April 17, 2019 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:47:04
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Is it good? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| All right. | ||
| Cut all this out. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Hello, Adam. | ||
| Hey, thanks for having me, Joe. | ||
| Hey, thanks for being here, man. | ||
|
unidentified
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I appreciate it. | |
| I'm a giant fan of your show. | ||
| I really appreciate that. | ||
| I love the fact that it annoys people, too. | ||
| It really pisses people off. | ||
| That's the goal, pretty much. | ||
| I mean, I'm not the kind of person where I'm like, if you're pissing people off, you're doing something right, but there's some truth to that. | ||
| There's some truth to that. | ||
| And also the way you structured the name. | ||
| I mean, I don't know if you came up with the name of it, but Adam ruins everything. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I think I might have to give that to my former boss, Sam Raich, a college humor. | ||
| I think we came up with the name together. | ||
| He might have been the first person to say it. | ||
| It's perfect. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| It lets you know that, hey, this is going to annoy you a little bit. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But at the end of the day, it makes it better. | ||
| It's an optimistic show at the end of the day. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Yeah, you give them the truth. | ||
| 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, we show you why you're actually better off knowing that thing, and you're always better off knowing the truth, in my view. | ||
| In my view as well. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Was there ever, was there one episode that stands out as being one that people got the most upset about? | ||
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unidentified
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What? | |
| There's a bunch of them. | ||
| I mean, people get upset with us for a lot of different reasons. | ||
| We did one about how breastfeeding isn't better than formula feeding. | ||
| It's not? | ||
| No, they're both like, formula feeding is fine. | ||
| You know, and the problem is formula feeding has become stigmatized now. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And if, you know, someone's choice or need is to do that, there's no reason to stigmatize it. | ||
| We go through all the reasons that that's the case. | ||
| 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. | ||
| We did one about trophy hunting animals, about how, because people get so mad, oh, look at this guy shot a lion, right? | ||
| 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, 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. | ||
| And yeah, people don't want to hear that, right? | ||
| It's I feel really hard. | ||
| That's a weird one to me, and I hunt. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, the whole lion and elephant thing, like, ooh, that's a weird one. | ||
| Well, what they can do is they can say, okay, well, we've got these elephants. | ||
| One of these elephants is an old male that's, like, killing the other elephants, right? | ||
| And if we organize these hunts where you've got to pay half a million dollars for the right to even go in there, right? | ||
| Does that happen with old male elephants? | ||
| I know that was the issue with that giraffe, that... | ||
| Remember that woman that got in trouble? | ||
| I actually don't know that specific case. | ||
| Yeah, there was a woman who got in trouble because she shot this really beautiful giraffe. | ||
| It was really dark and unusually colored, and it was dark because it was very old. | ||
| The older the giraffe, apparently the males get really dark. | ||
| It was really cool looking. | ||
| But she shot it, and everybody went crazy on the internet because she was posing and smiling with this little giraffe. | ||
| But apparently that giraffe had to be killed because it had killed at least two, maybe three young males. | ||
| And it was no longer of a viable breeding age. | ||
| So they were in this situation where they didn't have the money to take it and bring it to a zoo somewhere. | ||
| And they would have gotten money from having this woman come in and shoot it. | ||
| Yeah, that's sort of the idea, you know? | ||
| I mean, one of the issues is if you've got an area where, you know, one of the problems is you need to have a reason for the people who live in the place to care about the animals, you know what I mean? | ||
| If it's just like, hey, the elephants are going to roam free, well, you've got people there who are like, alright, fine, so I'm living near some elephants, occasionally they eat my crops and shit, and that annoys me. | ||
| Not just occasionally. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| I don't give a shit about that. | ||
| And what that allows to happen is it allows poachers to come in and kill them wantonly, right? | ||
| But if instead, okay, we're protecting them, we have a revenue stream, right? | ||
| We get money when hunters come in and pay a lot of money to go kill one animal, right? | ||
| Now we've got a way to hire guards. | ||
| This is now a resource that we're protecting, right? | ||
| And that sounds a little cynical, but it is working in some places. | ||
| It's both. | ||
| It's cynical and effective. | ||
| And effective. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Now, in some places, if you've got a corrupt government where they're just going to pocket the bunny, yeah, that's bad, right? | ||
| But the point is, just because the mere idea of someone going overseas and killing an animal is not necessarily the worst thing in the world, we have to look at the details of the situation. | ||
| And that's hard for animal lovers to hear. | ||
| Animal lovers don't like to hear that. | ||
| Yeah, they don't. | ||
| Like I said, I don't like to hear it. | ||
| I don't like to hear it either! | ||
| What freaks me out more than anything is that there's no other options. | ||
| It's not like a bunch of people are donating a bunch of money to keep these areas clean and free of poachers. | ||
| The amount would be massive, right? | ||
| We can donate money. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Again, you know, people want to farm on that land. | ||
| People, you know, people have lives, right? | ||
| They're not sitting around going – the people in those countries are not sitting around going – Oh, I love the cute elephant, like we have the luxury to do. | ||
| They, like, fucking live there, right? | ||
| And so how do you get those people in that society to really protect those animals? | ||
| That's a hard question to answer. | ||
| And some places are having success with that strategy. | ||
| And that's something that we can understand. | ||
| We don't have to approve of it in every single case. | ||
| And we can say, that's really tough for us as animal lovers. | ||
| And in fact, the character who I'm talking to on the show says, I still just hate the idea of an animal being killed, right? | ||
| And I say, yeah, so do I. We try to dramatize that emotional resistance on the show, like that emotional reaction that we have. | ||
| I also don't like the idea of an animal being killed brutally. | ||
| I think I'm uncomfortable with the idea. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's what I chose about. | ||
| It's really weird when it comes to things that people don't eat. | ||
| Like lions and stuff. | ||
| I don't understand the psychology. | ||
| You're like Michael Douglas in the, what was that movie? | ||
| With Val Kilmer? | ||
| The Ghost in the Darkness. | ||
| The lions that decided to kill those dudes. | ||
| I've never heard of this movie. | ||
| movie it's a great movie the ghost in the darkness yeah i feel like it's from the 90s but it's a really good movie about a true story about this guy that they brought they brought this michael douglas character was brought in to hunt these lions that were systematically targeting and killing these workers that worked on this railroad this team of lions worked together and started eating people wow It's a great movie. | ||
| It's really good. | ||
| It sounds odd, and they have to go after the lions. | ||
| Yeah, they have to go kill these lions. | ||
| Yeah, there it is. | ||
| Ghost in the Darkness. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, holy crap. | |
| Hail-biting tension. | ||
| That is a great... | ||
| Pray for the hunters. | ||
| Val Kilmer is looking good there. | ||
| Yeah, that was pre-fatso Val Kilmer. | ||
| Pre when he went off the deck. | ||
| It was too handsome. | ||
| He couldn't handle it anymore. | ||
| Really good-looking guy. | ||
| Too handsome. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| He had to just go off the deep end. | ||
| Another one people got really mad about. | ||
| This is weirdly the one we got the biggest reaction to. | ||
| And to the extent that I'm a little hesitant talking about it because it always starts to shift storm every time I do. | ||
| Vaccines? | ||
| No, actually we've not done a whole lot on vaccines, but we really should because it's coming back. | ||
| I used to think that vaccines was kind of done as a topic and we've gone through it. | ||
| It is really back and it is big. | ||
| But no, we did one on alpha males. | ||
| We did an episode about dating. | ||
| And we did one on how the idea of the alpha male doesn't exist in humans. | ||
| Like, if you talk to any anthropologist, any biologist, any sociologist, and be like, are humans organized in a social relationship where there's alphas and betas? | ||
| They'll be like, no, what are you talking about? | ||
| This is an unscientific idea. | ||
| And we just did something laying that out in the context of people who are, oh, my type is I like alphas. | ||
| Well, there's no such thing, actually. | ||
| Humans are your dominant in some situations, not in others. | ||
| It's an overly simplistic way of looking at human relationships. | ||
| And I thought that was a pretty simple, straightforward thing. | ||
| I was like, this is just a bit of pseudoscience that you hear people tossing out. | ||
| And people went ballistic on the internet because people have sort of like... | ||
| 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? | ||
| Well, let's take away the words. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And there's a scale. | ||
| In some situations, you know? | ||
| Social situations. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And that's what we're talking about, right? | ||
| Well, yeah, but your social situation could change based on what situation you're in. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It could, but an athletic, confident male is always going to be an athletic, confident male. | ||
| And an introverted, anxious male who has problems with social anxiety is going to be the same. | ||
| That's who that person is. | ||
| I don't think so necessarily. | ||
| So when we're talking about alphas, right? | ||
| In animals, what is that? | ||
| It's a social hierarchy, right? | ||
| In animals. | ||
| So let's take away that word. | ||
| I mean, what people are using to describe when they're saying alphas and betas, they're saying, like, confident... | ||
| Strong, secure people and people that are anxious and not confident. | ||
| So if you're trying to say, hey, it's good to be confident, it's not so great to be anxious. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And they'll start saying stuff like, well, there's alphas and there's betas, and women are hardwired to be attracted to the alpha, you know, because that's what it's like in nature. | ||
| Like, they'll be using that language, right? | ||
| And so what we're pointing out is, that's not scientific, right? | ||
| It's not scientific, but it is true that women are hardwired to be attracted to confident, athletic men. | ||
| Well, I don't know if I agree with that, but... | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You don't think that women look at, like, pro athletes and, like, big, strong, athletic men... | ||
| And you don't think they're drawn to that for evolutionary reasons? | ||
| No, I don't actually. | ||
| Do you think that men are drawn to women with small waists and big hips and large breasts for evolutionary reasons? | ||
| You know, I think that's an easy intuition to come to if you're looking at the way people behave, right? | ||
| But one of the things about evolutionary psychology is it's the most common mistake to look at the way that people do behave And say, the reason we behave that way is because evolution says that's the best way, right? | ||
| That's their argument, for instance, I'll give you an example. | ||
| That's the argument that was, arguments like that were used, for instance, to justify slavery, right? | ||
