, changes your cardio, your VO2 max changes.

01:04:28.000 Here's the weird thing.

01:04:29.000 There's this weird idea in sports.

01:04:33.000 You know a shitload more about athletics than I do.

01:04:35.000 It's not my real forte.

01:04:37.000 But I do enjoy.

01:04:38.000 And the thing that's always weird to me is that we have this idea that there's some kind of level playing field.

01:04:44.000 There's this baseline human that we can just say, well, you've got to be at the baseline, right?

01:04:48.000 And humans are so variable, you're always going to find these weird cases.

01:04:51.000 And when you try to adjudicate, it gets really weird.

01:04:54.000 Do you know about Castor Semenya?

01:04:56.000 Do you know who she is?

01:04:57.000 No.

01:04:57.000 Oh, no, I do know.

01:04:58.000 Tell the story.

01:04:59.000 This story pisses me off so much.

01:05:01.000 So she's a marathoner. 1.00

01:05:02.000 She's not a marathoner. 0.99

01:05:03.000 She's a middle distance runner. 0.83

01:05:04.000 I believe she's South African.

01:05:07.000 She's like the best in the world at the 200 meters. 0.98

01:05:10.000 I actually got to see her because I went to the Prefontaine Classic in Eugene, Oregon with my dad to watch the big track meet.

01:05:19.000 Best in the world.

01:05:20.000 This is like an Olympics, not qualifier, but it's like the Olympics caliber athletes.

01:05:25.000 Saw her.

01:05:25.000 She's incredible.

01:05:26.000 Just...

01:05:27.000 One of the best in the world.

01:05:30.000 Her whole life has faced accusations that she's a man, basically, because she has an elevated level of testosterone.

01:05:42.000 This is her natural body.

01:05:43.000 And so she's had to deal with people saying, oh, we got to do a sex check on you, which is humiliating and also completely unscientific.

01:05:51.000 What are they going to do?

01:05:54.000 Like a sex check? 0.99

01:05:55.000 They want to look at her genitals? 1.00

01:05:56.000 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. 0.98

01:06:02.000 How many people have to be in the room? 0.62

01:06:03.000 Are they going to take a picture?

01:06:04.000 This is the problem, right?

01:06:06.000 How do you adjudicate that, right?

01:06:07.000 And also, there's such a thing, I don't know anything about her personal situation, right?

01:06:11.000 There's such a thing as intersex people, right?

01:06:13.000 Where when you look at their genitals, you can't tell. 0.99

01:06:15.000 It's not like, hey, just look at their junk and you can tell, right? 0.99

01:06:18.000 This is a real phenomenon. 0.99

01:06:19.000 Like, 1% of people are intersex, right?

01:06:21.000 Is it really that high?

01:06:22.000 I was speaking off the top of my head, but it's higher than you think.

01:06:26.000 It's a non-zero number of people, right?

01:06:28.000 Intersex people are a real thing.

01:06:29.000 Yeah, it's a real thing.

01:06:32.000 So she got past that, right?

01:06:35.000 They stopped challenging whether she was a man or a woman.

01:06:37.000 They did a chromosome test on her.

01:06:39.000 I think you might be right, yeah.

01:06:41.000 But so she's had a deal with that.

01:06:43.000 That's not fair, right?

01:06:44.000 Well, she's just an outlier. 0.99

01:06:45.000 She's a physical outlier. 1.00

01:06:46.000 She's a physical outlier. 1.00

01:06:47.000 And now the IAAF, which is the organization that runs all – it's like FIFA for track, right?

01:06:53.000 They run all track.

01:07:03.000 Wow.

01:07:18.000 That's crazy. 1.00

01:07:19.000 It's really, really fucked up. 0.99

01:07:20.000 And so the thing is, when we make those decisions about what's fair and what's not fair, there's no baseline human. 0.99

01:07:27.000 It's always a value judgment, and when we're excluding some people, we always need to look at that and say, are we discriminating?

01:07:33.000 They're definitely discriminating against gastrosomania.

01:07:35.000 And is this the IOC that's doing this?

01:07:37.000 No, it's the IAAF. The IOC is the Olympics, IAAF. The Olympics aren't doing this, so they don't have an issue with it?

01:07:44.000 Oh, incredibly dirty.

01:08:04.000 And he is literally trying to unionize the athletes, which is very hard, right?

01:08:08.000 Because there's new athletes every four years.

01:08:10.000 But yeah, those athletes are not paid.

01:08:12.000 Plus, no one's going to listen to the guy who throws the heavy rock.

01:08:15.000 What do you do, dude?

01:08:17.000 Did you win the 100 meters?

01:08:18.000 Yeah, I got a gold medal for the hockey team.

01:08:20.000 Do you hook a cannonball?

01:08:21.000 Oh, you throw a rock.

01:08:24.000 Weird that you can't make a living throwing rocks, dude.

01:08:26.000 Sorry. 0.96

01:08:27.000 It's fucked up, though, because people watch those sports, you know? 0.99

01:08:30.000 The most fucked up thing is when they let the NBA play. 0.99

01:08:33.000 When they let the NBA play against those fucking poor Eastern Bloc nations, and you've got these fucking, you know, super athletes who are professional American basketball players. 0.99

01:08:44.000 For the biggest ones, Michael Phelps can get a sponsorship, right? 0.99

01:08:50.000 For the biggest ones.

01:08:51.000 For the biggest ones.

01:08:51.000 But the lower ones can't get sponsorships, and the shot put people can't get sponsorships.

01:08:56.000 And they're also not even allowed to promote themselves using the Olympics.

01:08:59.000 They can't be like, hey, pizza place, I'll be an Olympic athlete, me, at the pizza place.

01:09:05.000 Because if they use the word Olympics, the IOC will sue them.

01:09:08.000 Jeez.

01:09:08.000 Jesus.

01:09:08.000 So, yeah, it's...

01:09:10.000 Dirty people.

01:09:11.000 It's really, really, really not fair. 0.98

01:09:12.000 But it's so prestigious.

01:09:14.000 If you can win a gold medal in the Olympics, I mean, you basically can...

01:09:17.000 You have a fitness career for a life.

01:09:20.000 Yeah, but, well, you could...

01:09:22.000 If you can figure it out.

01:09:22.000 You could be a high school coach for the rest of your life.

01:09:24.000 Depending on the sport.

01:09:25.000 Depending on the sport, right?

01:09:26.000 Like, shot put...

01:09:28.000 Shot put, I don't know what your prospects are, right? 1.00

01:09:30.000 You're fucked, bro. 1.00

01:09:31.000 You're throwing rocks. 1.00

01:09:32.000 Should have picked something that people enjoy watching.

01:09:35.000 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.

01:09:40.000 But why is that a part of track and field, the rock-throwing part?

01:09:44.000 Just history, I guess.

01:09:45.000 Where's that track or field?

01:09:46.000 What are you doing?

01:09:47.000 Are you a human catapult?

01:09:49.000 Are you the dude that they put on the top of the bridge to throw rocks?

01:09:54.000 I like the sports where someone has to ride a horse, then shoot a gun, then go for a swim. 1.00

01:09:58.000 Old timey shit. 1.00

01:10:01.000 Yeah, there's some stupid fucking sports in the Olympics. 1.00

01:10:04.000 Sorry, my Canadian friends, but curling. 1.00

01:10:06.000 Curling's the top of the heap.

01:10:08.000 Curling's getting bigger and bigger every year. 1.00

01:10:09.000 This shit's preposterous. 0.99

01:10:10.000 They don't have jiu-jitsu in the Olympics. 1.00

01:10:12.000 They don't?

01:10:13.000 No. 1.00

01:10:13.000 Okay, that's fucked up. 1.00

01:10:14.000 Yeah, retired NFL guy's currently trying to make the curling team just based off of a bet that he made with his drunk buddies. 0.99

01:10:20.000 He's like, I bet I could do it.

01:10:20.000 I bet he could do it for sure.

01:10:22.000 They're having a tough time, actually. 1.00

01:10:23.000 Fuck that they are. 1.00

01:10:25.000 They're drunk. 1.00

01:10:26.000 They're not even trying.

01:10:28.000 It's just that the systems we use to organize these things are so important.

01:10:33.000 Here's a really good example of this.

01:10:35.000 I thought this was fascinating.

01:10:37.000 India, a country of over a billion people, a huge number of people, has almost no Olympic athletes.

01:10:46.000 Didn't they have wrestlers? 0.98

01:10:47.000 Didn't they have wrestlers? 0.98

01:10:48.000 I'm not sure, but I remember this because a couple Olympics ago, the first individual gold medalist ever from India won a gold medal.

01:10:56.000 And he wanted an air pistol, which is like a shooting. 0.99

01:10:59.000 That's my shit. 1.00

01:10:59.000 Oh yeah? 1.00

01:11:00.000 No.

01:11:01.000 Okay.

01:11:02.000 I've never heard of it before, right?

01:11:03.000 He's into air pistols.

01:11:04.000 Turns out he's independently wealthy and had just practiced and practiced and practiced, right?

01:11:08.000 What they don't have is India is – it's a great country.

01:11:11.000 It's not a very organized country.

01:11:12.000 They don't have a lot of infrastructure in terms of, you know, we've got teams, right?

01:11:16.000 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.

01:11:26.000 In India, they don't have that, right? 0.90

01:11:28.000 So despite the fact that they have – So many people.

01:11:31.000 They got a billion people.

01:11:31.000 They must have every type...

01:11:32.000 They must have one of the world's strongest people.

01:11:34.000 They must have one of the world's fastest people because they got a billion people, right?

01:11:37.000 What they don't have is that training infrastructure, right?

01:11:40.000 So if you look at it that way, you're like, okay, hold on a second.

01:11:42.000 We don't like performance-enhancing drugs because unearned unfair advantage.

01:11:46.000 Well, what else is training infrastructure than an unfair advantage?

01:11:49.000 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. 1.00

01:11:55.000 How is that fair?

01:11:56.000 How is that not an unfair advantage, you know?

01:11:58.000 That's true, but...

01:11:59.000 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 to pay your bills while you're working for the Olympics.

01:12:11.000 You totally do.

01:12:11.000 So my point is, there's no baseline human.

01:12:14.000 There's no way to eliminate all advantages and just say, oh no, it's just what you were born with.

01:12:21.000 It doesn't exist.

01:12:23.000 There's no such thing.

01:12:23.000 Those women who are running with that...

01:12:25.000 I'm sorry, what's her name again?

01:12:26.000 Casterson.

01:12:27.000 Caster Semenya.

01:12:28.000 Those women who are running with her, they just, shit happens, bro. 1.00

01:12:31.000 You know, if you're a heavyweight boxer and you grow up in the era of Mike Tyson, I'm sorry, but this is just what you're stuck with. 0.99

01:12:37.000 Yeah.

01:12:37.000 This is what's going on, and some people are just, they just have advantages.

01:12:41.000 Yeah.

01:12:42.000 They just have advantages physically, mentally, and there's outliers.

01:12:46.000 You found it.

01:12:47.000 Sorry, you got an outlier.

01:12:48.000 Might want to do something else.

01:12:49.000 Yeah.

01:12:50.000 Yeah.

01:12:50.000 Yeah, absolutely.

01:12:51.000 Or find out what races that lady's going to run and don't run those races. 1.00

01:12:54.000 Yeah, run a different race.

01:12:57.000 That's always been my advice.

01:12:57.000 How do you feel about trans athletes?

01:12:59.000 You know, it's a good question.

01:13:02.000 I think we're really going to go through a cultural change on how we think about that.

01:13:08.000 It's morphing so quickly.

01:13:09.000 You know what I mean?

01:13:10.000 Yeah.

01:13:12.000 I'm very much, because I am of this opinion that there is no such thing as perfect fairness, and when we make those distinctions, we're always choosing who to allow.

01:13:21.000 And because I think we should choose to allow trans people to participate in society, I'm for an inclusive approach where we're able to find a model that allows those folks to compete fairly in a way that everybody's happy with.

01:13:36.000 I think that's what we should do.

01:13:39.000 And that, to me, is like...

01:13:41.000 That's what makes me like sports more, you know, is those comparisons. 0.99

01:13:45.000 Like, you know, another thing that pissed me off so much was like, fuck, what's his name? 0.99

01:13:50.000 The disabled runner who then killed his girlfriend. 1.00

01:13:54.000 Oh, yeah.

01:13:55.000 Oscar Pistorius.

01:13:57.000 And people were saying about this guy that his prosthetic gave him an advantage. 0.97

01:14:02.000 Now, first of all, there's no fucking way that's true because he doesn't have muscles. 0.93

01:14:05.000 Right. 0.98

01:14:06.000 Muscles convert food into...

01:14:07.000 Yeah, but I actually think it does give you an advantage.

01:14:09.000 You do think so?

01:14:10.000 Yeah, I think mechanically it does, because they're springs.

01:14:13.000 Essentially, the way his leg works with those things is, you've seen them, right?

01:14:19.000 They don't even look remotely like feet.

01:14:21.000 No, yeah, yeah.

01:14:22.000 I've seen them, yeah, the cheetah things, yeah.

01:14:23.000 Yeah, it's a crazy, like...

01:14:25.000 But dude, the...

01:14:26.000 Seesaw type thing.

01:14:27.000 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.

01:14:35.000 Right?

01:14:36.000 Because that's the laws of thermodynamics, right?

01:14:37.000 You can't get more out than you put in.

01:14:39.000 Except a muscle does give you more than you put in because a muscle converts food into energy for a brief period, right?

01:14:45.000 And so he doesn't have springs.

01:14:49.000 He doesn't have a machine in his leg the way the rest of us do that creates force out of food.

01:14:55.000 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 advantage, the mechanical advantage of the shape of those things, which applies all sorts of really unusual leverage when you're running.

01:15:09.000 It's totally...

01:15:11.000 I don't know if it's...

01:15:13.000 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.