| That like, oh, because, you know, whites and blacks have this hierarchical relationship in American society, that's the way it was intended. | ||
| That's how nature intended it to be, right? | ||
| But we can't make that leap. | ||
| We can't make that leap. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Men universally are attracted to a certain shape of bodies. | ||
| There's men that are attracted to different ones. | ||
| I don't think men are universally attracted to the same body. | ||
| People vary, but that hourglass shape has been throughout time something that men are attracted to. | ||
| I think that hourglass shape is something throughout our recent cultural memory. | ||
| That we tell each other that men are attracted to, right? | ||
| That's what we're told from an early age, that this is the sort of women that men are attracted to. | ||
| And so a lot of men end up adopting that, right? | ||
| But I don't think that deep down, that's how men naturally are. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| But that doesn't make any sense to me. | ||
| That's so non-intuitive. | ||
| I'm all about things that are non-intuitive. | ||
| Where do you think it started? | ||
| 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? | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| There's all these evolutionary biology reasons why people are attracted to certain things. | ||
| Why a woman would be attracted to a tall, muscular, handsome man, good genetics, very strong and confident, can take care of her. | ||
| All these things are based on evolutionary biology. | ||
| So I don't understand why you think these are learned sort of cultural artifacts. | ||
| So my question is, this is an assumption that we, the public, make about how evolutionary biology works, right? | ||
| Well, it's more of a thing that we sort of agree on. | ||
| Well, we as the, like, there's an idea among the public that this is true. | ||
| I don't know if it's a scientific idea. | ||
| That's my point. | ||
| 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. | ||
| This is sort of, I mean, this is science, in a way. | ||
| I mean, this... | ||
| The reason why they're attracted to tall men that are muscular and confident is because that is what's always saved you throughout history. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| It totally makes sense, doesn't it? | ||
| Well, just because it makes... | ||
| The point of our show, right? | ||
| Is that just because something makes intuitive sense doesn't mean that it's necessarily true, right? | ||
| But don't you think that in this case, that this is a varied argument? | ||
| Like, I don't think that's something that you can dismiss. | ||
| I don't dismiss it, but I don't assume the truth of it simply because that's what everybody agrees upon, right? | ||
| But if you ask girls, like, what are you into? | ||
| And you say, are you into tall, muscular, confident men who are also nice to do? | ||
| Jesus Christ, it's going to be off the charts. | ||
| It's going to be like most of them. | ||
| I'm really not sure that's the case. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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? | ||
| 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? | ||
| So, like, are women attracted to attractive bodies? | ||
| If that's the question, then I would say, of course. | ||
| Dad bods are more attractive to women's study finds. | ||
| Some fucking guy with a dad bod made that. | ||
| Look, here's something that I was really influenced by. | ||
| What do you think of that, what I just said, though? | ||
| That doesn't make sense to you, that women would be attracted to someone who's fit? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Look, I mean, it's a hypothetical, right? | ||
| Certainly, athleticism, right, is something that is attractive, right? | ||
| That's something that many people find attractive, right? | ||
| Not everybody finds that attractive. | ||
| And I don't think that we can necessarily reason backwards to, like, a specific evolutionary relationship, right? | ||
| Because the truth of what those evolutionary relationships are is, like, often a lot more complicated than, you know, our immediate intuition about it. | ||
| And what we're specifically pushing back against in that segment is like the really sort of unscientific, you know, use of alpha and beta. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Where it's like, you know, you've got people, you know, just on Internet forums, like sort of doing amateur pseudoscience, right? | ||
| Saying like, this is how the relationships between men and women are like designed evolutionarily. | ||
| And we were just pointing out on a very, very simple level, like the alpha and beta social hierarchy theory, right? | ||
| That like humans are organized in a social hierarchy and alphas are above betas. | ||
| Not true, right? | ||
| Even someone who is the person who you posited, right? | ||
| The person who is athletic and confident, right? | ||
| The, you know, the high school football quarterback, right? | ||
| Versus the high school football nerd. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Well, take those two people and then put them in a different situation, right? | ||
| If those two people are like in gym class together, right? | ||
| Of course, the high school quarterback is like on the top of that social interaction, right? | ||
| Looking at the sort of, you know, classic Wolfpack model. | ||
| They're the one who's sort of running the show, right? | ||
| And the other guy's like hanging out in the bleachers talking to his friends, right? | ||
| Or talking to nobody because he's a beta in that situation, right? | ||
| If you then take that kid and then you send that kid to nationals or whatever, and that kid – sorry, take the quarterback character. | ||
| And he's suddenly from the little podunk town. | ||
| He's not from the big school. | ||
| He's way down on the totem pole. | ||
| That person is no longer going to be in that social hierarchy. | ||
| And if you take that nerd and you take that kid and maybe he's the dungeon master of his Dungeons & Dragons group, right? | ||
| That kid is going to be the alpha in that situation, right? | ||
| That's how humans work. | ||
| Humans aren't organized in little pods that stay together for life and there's one person who's dominant the whole time. | ||
| And that's the simple point that we were making in that piece. | ||
| And people get upset. | ||
| Yeah, people got upset because there are so many people who, we talked about this later on the show, there's this idea called the backfire effect, right? | ||
| where when people are told something that they don't agree with, that when someone is told somebody a fact, when somebody is told a fact that contradicts a really deeply held belief, it can often cause them to disbelieve it even when it's true and fight back even harder. | ||
| One of the reasons that happens is because of an idea called identity protective cognition. | ||
| If the fact that is being debunked is literally part of your identity, like if it's something that you believe really, really deeply, it's incredibly hard for you to disbelieve it. | ||
| The classic example of this is like, Sean Hannity doesn't believe in climate change. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Well, you know what? | ||
| I actually don't know that specifically what Sean Hannity thinks about climate change. | ||
| Let's just say somebody who's made their whole career on climate change doesn't exist. | ||
| All their friends are in the anti-climate change community. | ||
| They met their wife at an anti-climate change fundraiser. | ||
| They make their money. | ||
| They write a new anti-climate change book every year. | ||
| Now, climate change is real. | ||
| There's no evidence I could present that person with that is going to make them take the social risk of ending all their relationships, changing their whole life, right? | ||
| Because if they were to say, okay, you know what? | ||
| Actually, I'm convinced climate change is real. | ||
| They would lose all their friends. | ||
| Their wife would leave them. | ||
| They would lose their revenue stream. | ||
| They can't possibly come to that conclusion, right? | ||
| And so they fight back so super hard, right? | ||
| And so that's what ended up happening with that segment. | ||
| There's a whole group of people who have built their whole lives on the idea. | ||
| There's alphas and betas. | ||
| I'm an alpha. | ||
| I'm not going to be a beta. | ||
| And maybe that meant something positive to them. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And maybe they started acting a little bit more confidently, and now they're in a relationship. | ||
| All those things can be true with The idea of alphas and betas and humans not being scientific, right? | ||
| But so when I tell them that, they fight back really hard. | ||
| They're like, no, no, no, no, no, this is real, this is real, you know? | ||
| 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. | ||
| And the weirdest thing was, people started to say, this is political. | ||
| Like, why is Adam Ruins everything getting political? | ||
| I'm like, I don't know what the hell they're talking about. | ||
|
unidentified
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How is that political? | |
| I have no idea. | ||
| I have no idea how it's political. | ||
| Alphas and betas are now political? | ||
| I mean, that's what people were saying. | ||
| I guess, you know, for some people it's become that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But to me, I'm just like, guys, in dating, right, in life, like, this is not a real concept. | ||
| If you want to say, I'm going to be confident tomorrow, I'm not going to tell you that's not going to help you out. | ||
| I'm a little bit reticent to make a broad conclusion about evolutionary psychology. | ||
| But I can tell you, again, go talk to any anthropologist, any biologist, any sociologist. | ||
| Is there such a thing as alpha males in humans? | ||
| In the strictest scientific sense of the word, no. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I think you're correct. | ||
| And I think, obviously, humans operate on a giant spectrum. | ||
| And if you start going around saying alpha and beta and the 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. | ||
| It becomes an ideology. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It's a pro-male ideology. | ||
| Which I have the biggest problem with, like, overconfident men's rights guys. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because I'm like, listen, we have all the rights. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like... | ||
| Fucking settle down. | ||
| Yeah, we got enough of them. | ||
| I had a whole bit about it. | ||
| It was like divorce laws and that's it. | ||
| Everything else is stacked in our favor. | ||
| Just fucking chill out. | ||
| You're making us look bad. | ||
| And the problems that men have are different than the problems those guys think men have. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So you've got the stereotypical black kid, you've got the stereotypical Asian kid. | ||
| Do you have a gay neighbor? | ||
| What do you say? | ||
| Do you have a gay neighbor? | ||
| No, we didn't do that. | ||
| Well, there's only three acts on the show. | ||
| I wish we could have done that, and women, and all sorts of things. | ||
| And we had a stereotypical dad. | ||
| You know, like a home improvement type dad, you know? | ||
| 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? | ||
| For instance, men have a very high suicide rate, right? | ||
| And specifically – Loneliness is a health problem for men, for older men. | ||
| Take my dad. | ||
| My dad's about 65. He doesn't have a friend. | ||
| I hope he doesn't hear this. | ||
| He has work colleagues. | ||
| He's got my mom. | ||
| He's got me. | ||
| I'm sure he's got people he's friendly with. | ||
| But he doesn't have a best friend who comes over to watch the Red Sox with him. | ||
| That's terrible. | ||
| It's terrifying to me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the thing is, loneliness is associated with early death, you know, and with disease, right? | ||
| And, like, when you look at the way that we bring up men, men are socialized to not have close relationships with each other, you know? | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, like... | ||
| Well, like, we talk about, from an early age, we talk about this so briefly on the show, but we could have gone into a whole episode on it. | ||
| From an early age, researchers have found this, that little boys, when they're very young, are very close, form very close friendships. | ||
| That are physical friendships. | ||
| They hug, you know, they'll kiss, they'll, you know what I mean? | ||
| They'll have physical close friendships like that. | ||
| And then they reach an age where that starts to become not okay. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Where it becomes, oh, that's not how boys act. | ||
| And girls are still doing that with their friends. | ||
| They're still holding hands with their friends. | ||
| They're still having close relationships like that. | ||
| And boys start to build a little bit of distance. | ||
| And it's easy to say, well, when you're a teenager, that's because of the stigma against being gay and we don't want to appear gay. | ||
| But it happens even younger than kids would even have a notion of that. | ||
| So it really seems to be a deep down way that we bring up boys of like, hey, don't get too close to each other. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| That's a little weird. | ||
| It's just a little weird for boys to do that, you know? | ||
| And we do that from a young age. | ||
| It's very subtle. | ||
| It's very subtle, but it's universal? | ||
| I mean, in America, it seems to be. | ||
| I've even felt that myself. | ||
| I've often had an easier time having close, close relationships with women rather than men. | ||
| Really? | ||
| As friendships, yeah. | ||
| As friendships, yeah. | ||
| Man, I don't have that at all. | ||
| Just in terms of who I talk with about my relationships and stuff. | ||
| I have good friendships with women, mostly that are comics, but almost all my good friends are guys. | ||
| I have a lot of good friends. | ||
| I mean, you're lucky if that's the case. | ||
| Yeah, I certainly am. | ||
| There's that phenomenon of having a little bit of distance from your male friends, of not getting really into it emotionally. | ||
| If you don't feel that way, that's fine. | ||
| I've felt that myself, and that results in health outcomes. | ||
| Some people feel it. | ||
| You've felt it. | ||
| Some people feel it. | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
| I don't experience that. | ||
| Most of my friends that I know have good male friends, and they're pretty tight with people. | ||
| Well, the point is that there is a trend, especially in older age, right? | ||
| It's a bad scene for anybody, whether it's a male or a female. | ||
| When you get older and you don't have any friends, that's a bad scene. | ||
| Well, so demographically, we know that that happens to men more than women, right? | ||
| A man my dad's age is more likely to have less friends than a woman my mom's age. | ||
| Do we know why? | ||
| 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. | ||
| So that is a serious problem that men have, that men face, right? | ||
| Another one we talk about is stuff like, you know, drinking and smoking, for instance. | ||
| Those are behaviors that are much more pushed on men. | ||
| You know, those are much more advertised towards men, right? | ||
| And those are dangerous, right? | ||
| Those will like hurt you physically and can lead to an early death, right? | ||
| 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? | ||
| And it's so funny how the sort of, like, men's rights people, you know, they don't talk about that stuff quite as much. | ||
| They talk about, you know, violence. | ||
| And, you know, people being hurt at work and stuff like that, like men having dangerous occupations, and that stuff is true as well. | ||
| But, 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. | ||
| Hey, men are like this, you should be like this, you know? | ||
| And some of those things hurt men. | ||
| Do you think we still do that, though? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Do you think people still put narrow expectations of what men should be? | ||
| I totally think they do. | ||
| I think we might be lucky here in LA, you know, because we can sort of, like, live any way that we choose. | ||
| I mean, you clearly live exactly how you want to live, which is great, you know, and I get to as well. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, but I don't know of anyone who's putting pressure on men to not be friendly with other men. | ||
| That seems so ridiculous to me, to deny camaraderie. | ||
| Obviously, in the military, it's a huge aspect of military service, is the brotherhood that these guys form with each other. | ||
| And that's about, you know, if you want to talk about traditional male values, that's about as manly a thing as a person can do, right? | ||
| Serve their country. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Very much so. | ||
| But are men, for instance, encouraged to be emotionally vulnerable with their friends, for instance? | ||
| I think that's something that's tougher. | ||
| Don't do it. | ||
| They're going to bring it up when you argue. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and so that's the thing. | ||
| There's a level of intimacy that we're like, and that sort of intimacy is what leads to long friendships, you know, that really, really last, right? | ||
| It's a balancing act, I think, because I think there is intimacy, and then there's also guys who are just being a bitch, and they need to learn how to man up. | ||
| Both things are real. | ||
| Both things are real. | ||
| It is real to be intimate and to be vulnerable and to explain how you feel. | ||
| But then sometimes you shouldn't be just fucking complaining about things. | ||
| You should figure your life out and man the fuck up and go do something. | ||
| And it's not necessarily you being emotionally vulnerable, as you like to say it in such a normalizing way. | ||
| It might just be you being a bitch. | ||
| That's possible too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You don't think that when you say that you put a little pressure on men at all? | |
| Yes, I put pressure on men. | ||
| Maybe you're the one putting a little pressure on you. | ||
| Yes, they need some pressure. | ||
| I think most men need just a little bit of a motivational shove in the general direction of success and happiness. | ||
| And a lot of that is overcoming laziness and applying some discipline to your life. | ||
| I think those things are very manly attributes that turn out to actually be good for you. | ||
| You know, I think there's a lot of – I don't disagree with you about some of those aspects being good for you. | ||
| Let me just give one other example. | ||
| And I'm blanking on the name of this podcast. | ||
| I can look it up if you want. | ||
| But a very wonderful podcast about philosophy. | ||
| Philosophize this? | ||
| No, I love Philosophize This. | ||
| It's a different one here. | ||
| I'll look up what it was as I'm talking to you about it. | ||
| But really wonderful podcast where they were talking to this guy who was in the military and has PTSD. | ||
| And he was talking about how the idea of be a man was just a phrase that he would hear a lot in the military. | ||
| And it's called Hi-Fi Nation is the name of the podcast. | ||
| And there's an episode called Be a Man. | ||
| Hi-Fi Nation, really wonderful podcast about philosophy. | ||
| And it's talking about that idea of be a man. | ||
| What does that mean in the military? | ||
| And look, I'm just repeating what this is in the podcast. | ||
| I have no military experience myself. | ||
| I don't want to claim to. | ||
| And that means sort of like overcome adversity. | ||
| Don't complain too much. | ||
| If you have a problem, solve it yourself kind of thing. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And can actually exacerbate PTSD because it means that they're not trained how to reach out for help for those problems. | ||
| No, I couldn't agree more. | ||
| That's a different situation, I think. | ||
| Oh yeah, it'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? | ||
| That works in some situations, maybe that works when you're in a foxhole, right? | ||
| It doesn't work so well when you're out of it, right? | ||
| And so that's a narrow idea that can lead to a bad outcome. | ||
| Sure, but that's basically what we were just saying, that you should be emotionally vulnerable and know how to express yourself with your friends and be honest and true about how you feel about things. | ||
| But you also should know when you're being a bitch. | ||
| Both of those things are real. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| 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. | ||
| My foot hurts, too. | ||
| Just fucking walk. | ||
| You're walking fine. | ||
| I completely agree with you. | ||
| I just don't think this is worth it. | ||
| This is not what I had in mind when we started hiking. | ||
| That guy's being a bitch, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He needs to man the fuck up, right? | ||
| But let me... | ||
| You're hesitant to say man the fuck up. | ||
| Because if it was a woman, what would you say? | ||
| You'd say toughen up? | ||
| Just soldier on? | ||
| What would you say? | ||
| Well, I don't think that... | ||
| The reason I'm hesitant to use that word is I don't think that being tough is exclusively a male characteristic. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| That's why I said if you're a woman, what would you say? | ||
| Would you say toughen up? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I guess I would. | |
| If it was a woman in the same situation, you got to toughen up. | ||
| You got to deal with it. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Press on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But men, we like to equate that to one of our best attributes. | ||
| Being a fucking man. | ||
| Because I'm a fucking man. | ||
| But the problem is, what if you're on that hike with a friend? | ||
| And your friend is legit afraid of hikes. | ||
| I've been on hikes with... | ||
| Sorry, I didn't say hikes. | ||
| Heights. | ||
| I was like, damn, you can't be hiking with that dude anymore. | ||
| I went on a hike with a friend. | ||
| My friend had, we were in Zion National Park, which has some very narrow bridges. | ||
| That's Utah, right? | ||
| Utah, yeah. | ||
| My friend had a panic attack, right? | ||
| Because of the hike. | ||
| And it was, you know, and that's legit, right? | ||
| And thank God he was able, he felt able to share it with me, right? | ||
| But if we... | ||
| So that's the balancing act of creating an environment where you're not... | ||
| Hey, yeah, don't complain about your foot. | ||
| But hey, if you're really in distress, you can share that with me. | ||
| And some men feel that they can't do that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And that sucks. | ||
| And so my goal is to... | ||
| And what that segment that we did about manliness was about was saying, hey, if you... | ||
| If you're a man and being a man to you means, you know, being confident, being assertive and stuff like that. | ||
| Great qualities. | ||
| Not bad qualities at all, right? | ||
| But we want to expand the notion of manliness so it includes all the different ways that one can be a man, right? | ||
| That it's as wide as possible, right? | ||
| Because otherwise you don't shut it down. | ||
| The expression manliness, right? | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| Because manliness, like, instantly becomes handsome, aggressive... | ||
| You know, muscular. | ||
| That's our cultural idea of a man. | ||
| But womanliness is more like soft and kind. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know, you don't think of it sexually, right? | ||
| When you think of womanliness isn't really a word that's used, but if it was. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Womanly sexually. | ||
| Those are the cultural ideas that we associate with those things. | ||
| Let me just give you my example. | ||
| Personally, I love taking care of other people. | ||
| Me and my girlfriend, we've been together 10 years. | ||
| One of the main things I love to do in our relationship is I really like cooking for her. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I like taking care of her. | ||
| That's something that I enjoy. | ||
| That's the part of my manliness. | ||
| That's how I am a man. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| To provide. | ||
| It feels good to give food and to sit down and do something for and cook for. | ||
| You can associate it with, yeah, providing goes back to that classic sort of manly value. | ||
| Okay, we'll take away that word. | ||
| I'm not even saying in that sense. | ||
| There's nothing wrong with that word. | ||
| But in that sense, you want to give. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're trying to give. | |
| And that's not a value that I was brought up with of, like, that's a manly thing to do, right? | ||
| Is to, like, be kind and be nurturing. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Really? | ||
| But it's something that really means a lot to me. | ||
| Yeah, it wasn't what I was brought up with. | ||
| And so to me, it's important to, like, expand, you know, my notion of what... | ||