01:15:18.000 But the thing is... 0.99

01:15:19.000 You can run fast as fuck with those things. 0.99

01:15:22.000 You've seen those guys, right? 0.99

01:15:23.000 Well, he could, right?

01:15:24.000 But where's all the other double amputees who are, like, you know, coming and ruining... 1.00

01:15:43.000 I remember reading stuff.

01:15:46.000 At the time, from athletic scientists, I forget what it's called, who said that it didn't, right?

01:15:54.000 That it didn't?

01:15:55.000 Yeah.

01:15:55.000 So that's a debate that we could have, right?

01:15:57.000 Right.

01:15:58.000 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.

01:16:03.000 I'm so happy he was in it, right?

01:16:05.000 I see what you're saying.

01:16:06.000 But if it does give you an advantage, there's someone who comes in second place.

01:16:11.000 Well, he didn't win.

01:16:12.000 Well, so the point is, when we make the rules of a game, right?

01:16:16.000 And this is the point of our episode about games, which is about the Olympics, actually.

01:16:19.000 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?

01:16:26.000 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.

01:16:35.000 You know what I mean?

01:16:35.000 Right.

01:16:36.000 Just like in baseball, too many home runs, move the mound up or down. 0.70

01:16:39.000 You know how they change the rules a little bit because they want more home runs?

01:16:41.000 Same thing with track and field.

01:16:43.000 We change the rules a little bit to allow this person and not allow this person, right?

01:16:47.000 I think that when we're talking about people, we should always try to include more people, not less.

01:16:52.000 And hey, if you're a double amputee and you can get your way into the Olympics and 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? 0.80

01:17:01.000 As far as trans athletes go, we could sit here and talk for three hours about all the different ways that hormones might affect your body and might not affect your body, and I'm not an expert on that, and I don't want to claim to be.

01:17:12.000 But sports with trans athletes who are competing with their gender, that is a sporting world that I'm more interested in.

01:17:25.000 And I think we should find a way to make that happen.

01:17:27.000 I know it's going to be really complicated and messy, and there's going to be a lot of debate about it, and it's going to be uncomfortable, and there's going to be a lot of arguments, but I hope that that's the world that we've moved forward to.

01:17:38.000 That's my point of view.

01:17:41.000 My point of view is that there's a reason, there's a distinction, there's a reason why we make the distinction to have male athletics versus female athletics.

01:17:50.000 The reason is that males have a physiological advantage over women. 1.00

01:17:55.000 So in most sports, most physical sports, we do not have males compete with females.

01:18:00.000 The question becomes when someone who is male transitions and becomes female, Do those same physiological advantages apply?

01:18:09.000 And what is the evidence?

01:18:12.000 Well, the evidence in competition seems to be that it shows that it does apply, particularly in weightlifting, rugby, mountain biking, power-heavy sports that are...

01:18:22.000 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

01:18:53.000 and competes as a woman and destroys records and dominates you in that sport. 1.00

01:18:58.000 That's bullshit. 0.99

01:18:59.000 And that's not competing on a level playing field. 0.99

01:19:03.000 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. 0.65

01:19:22.000 It's not fair.

01:19:23.000 It's as much cheating as taking steroids when the other person doesn't or taking performance-enhancing drugs when the other person doesn't.

01:19:31.000 Maybe even more so.

01:19:32.000 Maybe even more so because you also have...

01:19:34.000 There's a bunch of advantages in terms of reaction time that males enjoy.

01:19:39.000 It's some significant difference in reaction time between males and even untrained males versus female professional athletes.

01:19:47.000 Well, I disagree.

01:19:49.000 What do you disagree about?

01:19:51.000 Well, my main point being the one that I already made.

01:19:56.000 I don't think that there is such a thing as a perfectly level playing field.

01:20:00.000 I think we decide what kind of playing field we want to have.

01:20:02.000 Sure, but we do make the distinction where we don't allow men to compete in women's divisions.

01:20:08.000 And I think that that distinction may be breaking down a bit.

01:20:11.000 And I think it may be time to break down that distinction a little bit.

01:20:13.000 So you think that males should be able to compete in the women's division of weightlifting?

01:20:17.000 No, I don't necessarily.

01:20:19.000 But they can if they transition.

01:20:21.000 Well, first of all, there's a lot of stuff to break down.

01:20:28.000 I'm not an expert on the subject, so it's just sort of off the top of my head.

01:20:32.000 One thing is, you're postulating a particular person who decided to transition at the age of 30. Right?

01:20:40.000 And they were very big and strong before, right?

01:20:42.000 And they decided to transition.

01:20:42.000 Now, that is a type of person that exists, right?

01:20:46.000 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?

01:20:56.000 They're just people who are trans, you know?

01:20:57.000 And this is something that we're going to accept and support, right?

01:21:00.000 You're seeing folks transition much, much earlier age, you know?

01:21:05.000 There's a...

01:21:06.000 And so if someone is transitioning from the age of seven years old and working with those hormones from that age, their body situation is going to be very different than the one that you postulated.

01:21:23.000 I also know from my trans friends that the effects that the hormones have on your body are really profound.

01:21:30.000 Really, really profound.

01:21:31.000 We're not...

01:21:34.000 To a surprising degree.

01:21:50.000 I don't know.

01:21:51.000 We're in such new territory here, right?

01:22:08.000 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 25. People don't know who they are.

01:22:21.000 A seven-year-old, you won't even...

01:22:23.000 People don't even give their seven-year-old phones.

01:22:25.000 You don't let them vote.

01:22:26.000 You're going to let them decide what sex they're going to be for the rest of their life? 1.00

01:22:30.000 The research that I've seen, and again, I'm not an expert on this, and I'd love to...

01:22:36.000 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, you know, also speaking to trans folks, you know, in this conversation.

01:22:50.000 But so to touch on just what I've, you know, 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.

01:23:00.000 We're good to go.

01:23:08.000 We're good to go.

01:23:11.000 We're good to go.

01:23:30.000 Did it change?

01:23:30.000 The answer was, generally, no, it really didn't.

01:23:34.000 And, you know, I have a friend who has a trans kid.

01:23:39.000 I don't know the kid's exact age, but, you know, in the age range that we're talking about.

01:23:42.000 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.

01:23:53.000 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?

01:24:02.000 Embrace that choice meaning hormonally...

01:24:06.000 I shouldn't even phrase it as a choice, like embrace that identity.

01:24:10.000 But it is a choice, right?

01:24:11.000 I mean, if you're choosing to add hormones to a child's body, that's a choice.

01:24:17.000 It's a choice on the part of the parent.

01:24:20.000 It's not a choice on the part of the child.

01:24:25.000 In the same way that being gay isn't a choice.

01:24:28.000 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? 1.00

01:24:39.000 Because...

01:24:39.000 I'm sorry, can you expand on the question?

01:24:42.000 It's a simple question.

01:24:43.000 If you say that the child thinks it's a girl, so you're going to give the child hormones. 0.54

01:24:48.000 If the child thinks it's a girl, let it be a girl. 1.00

01:24:51.000 Why are you adding hormones?

01:24:53.000 If you're shooting hormones into a child, and you're affecting the child's development, you're saying that's not a choice.

01:24:59.000 That's nonsense.

01:25:00.000 Of course it's a choice.

01:25:01.000 You're choosing to chemically...

01:25:03.000 Change this child's body. 0.95

01:25:05.000 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.

01:25:14.000 And you're saying that this isn't a choice.

01:25:16.000 Well, it's definitely a choice to do that.

01:25:18.000 So what trans people express...

01:25:21.000 And again, I'm not an expert.

01:25:23.000 This is from me talking to my trans friends and, you know, seeing what other trans folks say.

01:25:28.000 Is that the, you know, experience of being trans and not receiving hormones, right?

01:25:33.000 And not having the body that you identify with.

01:25:36.000 The feeling of dysphoria, right?

01:25:38.000 Is extremely...

01:25:40.000 I think?

01:25:56.000 Where their inner self, the self that they are, they're not thinking they are a woman, they're like, this is the person that I am.

01:26:03.000 Doesn't match the body that they have.

01:26:05.000 And that gives them extreme distress.

01:26:07.000 And that leads to suicide.

01:26:10.000 That leads to other damaging behaviors.

01:26:15.000 And the best treatment for that, that we know exists, is to do gender confirmation via hormones. 0.96

01:26:27.000 And you know that that doesn't affect the suicide rate.

01:26:30.000 The suicide rate for trans people is very high, post-op and pre-op.

01:26:34.000 It really doesn't get affected by whether or not you treat them.

01:26:37.000 Well, the operation, you know, one misconception is...

01:26:40.000 Why is that?

01:26:41.000 Is that because they're not accepted by society and we're not more loving?

01:26:44.000 Could it be underlying issues that are causing them to feel this way in the first place?

01:26:49.000 Like, what is it?

01:26:49.000 We don't know, and I'm sure it varies widely.

01:26:52.000 Look, so all I can do is defer to the experts that I know about this, right?

01:26:59.000 So, you know, for instance, there's an author named Bryn Tannehill, who's a former military helicopter pilot.

01:27:08.000 I just interviewed her for my new podcast that's coming out soon called Factually.

01:27:12.000 I'm doing it on Earwolf, and it's like a long-form interview podcast.

01:27:16.000 And so she's one of the people who's affected by the Trump...

01:27:22.000 Because she's trans. 0.99

01:27:44.000 I don't want to speak to suicide rates.

01:27:46.000 My entire concern is with children.

01:27:48.000 My concern is not with young adults deciding to take steps to confirm their gender identity, who they feel they really are.

01:27:56.000 I'm all for you doing whatever you want to do when you're an adult, when your mind is formed.

01:28:00.000 But people change their mind.

01:28:02.000 They change their opinion.

01:28:03.000 They change their thoughts. 0.90

01:28:03.000 There's nothing wrong with just deciding to be a gay man. 0.90

01:28:06.000 There's nothing wrong with your body...

01:28:09.000 As you grow and mature and develop, you're growing out of these ideas.

01:28:13.000 Some will and some won't.

01:28:15.000 And the ones who won't, they always have the option to do something later on in life.

01:28:19.000 But if you do something to hormonally block a child very early on, there's no turning back from that.

01:28:24.000 Well, let me say a few things to that.

01:28:26.000 First of all, it's not wrong to be concerned about children.

01:28:29.000 And there's a reason this is the most intense part of this conversation.

01:28:32.000 And I think it's correct, right?

01:28:34.000 Because we're all very concerned about children, right?

01:28:36.000 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.

01:28:44.000 It happens very often.

01:28:46.000 I know trans people.

01:28:47.000 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.

01:28:59.000 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.

01:29:06.000 And then as they became older, just decided to be gay, including women who wanted to be men, who just became gay women. 0.68

01:29:11.000 And I think, what's that girl's name that was in John Wick, Ruby Rose?

01:29:16.000 She was one of those. 0.86

01:29:17.000 She wanted to be trans when she was younger, and now she's just a gay woman. 0.90

01:29:20.000 So, look, I know quite a few trans folks, right?

01:29:26.000 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?

01:29:34.000 I know quite a few trans women who were straight men, right?

01:29:38.000 Or who, you know, lived their lives as, presented as straight men, right?

01:29:42.000 And then transitioned, right? 0.75

01:29:44.000 And often become lesbians. 1.00

01:29:47.000 Yeah, I mean, that's one of the ways that people can be.

01:29:50.000 I really recommend that...

01:29:52.000 Oh, the other thing I was going to say is that I do know, also among the trans folks that I know, or the trans people who speak about this that I've heard, so many of them say, I wish I had access.

01:30:02.000 I knew this about myself at a very young age, and I wish to God that I had had the ability to receive these hormones at a young age.

01:30:11.000 My life would be so much better.

01:30:12.000 And I'm not going to argue with those folks, you know?

01:30:14.000 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.

01:30:22.000 There's a lot of those people too.

01:30:23.000 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.

01:30:29.000 I'm very curious, and this is what I'd go consult my friend or my recent interview subject, Tannehill's work on this, to see how many are in each group.

01:30:39.000 Which sets of these folks are the outliers?

01:30:41.000 I think the folks that you're talking about are probably the outliers, but I can't confirm that.

01:30:46.000 All surgeries have potential costs, however, according to a Swedish study of 324 patients, 41% of whom were born female.

01:30:54.000 Surgery was associated with considerably higher risk for mortality, suicidal behavior, and psychiatric morbidity than the general population.

01:31:03.000 So that's people who got the surgery.

01:31:06.000 I am...

01:31:07.000 I'm curious.

01:31:08.000 Wait, 3.41% of them.

01:31:10.000 I mean, the devil of this is in the details, right?

01:31:13.000 Because how much is the higher risk?

01:31:15.000 What does it mean 3.1% of them who are born female?

01:31:18.000 Well, some of them were born female and the other ones were born male.

01:31:21.000 The males that transition to females is what it's saying.

01:31:23.000 It's only saying...

01:31:35.000 Sure.

01:31:43.000 That's saying that having that surgery is associated with higher risk of mortality, suicidal behavior, and psychiatric morbidity.

01:31:50.000 But it also says above, following surgery, patients report lower gender dysphoria and improved sexual relationships.

01:31:56.000 Right before they kill themselves, everything's awesome?

01:31:58.000 Well, this isn't saying that people are killing themselves.

01:32:01.000 You're looking for something that confirms a previously established...

01:32:07.000 And as are you.

01:32:08.000 We should always be careful of drawing too much from a single study and look at it widely, right?

01:32:18.000 What was the point I was about to make?

01:32:22.000 It fled my head.

01:32:24.000 I'm sort of at the, oh, here's what it was.

01:32:28.000 Surgery, another thing I know from speaking with trans folks is that surgery is overemphasized, right? 1.00

01:32:32.000 And that surgery 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?

01:32:41.000 And really it's more about what are you living as and what sort of set of hormones do you have, right?