| It was really a big deal for me to, like, realize that that was part of what being a man was to me. | ||
| And I noticed that, like... | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like, the female characters are the ones who are taking care of other people, and the male characters are the ones who are kicking ass, right? | ||
| And I like kicking ass sometimes, too, but I realized 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. | ||
| Like Dr. Phil. | ||
| Dr. Phil, he does it a little bit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He does. | |
| He does. | ||
| I see what you're saying. | ||
| Whenever you have a label, especially a narrow label, it's a problem. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Toxic masculinity, which is the phrase that gets tossed around a lot. | ||
| But I think this is just shitty humans. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| You know, I mean, that's really where the problem is. | ||
| And it's not specific to men, right? | ||
| Oh, it's definitely not. | ||
| It's everybody. | ||
| But let me give you one more example, just to get back to what you're talking about, about body type and what people are attracted to. | ||
| I read this wonderful advice column. | ||
| It's this guy who, this guy does an advice, it's got a kind of silly name, it's Dr. Nerd Love. | ||
| But he does a really good advice column. | ||
| him and this dude wrote in and said hey i'm with a woman she's um you know a little bit bigger of a gal you know than i've dated in the past i really am into her she's so cool but she's not my type i'm not normally into women like this and that bothers me that she's not my type right even though i'm into her so much she's not my type what do i do about this she's not my type and i loved this He wrote back and he said, "Dude, she's your fucking type. | ||
| You like her, right? | ||
| You're into her. | ||
| You think she's a sexy woman, right? | ||
| The problem is you were brought up in a world where it's not okay for men to like women like that. | ||
| It's not okay to like women who are her size. | ||
| And you've ingested that your whole life and now you're hating yourself because you were told something about what's okay for you to like and what's not okay for you to like." And I really related to that, you know, because I remember feeling that way about girls I dated. | ||
| Like, hold on a sec, oh, I'm into her so much, but, oh, wait, is she not, like, attractive, right? | ||
| Am I wrong to be dating her because she doesn't fit what I, you know, the sort of, like, set of parameters for what an attractive woman is, right? | ||
| And so when you talk about what people say they're attracted to, if you ask any woman, wouldn't she say she's attracted to this kind of man? | ||
| If you ask any man, wouldn't she say she's attracted to that kind of woman? | ||
| Yeah, they might say that, right? | ||
| But deep down, do they maybe have a desire that they've been told is wrong their whole lives, right? | ||
| And I really related to that. | ||
| I was like, man, that is really a good point. | ||
| 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? | ||
| And that's a mental prison that I want to get out of, you know? | ||
| And, you know... | ||
| Now I have the benefit I'm a little bit older, and I feel like I'm in less mental prisons than I used to be. | ||
| I feel like you're in no mental prisons at all. | ||
| I feel like a lot of your listeners have broken out of them. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's a weird thing to say. | ||
| I'm really into her, but she's not my type. | ||
| But, you know, the problem there seems to, in my mind, in my estimation, seems this guy's worried too much about his identity. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Instead of just being who he is... | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| He's worried about his identity. | ||
| And that's a really tough thing to get over, and that's what we were trying to help people get over in that episode. | ||
| But, you know, when I think about... | ||
| 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. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Did you just come up in alt rooms? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| They're the meanest motherfuckers. | ||
| They sure fucking are. | ||
| Those super nerds. | ||
| Like, oh, super progressive. | ||
| Fucking mean. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Dude. | |
| So goddamn socially vicious. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, especially just at the open mics in New York City, you know? | ||
| It was a real... | ||
| L.A. too. | ||
| Same deal. | ||
| Yeah, because there's no organization. | ||
| I never set foot in a club because I was like, I don't want to deal with anybody at the club thinking, oh, I'm trying to get a spot or whatever. | ||
| I was like, I'm just doing bar shows, open mics, stuff like that. | ||
| And yeah, there's no rules. | ||
| So it's just social enforcement and it's just people being like, I'm the big dog. | ||
| And people would cross their arms during other people's sets or say shit. | ||
| And it really fucking sucked. | ||
| And the only way I got past it, I was saying, I don't give a shit about what any of these motherfuckers think. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I'm going to focus on that. | ||
| But you should look at the people that are crossing their arms with amusement because all those people are fools. | ||
| You're fools. | ||
| I know what you're doing. | ||
| You're just throwing poison at people for no reason. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Especially in open mic nights and those kind of shows, those bar shows, people are just developing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know, you're watching little babies run around in nursery homes. | ||
| I mean, that's really what it is. | ||
| Yeah, and what they're trying to do- They're comedy babies. | ||
| What those people are trying to do is they're trying to say, well, I know the difference between good and bad, and that's one of the reasons I'm good, and so I'm going to say that you're bad, right? | ||
| Exactly, yeah. | ||
| But that's bullshit, you know? | ||
| It's bullshit. | ||
| It's bullshit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And a lot of them aren't funny. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's the real part of the problem. | ||
| They're trying to enforce a narrow band of comedy because they think they can operate inside those parameters. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But if they wanted to go on stage at the Comedy Store after Joey Diaz, they'd burst into flames. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's not really that good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's not that good. | |
| What you're doing is not that good. | ||
| I know you think you have a point, but what you're saying is your art is not that well thought out. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's a waste of energy. | ||
| You know, it really is and the best the best energy in These small groups the best way to use your energy is to appreciate good work and recognize bad work and recognize Maybe you have some of that aspect totally in yourself some some aspects of bad work in your own act and maybe you should trim it out and look at yourself objectively the way you're looking at this person and | ||
| 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? | ||
| What do you care? | ||
| They just suck. | ||
| You suck too, bro. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| You're at the open mic at 11pm. | ||
| You both have been waiting three hours to do three minutes. | ||
| I remember what it was like your first couple of years on stage. | ||
| It was terrible. | ||
| I want to go back and hug everyone who's ever in the audience and say, I'm sorry. | ||
| I didn't mean to put you through whatever the fuck I did up there. | ||
| That 10 minutes of nonsense? | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| You know, one time when I was doing open mics, I was doing, you know, I was doing three open mics a night in New York, you know, and I kind of missed that. | ||
| It was like really fun. | ||
| It was like going to the gym, you know, it's like bouncing around, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. | ||
| But, you know, you really get used to it. | ||
| And there was one night, I can't remember why the hell this happened, but my girlfriend and her friend, um, and they're both cartoonists. | ||
| My girlfriend is a, uh, incredible, uh, cartoonist, uh, on, uh, her name's Lisa Hanawalt. | ||
| Um, uh, And so she's funny. | ||
| You know, these are funny people. | ||
| For some reason, they're like, we want to come to the open mic at the Creaking Cave in New York. | ||
| I was like, you do? | ||
| Okay, here we go. | ||
| And they sat there, and they were like, we sat in the front row, and they were like, their hands were like covering their eyes. | ||
| They were like, oh! | ||
|
unidentified
|
I can't believe it. | |
| Every single person. | ||
| What is he doing? | ||
| Why did he say that? | ||
| Oh my god, this person. | ||
| What were they thinking? | ||
| It was just the worst freak show to them. | ||
| And I was like, yeah, I do this every single night. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And it made me really enjoy going to those mics again, because it made me see for the first time, you know, like, it made me fresh again to, like, how fucking weird. | ||
| I miss open mics so much. | ||
| Because it's such a beautiful disaster, right? | ||
| Because you're right, every single person that goes up on an open mic is sweating. | ||
| Basically, they're doing, like... | ||
| They're like endurance training. | ||
| They're doing something that is physically uncomfortable, even socially terrible, and they're bad at it. | ||
| And they're just doing it over and over again until they get used to it so that they can just go up on stage without flop sweating. | ||
| You're just watching a hundred people in a row have panic attacks, basically. | ||
| And people are just being their weird fucking selves. | ||
| And you see a lot of nonsense, and then you see a lot of people where you're like, God damn, that person is... | ||
| There is a core there and they're going to be really fucking funny. | ||
| And I love the fact that I know so many people from those days. | ||
| We've just all grown up together and now they're all writing sitcoms or they're doing... | ||
| You know, I met Michelle Wolfe... | ||
| Our first week doing open mics. | ||
| It was so cool. | ||
| We met, like, I was, like, my second open mic, and it was, like, her third open mic. | ||
| And we saw each other, her and a couple friends, and I was like, you guys are funny, you're funny. | ||
| And she was like, yeah, we're going to this other mic, you want to come? | ||
| Yep, let's go. | ||
| And then I've known her ever since, and then, like, to see her do that White House Correspondents' Dinner was, like, I just felt all that history all at once. | ||
| I was like, this is fucking amazing, you know? | ||
| What did you think when the president was tweeting at her? | ||
| I was like, damn, she got him on the hook. | ||
| I was like, this is the best. | ||
| That's what a comic's supposed to do. | ||
| The way that she pissed people off, that was such a beautiful moment. | ||
| I loved it. | ||
| She was so fucking funny. | ||
| It was great writing, too. | ||
| It was great writing. | ||
| Funny shit. | ||
| Yeah, she wrote it. | ||
| A bunch of our friends from those days, Anthony DeVito, Greg Stone, Dan St. Germain, I believe, helped her write jokes. | ||
| And yeah, they were really funny. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| The crowd didn't want comedy, apparently. | ||
| But they got one of the best comics in the country. | ||
| She's in her prime right now. | ||
| And she fucking tore it up. | ||
| She did her job better than they wanted. | ||
| And they got pissed off about it. | ||
| And it was brilliant. | ||
| Did they really get pissed off? | ||
| Did you forget it was like a three-day news cycle of how much everybody hated her? | ||
| Yeah, but people that were there didn't get pissed off. | ||
| Some of them, they were 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. | ||
| That was so nothing. | ||
| It was nothing. | ||
| It was so nothing. | ||
| And they were talking about, what did they say, the appearance shamed? | ||
| She appearance shamed her? | ||
| What was the word they were looking at? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I forget what it was. | ||
| Listen, she got off light. | ||
| Everybody got off light. | ||
| She was great. | ||
| It was fun. | ||
| People forget when Colbert did that 10 years earlier and he was applauded for it, the people in the room hated that too. | ||
| If you go back and watch that video, he gets no laughs. | ||