01:32:47.000 But I would really...

01:32:49.000 I've sort of reached the limit of my facility with this topic.

01:32:53.000 I really want to shout out videos made by a friend of mine.

01:32:57.000 Her videos are called ContraPoints.

01:32:59.000 Her name's Natalie Nguyen.

01:33:00.000 She's a former philosopher, former philosophy PhD.

01:33:04.000 And she does these incredibly funny videos about...

01:33:08.000 Not just about transitions, about all types of things.

01:33:11.000 She had a really great one about comedy recently.

01:33:14.000 But she really breaks down like a lot of these, a lot of misconceptions, right?

01:33:18.000 And has really changed.

01:33:19.000 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?

01:33:24.000 And I think you should check them out.

01:33:26.000 You might enjoy talking to her on the show.

01:33:29.000 She's like a really fascinating person.

01:33:31.000 ContraPoints.

01:33:31.000 It's an incredibly complex subject.

01:33:33.000 It really is.

01:33:35.000 I've had Buck Angel on the podcast before who transitioned from female to male, which is also a different and interesting thing. 0.98

01:33:43.000 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. 0.98

01:33:49.000 It didn't make sense. 0.97

01:33:51.000 And then once he transitioned to being a male, then he felt complete.

01:33:55.000 I don't deny that.

01:33:57.000 My entire concern is that you're making decisions for children and that this is a completely new thing with no historical precedent.

01:34:05.000 We've never done this before.

01:34:06.000 There's not like a history of hundreds of years of hormone blockers being used on young children and whether or not that is healthy and promotes a positive life.

01:34:16.000 I feel like if a child thinks they're a girl, Let them live as a girl. 1.00

01:34:21.000 But you don't have to hormonally engage with their body with chemicals.

01:34:25.000 It just seems crazy.

01:34:27.000 It seems ill-advised.

01:34:29.000 It seems like this movement of acceptance and progressive thinking in many ways is a fantastic thing.

01:34:38.000 It's a fantastic movement.

01:34:39.000 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're 100% cool with trans people, and you're 100% cool, and you're going to recognize this child is trans.

01:34:52.000 But you're doing something to this child's body that you can't turn around.

01:34:57.000 And if this child decides at...

01:34:59.000 Whatever age we decide that you can make rational decisions to transition as trans, let them fully develop first. 0.96

01:35:06.000 Let them be a person.

01:35:08.000 Let them make these decisions. 1.00

01:35:10.000 If you want to identify as a woman and you want to keep your penis, that should be fine too. 1.00

01:35:15.000 There's nothing wrong with that. 0.99

01:35:17.000 If you want to keep a functional penis, you want to identify as a woman and not even take hormones. 0.99

01:35:20.000 Who cares? 1.00

01:35:21.000 Do that.

01:35:22.000 Do that.

01:35:23.000 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.

01:35:36.000 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 hormonally interact with their body in some sort of a random Dr. Frankenstein sort of way.

01:35:51.000 What evidence do we know?

01:35:53.000 What evidence do we have that this is a powerful, absolute, intelligent, smart way to handle a child's life over the long term?

01:36:02.000 When these kids grow to be 60, as opposed to kids who don't get the hormone shots when they're 6, these people are 15% more happy.

01:36:10.000 There's nothing like that.

01:36:11.000 But yet people are jumping into it because it seems like the thing to do.

01:36:14.000 Because it seems like the tide of society is moving in that direction.

01:36:17.000 Well, I don't jump into it for that reason.

01:36:22.000 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.

01:36:32.000 Listen to the children.

01:36:33.000 Listen to the children and listen to the adults, right, who said, I used to be that child.

01:36:36.000 Okay.

01:36:37.000 But they are not that child.

01:36:39.000 And, you know, to you said, look, everyone's different.

01:36:41.000 So for them to say, I was that child, that's nonsense.

01:36:44.000 You were a similar child in a similar situation.

01:36:48.000 You were not that child.

01:36:49.000 They're not literally saying they're that child.

01:36:50.000 But they don't know how that child is feeling.

01:36:52.000 They don't know how much that child's being influenced by its environment.

01:36:54.000 They don't know how much their thoughts and their expressions are being encouraged by their parents.

01:36:59.000 Sure.

01:37:00.000 So, my point is, when you and I are talking about this right now, we're speaking pretty hypothetically, right?

01:37:07.000 We're talking about a child that is not in the room that we don't have.

01:37:10.000 We're talking about a fictional child, right?

01:37:12.000 So, what we really care about are the actual people.

01:37:14.000 Right?

01:37:15.000 And when we talk to the actual trans folks, right, and talk to, you know, say, hey, what do you think?

01:37:23.000 You know, how do you feel?

01:37:25.000 And, you know, include them in the conversation.

01:37:28.000 I think we have a different conversation about it, you know?

01:37:31.000 We do have a different conversation, but we also have a different conversation.

01:37:33.000 We talk to people that have regret from transition surgery, because there's a lot of those.

01:37:38.000 Sure, but we're not, we don't have either of those folks in the room. 1.00

01:37:40.000 Right, but we have to acknowledge that they're real as well.

01:37:42.000 Yeah, I don't...

01:37:43.000 I'm not dismissing that those people are real.

01:37:46.000 Right, but when we say, if you talk to trans folks, you get this impression.

01:37:49.000 That's not necessarily true.

01:37:52.000 You get a wide range of impressions.

01:37:56.000 I wasn't just...

01:37:57.000 I wasn't talking about specifically the impression that...

01:38:00.000 I wasn't saying we should reason from anecdotal evidence, right?

01:38:03.000 I'm saying that...

01:38:06.000 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?

01:38:19.000 Comprehensively looked at the research and told me that the research shows that the evidence that you're asking for exists, maybe not on a 30-year timeline, but there have been studies of this and here's what we know about them.

01:38:30.000 About children transitioning?

01:38:33.000 Yeah, I mean, that is my understanding.

01:38:35.000 I have not looked at the research myself.

01:38:37.000 I don't think there's research that shows the positive benefits of children transitioning.

01:38:41.000 I don't think that exists.

01:38:42.000 Well, we can't solve that in this conversation right here.

01:38:46.000 My point is, look, I'm not going to go out on a limb and tell you more than I can say off the top of my head, right?

01:38:51.000 Because I'm not an expert on the subject.

01:38:54.000 This is something that, you know, if this were something we had done on our show and I had dived into the research more, I could tell you more than I know it exists.

01:39:00.000 But I can tell you what I have been told exists by people who have made it their business to know, you know?

01:39:07.000 So, you know, that would be my next step in the conversation.

01:39:12.000 But, you know, that's what I'm saying is those are, You know, including those folks in this conversation is a really critical part of it for me.

01:39:22.000 So, yeah.

01:39:25.000 But it's a conversation the world needs to have, for sure.

01:39:27.000 Yeah.

01:39:27.000 And I think it's one that we will have.

01:39:29.000 And, you know, again, just to bring it back to athletics, right?

01:39:34.000 I think that the undeniable existence of trans people You know, children to teenagers to adults, right, who want to compete, right, and who make a compelling case that they should be able to compete, right, is going to be something that we're going to have to grapple with. 0.59

01:39:50.000 You know, I don't think there's going to be easy answers to it.

01:39:53.000 And we're grappling with it right now.

01:39:54.000 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, a trans division.

01:40:03.000 If you want to compete athletically, that's fair to me.

01:40:06.000 That makes sense.

01:40:07.000 Well, I hope that there's, you know, like, say with the, you got the Paralympics, right?

01:40:12.000 And the Paralympics is really, like, it's divided.

01:40:15.000 Do you know how they do it?

01:40:15.000 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?

01:40:21.000 And so that's really great to make a way that, you 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?

01:40:30.000 But the fact that Oscar Pistorius, which, by the way, we should bring up again, he killed his girlfriend.

01:40:34.000 Oh! 0.60

01:40:34.000 Which is a very weird part of the story. 0.60

01:40:36.000 He said he thought she was a robber, right?

01:40:38.000 Bizarre.

01:40:39.000 Completely bizarre.

01:40:40.000 But the fact that he was able to compete in the Olympics, right?

01:40:43.000 Not just in the Paralympics.

01:40:45.000 I think it's such a wonderful thing, you know?

01:40:46.000 And so I would hope that whatever organization we come up with, you know, allows for humans in all their variations to compete in the main league as well.

01:40:58.000 Right.

01:40:59.000 I disagree. 0.99

01:41:00.000 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. 0.97

01:41:10.000 There are people that want to win so bad, they would cut the bottom of their legs off to get bionic prosthesis. 0.98

01:41:16.000 They would.

01:41:17.000 Really?

01:41:17.000 For sure.

01:41:18.000 100%.

01:41:19.000 Would you?

01:41:20.000 No, I wouldn't, but I'm not crazy.

01:41:21.000 Look, this There's people that amputate their hands just because they are...

01:41:24.000 It's a little bit...

01:41:25.000 Do you know that people have that feeling that they're supposed to be disabled?

01:41:28.000 Yes.

01:41:28.000 So they amputate their hands?

01:41:30.000 Yes.

01:41:30.000 There's people with all sorts of psychological disorders, but the need to win is so insanely strong in some people.

01:41:36.000 And if they found out that, hey man, who gives a fuck about your feet and your calves, man? 0.97

01:41:40.000 They're going to look just like feet and calves, except they allow you to run 45 miles an hour. 0.86

01:41:44.000 You don't think people would do it?

01:41:46.000 Isn't that a little similar to the argument where people say, Oh, trans bathrooms, it's just so men are just going to lie about it so they can go in the bathroom and peep at women.

01:41:53.000 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 not a man, I'm a woman, they're going to start dressing differently, they're going to take hormones, they're going to live with the stigma, right?

01:42:06.000 They're going to, one of the most stigmatized type of people you can be in America today as a trans person.

01:42:10.000 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?

01:42:16.000 That doesn't make any sense.

01:42:18.000 Highly unlikely, and it doesn't make any sense.

01:42:19.000 But it also, that's not entirely what could happen.

01:42:23.000 What also could happen is you could get some creep who dresses up like a woman and goes to the women's bathroom. 1.00

01:42:29.000 You can get that.

01:42:30.000 I mean, I'm all for trans people.

01:42:32.000 Listen, but it can happen now. 0.99

01:42:33.000 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. 0.97

01:42:42.000 Of course people do that. 0.97

01:42:43.000 Of course there's...

01:42:44.000 And people have been arrested.

01:42:45.000 There's not a...

01:42:46.000 No, no, no, there is.

01:42:46.000 There's people who have been arrested, men who were sex offenders who dressed up as women and went into the women's room and harassed women.

01:42:53.000 There's already been arrests.

01:42:54.000 But it's not because...

01:42:56.000 But Lisa, these aren't trans people.

01:42:58.000 But here's the thing, they're not trans people. 0.78

01:42:59.000 People that are taking advantage of a loophole, and they're creeps.

01:43:03.000 And they probably wanted to go into the female bathroom anyway, but they just couldn't do it before. 1.00

01:43:08.000 And now that there's trans-inclusive bathrooms, some creeps have been arrested doing that. 0.94

01:43:13.000 They're not trans people. 0.99

01:43:15.000 The real problem is the creeps. 0.94

01:43:17.000 The real problem is not the trans people using the women's room. 1.00

01:43:19.000 They should, of course, be able to use the women's room. 1.00

01:43:21.000 Yeah, but the creeps can go, like, you don't need a law for it.

01:43:25.000 So, if they're not trans people, right, they are not supposed to be in the bathroom, right? 1.00

01:43:30.000 Right, they're pretending to be trans people, and this is what people are worried about. 0.84

01:43:34.000 They have arrested people doing that.

01:43:35.000 But so they could also do that even if it was not a gender-inclusive bathroom, right?

01:43:39.000 Because they would be breaking the rules of the bathroom in exactly the same way.

01:43:42.000 But everybody would know that they're a man in a dress versus them being trans. 0.99

01:43:48.000 See, if you see a trans person, oftentimes trans people look very masculine. 0.91

01:43:52.000 There's no need, if you're just going to pretend to be trans, there's no need to hide. 0.79

01:43:56.000 What we have to ask ourselves is if the...

01:44:01.000 Hypothetical, or if the extremely, extremely rare situation that you're discussing, right, is so horrifying to us and 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,

01:44:20.000 you know?

01:44:22.000 Extreme edge case or hypothetical case. 0.93

01:44:25.000 Are we really going to hurt all of these actual people who actually exist and say, I just need to goddamn go to the bathroom in a place that is safe for me. 0.59

01:44:42.000 And I don't think I don't think it is. 0.84

01:44:44.000 We can talk about that one edge case all day long.

01:44:49.000 I don't think it's just one.

01:44:50.000 There's been more than one case, but I think...

01:44:52.000 Here's the question.

01:44:53.000 What are there more of? 0.99

01:44:56.000 Are there more trans people or are there more sexual predators? 0.99

01:45:00.000 100% more trans people than sexual predators who are specifically going to put on a dress in order to go into a bathroom specifically. 1.00

01:45:10.000 Right. 0.95

01:45:10.000 Yeah, I would agree with that. 0.95

01:45:11.000 100% there's more trans people.

01:45:12.000 Yeah, I would agree with that.

01:45:13.000 Like by a factor of a million.

01:45:14.000 Well, I don't know about a factor of a million.

01:45:16.000 I mean, how many people are trans?

01:45:18.000 What's the numbers on that?

01:45:19.000 You know, I don't know, but I would consult my friend Bryn's book to find out, because I'm sure it's in there.

01:45:25.000 I guess she wrote a book that breaks down all these statistics.

01:45:28.000 This is such a minefield of a subject. 0.99

01:45:31.000 You know, as soon as you start bringing this shit up, people go crazy. 0.99

01:45:34.000 Because it's complicated, and people, they dig their heels in the ground on both sides. 0.99

01:45:39.000 I try to have a conversation that's based on what I try not to say more than I think I can say with surety.

01:45:55.000 But my basic principle is, man, I just want to defer to the humanity of the people that I'm talking about.

01:46:02.000 Yeah.

01:46:02.000 We're good to go.

01:46:24.000 You kill the perverts and you don't have any issues. 1.00

01:46:26.000 I think there's a way with sports again, right? 0.98

01:46:28.000 I genuinely think, hey, my default is I understand this problem.

01:46:32.000 I understand you're going to have female athletes who say, hey, wait a second, is this fair, right? 1.00

01:46:37.000 I think we can go forward with good faith and find a way.

01:46:40.000 Let's find a model that works for everybody.

01:46:42.000 I think we can do it in a way that respects the humanity of the trans athletes and the cis athletes.

01:46:47.000 I think that we can do that.

01:46:49.000 And that'll always be my...

01:46:51.000 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.

01:46:59.000 Because I think they have a distinct physiological advantage that's been expressed many times.

01:47:04.000 I mean, there's a lot of records have been broken by trans women who are now weightlifters. 0.97

01:47:09.000 And there's that one who's the fucking dirt biker who was a professional dirt bike, professional rider before as a man and then transitioned over to a woman. 0.98

01:47:19.000 It's just dominating these things. 0.99

01:47:21.000 It's just, I don't necessarily think it's fair.

01:47:24.000 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. 0.88

01:47:32.000 Especially in a short time period.

01:47:34.000 I just don't think they do.

01:47:35.000 And I don't think there's any evidence that shows they do.

01:47:37.000 There's a diminishing amount, but how much so?

01:47:40.000 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 male fighters transitioning to becoming female and competing as female, which has happened.

01:47:56.000 And they're saying that not only does the estrogen therapy, it actually preserves bone density.

01:48:02.000 It doesn't just turn them into a woman. 1.00

01:48:05.000 Mm-hmm.

01:48:21.000 Female hormones into a male's frame. 0.99

01:48:24.000 So they maintain this male bone density.

01:48:26.000 Now there's also arguments that African-American female bone density is in many cases similar to white European male bone density.

01:48:36.000 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.

01:48:43.000 Yeah, I mean, so that's where I get back to the idea that, look, could someone show that a trans athlete who wants to compete is going to have a physiological advantage because of their history of transition,

01:48:58.000 right?

01:48:59.000 Could that be the case sometimes?

01:49:01.000 Probably so.

01:49:02.000 How about this?

01:49:05.000 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.

01:49:10.000 So let's just grant that for the sake of this thought experiment.

01:49:15.000 So that being said, let's compare that against every single other advantage that every other competitor could have.

01:49:22.000 Socioeconomic advantage, right?

01:49:23.000 Country of origin.

01:49:25.000 Whether or not they live in Denver or if they live below sea level.

01:49:29.000 All those different things, right?

01:49:32.000 Is it humane to draw a line around that one unearned advantage against all those other unearned advantages?

01:49:39.000 At what point does our fantasy of having a true level playing field end up hurting people?

01:49:47.000 End up excluding people?

01:49:49.000 And that's the conversation that I think we could have.

01:49:52.000 I heard a really great...

01:49:55.000 This is just the beginning of a thought, right?

01:49:57.000 But it came up just somewhere.

01:50:00.000 I was talking to some people about this.

01:50:06.000 And in sports, one of the things...

01:50:10.000 Our assumption that men have an advantage over women in sports is partially based on the fact that so many of the sports were designed for male bodies.

01:50:26.000 They're optimized for male bodies. 0.99

01:50:29.000 Basketball, for example.

01:50:32.000 How is that optimized for male bodies? 0.73

01:50:34.000 It's like the height of the basket, you know?

01:50:39.000 The way that the ball moves around.

01:50:44.000 The way the ball moves around?

01:50:45.000 If we're going to say that men and women have physiological differences, right?

01:50:51.000 And then we're creating sports, and the sports are sort of tuned to the physiological differences of men rather than women.

01:50:56.000 I think we're splitting hairs here.

01:50:57.000 We're talking about power, speed...

01:51:00.000 Athleticism, all those, there's an advantage that males enjoy.

01:51:03.000 Okay, so when you look at, say, gymnastics, right?

01:51:05.000 Yes.

01:51:06.000 I would say that, like, women, for the events that are in a women's gymnastic competition, right, have an advantage over men, right?

01:51:15.000 They're lighter.

01:51:16.000 Women don't compete on the ring hold thing, you know what I mean, right? 1.00

01:51:20.000 Men don't compete at some of that crazy, you know, bar shit, you know what I mean? 1.00

01:51:25.000 Right. 1.00

01:51:26.000 It's larger.

01:51:27.000 Right.

01:51:27.000 It's height.

01:51:28.000 It's flexibility.

01:51:29.000 It's like there's a lot going on, right?

01:51:31.000 So that's a rare case where women's gymnastics, we've actually created events in that and like competitions that like only women can do, right? 1.00

01:51:39.000 And so we sort of optimize that sport more for a female body. 1.00

01:51:43.000 What if we did that with a lot more sports?

01:51:46.000 And how about this?

01:51:47.000 What if we were able to...

01:51:49.000 Because again, the rules of the game are not absolute.

01:51:53.000 The rules of the game are things that humans create.

01:51:55.000 And so why do we...

01:51:56.000 Maybe part of our assumption that men are better at sports than women, or men have an advantage in 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. 0.93

01:52:08.000 That sounds ridiculous.

01:52:09.000 First of all, The reason why women are good at gymnastics, first of all, their flexibility, their lightness, all those things. 0.94

01:52:19.000 Also, they're not competing against men in a one-on-one type of situation.

01:52:24.000 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.

01:52:31.000 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.

01:52:37.000 It's a physical event as opposed to a sport.

01:52:39.000 So a physical event is you have to do this thing.

01:52:41.000 It's very athletic.

01:52:42.000 It's an athletic endeavor.

01:52:43.000 You do it, you bounce, you land.

01:52:45.000 No one's trying to stop you from doing it.

01:52:46.000 When you're shooting basketballs, you're not just shooting basketballs.

01:52:50.000 You're trying to shoot a basketball while people are trying to defend.

01:52:54.000 You're trying to juke left and then go right.

01:52:57.000 You're trying to be sneaky. 0.95

01:52:59.000 You're trying to shoot from the outside. 1.00

01:53:00.000 There's all this shit going on and a lot of it involves your ability to move fast. 0.99

01:53:05.000 To close distance, to have the physical strength to leap up in the air. 0.99

01:53:09.000 There's a huge physical advantage that men enjoy.

01:53:12.000 And this is not because the sport's designed this way.

01:53:15.000 It's because the sport is very simple.

01:53:17.000 There's a basket on one side, a basket on the other side.

01:53:20.000 You gotta get it in here.

01:53:22.000 They gotta get it in there.

01:53:23.000 Ready?

01:53:23.000 Go.

01:53:24.000 If you're faster and you're stronger, you'll be able to accomplish that better.

01:53:28.000 Males are faster and stronger.

01:53:29.000 There's a reason why there's a male and a female division. 1.00

01:53:32.000 It's not that these sports were designed for males.

01:53:35.000 It's that men are physically bigger and stronger and faster.

01:53:40.000 Physiological advantages.

01:53:41.000 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 can do things with their body that men can't because of the shape, all the mass, all the different things. 1.00

01:53:52.000 But that's rare.

01:53:54.000 That's the outlier.

01:53:55.000 Yeah, I don't think we actually disagree that much.

01:53:57.000 The reason it's rare is because historically we've created most of our sports around things that men have the advantage in.

01:54:05.000 You're not wrong.

01:54:06.000 But sports are, most sports involve speed and power.

01:54:12.000 Most sports, men have an advantage in speed and power.

01:54:16.000 I know, but we created those sports, right?

01:54:18.000 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? 1.00

01:54:27.000 I mean, look, man, this is not, again...

01:54:31.000 Like I said, this is the beginning of a thought, right?

01:54:33.000 I'm trying to use this as a thought experiment as sort of like a possibility opening device, right?

01:54:38.000 But so, you postulate, hey, now, you make a fair point that there's a difference between individual athletic events like gymnastics and competitive one-on-one events like grappling or basketball or something like that, right?

01:54:50.000 And so, again, I'm thinking this through myself as I'm talking about it, right?

01:54:55.000 But...

01:54:57.000 Like, I don't think it's impossible that you could come up with a one-on-one competition that privileges, that is designed around the same athletic qualities that make a woman give her an advantage in a certain gymnastics event.

01:55:12.000 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?

01:55:18.000 There's also...

01:55:20.000 What could it be?

01:55:21.000 I mean, well, here's an example.

01:55:23.000 For instance, I believe, I'm not sure...

01:55:26.000 I'm not 100% sure, but I believe in shooting events, for example, that women and men are on a level playing field, correct?

01:55:33.000 Or that air rifle sort of thing.

01:55:38.000 There are events, right?

01:55:40.000 There do exist athletic events where you can have men and women in direct competition with each other, right?

01:55:46.000 Where that event is not designed around a particular facet of a...

01:55:53.000 You know, male or female body, right?

01:55:55.000 So, my point is, look, men have...

01:56:00.000 Do you agree that men have run the country and the world for, like, most of civilization?

01:56:05.000 Almost every country.

01:56:06.000 Okay, great.

01:56:07.000 So, men have been the ones setting up the sports. 0.70

01:56:09.000 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?

01:56:19.000 I think that might be because men have been setting up all the sports, right?

01:56:23.000 But there's a lot of sports that women gravitate towards. 1.00

01:56:27.000 How do you mean?

01:56:28.000 There's sports that women gravitate towards, that they really enjoy.

01:56:31.000 Like women's volleyball, it's huge, right?

01:56:33.000 There's many sports that women have traditionally gravitated towards. 0.99

01:56:38.000 Gymnastics, as you said earlier, is a perfect example.

01:56:40.000 There's probably way more women involved in gymnastics than men. 1.00

01:56:43.000 Oh, absolutely.

01:56:44.000 But those are the sports that get the less attention, right?

01:56:47.000 Gymnastics get huge amounts of attention.

01:56:49.000 It sure does.

01:56:49.000 It's one of the rare examples of ones where that is a real female-first sport, right?

01:56:55.000 You know what one bothers me the most is the volleyball.

01:56:57.000 Why is that?

01:56:58.000 Because the girls have to dress like hoes. 1.00

01:57:00.000 Even in the Olympics, they wear thongs.

01:57:02.000 Come back! 1.00

01:57:03.000 Can you imagine if fucking basketball players had a dress like that? 1.00

01:57:06.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:57:06.000 That's fucked up, man. 1.00

01:57:07.000 Well, I think they can choose what they're wearing. 1.00

01:57:09.000 Well, they can.

01:57:10.000 The Egyptian team, the Muslim Egyptian team, they dress in traditional garth. 1.00

01:57:15.000 What's the name of the volleyball player who has the black tape on?

01:57:18.000 Very famous.

01:57:19.000 You know, the two women from the U.S., they're very famous volleyball players whose names I can't remember. 0.90

01:57:24.000 They probably aren't complaining about what they're wearing.

01:57:25.000 They're probably choosing what they're wearing.

01:57:26.000 I don't know.

01:57:28.000 I don't think anyone's forced them to wear that stuff. 0.93

01:57:30.000 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. 1.00

01:57:35.000 They're not even at the beach. 0.98

01:57:36.000 It's a choice, apparently.

01:57:38.000 They want to wear it.

01:57:39.000 They want to wear it.

01:57:40.000 Good move.

01:57:41.000 Okay, but is that a choice for the men basketball players?

01:57:43.000 Can they wear thongs? 1.00

01:57:44.000 They can wear short shorts if they want to.

01:57:46.000 Can you imagine if they decided to wear a cutoff with a midriff showing and little booty shorts?

01:57:53.000 They might be allowed to if they wanted to. 0.99

01:57:54.000 Speaking of narrow masculinity, they might get shit in the locker room. 1.00

01:57:58.000 Maybe not. 0.99

01:57:59.000 Maybe they make a point.

01:58:00.000 I like the short shorts that they used to wear a couple decades ago.

01:58:04.000 Larry Bird style?

01:58:05.000 You know, one of the things I love about baseball, when I started watching baseball, is you get to choose your own baseball pants.

01:58:11.000 You ever notice that?

01:58:12.000 Do you?

01:58:13.000 When you look at them, some of them wear really tight baseball pants, and some of them wear really baggy baseball pants.

01:58:18.000 And I just love imagining, I like clothes, I imagine them going to the baseball tailor and being like, dude, I want to sag my pants, I want to, you know.

01:58:26.000 Right, show a little swag, but you don't want to impede your performance.

01:58:29.000 Do you think the tight would be better as you're running?

01:58:32.000 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 be?

01:58:42.000 For real.

01:58:43.000 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?

01:58:50.000 Maybe. 0.86

01:58:50.000 Maybe he just had big-ass thighs. 0.86

01:58:53.000 Maybe you have big ass thighs and they only feel good with baggy pants. 1.00

01:58:56.000 Let me just put a bow on what I was trying to get at earlier, right? 0.99

01:58:58.000 Because I know I was sort of like getting to a pretty spacey place.

01:59:02.000 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?

01:59:12.000 And we can question it.

01:59:13.000 And so when we say men have advantages in women over sports, I'm like, well, hold on a second.

01:59:18.000 Let's look at how we set the sports up.

01:59:19.000 And Is it possible that we could set it up in a different way that would allow more people to compete in sports?

01:59:26.000 It might not be the same sports.

01:59:27.000 I'm not going to say that women should play in the NFL against men.

01:59:31.000 I don't think that would be safe.

01:59:32.000 I don't think anyone should play in the NFL, frankly.

01:59:33.000 I think it's way too dangerous.

01:59:35.000 It's very bad for people.