| When he's making fun of Bush. | ||
| It's one of the most famous comedy appearances ever, right? | ||
| And he got zero laughs in the room. | ||
| It's dead quiet. | ||
| It's bizarre if you watch it. | ||
| And then a year later, it was like, oh, Colbert, he's the master, he did it, da-da-da. | ||
| That was one of the big moments for comedy getting serious and satire getting serious. | ||
| That was a breakout for him. | ||
| And the political hacks in the room can't take it because they don't... | ||
| I don't know why they book comics because they do not want comedy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And that's why they, I guess they're, you know, they're not going to book comedy anymore. | ||
| But there's an interesting cat, man. | ||
| Yeah, he's a bunch of things rolled up into one because he's a, he's a legitimate Catholic. | ||
| Like, yeah, really Catholic. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Despite all the scandals and kid fucking and all the craziness. | ||
| And then on top of that, he's this character. | ||
| But now he's not the character anymore. | ||
| Now he's like a guy who's not totally playing the character, but the character comes in and out like little shadows. | ||
| Yes, it does. | ||
| It's like, what are you? | ||
| What's your real thoughts on things? | ||
| Because I know you as Colbert. | ||
| I know you from the Colbert Report, this hilarious fake Republican guy. | ||
| And now I'm not sure what's going on here, man. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, he's, well, and when you're in late night, you know, I play a character on my show too, that's like a heightened version of myself that's developed, it's like a very extra nerdy, it's almost like me as Pee Wee Herman a little bit, like it's, or it's me as my younger self, it's like very socially awkward, I'm a little, oh, sorry, like it's a lot of up there, you know, and I'm a little, oh, sorry, like it's a lot of up there, you know, and it's different than | ||
| And, you know, I can only imagine, even though he's still, he's like, his big thing for late night was like, I'm going to be myself, I'm not the character anymore, you still build a little bit of a character for yourself, you know? | ||
| Yeah, well, also with him, it's like, that's what brought him to the dance. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The reason why you're there is like, what kind of meetings did they have with him? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like, what are we going to do here? | ||
| We're going to play this straight? | ||
| Are you going to be Colbert? | ||
| I heard him say once, he only said this in one interview, but he was like, we're basically creating a new character for Late Night. | ||
| And so he had the same writers from the Colbert Report. | ||
| And so he was like, we're sort of like creating a new character. | ||
| How does this character work? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I gotta say, the old show, I mean, he's great. | ||
| The old show was probably the best performance ever made by a single late night comic. | ||
| Because the way that he, when I watch it now, if I go back and watch clips, I'm like, the way he would do, like, three or four fast little turns, you know, in a single line, where it would, like, mean one thing, but there'd be some subtext, then he would flip around and he would do it. | ||
| Like, it was like watching, like, a figure skater do triple axles, you know, like, watching him do that. | ||
| It was really impressive. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| 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. | ||
| I do have to agree. | ||
| I think that's also my prejudice against that format. | ||
| I'm like, you guys just saw what Jack Parr did and kept going. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Totally. | |
| It's the same goddamn thing. | ||
| But I understand why he couldn't do The Colbert. | ||
| He did that show for like 10 years. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| I get it. | ||
| That was a limited thing for him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He had that character, and so he could only do what was in the box, that character. | ||
| And so he's looking to do more, and I get it. | ||
| I also feel like, man, that Colbert Report is more interesting than the Late Night Show to me as a comic and as a comedy writing fan. | ||
| Well, for sure, because the Late Night Shows are just promotion shows. | ||
| That's all they are. | ||
| All they are is, hey, Adam, I hear you have a book out. | ||
| Hey, Mike, tell us about your new show. | ||
| Here's our 10 minutes of comedy before that, and then we do that. | ||
| Yeah, it's basically like a version of a commercial. | ||
| And the nightly thing is a prison, you know, because you can only talk about what happened that day. | ||
| So the smartest thing that, you know, John Oliver, right? | ||
| He was up for The Daily Show. | ||
| He wanted to do The Daily Show. | ||
| He was John Stewart's pick for The Daily Show. | ||
| They said this in the oral history book of The Daily Show. | ||
| And then Comedy Central didn't close the deal with Oliver, and HBO came and said he wanted to do a show instead. | ||
| And Jon Stewart was like, alright, go with God, and that's what Jon Oliver did instead. | ||
| So we're living in that alternate reality from Jon Oliver hosting The Daily Show. | ||
| And so the smartest thing Oliver did was do weekly and not daily, because it lets him go wider. | ||
| If he was doing daily, he would have to just talk about what happened that day. | ||
| You don't have that much. | ||
| Guess what? | ||
| You can't have... | ||
| As much of a complete thought in 24 hours, or in realistically the six hours you have between when you show up and when you tape the show, right? | ||
| You can't say as much. | ||
| It's harder. | ||
| And so being on that weekly schedule, and he's only doing 30-something shows a year, right, because they have hiatuses, that's what allows them to have those big, long, complete thoughts that everyone likes so much, you know? | ||
| Yes, his rants and his intelligent takes on news issues and pointing out hypocrisy. | ||
| Yeah, it's great. | ||
| Our show, it takes us three or four months to write an episode. | ||
| We're writing 16 at once, but that's how long we have to think about it. | ||
| And so we're able to take twists and turns. | ||
| We go into it thinking this is going to be our angle, and then we're diving into the research. | ||
| We have a wonderful research staff, and they say, actually, this is the more interesting part of the story. | ||
| And then we have the time to go chase it that way instead. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Do you ever feel time constraints in terms of the subject matter? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Totally. | |
| The subject matter is very involved? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, we try to do the most difficult topics we can. | ||
| We don't hold back from anything. | ||
| But the only constraint that we have is that the show, we've got 21 minutes, and then... | ||
| We've got commercials, so we can only talk about something for six minutes before we have to move on. | ||
| And so that's the only limitation that we have. | ||
| The network will let us do anything. | ||
| We've been on the network for four years. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, in the case of football, it is killing them. | ||
| They should pay athletes. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| We talk about that all the time. | ||
| I think it is one of the craziest fucking scams in all of money. | ||
| That college sports are... | ||
| It's unbelievable. | ||
| They're making so much money off those kids. | ||
| When you watch those things, every single person's getting paid. | ||
| Everyone. | ||
| Everybody's getting paid. | ||
| Except the best players in the world. | ||
| The guy bringing water to the announcers are getting paid. | ||
| Except for the players, right? | ||
| It's so crazy. | ||
| And the guy who literally... | ||
| I'm blanking on his name. | ||
| But the guy who created the system, right? | ||
| Who like... | ||
| He was like, this is like slavery what I invented, you know, there's no justification for it at all. | ||
| It is bananas. | ||
| We want to do that topic for a college episode. | ||
| We pitch that to true TV. | ||
| You know what airs on true TV every March, March Madness. | ||
| March Madness. | ||
| And they said no? | ||
| They said, and here's how I live with myself. | ||
| I say, look, I will never take a no until it's the only absolute answer I can get. | ||
| So they said no. | ||
| I say, I really want to do it. | ||
| Tell me no again. | ||
| They told me no again. | ||
| I was like, if the president of the network tells me no, then I'm not doing it. | ||
| And the president of the network told me no. | ||
| Because that's the guy who, I could write it and he could kill the episode. | ||
| Yeah, but why? | ||
| It's true! | ||
| It doesn't mean that you shouldn't have NCAA on your network. | ||
| They're worried about pissing off, not just the NCAA, but... | ||
| Pissing off those money-grubbing thieves. | ||
| I'm with you, man. | ||
| Stealing from those athletic kids. | ||
| I'm with you. | ||
| All these people are paying money to see those fucking kids. | ||
| That shit drives me crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Exploiting of young athletes in college is- It's bonkers. | ||
| It is one of the ones that drives me, because I got into it with Joey Diaz, who explained to me, because Joey used to be a bookie, and he really understands gambling. | ||
| He was explaining to me how much money gets donated to these schools by people who used to go to them. | ||
| He goes, it's insane. | ||
| And most of it is based on the performance that the school has in college sports. | ||
| These people who are, you know, I'm a fucking, you know, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| I went to school there and I'm there till I die. | ||
| Fucking go team. | ||
| These assholes throw shit tons of money and there's thousands of them all throughout history. | ||
| Years and years. | ||
| This guy's been donating for 25 fucking years. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And when the team wins a championship, they give them a bonus doing it even more, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| But who doesn't get the money is the kid, right? | ||
| The fucking people who play the game. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All they have to do is, oh, well, if you get through here, you get an education, and then you get to go to pro sports. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| How many of them make it, especially in football? | ||
| Almost none. | ||
| Almost. | ||
| What are the numbers? | ||
| I wonder what the numbers are. | ||
| Guys who sign up for college football, who make it, first of all, with a body that's functional after four years of 600 fucking pound dudes slamming. | ||
| I guess it's not that big, but... | ||
| They're giant. | ||
| Giant dudes slamming into you, you know, five days a week. | ||
| We did an episode on football and the concussion thing. | ||
| I mean, it's not just concussions, right? | ||
| It's like just the little hits, right? | ||
| It's just the routine tackles. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| What happens every single time you do that, your brain, you got to think of it this way. | ||
| Your brain is riding, your skull is the car, your brain is the passenger. | ||
| Your brain doesn't have a seatbelt. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And even if that doesn't cause a concussion, it causes a little hurt every single time. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It happens in soccer players. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a big issue in soccer players. | ||
| And those kids are hurting themselves, you know? | ||
| So this is what Jamie wrote here. | ||
| In football, out of 73,557 NCAA participants, approximate number who are draft eligible is down to 16,346. | ||
| And now, down to draft picks, it's 256. So 256 out of 73,000 make it to draft picks. | ||
| 1.6% make it from the NCAA to the majors. | ||
| 1.6%. | ||
| Ridiculous. | ||
| From NCAA to major pro. | ||
| 1.6%. | ||
| That is fucking crazy. | ||
| And let's be honest. | ||
| These kids are not getting a full education. | ||
| Look how high baseball is. | ||
| Baseball's almost 10%. | ||
| Way more teams with minors and all that kind of thing. | ||
| Isn't that crazy, though? | ||
| That's wild. | ||
| It's almost 10%. | ||
| That's weird. | ||
| Oh, that's 10% of from draft eligible to drafted, though. | ||
| It's a major pro. | ||
| That's not even the participants, because look, that's 35K, 7K are draft eligible, and then 7 are drafted. | ||