01:59:38.000 Is it, like, is our assumption just based on, hey, these are the sports that we invented?

01:59:42.000 We happen to invent sports that where men have the advantage. 0.88

01:59:45.000 Can we imagine a world where 90% of sports are ones where women have an advantage or would we be having a different conversation? 0.73

01:59:51.000 And if that's the case, could we come up with some sports that, like, everybody could, you know, where there's no...

01:59:57.000 It would have to be non-physical sports, I think.

02:00:00.000 But I think, yeah, you could come up with competitions where women and female... 1.00

02:00:06.000 Traditional female characteristics would have an advantage. 1.00

02:00:08.000 For sure you could.

02:00:09.000 I mean, it could definitely be done.

02:00:11.000 You know, it's just the ones that exist now that involve running and lifting things and moving fast.

02:00:18.000 Physiologically, males have an advantage.

02:00:20.000 That's why we have these distinctions.

02:00:21.000 That's why we have men's divisions and women's divisions. 1.00

02:00:24.000 Over hundreds and hundreds of years, they go, you know what?

02:00:26.000 This is just not fair.

02:00:27.000 It's not fair.

02:00:33.000 That's the notion of fairness we have now.

02:00:35.000 I think the interesting thing about the question of trans athletes is it's going to challenge that notion.

02:00:40.000 It's going to lead to conversations like this one.

02:00:41.000 I think that's really cool, and that's what I think we should be down to have as a society.

02:00:46.000 Talking about things, especially when there's a disagreement, is the only way to solve them.

02:00:50.000 But, you know, I think these conversations oftentimes become these shouting matches, and, you know, everybody digs their heels in, 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...

02:01:17.000 Right.

02:01:18.000 Exactly.

02:01:24.000 It was, 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.

02:01:35.000 And it was just like, just the idea of questioning that really set them off, right?

02:01:39.000 But what I'm about is questioning all these things.

02:01:43.000 You know, this conversation that we had, this disagreement, to the extent that we were disagreeing, I think is a really good one to have, you know?

02:01:49.000 And I'm always...

02:01:51.000 I'm testing what I think I know and trying to sort of undermine it and say, do I know this for sure?

02:01:56.000 I mean, dude, on our show, we have done more than one segment.

02:01:59.000 We have another one coming out later this year where we go back and we correct our own mistakes.

02:02:03.000 We correct the things that we've done wrong on our show.

02:02:05.000 What was a big one?

02:02:07.000 Let's see.

02:02:07.000 A really big one that we have coming out.

02:02:12.000 I'll give you a preview.

02:02:14.000 We did one about...

02:02:19.000 We did a topic about sugar and fat, about how Americans were obsessed with cutting fat, the low-fat craze.

02:02:28.000 And a lot of that was...

02:02:33.000 There was early research by this one researcher who showed that sugar caused a lot of heart disease and obesity and stuff like that.

02:02:42.000 And basically, the sugar lobby shut him down and were sort of funding research that really showed that that was the problem.

02:02:52.000 And that research sort of took over and that really led to the sort of anti-fat craze, right?

02:02:57.000 Right.

02:02:57.000 Yeah, I think.

02:03:13.000 Right.

02:03:14.000 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.

02:03:26.000 Does that make sense?

02:03:27.000 And so 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 sort of misled us down that path.

02:03:38.000 A little too simplistic.

02:03:40.000 It's more complicated than that.

02:03:41.000 Exactly.

02:03:41.000 And that's what happens when you're doing a show that has, you know, six minute segments, right?

02:03:45.000 Yeah, that's what I was getting at.

02:03:46.000 It's like when we were talking about earlier, like the time constraints on some subjects, like think about how much time we spent just talking about trans people and trans athletes.

02:03:55.000 Yeah, a good hour at least.

02:03:56.000 Two cis males, you know, talking about something you have no personal experience in.

02:04:01.000 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.

02:04:07.000 Well, it's not just that.

02:04:08.000 That's why I'm looking to go longer in my career.

02:04:11.000 I'm looking to find ways to go longer.

02:04:12.000 Well, why can't you do it online?

02:04:14.000 Say it's that NCAA thing.

02:04:16.000 Doesn't pay as well.

02:04:17.000 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 your own version of it?

02:04:27.000 Yeah, totally.

02:04:28.000 I mean, I'd have to find a way to fund it, you know, like...

02:04:30.000 You just call it, definitely not Adam Ruins Everything.

02:04:32.000 Yeah, I totally could do that.

02:04:33.000 Totally different show.

02:04:34.000 I mean, so far, I've talked about it here, right?

02:04:36.000 Yeah.

02:04:37.000 And I do want to say, by the way, we talk about the thing that...

02:04:41.000 We have a very cool network.

02:04:43.000 That was the one time they ever killed a topic.

02:04:45.000 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.

02:04:51.000 And we talked about how...

02:04:53.000 You know, we're on advertising-supported TV. Right.

02:04:55.000 And occasionally, we...

02:05:09.000 Could you say sugary sports drinks?

02:05:13.000 We said, okay, all of the sports drinks overemphasize hydration as a problem.

02:05:19.000 And so we did a whole segment examining how much does advertising affect the show, right?

02:05:26.000 And as a result of the NCAA, we had to kill that segment.

02:05:29.000 And the network let us say that on TV. So that was really cool that they allowed us to bring up that conflict on the show.

02:05:35.000 But yeah, no, there's nothing stopping me from going on the internet.

02:05:38.000 It just so happens that I'm a comic and I had the wonderful opportunity.

02:05:44.000 I've always wanted to have my own TV show and I had the wonderful opportunity to create one.

02:05:47.000 If I hadn't had that chance four or five years ago, I would probably be on YouTube right now doing hour-long explainer videos with me doing jokes straight to camera.

02:05:57.000 And I love folks who do that.

02:06:00.000 And maybe I'll find myself doing that again someday.

02:06:03.000 But right now I'm just too busy making...

02:06:05.000 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.

02:06:11.000 I can only imagine.

02:06:12.000 You did start out doing that, right?

02:06:14.000 You started out on YouTube?

02:06:15.000 Yeah, on College Humor.

02:06:17.000 I was a writer there and I developed Adam Ruins Everything while I was there and then we sold it to TruTV.

02:06:22.000 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 to do what I do in a stand-up context, right?

02:06:34.000 And so I took that all across the country.

02:06:37.000 I'm hoping to set up some more dates soon.

02:06:39.000 It's this really cool show about how these biological parasites that control their host minds, like this fungus that takes control of an ant, and like...

02:06:49.000 A lot of weird things.

02:06:51.000 It's like literally their minds become controlled by this parasite that infects them.

02:06:54.000 And 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.

02:07:04.000 I quit drinking recently.

02:07:06.000 How long ago?

02:07:07.000 About a year ago.

02:07:08.000 Did you miss it?

02:07:09.000 No, not at all.

02:07:10.000 Not at all?

02:07:11.000 Not at all, man.

02:07:12.000 I'm really sorry.

02:07:13.000 I know you'd love to get me in a Musk moment.

02:07:17.000 I know it would make a lot less news.

02:07:19.000 You look very happy not drinking.

02:07:21.000 I lost a ton of weight right away.

02:07:23.000 Did you?

02:07:24.000 Alcohol is bad for you.

02:07:26.000 But yeah, so that show is me going longer, right?

02:07:30.000 That's cool.

02:07:31.000 So it's a theme, essentially.

02:07:32.000 It's a theme, yeah.

02:07:33.000 It's got a title, it's got sections, and I'm up there.

02:07:36.000 Did you write it out as a theme initially?

02:07:38.000 Yeah.

02:07:38.000 Did you have a framework for it to do as a live show?

02:07:41.000 Yeah, I did.

02:07:41.000 I did.

02:07:42.000 And that was so hard to write because as a comic, you're used to going up and just like, well, I'm just going to riff on a new idea.

02:07:48.000 Oh, that's a chunk.

02:07:49.000 And then I'll combine it with that other chunk.

02:07:50.000 And then that's my special, right?

02:07:51.000 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 some information and put it in a framework.

02:07:59.000 So I was like, all right, mind parasites. 0.81

02:08:00.000 I'll talk about these biological parasites. 0.97

02:08:02.000 I also want to talk about advertising. 0.95

02:08:03.000 Time to write some jokes.

02:08:05.000 And that was hard as hell.

02:08:06.000 It felt like doing it backwards.

02:08:08.000 Ah.

02:08:08.000 But I worked it out a lot on stage and eventually found it, and the show's really clicking now.

02:08:14.000 I'm really happy about it.

02:08:15.000 Ari Shafir and I were just talking about that, because Ari Shafir is doing that with his most recent hour.

02:08:19.000 His most recent hour is entirely about his history in Orthodox Judaism.

02:08:26.000 He was a serious Orthodox Jew, spent a lot of time in Israel, living in one of those... 0.93

02:08:35.000 Religious commune-type deals.

02:08:37.000 What do they call those?

02:08:37.000 Yeshivas?

02:08:38.000 Oh, yeah.

02:08:39.000 Is that what they call it?

02:08:39.000 Yeah, I think that's what it's called.

02:08:42.000 I mean, he studied the Talmud and the Torah.

02:08:45.000 He studied it all day long.

02:08:46.000 I didn't know that.

02:08:47.000 Yeah, I mean, he's 12 hours a day.

02:08:49.000 Wow.

02:08:49.000 And then said, this is nonsense.

02:08:51.000 What the fuck am I doing? 1.00

02:08:52.000 And then became Ari. 0.99

02:08:54.000 And so his most recent special that he's in the middle of creating right now is called Jew. 0.55

02:08:59.000 And it's the first time that he's ever done...

02:09:03.000 Yeah.

02:09:07.000 Yeah.

02:09:12.000 Yeah.

02:09:21.000 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.

02:09:27.000 You're like, alright, that joke was pretty good, but I could juice it more, but I need to get to the next point.

02:09:32.000 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... 0.92

02:09:40.000 I'm not going to say I'm the funniest motherfucker ever, but it's got the punchlines I want it to have. 0.79

02:09:44.000 That's awesome. 0.93

02:09:46.000 It's cool to think about it that way, too, as a framework and then start from there.

02:09:49.000 I know Chris Titus does it that way, too.

02:09:51.000 A lot of guys do it that way.

02:09:53.000 They'll try to make a framework and then have all their ideas fit inside of that framework.

02:09:58.000 Yeah. 0.96

02:09:59.000 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?

02:10:11.000 Like, okay, Greg, I'm forcing an audience to make a noise all at once, you know what I mean?

02:10:15.000 But I can't make them remember me.

02:10:16.000 Right?

02:10:17.000 And so when I started talking about the stuff that I've learned, you know, I'm just an information sponge. 0.99

02:10:21.000 I just pick up shit like this, you know? 0.90

02:10:23.000 And I started talking about, you know, oh, do you know that the diamond engagement ring was a scam on the part of the De Beers Corporation in the 30s and everyone just forgot and now we think it's tradition, right? 0.99

02:10:30.000 That was the first bit I ever did that with.

02:10:32.000 That was my most sort of famous signature bit.

02:10:34.000 People start paying more attention, you know?

02:10:36.000 And like, oh my god, I didn't realize that, you know?

02:10:39.000 And now I'm in this weird niche.

02:10:40.000 No one else does what I do.

02:10:42.000 I do like educational investigative comedy, right? 0.98

02:10:45.000 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? 0.97

02:10:52.000 And no one else is doing it. 0.97

02:10:54.000 And so the cool thing about it is when I go up there...

02:10:57.000 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.

02:11:02.000 Every other comic, I'm like, every other comic's trying to win the 100 meter dash and maybe Usain Bolt's in the race with them, right?

02:11:07.000 That's Bill Burr or whoever, you know what I mean? 0.97

02:11:09.000 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? 0.97

02:11:13.000 I'm running a race, I'm the only person doing this. 0.98

02:11:15.000 You know, like, 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, for sure.

02:11:23.000 For sure, right?

02:11:25.000 But at my show, you're going to learn about some weird bugs and you're going to think differently about social media.

02:11:31.000 You know, you're gonna come away with a new idea.

02:11:33.000 And so that's what I have to offer.

02:11:35.000 Yeah, I've engineered it that way.

02:11:37.000 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?

02:11:42.000 I'm like, dude, just figure out what you can give people that other people aren't giving them, you know?

02:11:47.000 And like, it's possible to write in a different way, you know?

02:11:50.000 I miss doing straight stand-up. 1.00

02:11:52.000 I have my straight stand-up hour where I just go and I tell you my stupid observations about shit. 0.99

02:11:57.000 And I love doing that material, but that material is not going to get me a Netflix special because it's not different enough. 0.99

02:12:05.000 I see what you're saying.

02:12:06.000 So you have a strategy.

02:12:08.000 For a little bit, yeah.

02:12:09.000 That's also what I want to talk about.

02:12:11.000 It's not just cynical, but yeah.

02:12:12.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:12:13.000 It's not like you're being disingenuous.

02:12:15.000 This is who you are.

02:12:16.000 Yeah.

02:12:16.000 Yeah, it's cool that you found a niche like that.

02:12:18.000 You found this little groove that you could cut into.

02:12:21.000 I'm just working on it.

02:12:21.000 I have a few bits that I do that are scientific reality that people don't believe in or that people wouldn't imagine until you hear about it, particularly biological stuff.

02:12:31.000 But Mind Parasites is one we've brought up in this podcast a fucking thousand times.

02:12:36.000 Yeah. 0.87

02:12:36.000 We had Sapolsky on, Robert Sapolsky from Stanford, who's the top researcher, and one of the top researchers is toxoplasma. 0.87

02:12:44.000 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:12:45.000 I talk about that a little bit in my show, yeah.

02:12:46.000 Listen to his lectures on it.

02:12:48.000 It's crazy.

02:12:48.000 No, that stuff is nuts.

02:12:50.000 Crazy.

02:12:50.000 The toxoplasmosis is wild.

02:12:52.000 50 million Americans have it.

02:12:53.000 Yeah.

02:12:54.000 Probably me.

02:12:54.000 Yeah.

02:12:55.000 I think I have it. 1.00

02:12:56.000 In your brain, the cat parasite.

02:12:58.000 And my understanding, I want to check out this guy's research.

02:13:01.000 The research that I saw was not quite definitive enough to be able to say, this affects your behavior.

02:13:06.000 It's like they think maybe, probably, so I was like, that's not enough for me, for my show.

02:13:13.000 But what I talk about is the way that the social media algorithm...

02:13:18.000 Is designed, it's just like evolution, right?

02:13:21.000 It's just testing on you.

02:13:22.000 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?

02:13:30.000 Are you interested?

02:13:31.000 Are you upset?

02:13:32.000 Are you going to engage?

02:13:33.000 Exactly.

02:13:33.000 And the best way to get you engaged is to piss you off.

02:13:35.000 Exactly.

02:13:36.000 And if I can get you to click, all they do is they just reproduce that same stimuli with little changes, just like evolution. 0.98

02:13:41.000 And by doing that, they're able to control our behavior in a real fucking way.

02:13:44.000 And people know this, you know, but it really is happening Do you listen to Sam Harris' podcast? 0.98

02:14:02.000 And the guy's name is Roger McNamee.

02:14:08.000 McNamee.

02:14:09.000 But it's episode 152. 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.

02:14:19.000 The best way to collect your data is to get you to engage.

02:14:21.000 The best way to get you to engage is to put things in your news feed that are going to piss you off.

02:14:25.000 Yeah.

02:14:25.000 And it's like this division that's rising in this country coincides with social media and it's not coincidentally.

02:14:34.000 And here's the thing.

02:14:35.000 They don't even... 0.98

02:14:37.000 The really fucked up part is the people who created these algorithms... 0.98

02:14:41.000 That is not their intent. 0.98

02:14:42.000 They're not trying to piss you off and they're not trying to create division.

02:14:46.000 All they're doing is they're like, look, we just want people to spend as much time on the site as possible.

02:14:49.000 Algorithm, watch what they're doing and give them more like that. 0.83

02:14:52.000 And then so it's happening accidentally.

02:14:54.000 And so then when we're all looking at Facebook going like, look what Facebook's doing.

02:14:58.000 They're like, what are you talking about?

02:14:59.000 It's just about, we don't need to change anything.

02:15:01.000 We just have an algorithm that rewards engagement.

02:15:05.000 Yeah.

02:15:06.000 I know that you had Jack Dorsey on.

02:15:09.000 I did not hear that interview.

02:15:10.000 I just know you had him on.

02:15:11.000 I had him on a couple times.

02:15:12.000 I know that people are pissed off at – and my own personal piss off with them is that they don't take enough ownership of it.

02:15:22.000 And that's not just – I don't want to just focus on Dorsey.

02:15:24.000 Zuckerberg is the worst with it.

02:15:27.000 That they...

02:15:28.000 These algorithms are causing these behaviors and then they're saying, oh, that's not...

02:15:32.000 No, we're not doing that.

02:15:34.000 We've just like...

02:15:34.000 We're just trying to get people to be on the site more.

02:15:37.000 Like, it's not that bad.

02:15:38.000 We're trying to connect people, you know?

02:15:39.000 And so they don't change it.

02:15:40.000 But what if they had no algorithm?

02:15:42.000 What if they just allowed it to exist as just a virtual message board with no moderators?

02:15:48.000 Twitter...

02:15:49.000 Well, that's a problem itself, right?

02:15:51.000 Because that's like...

02:15:51.000 Okay, a virtual message board with no moderators is like...

02:15:56.000 Let's just talk about fighting, for instance.

02:15:58.000 When you've got a UFC fight, you've got a referee, you've got a situation you've created, you've got a ring, you've set things up so people are going to get hurt, but not more than you want them to.

02:16:11.000 No moderators, that's like, hey, let's have a street fight with nobody watching.

02:16:15.000 Right?

02:16:16.000 There's no rules.

02:16:17.000 There's an unlimited number of people in there.

02:16:19.000 It's just people wailing on each other.

02:16:20.000 Well, people are going to get hurt, you know?

02:16:21.000 So, like, I think when you are 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?

02:16:32.000 Because you're the one who set up the ground rules.

02:16:35.000 You know what I mean?

02:16:35.000 They were trying to do that with YouTube for a while.

02:16:37.000 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.

02:16:44.000 That you were supposed to clean up your comments. 0.99

02:16:47.000 And then people went, what the fuck are you talking about? 0.98

02:16:49.000 And YouTube was like, ah, forget it. 0.99

02:16:50.000 Yeah, so I think that should be on YouTube, right?

02:16:53.000 That's YouTube.

02:16:54.000 YouTube is the one that allowed that to happen in the comments.

02:16:56.000 YouTube is the one saying that we're not going to moderate anything.

02:16:58.000 How could they?

02:16:59.000 How can they?

02:17:00.000 I mean, you literally need physical moderators.

02:17:04.000 Yeah, I know.

02:17:05.000 That's the contradiction that they're faced with.

02:17:07.000 There's so many people.

02:17:09.000 And this is the issue with Facebook.

02:17:11.000 This is the issue with Twitter.

02:17:13.000 The real question is, like, who gets to decide what is offensive and what is not?

02:17:18.000 I'm sure you're aware of the learn to code fiasco.

02:17:22.000 Oh, I kind of heard about this.

02:17:25.000 People are getting banned for saying learn to code.

02:17:27.000 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.

02:17:36.000 I tuned this out.

02:17:37.000 You should learn to code.

02:17:38.000 And so people started mocking people by saying learn to code.

02:17:42.000 And then learn to code, apparently according to Jack Dorsey and Vidja, it got connected to anti-Semitic remarks and hate remarks.

02:17:51.000 I try to tune out this level of internet nonsense.

02:17:55.000 But it's fascinating because that doesn't mean anything.

02:17:57.000 Learn to code is not offensive.

02:17:58.000 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. 0.96

02:18:04.000 That is ridiculous. 0.98

02:18:05.000 But I mean, the fact that you get banned for life from saying that, that's actually even more ridiculous. 0.99

02:18:10.000 Yeah.

02:18:10.000 Yeah, but then there are cases where people go and they try to create, like, a...

02:18:15.000 If someone who...

02:18:17.000 Look, there are anti-Semites out there, right?

02:18:19.000 They do try to come up with, like, ways to indicate anti-Semitism to each other that other people won't detect.

02:18:25.000 You know what I mean?

02:18:26.000 Via, you know, slang, basically.

02:18:28.000 Inner slang, right?

02:18:30.000 And at some point, someone needs to be able to say, okay, wait, hold on a second.

02:18:33.000 We figured out this is anti-Semitic slang, so we're not going to allow you to say it.

02:18:37.000 You know what I mean? 0.99

02:18:37.000 It's like shit like 88 or what? 0.99

02:18:38.000 Isn't that a thing where it's like... 0.99

02:18:40.000 Yeah, HH. This is the problem, right?

02:18:43.000 This is the exact problem that you're talking about.

02:18:46.000 But the contradiction that all of these platforms have is the early days of the internet.

02:18:52.000 Remember the early days?

02:18:54.000 It was like people were really concerned that People would start suing websites because of what was on the website.

02:19:01.000 Like the Pirate Bay, the big torrent site.

02:19:05.000 You're going to get sued because you've got DVD screeners on there.

02:19:07.000 No, hold on a second. 0.99

02:19:07.000 This is just where people can upload the shit. 0.99

02:19:10.000 Google getting sued because they would direct someone to the DVD screeners. 0.99

02:19:14.000 They searched for leaked DVD screener.

02:19:16.000 You know what I mean?

02:19:17.000 And so that was a big concern in the early days of the internet.

02:19:19.000 And so we established this precedent that like, no, no, no.

02:19:22.000 These sites don't have a responsibility for that.

02:19:24.000 They're just how people are connecting to things. 0.97

02:19:26.000 They're not the people doing the bad shit. 0.99

02:19:28.000 You go after the people doing the bad shit, not the people who made it possible to find the bad shit. 0.99

02:19:33.000 Now, though, we're in such a place where – so all these businesses built themselves on the idea of YouTube. 0.99

02:19:39.000 We don't make anything at YouTube.

02:19:41.000 We just give you a place to upload your videos.

02:19:44.000 So at first, that's fine.

02:19:45.000 All right, just take down the anti-Semitic white supremacy videos or whatever.

02:19:49.000 But now there's so, so many of them.

02:19:51.000 Right?

02:19:51.000 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.

02:19:59.000 Right?

02:20:00.000 And at the same time, like, you know, these videos exist, right?

02:20:05.000 And at the same time, they're still trying to say, well, we have no responsibility for that happening.

02:20:08.000 It's like, Hold on a second.

02:20:09.000 You guys built a system where any kind of content is allowed, and 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.

02:20:19.000 I think you guys have a little bit of responsibility.

02:20:21.000 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.

02:20:31.000 They're trying to say, we have no responsibility for what's on the platform, but also we've allowed...

02:20:37.000 This kind of content to go up, you know?

02:20:39.000 I don't know if YouTube profits on anti-Semitic videos.

02:20:44.000 I don't know if that's true.

02:20:45.000 They have in the past.

02:20:45.000 I talk about it in my show.

02:20:47.000 They have a demonetizing aspect of YouTube that affects people whenever anything's even remotely controversial.

02:20:55.000 They've started doing that up until, like there was a case I talk about in my show, like a year or two ago, where they were running Under Armour ads on white supremacy YouTube videos.

02:21:07.000 You know what I mean?

02:21:08.000 So their algorithm was causing this to happen?

02:21:10.000 Their algorithm was causing that to happen, right?

02:21:12.000 And these were videos getting 100,000 hits, and it was like major brands, and those brands found out.

02:21:17.000 What was the title of these videos?

02:21:18.000 Did they say obvious anti-Semitic things in the title?

02:21:22.000 These were obvious enough that anybody would be pissed off about them, yeah.

02:21:25.000 Wow.

02:21:26.000 And so that's where the demonetization thing came from, right? 0.99

02:21:29.000 Because they're like, oh shit, now the people who actually pay us, the advertisers, are pissed off, right? 0.87

02:21:35.000 So okay, let's put a band-aid on the problem and let's demonetize videos, right? 0.98

02:21:38.000 Here's the problem.

02:21:39.000 Now they're just doing that algorithmically, right?

02:21:41.000 They're choosing which videos to demonetize algorithmically.

02:21:44.000 So sometimes they demonetize stuff that they shouldn't.

02:21:46.000 That's definitely happened a ton. 0.99

02:21:47.000 And a lot of shit is still getting through the cracks, you know? 0.99

02:21:51.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:21:51.000 And again, they're saying, okay, we did what we had to. 1.00

02:21:54.000 No, you guys didn't solve the fucking problem. 0.99

02:21:55.000 Because now people are pissed off again, right? 0.99

02:21:58.000 So that is the bind that these companies are in.

02:22:00.000 They're based on this premise of we don't moderate anything. 0.99

02:22:04.000 But when you do that, a lot of shit comes in. 0.99

02:22:06.000 And now you're in the position where, sorry, it's still your house. 1.00

02:22:09.000 The shit's happening in your house. 1.00

02:22:10.000 You threw the house party, dude. 1.00

02:22:12.000 Like the vase got broken.

02:22:13.000 It's your fault at the end of the day.

02:22:15.000 You have to take some responsibility for it.

02:22:16.000 And they're like, well, how am I supposed to police 200 kids?

02:22:18.000 I don't know.

02:22:19.000 You're the one who threw the party.

02:22:20.000 Yeah, that's a good analogy because it's the scale that's the problem.

02:22:24.000 It's probably more like 200,000 kids in a house.

02:22:26.000 Totally.

02:22:27.000 Because it's unmanageable.

02:22:29.000 Yeah.

02:22:29.000 When you think about how many different people are on YouTube and how many different countries are uploading videos, and some of them are ISIS beheading videos.

02:22:36.000 Yeah.

02:22:37.000 There's a bunch of cartel videos that people have sent me to on YouTube, and they stay up for a little while.

02:22:42.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:22:43.000 You get to watch some horrible shit for a little while before they catch on. 0.99

02:22:46.000 Or, like, I talk about these videos in my show where, like, 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? 0.99

02:22:57.000 And, like, Spider-Man Elsa videos, or, like...

02:23:00.000 Those are so strange, though.

02:23:01.000 There's so many...

02:23:02.000 If you look at kids' YouTube, it's still so full of it.

02:23:04.000 They've tried to stamp it out.

02:23:05.000 There's still tons of it.

02:23:06.000 And these videos...

02:23:07.000 Literally, I show a video which is just total nonsense.

02:23:10.000 It looks like it was made by a computer. 0.99

02:23:11.000 It's just weird garbage. 0.98

02:23:12.000 It doesn't look wrong until you actually watch it closely and then you're like, this video is saying weird nonsense. 0.98

02:23:16.000 The video has 600 million views.

02:23:19.000 Right? 0.99

02:23:20.000 And it's just garbage, right? 0.92

02:23:22.000 And I have literally spent my whole life trying to make good internet content. 0.57

02:23:26.000 Make content that's 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?

02:23:34.000 And the algorithm is directing people towards nonsense.

02:23:37.000 So people are watching this because it has Elsa or Spider-Man, or they're watching this...

02:23:41.000 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 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.

02:23:56.000 You've seen the ones where they break down those videos, where it's weird, like there's always a baby, an alcohol...

02:24:01.000 And someone always gets hurt from a broken bottle.

02:24:04.000 Over and over and over again, these things happen.

02:24:06.000 They do that because it's sort of like the people who make those videos have found how to hack the algorithm.