| Right, but look how low the number is in terms of baseball participants versus footballs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's half. | |
| Less than half. | ||
| And yet they have way higher percentage. | ||
| This is our writing process as we look at charts. | ||
| Also, the thing is like with baseball, you don't get hit, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Unless you get hit by a ball, most of the time your injuries are just from running or... | ||
| Sliding and stuff like that. | ||
| Colliding in each other. | ||
| Well, you can get hit in the head with a baseball. | ||
| Yeah, but it's so much safer. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If I had a kid and the kid was thinking, like, baseball, football, or basketball, I'd be like, well, take that football out of the fucking equation. | ||
| You've got two choices. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'd be like, don't do it. | ||
| Just don't do it. | ||
| You're not going to make it. | ||
| The very few people that make it out of there without, like, serious injury, it's like, it's not worth it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just not. | ||
| Especially if you look at that 75,000 number, if you look at for how many kids are playing in the NCAA, now think about how many kids are playing high school football. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I don't know the number, but it's got to be ten times that, right? | ||
| What are you showing us, Jamie? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's cool. | |
| So there's like a big discussion on what should he do. | ||
| It's up to him, obviously, but players like Deion Sanders who have been in both leagues and have done both at the same time, it's like, play baseball. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| I play baseball, man. | ||
| Yeah, well that's better for your life because you're less likely to have brain damage. | ||
| Do you ever talk to a fucking baseball player that's retired? | ||
| It's like talking to a regular person. | ||
| He still wants to be the quarterback though, you know what I mean? | ||
| I mean, it's too bad he can't be a basketball player. | ||
| Those guys clearly have the best of it. | ||
| Like, out of all the major sports, basketball players, because they... | ||
| I don't know about that, because it's a much more grueling schedule physically. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's true. | |
| First of all, you're running and shooting every night. | ||
| You're sprinting. | ||
| You're doing all these different things. | ||
| Baseball is so much more leisurely. | ||
| But the celebrity aspect of basketball is so huge. | ||
| And, like, in baseball, it's not. | ||
| The celebrity aspect of baseball is gigantic. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Isn't it? | ||
| A-Rod and... | ||
| Still, there's five, ten, max ten guys on the court, and if you do anything, camera's right on your face immediately. | ||
| And here's the crazy thing about baseball. | ||
| This was pointed out to me. | ||
| The website Deadspin did this thing where they were pointing out the problem with baseball. | ||
| They went around and they asked people, Hey, what's the most famous baseball player that you could name? | ||
| And people were like Derek Jeter, A-Rod, Big Poppy, Manny Ramirez. | ||
| Retired guys. | ||
| And if you ask people, if they're a baseball fan, they'd say someone from my team. | ||
| Or maybe they'd say Mike Trout. | ||
| Or they'd say one of the guys in the Yankees. | ||
| But there is no A-Rod, Jeter level celebrity right now. | ||
| What happened? | ||
| I don't know exactly. | ||
| Steroids. | ||
| Give him back the steroids. | ||
| It's a goofy game. | ||
| No one's getting hurt. | ||
| What the fuck is the problem? | ||
| We're not talking about fighting. | ||
| We're talking about baseball. | ||
| Give him the steroids. | ||
| The best part about that stupid game is when someone hits the ball. | ||
| Does the steroids make him hit the ball better? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay, well give it to him. | ||
| What the fuck are you guys doing testing for that? | ||
| Performance enhancing drugs, man, are the craziest. | ||
| The debate about that, we've never done this on the show, so I'm not fully boned up. | ||
| I would like to. | ||
| I've thought about it in the past. | ||
| Because the divisions, it's like the rest of the drug war, right? | ||
| The divisions we make between the things that are acceptable and not acceptable are so arbitrary, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So the example I always use is like, okay, why don't we like performance-enhancing drugs? | ||
| Not everyone has access to them, so they're unfair, right? | ||
| They're bad for your health, and we think they're unnatural, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Cheating, too. | ||
| They're cheating. | ||
| Well, those are the reasons why we think they're cheating, right? | ||
| But there's some drugs you can take that aren't cheating. | ||
| Unfair advantage is the reason why it's cheating. | ||
| That's the primary reason. | ||
| So let me give you a counterexample. | ||
| For runners, for endurance athletes. | ||
| I like running. | ||
| I'm a shitty runner, but I like it. | ||
| I think it's a fun sport. | ||
| So I follow it a little bit. | ||
| So runners, endurance, the big thing is how much oxygen your blood can hold. | ||
| If you train at a high altitude, then you can increase that. | ||
| So there are these runners, the American runners. | ||
| They live at a high altitude. | ||
| They live super high up in Colorado or whatever. | ||
| And then when they're not there, they train there all year round. | ||
| They buy a place there. | ||
| And then when they're not there, when they're competing somewhere else, they sleep in a chamber that simulates low altitude. | ||
| How is that not the same thing as taking a performance-enhancing drug? | ||
| It's not illegal to do that. | ||
| It's unnatural. | ||
| It is an unfair advantage because not everybody can afford one of those chambers. | ||
| And I'm not going to say it's bad for your health. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But it's certainly as weird for your body as taking a drug, I would think. | ||
| So why do we draw the line? | ||
| It's not as weird for your body because it's only living at altitude. | ||
| It really just simulates low altitude. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That it's very expensive, and so they do it based on the athlete's biological passport and what they think are changing variables that, you know, for whatever reason, it triggers their interest when they start testing additionally. | ||
| It's a big deal. | ||
| It's a serious drug. | ||
| I mean, it's a serious endurance drug that also has some serious health complications. | ||
| People have died from taking it. | ||
| Young guys in their 20s in yeah cycling have gotten strokes and died from EPO That's shit, but there's no health negative effects of sleeping at altitude. | ||
| It's just can you afford to live there? | ||
| Can you write root your life? | ||
| No if you can't yeah, it's an advantage for that person over you So I'm just saying we have a we have sort of an are like yeah It's sort of an arbitrary where we're drawing the lines is not consistent, you know, and it's kind of a big one though That is a big one. | ||
| In terms of the impact on endurance, it is a big one. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They think that when you train at low altitude, you have more output. | ||
| So you're putting in more repetitions because you get more oxygen, so you have more work. | ||
| And then you get the same effect by living at altitude. | ||
| So you get up there and sleep and you don't have to train up there. | ||
| And if you train up there, it's actually slightly less valuable than training at low altitude and staying up there. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| Because whenever I'm 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. | ||
| That's not true. | ||
| That really fucks with me. | ||
| Well, you just ruined something for me. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, it's work. | |
| It's work, and it will help you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But if you are an athlete, like athletes are literally working for one or two percent of an advantage occasionally. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| On many occasions. | ||
| When you are living at high altitude and training at sea level, they think that that gives you a slight advantage because you can put more work in. | ||
| Especially for fighters, they think that skill work and repetitions and drilling is one of the most important aspects of it, and you can just simply get in more repetitions and get in more drills. | ||
| Again, though, you're right, because this is sort of a performance-enhancing thing. | ||
| You're not just living and just being yourself and then showing up and competing. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Here's the weird thing. | ||
| There's this weird idea in sports. | ||
| You know a shitload more about athletics than I do. | ||
| It's not my real forte. | ||
| But I do enjoy. | ||
| And the thing that's always weird to me is that we have this idea that there's some kind of level playing field. | ||
| There's this baseline human that we can just say, well, you've got to be at the baseline, right? | ||
| And humans are so variable, you're always going to find these weird cases. | ||
| And when you try to adjudicate, it gets really weird. | ||
| Do you know about Castor Semenya? | ||
| Do you know who she is? | ||
| No. | ||
| Oh, no, I do know. | ||
| Tell the story. | ||
| This story pisses me off so much. | ||
| So she's a marathoner. | ||
| She's not a marathoner. | ||
| She's a middle distance runner. | ||
| I believe she's South African. | ||
| She's like the best in the world at the 200 meters. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Best in the world. | ||
| This is like an Olympics, not qualifier, but it's like the Olympics caliber athletes. | ||
| Saw her. | ||
| She's incredible. | ||
| Just... | ||
| One of the best in the world. | ||
| Her whole life has faced accusations that she's a man, basically, because she has an elevated level of testosterone. | ||
| This is her natural body. | ||
| 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. | ||
| What are they going to do? | ||
| Like a sex check? | ||
| They want to look at her genitals? | ||
| Well, here's the weird thing, man, is that, yeah, they want to look at her genitals, first of all, which is humiliating to have that happen if you're an athlete. | ||
| How many people have to be in the room? | ||
| Are they going to take a picture? | ||
| This is the problem, right? | ||
| How do you adjudicate that, right? | ||
| And also, there's such a thing, I don't know anything about her personal situation, right? | ||
| There's such a thing as intersex people, right? | ||
| Where when you look at their genitals, you can't tell. | ||
| It's not like, hey, just look at their junk and you can tell, right? | ||
| This is a real phenomenon. | ||
| Like, 1% of people are intersex, right? | ||
| Is it really that high? | ||
| I was speaking off the top of my head, but it's higher than you think. | ||
| It's a non-zero number of people, right? | ||
| Intersex people are a real thing. | ||
| Yeah, it's a real thing. | ||
| So she got past that, right? | ||
| They stopped challenging whether she was a man or a woman. | ||
| They did a chromosome test on her. | ||
| I think you might be right, yeah. | ||
| But so she's had a deal with that. | ||
| That's not fair, right? | ||
| Well, she's just an outlier. | ||
| She's a physical outlier. | ||
| She's a physical outlier. | ||
| And now the IAAF, which is the organization that runs all – it's like FIFA for track, right? | ||
| They run all track. | ||
| They have tried to put forward a rule. | ||
| I don't know what the status is right now because it's being challenged. | ||
| But they've tried to put forward a rule that says if you have a testosterone level over a certain amount, you have to take a hormone changing drug to change your hormones. | ||
| And she's going to fall under that. | ||
| And so they literally want to change the body that she was born with because they're saying your body is unfair to her. | ||
| How fucked up is that? | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| It's really, really fucked up. | ||
| And so the thing is, when we make those decisions about what's fair and what's not fair, there's no baseline human. | ||
| It's always a value judgment, and when we're excluding some people, we always need to look at that and say, are we discriminating? | ||
| They're definitely discriminating against gastrosomania. | ||
| And is this the IOC that's doing this? | ||
| 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? | ||