02:24:11.000 Because algorithms are not that smart.

02:24:13.000 They're not brilliant things.

02:24:14.000 They're just like a little bit of code.

02:24:16.000 It's just like in a video game.

02:24:18.000 When you're playing a video game and you figure out, you're like, oh, the video game thinks that when X happens, I'm trying to do Y. But now that I've figured that out, I can exploit that.

02:24:26.000 Right?

02:24:27.000 I can figure out how to freeze that guy in place.

02:24:28.000 Or just like when you were a kid and you could figure out how to scroll the enemies off the screen in NES games.

02:24:32.000 Go left and then right.

02:24:33.000 Oh, they disappear.

02:24:34.000 You know?

02:24:34.000 You figure out how to hack the algorithm.

02:24:36.000 That's what the people who make these videos have done with the algorithm as well.

02:24:40.000 They figure out the little hole in the way that it works.

02:24:42.000 And they figure out, oh, if we just do this, the video will get shown again and again and again.

02:24:46.000 And here's the thing.

02:24:47.000 70% of all videos watched on YouTube are being served by the algorithm.

02:24:51.000 70%.

02:24:51.000 And people are watching a billion hours of YouTube a day.

02:24:53.000 So people are not choosing what we're watching.

02:24:56.000 The algorithm's choosing.

02:24:58.000 And the videos the algorithm is showing us are the ones that people are hacking. 0.99

02:25:02.000 Like these weird, fucked up videos. 0.97

02:25:04.000 To tap into this algorithm. 0.95

02:25:06.000 Yeah, that is really interesting, and it's also interesting these companies have figured this thing out.

02:25:10.000 Like, I don't know if you ever get, you see, like, whenever I post something, 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, are you just going to pretend I don't have a giant booty?

02:25:25.000 Mm-hmm.

02:25:25.000 And you're like, what is this?

02:25:27.000 And you go to it and it's some weird, sneaky, sort of computer-generated thing where it'll say it 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. 0.97

02:25:41.000 And then somehow or another they're trying to get you.

02:25:44.000 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.

02:25:54.000 And then that's how they tap into it.

02:25:56.000 And that's my point of how this works, right?

02:25:58.000 So Instagram set up a comment system. 0.98

02:26:00.000 These people have figured out how to hack the comment system to get their bullshit spam on the top. 0.99

02:26:04.000 Within seconds, I mean, so fast, they couldn't possibly have written it. 0.99

02:26:08.000 Like, it has to be a program.

02:26:09.000 And that's Instagram's fault for allowing that to happen.

02:26:13.000 At the end of the day, you know what I mean?

02:26:14.000 Like, that's Instagram's problem to solve, you know?

02:26:16.000 And that's the problem all these platforms have.

02:26:18.000 That's the problem YouTube has.

02:26:19.000 That's the problem Twitter has.

02:26:20.000 And so whenever they say, oh, no, it's just a couple bad apples, it's like, you guys threw the party.

02:26:24.000 You guys figure out how to fix it, right? 0.99

02:26:26.000 You got a shitty orchard, son. 0.99

02:26:27.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:26:28.000 Yeah, exactly.

02:26:29.000 Just a couple of bad apples.

02:26:30.000 I mean, YouTube's amazing in that you really can be entertained with things.

02:26:35.000 For someone who's into obscure things in particular, it's one of the best resources ever.

02:26:40.000 I made my career off of YouTube.

02:26:42.000 Yeah.

02:26:43.000 But it's also like if you want to watch old things, you want to watch interesting things, you can find almost everything.

02:26:50.000 On YouTube, including things that are not true.

02:26:52.000 This is like where they're cracking down on certain things like flat earth videos.

02:26:56.000 It's the Library of Alexandria, man.

02:26:58.000 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 could go back, you could watch, like, the first episode of Johnny Carson or whatever.

02:27:10.000 You know what I mean?

02:27:10.000 I was like, oh, that's so cool, right?

02:27:12.000 Now you don't need to go to that library.

02:27:13.000 You can just, it's literally on YouTube.

02:27:15.000 The first episode of Johnny Carson ever is on YouTube.

02:27:17.000 Who was the guest?

02:27:18.000 I don't remember.

02:27:19.000 I don't think I'm exaggerating.

02:27:20.000 I have seen it on the web.

02:27:21.000 I saw his very first appearance.

02:27:23.000 I'm sure it's up there.

02:27:24.000 Or at least the early ones, because maybe the early ones weren't taped, but it was super, super early.

02:27:28.000 He's got black hair.

02:27:29.000 Wow.

02:27:30.000 And so every episode of The Daily Show ever is on the internet.

02:27:35.000 And so – and, you know, say you like – you know, name – sometimes I just go watch – you know, name an old jazz musician you can go watch him play live.

02:27:44.000 You know what I mean?

02:27:44.000 You can watch The Lonious Monk, close-ups of his hands.

02:27:46.000 You know what I mean?

02:27:47.000 That's incredible.

02:27:49.000 That's incredible.

02:27:50.000 And so, like – and I still hope in my heart of hearts that, like, that is – At the end of the day, YouTube is serving a good purpose because we still have access to all that information.

02:28:00.000 My videos do pretty well on YouTube.

02:28:02.000 My videos aren't white supremacist Spider-Man nonsense.

02:28:06.000 They're good.

02:28:07.000 So hopefully they're doing some good in the world.

02:28:10.000 So I hope in my heart of hearts that this is still a positive force for humanity.

02:28:14.000 I think it's a positive force. 0.99

02:28:15.000 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. 0.99

02:28:23.000 That's the problem. 0.98

02:28:24.000 It's not...

02:28:26.000 Right. 0.99

02:28:41.000 But if you're the company that's allowing that bullshit to happen and you make money off of it, right? 0.99

02:28:45.000 Yeah, it's an issue. 0.98

02:28:46.000 It's an issue, but part of it is really interesting to me.

02:28:51.000 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 and there's no one who was there while the guy was making the YouTube video to go, Stop! 0.75

02:29:02.000 That's not true. 0.95

02:29:03.000 I'll show you how.

02:29:04.000 This is how you do it.

02:29:05.000 There you go.

02:29:05.000 There's the data.

02:29:06.000 Okay, next.

02:29:07.000 Keep going.

02:29:07.000 Stop.

02:29:08.000 That's not true either. 1.00

02:29:08.000 You don't know what the fuck you're talking about. 1.00

02:29:10.000 Of course it works like that. 1.00

02:29:11.000 This is why it works like that.

02:29:12.000 And this is what it means.

02:29:13.000 Did you see our video on the moon landing?

02:29:15.000 No.

02:29:15.000 Oh, this is one of my favorite videos we ever did.

02:29:17.000 So, you know, it's about how the moon land...

02:29:20.000 The thesis is the moon landing could not have been faked.

02:29:22.000 It would have been harder to fake the moon landing than it would have been to actually go to the moon.

02:29:28.000 Because the technology to fake it did not exist.

02:29:31.000 Like when we talked to a forensic film guy... 0.97

02:29:35.000 He's got a fucking Oscar for analyzing old films. 0.98

02:29:41.000 And he walked us through it. 0.99

02:29:42.000 He's like, look, the shadows are parallel.

02:29:45.000 They're not diverging.

02:29:47.000 A close light source, the shadows would diverge.

02:29:51.000 Wait a minute.

02:29:52.000 You know that that's one of the big arguments for the moon hoax?

02:29:55.000 Is that the shadows intersect?

02:29:57.000 The shadows indicate multiple light sources?

02:29:59.000 Well, that is because when...

02:30:03.000 That's one of the main arguments.

02:30:04.000 That is a...

02:30:06.000 I believe that's reflected light.

02:30:07.000 Okay, I'm getting past my memory of this segment.

02:30:09.000 Dude, I used to be a full-on moon hoaxer.

02:30:12.000 I fully believed we never went to the moon.

02:30:14.000 I shouldn't have brought this up.

02:30:15.000 I watched the documentary that was on Fox TV while I was on news radio.

02:30:19.000 It was like 1995 or something like that. 0.99

02:30:20.000 I was fucking convinced. 0.96

02:30:22.000 Can I just say news radio is one of my favorite sitcoms ever, by the way. 0.94

02:30:25.000 Thank you very much.

02:30:27.000 Unacknowledged classic.

02:30:28.000 I have watched the whole series like three times.

02:30:31.000 That show is so—I'm sorry, just go ahead.

02:30:33.000 I just had to say that much.

02:30:34.000 Well, anyway, back then, Fox News actually aired a full one-hour show called Conspiracy Theory, Did We Land on the Moon?

02:30:43.000 And it had me fully convinced— Yeah.

02:30:46.000 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. 0.97

02:30:54.000 Like, how is this possible? 0.99

02:30:56.000 They're supposed to be like nowhere near each other, but they have the same background.

02:30:59.000 And that is, 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.

02:31:08.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:31:09.000 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. 1.00

02:31:18.000 I was all in, dude. 1.00

02:31:20.000 All in.

02:31:21.000 And now you're all out? 0.99

02:31:22.000 No, I realize I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. 0.98

02:31:25.000 That's one of the real problems with being all in with anything. 0.97

02:31:29.000 But we also found that they did fake some things for publicity purposes.

02:31:34.000 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 pawned those photos off as spacewalk photos.

02:31:48.000 But I think that's overzealous publicists. 0.98

02:31:50.000 It doesn't mean no one went to space.

02:31:52.000 It's like making leaps.

02:31:55.000 What's the simplest explanation if they did fake some footage?

02:31:59.000 Well, it's probably a bunch of simple explanations, but overzealous publicists, people wanting to show people video that they didn't have video of.

02:32:06.000 Maybe the photos didn't come out so well, so they fake some of them.

02:32:09.000 Well, let me...

02:32:10.000 The thing about the shadows diverging, my memory of this is, we don't talk about that...

02:32:15.000 When people say they see the shadows diverge, right?

02:32:17.000 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...

02:32:24.000 There's one dominant shadow, and then there's a secondary one, right?

02:32:27.000 Yeah.

02:32:27.000 But...

02:32:28.000 Right.

02:32:49.000 They had not invented anything other than red lasers.

02:32:52.000 So NASA would have had to have multi-decade advanced laser light technology in order to fake this.

02:33:02.000 Another part of it is that- Do you think you've figured it out?

02:33:06.000 No, I mean, this is what we demonstrate in our segment.

02:33:10.000 You know, 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?

02:33:18.000 And at the time, that was something you could do with TV, but you literally couldn't do it with film, right?

02:33:23.000 There was no way to record film.

02:33:25.000 Sorry, there was no way to record TV at the time.

02:33:27.000 You had live TV and you had recorded film.

02:33:29.000 Right?

02:33:29.000 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?

02:33:37.000 There was no commercials?

02:33:38.000 I don't believe so.

02:33:40.000 And so they would have had to...

02:33:43.000 What did you say?

02:33:43.000 So we should probably know if there was commercials, because that changes the game.

02:33:46.000 Fair point.

02:33:46.000 But, you know, you would have needed, like, an enormous film canister, you know, that also didn't exist at the time.

02:33:51.000 But if anybody was going to have an enormous film canister, it would be those fucking hoaxers at NASA. Well... 0.99

02:33:56.000 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? 0.90

02:34:04.000 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?

02:34:12.000 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? 0.86

02:34:19.000 The simplest explanation is that we went to the moon because it would have been fucking easier. 0.67

02:34:22.000 Yeah. 0.95

02:34:22.000 We're good to go. 0.95

02:34:41.000 What Kubrick did in 2001, when was that?

02:34:45.000 When did 2001 come out? 0.87

02:34:47.000 I want to say like 71 or some shit? 0.84

02:34:49.000 Yeah, something like that. 0.83

02:34:50.000 When did that come out?

02:34:51.000 Let's see.

02:34:52.000 Yeah, look it up.

02:34:53.000 I think it was earlier than that, maybe.

02:34:54.000 68. 68. Okay, so we're talking about before the moon landings.

02:35:00.000 Kubrick had some pretty astonishing special effects in 2001. Yeah.

02:35:04.000 Yeah, but the argument is that 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.

02:35:16.000 Another part of it is, for instance, the slow jumping, right?

02:35:19.000 The slow boom, boom, you're on the moon, right?

02:35:23.000 The big argument that the moon truthers make is that it was regular speed footage and it was slowed down, right?

02:35:29.000 Right.

02:35:29.000 And there's this dude on, I can't remember the name of it, but if you search, he's a filmmaker on YouTube, right?

02:35:34.000 And he just breaks down why, like, the ability to overcrank and, like, shoot in slow-mo like that, like, didn't, that wasn't how film cameras worked at the time, you know?

02:35:44.000 They couldn't air things in slow-mo back then?

02:35:49.000 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.

02:35:53.000 But that's the argument that the dude makes.

02:35:56.000 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.

02:36:01.000 It's always an interesting argument when you're talking about the moon landing.

02:36:04.000 I also know about how much of 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. 0.74

02:36:11.000 Like 15%. 0.87

02:36:12.000 That was exactly going to be my guess.

02:36:13.000 There's always a number, man.

02:36:15.000 There's a number of people that think that vaccines cause autism.

02:36:17.000 I had Dr. Peter Hotez on here, who is an expert in tropical diseases and autism safety, and he's explaining that they've isolated five environmental factors that they think contribute to autism when it's in the child's womb.

02:36:31.000 They've isolated genes.

02:36:32.000 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. 0.88

02:36:38.000 Yeah.

02:37:02.000 Vaccines are giving people autism. 0.99

02:37:04.000 And when you say that, people go fucking ballistic. 0.99

02:37:07.000 And the comments fill with hate and Zionist shill and this and that. 0.99

02:37:11.000 Yeah, it's wild. 1.00

02:37:12.000 I get that shit a lot. 0.99

02:37:13.000 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. 0.99

02:37:22.000 I agree. 0.99

02:37:23.000 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,

02:37:39.000 blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, and I try to get into it and I say, hey, thanks for watching the show, you know, I don't feel that we lied, this is what our evidence says, you know, what do you think?