| Olympic policy is the Olympics is fucked up we do a whole episode on the Olympics the Olympics is fucked up in a lot of ways too it's another dirty dirty dirty business oh incredibly billions of dollars off those athletes who work for free we had this dude on a shot put guy who uh gold medalist in the shot put he was like the year I had a gold medal I was not able to pay my bills you know um and he is literally trying to like unionize the athletes which is very hard right Because there's new athletes every four years. | ||
| But yeah, those athletes are not paid. | ||
| Plus, no one's going to listen to the guy who throws the heavy rock. | ||
| What do you do, dude? | ||
| Did you win the 100 meters? | ||
| Yeah, I got a gold medal for the hockey team. | ||
| Do you hook a cannonball? | ||
| Oh, you throw a rock. | ||
| Weird that you can't make a living throwing rocks, dude. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| It's fucked up, though, because people watch those sports, you know? | ||
| The most fucked up thing is when they let the NBA play. | ||
| When they let the NBA play against those fucking poor Eastern Bloc nations, and you've got these fucking, you know, super athletes who are professional American basketball players. | ||
| For the biggest ones, Michael Phelps can get a sponsorship, right? | ||
| For the biggest ones. | ||
| For the biggest ones. | ||
| But the lower ones can't get sponsorships, and the shot put people can't get sponsorships. | ||
| And they're also not even allowed to promote themselves using the Olympics. | ||
| They can't be like, hey, pizza place, I'll be an Olympic athlete, me, at the pizza place. | ||
| Because if they use the word Olympics, the IOC will sue them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jeez. | |
| Jesus. | ||
| So, yeah, it's... | ||
| Dirty people. | ||
| It's really, really, really not fair. | ||
| But it's so prestigious. | ||
| If you can win a gold medal in the Olympics, I mean, you basically can... | ||
| You have a fitness career for a life. | ||
| Yeah, but, well, you could... | ||
| If you can figure it out. | ||
| You could be a high school coach for the rest of your life. | ||
| Depending on the sport. | ||
| Depending on the sport, right? | ||
| Like, shot put... | ||
| Shot put, I don't know what your prospects are, right? | ||
| You're fucked, bro. | ||
| You're throwing rocks. | ||
|
unidentified
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Should have picked something that people enjoy watching. | |
| I like track and field, which sucks because it's one of the dirtiest of all the sports, but it's my favorite one to watch. | ||
| But why is that a part of track and field, the rock-throwing part? | ||
| Just history, I guess. | ||
| Where's that track or field? | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| Are you a human catapult? | ||
| Are you the dude that they put on the top of the bridge to throw rocks? | ||
| I like the sports where someone has to ride a horse, then shoot a gun, then go for a swim. | ||
| Old timey shit. | ||
| Yeah, there's some stupid fucking sports in the Olympics. | ||
| Sorry, my Canadian friends, but curling. | ||
| Curling's the top of the heap. | ||
| Curling's getting bigger and bigger every year. | ||
| This shit's preposterous. | ||
| They don't have jiu-jitsu in the Olympics. | ||
| They don't? | ||
| No. | ||
| Okay, that's fucked up. | ||
| 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. | ||
| He's like, I bet I could do it. | ||
| I bet he could do it for sure. | ||
| They're having a tough time, actually. | ||
| Fuck that they are. | ||
| They're drunk. | ||
| They're not even trying. | ||
| It's just that the systems we use to organize these things are so important. | ||
| Here's a really good example of this. | ||
| I thought this was fascinating. | ||
| India, a country of over a billion people, a huge number of people, has almost no Olympic athletes. | ||
| Didn't they have wrestlers? | ||
| Didn't they have wrestlers? | ||
| 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. | ||
| And he wanted an air pistol, which is like a shooting. | ||
| That's my shit. | ||
| Oh yeah? | ||
| No. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I've never heard of it before, right? | ||
| He's into air pistols. | ||
| Turns out he's independently wealthy and had just practiced and practiced and practiced, right? | ||
| What they don't have is India is – it's a great country. | ||
| It's not a very organized country. | ||
| They don't have a lot of infrastructure in terms of, you know, we've got teams, right? | ||
| Whereas in the U.S., we devote tons of money, government money, private money to, like, you know, the swimming, U.S. swimming, billions of dollars, people training, science, da-da-da-da. | ||
| In India, they don't have that, right? | ||
| So despite the fact that they have – So many people. | ||
| They got a billion people. | ||
| They must have every type... | ||
| They must have one of the world's strongest people. | ||
| They must have one of the world's fastest people because they got a billion people, right? | ||
| What they don't have is that training infrastructure, right? | ||
| So if you look at it that way, you're like, okay, hold on a second. | ||
| We don't like performance-enhancing drugs because unearned unfair advantage. | ||
| Well, what else is training infrastructure than an unfair advantage? | ||
| If you're born in the U.S., you have a way better chance of making it to the Olympics and becoming that greatest athlete in the world than someone in India. | ||
| How is that fair? | ||
| How is that not an unfair advantage, you know? | ||
| That's true, but... | ||
| To play devil's advocate, if you are a state-sponsored athlete from Russia or China, you have a much better advantage than you do if you're an American and you're some shot-put dude who doesn't have a way to make a living to pay your bills while you're working for the Olympics. | ||
| You totally do. | ||
| So my point is, there's no baseline human. | ||
| There's no way to eliminate all advantages and just say, oh no, it's just what you were born with. | ||
| It doesn't exist. | ||
| There's no such thing. | ||
| Those women who are running with that... | ||
| I'm sorry, what's her name again? | ||
| Casterson. | ||
| Caster Semenya. | ||
| Caster Semenya. | ||
| Those women who are running with her, they just, shit happens, bro. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This is what's going on, and some people are just, they just have advantages. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They just have advantages physically, mentally, and there's outliers. | ||
|
unidentified
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You found it. | |
| Sorry, you got an outlier. | ||
| Might want to do something else. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Or find out what races that lady's going to run and don't run those races. | ||
| Yeah, run a different race. | ||
| That's always been my advice. | ||
| How do you feel about trans athletes? | ||
| You know, it's a good question. | ||
| I think we're really going to go through a cultural change on how we think about that. | ||
| It's morphing so quickly. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I think that's what we should do. | ||
| And that, to me, is like... | ||
| That's what makes me like sports more, you know, is those comparisons. | ||
| Like, you know, another thing that pissed me off so much was like, fuck, what's his name? | ||
| The disabled runner who then killed his girlfriend. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Oscar Pistorius. | ||
| And people were saying about this guy that his prosthetic gave him an advantage. | ||
| Now, first of all, there's no fucking way that's true because he doesn't have muscles. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Muscles convert food into... | ||
| Yeah, but I actually think it does give you an advantage. | ||
| You do think so? | ||
| Yeah, I think mechanically it does, because they're springs. | ||
| Essentially, the way his leg works with those things is, you've seen them, right? | ||
| They don't even look remotely like feet. | ||
| No, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I've seen them, yeah, the cheetah things, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's a crazy, like... | ||
| But dude, the... | ||
| Seesaw type thing. | ||
| But hold on a second, that's not an advantage, because how mechanics work, right, is that a spring, you put energy into it, and you get a little bit less energy out. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Because that's the laws of thermodynamics, right? | ||
| You can't get more out than you put in. | ||
| Except a muscle does give you more than you put in because a muscle converts food into energy for a brief period, right? | ||
| And so he doesn't have springs. | ||
| He doesn't have a machine in his leg the way the rest of us do that creates force out of food. | ||
| Well, the real question is whether or not the lower half of his legs, which is what he's missing, could make up for the advantage, the mechanical advantage of the shape of those things, which applies all sorts of really unusual leverage when you're running. | ||
| It's totally... | ||
| I don't know if it's... | ||
| I mean, I don't know if you took him with full legs and took him with those things, if they'd run the same amount of time. | ||
| But the thing is... | ||
| You can run fast as fuck with those things. | ||
| You've seen those guys, right? | ||
| Well, he could, right? | ||
| But where's all the other double amputees who are like, you know, coming and ruining track and field? | ||
| How many of them are trying to? | ||
| I mean, the Paralympics is huge. | ||
| There's like a ton of Paralympic athletes, you know, like I've been told that it has a mechanical advantage by someone who actually should know what they're talking about. | ||
| But I want to I'd like to look it up. | ||
| Do those legs, Pistorius's legs, they I remember reading stuff. | ||
| At the time, from athletic scientists, I forget what it's called, who said that it didn't, right? | ||
| That it didn't? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that's a debate that we could have, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| But the point that I was trying to make was, looking at that Olympics, God, that's a better event with that guy in it. | ||
| I'm so happy he was in it, right? | ||
| I see what you're saying. | ||
| But if it does give you an advantage, there's someone who comes in second place. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, he didn't win. | |
| Well, so the point is, when we make the rules of a game, right? | ||
| And this is the point of our episode about games, which is about the Olympics, actually. | ||
| When we make the rules of a game, we are – there's no such thing as a perfectly fair competition that would be designed by God to be perfect and be perfectly fair, right? | ||
| We're always making choices about what kind of competition we want to have and who we want to allow into it and what sort of outcome we want to have. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Just like in baseball, too many home runs, move the mound up or down. | ||
| You know how they change the rules a little bit because they want more home runs? | ||
| Same thing with track and field. | ||
| We change the rules a little bit to allow this person and not allow this person, right? | ||
| I think that when we're talking about people, we should always try to include more people, not less. | ||
| 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? | ||
| 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. | ||
| But sports with trans athletes who are competing with their gender, that is a sporting world that I'm more interested in. | ||
| And I think we should find a way to make that happen. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's my point of view. | ||
| 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. | ||
| The reason is that males have a physiological advantage over women. | ||
| So in most sports, most physical sports, we do not have males compete with females. | ||
| The question becomes when someone who is male transitions and becomes female, Do those same physiological advantages apply? | ||
| And what is the evidence? | ||
| 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... | ||
| that favor larger people stronger bodies males that transition to females have a significant advantage in their breaking world records so if you're a woman and you're a natural woman and you don't take any extra hormones or male hormones you're not taking steroids or any sort of performance enhancing drugs you're doing your very best to compete and you're at the top of the heap but then someone comes along that was a man for 30 years and decides they're going to be a woman and this has happened And literally transitioned a few months ago | ||