02:37:48.000 You know, and I try to take their temperature down, you know, and I don't match their anger is the most important part.

02:37:53.000 I'm like much nicer than their anger demands, you know?

02:37:56.000 And that usually cools them off right away, and then we have a conversation.

02:38:00.000 And a lot of the time when I do that, they leave going, okay, you know what?

02:38:06.000 We don't disagree that much.

02:38:08.000 Or, okay, thanks for talking to me.

02:38:11.000 But the most important thing I say to them is, even if I don't turn them around on whatever the issue was...

02:38:18.000 I say, okay.

02:38:19.000 They say, I'm never going to watch your show again because you lied about this.

02:38:22.000 Because I disagree.

02:38:23.000 You're wrong about this.

02:38:24.000 I'm never watching your show again.

02:38:25.000 And I say, okay, why would you never watch the show again just because you disagree with me about one thing?

02:38:30.000 I watch tons of stuff with people I don't disagree with.

02:38:34.000 Well, they don't really mean that.

02:38:35.000 They just want you to feel bad.

02:38:36.000 Yeah, exactly.

02:38:37.000 You're not a child.

02:38:38.000 You know what they're doing.

02:38:38.000 They're playing childish games.

02:38:40.000 Yeah.

02:38:40.000 Yeah, absolutely.

02:38:42.000 Unfollowed, Adam.

02:38:42.000 I'm never watching you again.

02:38:44.000 Unfollowed. 0.99

02:38:45.000 Like, does anybody think it's a good idea to only consume shit that you already agree with? 0.96

02:38:50.000 I think it's better to challenge yourself and to watch things that you don't agree with all the time, you know? 0.98

02:38:55.000 I watch Fox News at least one hour every week.

02:38:58.000 Do you really? 1.00

02:38:58.000 Yeah, I try to get an hour and just go, what the fuck are you doing? 1.00

02:39:02.000 What is happening? 1.00

02:39:05.000 I want to know what white people are really up to.

02:39:11.000 They're scared all the time. 0.98

02:39:13.000 When they're around me, they lie.

02:39:14.000 I need to know.

02:39:16.000 I would love to get high with Laura Ingraham.

02:39:18.000 You see how she's getting in trouble for laughing at Nipsey Hussle's funeral? 0.96

02:39:22.000 That was very bizarre.

02:39:24.000 Strange.

02:39:25.000 It's very strange to be that...

02:39:28.000 To be so dialed in to that...

02:39:31.000 Look, I understand when you're one of those hosts, right?

02:39:34.000 You have a message.

02:39:35.000 You're dialed into it.

02:39:36.000 You've got to say that message every single day, every single time.

02:39:40.000 You're a monomaniacal about it.

02:39:41.000 You know what I mean?

02:39:42.000 But to do that about someone's death specifically?

02:39:47.000 Bizarre.

02:39:48.000 And that sort of gives you...

02:39:50.000 Sometimes I think that TV shows are like a curse.

02:39:53.000 I feel for anybody who has to be on TV every day.

02:39:56.000 Because their life narrows down to that little camera lens, and they can't have a thought outside of it.

02:40:01.000 You know what I mean?

02:40:02.000 So all those people, Tucker Carlson, Rachel Maddow, Laura Ingram, you know what I mean?

02:40:07.000 Echo Chambers.

02:40:09.000 Yeah, apart from me disagreeing with some of them on various things, I disagree with all those folks on occasion.

02:40:14.000 Like, to live your life...

02:40:17.000 Right in that lens saying the same thing every night.

02:40:19.000 It must really impoverish your point of view in a way that's really a bummer.

02:40:22.000 And me seeing her do that was like, yeah.

02:40:24.000 That's a great perspective.

02:40:25.000 Impoverishing your point of view.

02:40:26.000 I think you're on to that.

02:40:27.000 Thank you.

02:40:28.000 I mean, that's when I saw that clip of her. 1.00

02:40:30.000 I was like, I can't. 0.97

02:40:32.000 I can't believe, but being on TV makes you a crazy person. 0.88

02:40:37.000 It probably does, man. 1.00

02:40:38.000 And with them, with Laura Ingraham, they had just played a clip of one of Nipsey Hussle's videos from one of his songs that was called Fuck Donald Trump. 0.99

02:40:48.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:40:48.000 And they were mocking the song and laughing about it. 0.99

02:40:50.000 Like, look, it's not about the guy's art.

02:40:52.000 The guy's dead.

02:40:53.000 He was murdered in Los Angeles.

02:40:55.000 And obviously, you look at all the hundreds of thousands of people that are mourning him in the streets.

02:40:59.000 They loved him.

02:41:01.000 Why did they love him?

02:41:02.000 Maybe look at that.

02:41:02.000 Maybe because he was giving back to the community.

02:41:04.000 Maybe it's because the guy became successful and still wanted to be in the community and help people out.

02:41:08.000 Maybe because he was a positive influence on a lot of young people.

02:41:12.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:41:12.000 So he had a song called Fuck Donald Trump. 1.00

02:41:14.000 Whatever. 1.00

02:41:15.000 And you know, the worst thing I think...

02:41:18.000 What's that?

02:41:18.000 He's on that song, but it's not his song.

02:41:20.000 Oh, it's not his song?

02:41:20.000 Whose song is it?

02:41:21.000 YG. What is the one that Ice Cube's got a dope song about the president?

02:41:26.000 It might be like, Arrest the President.

02:41:29.000 It might be called Arrest the President. 0.99

02:41:30.000 It's pretty fucking good. 0.99

02:41:31.000 You know, the worst thing that I think is... 0.99

02:41:34.000 It's good. 1.00

02:41:34.000 It's Ice Cube's new shit. 1.00

02:41:38.000 The worst thing I think that people say is the perspective that she had was, okay, because he doesn't like Donald Trump, he's not worthy of respect. 1.00

02:41:47.000 I'm not going to be sad he's dead because he said something mean about Donald Trump.

02:41:51.000 That is such a malignant version of the way that so many people feel.

02:41:55.000 The most frustrating thing people say to me is on our comments page on our YouTube page, This guy's a liberal.

02:42:03.000 This guy's a Democrat.

02:42:03.000 So I'm not going to listen to him.

02:42:04.000 I'm like, okay, well, first of all, we criticize Democrats and liberals all the time on the show.

02:42:10.000 Sometimes people do a responsibility.

02:42:12.000 They're like, doesn't Adam Conover realize he's criticizing a Democrat priority?

02:42:16.000 And I'm like, yeah, all the time.

02:42:18.000 We do not do a political show.

02:42:21.000 Look, I live in Los Angeles.

02:42:23.000 I went to college.

02:42:24.000 I didn't vote for Donald Trump.

02:42:25.000 You know what I mean?

02:42:26.000 Like most people who didn't.

02:42:28.000 Alright, so I'm gonna fess up to that, right?

02:42:30.000 Why does that mean that you would never listen to anything I ever had to say?

02:42:34.000 Or that you would treat me with disrespect, right?

02:42:36.000 Because they're trying to make you feel bad, bro.

02:42:38.000 Yeah.

02:42:38.000 And you're talking about it right now, so they win.

02:42:41.000 Oh, fair enough.

02:42:42.000 Fair enough.

02:42:42.000 Alright.

02:42:42.000 Yeah, okay.

02:42:43.000 Okay, we can move off of it.

02:42:44.000 But you know, that idea of someone who disagrees with me is like not a person who I'm going to listen to anymore.

02:42:50.000 What a bummer.

02:42:51.000 I listen to people from all perspectives and all backgrounds.

02:42:54.000 That's my goal. 1.00

02:42:55.000 Even more insidious, what they're doing is they're trying to say this whole life that was just lost is this one clip that says, fuck Donald Trump. 1.00

02:43:03.000 That's so stupid. 1.00

02:43:04.000 There's obviously a lot of things. 1.00

02:43:06.000 Like, that's quote mining.

02:43:07.000 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.

02:43:14.000 And it's unfortunate.

02:43:16.000 But again, I think it's these echo chambers.

02:43:18.000 These people think it's okay to do that.

02:43:20.000 Yeah.

02:43:20.000 They know that the other people that are like them are going to react the same way.

02:43:24.000 Like, what? 1.00

02:43:24.000 The guy had a song called Fuck Donald Trump. 1.00

02:43:27.000 I mean, hey, fuck you. 1.00

02:43:29.000 And then they all just repeat that. 1.00

02:43:31.000 That's like the people that were shocked that Trump won.

02:43:34.000 They couldn't believe anybody would vote for Trump because everybody around you would not.

02:43:38.000 So you get stuck in these echo chambers.

02:43:40.000 You don't understand how other people outside see it.

02:43:42.000 And I think that's what's happening with this.

02:43:45.000 100%.

02:43:46.000 It's sad. 1.00

02:43:46.000 The guy's fucking dead. 1.00

02:43:48.000 The guy was murdered. 1.00

02:43:48.000 Yeah, we did a segment on guns, right? 1.00

02:43:52.000 We did an episode on guns, and I always thought that...

02:43:54.000 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, everyone would fold their arms, and they'd say, are you going to do an episode on guns?

02:44:01.000 Well, you better say what I want you to say, or I'm changing the channel, right?

02:44:05.000 But we'd been doing the show for four years.

02:44:07.000 I was like, I think we can finally do it.

02:44:09.000 And here's the thing.

02:44:10.000 Everybody is wrong about guns.

02:44:11.000 That's the premise of our show.

02:44:12.000 Everyone's wrong about everything.

02:44:14.000 If you think you know about something, you probably don't.

02:44:16.000 And any topic that I do, I'm going to tell you something you don't know.

02:44:19.000 And so we specifically did an episode that's about, you know, we had a gun rights advocate, a gun control advocate.

02:44:27.000 I'm talking to both of them.

02:44:27.000 And they're both making mistakes, right?

02:44:30.000 About it.

02:44:32.000 And that was the point, was that, like, the thing that liberals...

02:44:37.000 No, I don't want to say liberals.

02:44:38.000 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,

02:44:54.000 right?

02:44:54.000 Like, the NRA has a lot of...

02:44:58.000 Yeah.

02:45:02.000 Yeah.

02:45:20.000 You know, and just as much need of checking themselves and, you know, examining their own biases and, you know, getting closer to the truth as gun rights advocates. 0.99

02:45:30.000 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. 1.00

02:45:36.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:45:36.000 Like, you fucking morons don't get it. 1.00

02:45:38.000 Okay, that's not helping anybody. 1.00

02:45:40.000 And that's the issue with people that also get angry at people who voted for Trump. 1.00

02:45:44.000 They want to say they're all stupid. 1.00

02:45:45.000 Okay, you want to say that half the country's stupid? 1.00

02:45:47.000 That's not a good idea. 1.00

02:45:48.000 That's not smart.

02:45:49.000 Yeah.

02:45:49.000 I want to say, by the way, the reason I said I went to college and didn't vote for Donald Trump, not because a lot of people who went to college did vote for Donald Trump.

02:45:56.000 The trend is that they didn't vote for him.

02:45:58.000 So I was trying to say I'm in a different demographic, but I don't want people to think I was implying...

02:46:02.000 I believe so, yeah.

02:46:04.000 I mean, that's sort of how it breaks down.

02:46:06.000 People with BAs or higher tend to vote for Democrats.

02:46:09.000 So I'm just giving a nod to the demographics here.

02:46:11.000 This is how it breaks down.

02:46:12.000 Right, right.

02:46:13.000 I've got to wrap this up.

02:46:14.000 Yeah, man.

02:46:14.000 Listen, man, that was a lot of fun.

02:46:15.000 It's already up to 3 o'clock.

02:46:16.000 Can you believe it? 1.00

02:46:17.000 Holy shit. 0.99

02:46:17.000 It's 3.05. 0.99

02:46:18.000 Not for a while.

02:46:18.000 Thank you.

02:46:19.000 Oh, you got the...

02:46:20.000 I was wondering what time it was.

02:46:21.000 Well, hey, this has been a real...

02:46:22.000 I really appreciate the... 0.99

02:46:23.000 We got deep on some shit. 0.99

02:46:24.000 Yeah, it was fun, man. 0.99

02:46:25.000 Thanks for coming on.

02:46:26.000 I appreciate it.

02:46:27.000 And tell everybody when your show is, when they can watch it.

02:46:29.000 Adam Ruins Everything is on True TV. We've got episodes on Netflix.

02:46:33.000 New episodes are coming out probably around August.

02:46:35.000 Don't have an exact date yet, but we're having our next run of eight coming out then.

02:46:38.000 How many more years do you think you're going to do this?

02:46:40.000 You know, hopefully pretty soon.

02:46:42.000 Never run out of stuff.

02:46:43.000 And check out my new podcast, Factually.

02:46:45.000 Hopefully pretty soon you'll end it?

02:46:46.000 No, no.

02:46:47.000 Sorry.

02:46:47.000 Hopefully pretty soon we'll know whether we're going to keep doing it.

02:46:50.000 We're between.

02:46:51.000 We're waiting for a pickup right now.

02:46:52.000 We have to keep doing it.

02:46:52.000 Yeah.

02:46:53.000 I love doing the show.

02:46:54.000 Look, I'm going to be doing what I do for the rest of my life no matter where I'm doing it.

02:46:57.000 Oh, that's a good way to look at it.

02:46:58.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:46:59.000 Okay.

02:46:59.000 Awesome.

02:47:00.000 Either way.

02:47:00.000 Adam, thank you.

02:47:01.000 Thank you so much, man.

02:47:02.000 Thanks for being here.

02:47:04.000 Bye, everybody.

02:47:05.000 That was great.

The Joe Rogan Experience - April 17, 2019

Joe Rogan Experience #1282 - Adam Conover

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Transcript