| and competes as a woman and destroys records and dominates you in that sport. | ||
| That's bullshit. | ||
| And that's not competing on a level playing field. | ||
| That's a person who's biologically a male and who is a male for 30 plus years of having testosterone run through their body and affect their tendon strength and affect the shape of their bones and the mechanical advantages of the male hips versus the female hips and then they're competing With smaller people who have been a woman their whole life. | ||
| It's not fair. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Maybe even more so. | ||
| Maybe even more so because you also have... | ||
| There's a bunch of advantages in terms of reaction time that males enjoy. | ||
| It's some significant difference in reaction time between males and even untrained males versus female professional athletes. | ||
| Well, I disagree. | ||
| What do you disagree about? | ||
| Well, my main point being the one that I already made. | ||
| I don't think that there is such a thing as a perfectly level playing field. | ||
| I think we decide what kind of playing field we want to have. | ||
| Sure, but we do make the distinction where we don't allow men to compete in women's divisions. | ||
| And I think that that distinction may be breaking down a bit. | ||
| And I think it may be time to break down that distinction a little bit. | ||
| So you think that males should be able to compete in the women's division of weightlifting? | ||
| No, I don't necessarily. | ||
| But they can if they transition. | ||
| Well, first of all, there's a lot of stuff to break down. | ||
| I'm not an expert on the subject, so it's just sort of off the top of my head. | ||
| One thing is, you're postulating a particular person who decided to transition at the age of 30. Right? | ||
| And they were very big and strong before, right? | ||
| And they decided to transition. | ||
| Now, that is a type of person that exists, right? | ||
| I think over the next, certainly, 30 years, we're going to see, you know, now that people are starting to understand that being trans is just a way that people are, right? | ||
| They're just people who are trans, you know? | ||
| And this is something that we're going to accept and support, right? | ||
| You're seeing folks transition much, much earlier age, you know? | ||
| There's a... | ||
| 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. | ||
| I also know from my trans friends that the effects that the hormones have on your body are really profound. | ||
| Really, really profound. | ||
| We're not... | ||
| To a surprising degree. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so, you know, I have look if the question is, how does you know, how does a person who starts taking hormones at a particular age? | ||
| Right. | ||
| How does their body change and how does that affect vis-a-vis athletic performance? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| know we're in such new territory here right we certainly are and we particularly we just scratched upon the idea of kids transitioning at a very early age i mean there's been more scientific evidence at points that if kids don't do that than when they wanted to be trans at an early age they just become gay men and that there's nothing wrong with that either um there's no reason to give kids hormones and there's no reason to decide before a person's frontal lobe is completely completely fully developed which doesn't even take place till like 25 | ||
| People don't know who they are. | ||
| A seven-year-old, you won't even... | ||
| People don't even give their seven-year-old phones. | ||
| You don't let them vote. | ||
| You're going to let them decide what sex they're going to be for the rest of their life? | ||
| The research that I've seen, and again, I'm not an expert on this, and I'd love to... | ||
| This is a conversation, this is something I'd love to talk about on our show, and I'd specifically love, you know, this is before, this is the kind of topic where I really want to make sure that I know the research and that I'm, you know, also speaking to trans folks, you know, in this conversation. | ||
| But so to touch on just what I've, you know, my own experience and what I've, the research I've seen, the research I've seen is that trans kids from a young age, they are incredibly consistent in their, you know, when they're expressing their gender identity. | ||
| Okay, but that's a big generalization. | ||
| You're talking about a lot of human beings. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| But that fits this narrative by saying they're incredibly consistent. | ||
| But if you polled these people, like, what are you talking about? | ||
| I mean, that's, look, I don't have the research in front of me that I saw, so I can't, like, go into the details on it. | ||
| But, like, yeah, it was, I mean, it was, you know, it was research that was surveying and tracking, like, trans kids who declared their identity from a young age. | ||
| The answer was, generally, no, it really didn't. | ||
| And, you know, I have a friend who has a trans kid. | ||
| I don't know the kid's exact age, but, you know, in the age range that we're talking about. | ||
| And, you know, he's explained that, like, well, you know, my child from a very young age consistently, like, said, I am a girl, like, and has never contradicted themselves, never changed their mind. | ||
| And so the humane thing and the thing that he felt was going to do as a parent was to, like, embrace that choice on his child's part, right? | ||
| Embrace that choice meaning hormonally... | ||
| I shouldn't even phrase it as a choice, like embrace that identity. | ||
| But it is a choice, right? | ||
| I mean, if you're choosing to add hormones to a child's body, that's a choice. | ||
| It's a choice on the part of the parent. | ||
| It's not a choice on the part of the child. | ||
| In the same way that being gay isn't a choice. | ||
| 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? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because... | |
| I'm sorry, can you expand on the question? | ||
| It's a simple question. | ||
| If you say that the child thinks it's a girl, so you're going to give the child hormones. | ||
| If the child thinks it's a girl, let it be a girl. | ||
| Why are you adding hormones? | ||
| If you're shooting hormones into a child, and you're affecting the child's development, you're saying that's not a choice. | ||
| That's nonsense. | ||
| Of course it's a choice. | ||
| You're choosing to chemically... | ||
| Change this child's body. | ||
| You're choosing to inject things into this child's body on a regular basis that are going to radically affect the physical development of their body. | ||
| And you're saying that this isn't a choice. | ||
| Well, it's definitely a choice to do that. | ||
| So what trans people express... | ||
| And again, I'm not an expert. | ||
| This is from me talking to my trans friends and, you know, seeing what other trans folks say. | ||
| Is that the, you know, experience of being trans and not receiving hormones, right? | ||
| And not having the body that you identify with. | ||
| The feeling of dysphoria, right? | ||
| is extremely painful and is a condition unto itself. | ||
| And the feeling of not belonging with the body that you have, of that mismatch, that seems to be in the broad variety of humanity, the way that some people are born, where their inner self, the self that they are, they're like, I am a, they're not thinking the self that they are, they're like, I am a, they're not thinking they are a woman, they're like, this is the person Doesn't match the body that they have. | ||
| And that gives them extreme distress. | ||
| And that leads to suicide. | ||
| That leads to other damaging behaviors. | ||
| And the best treatment for that, that we know exists, is to do gender confirmation via hormones. | ||
| And you know that that doesn't affect the suicide rate. | ||
| The suicide rate for trans people is very high, post-op and pre-op. | ||
| It really doesn't get affected by whether or not you treat them. | ||
| Well, the operation, you know, one misconception is... | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| Is that because they're not accepted by society and we're not more loving? | ||
| Could it be underlying issues that are causing them to feel this way in the first place? | ||
| Like, what is it? | ||
| We don't know, and I'm sure it varies widely. | ||
| Look, so all I can do is defer to the experts that I know about this, right? | ||
| So, you know, for instance, there's an author named Bryn Tannehill, who's a former military helicopter pilot. | ||
| I just interviewed her for my new podcast that's coming out soon called Factually. | ||
| I'm doing it on Earwolf, and it's like a long-form interview podcast. | ||
| And so she's one of the people who's affected by the Trump... | ||
| ban on trans service people you know so that's why she's trans because she's trans yeah and she wrote a fantastic book called everything you need to know about trans that like she's a she is now a researcher right and she went into really deep detail about like here is all of the medical science here is all of here's all the science about it and so at this point in the conversation I would say hey man I just got a bone up on you know on that because I don't want to speak to suicide rates My entire concern is with children. | ||
| My concern is not with young adults deciding to take steps to confirm their gender identity, who they feel they really are. | ||
| I'm all for you doing whatever you want to do when you're an adult, when your mind is formed. | ||
| But people change their mind. | ||
| They change their opinion. | ||
| They change their thoughts. | ||
| There's nothing wrong with just deciding to be a gay man. | ||
| There's nothing wrong with your body... | ||
| As you grow and mature and develop, you're growing out of these ideas. | ||
| Some will and some won't. | ||
| And the ones who won't, they always have the option to do something later on in life. | ||
| But if you do something to hormonally block a child very early on, there's no turning back from that. | ||
| Well, let me say a few things to that. | ||
| First of all, it's not wrong to be concerned about children. | ||
| And there's a reason this is the most intense part of this conversation. | ||
| And I think it's correct, right? | ||
| Because we're all very concerned about children, right? | ||
| But I do want to say, first of all, I don't think it's correct that trans people, if they don't receive hormones from a young age, they simply become gay men. | ||
| It happens very often. | ||
| I know trans people. | ||
| See if you can find that, because there was a big article that was written about that recently, where they were talking about whether or not gender confirmation surgery and hormone blockers on young children is ethical because of this fact. | ||
| And this was what they were talking about, where people at one point in time wanted to be trans, and they listed several famous examples. | ||
| And then as they became older, just decided to be gay, including women who wanted to be men, who just became gay women. | ||
| And I think, what's that girl's name that was in John Wick, Ruby Rose? | ||
| She was one of those. | ||
| She wanted to be trans when she was younger, and now she's just a gay woman. | ||
| So, look, I know quite a few trans folks, right? | ||
| 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? | ||
| I know quite a few trans women who were straight men, right? | ||
| Or who, you know, lived their lives as, presented as straight men, right? | ||
| And then transitioned, right? | ||
| And often become lesbians. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that's one of the ways that people can be. | ||
| I really recommend that... | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| My life would be so much better. | ||
| And I'm not going to argue with those folks, you know? | ||
| I wouldn't argue with those folks either, but you have to address the fact that there are people that have gone through transition surgery and said, I wish to God that I never did this. | ||
| There's a lot of those people too. | ||
| So if you're looking for anecdotal evidence and you want to be objective, you kind of have to look at both sides of it. | ||
| I'm 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. | ||
| Which sets of these folks are the outliers? | ||
| I think the folks that you're talking about are probably the outliers, but I can't confirm that. | ||
| All surgeries have potential costs, however, according to a Swedish study of 324 patients, 41% of whom were born female. | ||
| Surgery was associated with considerably higher risk for mortality, suicidal behavior, and psychiatric morbidity than the general population. | ||
| So that's people who got the surgery. | ||
| I am... | ||
| I'm curious. | ||
| Wait, 3.41% of them. | ||
| I mean, the devil of this is in the details, right? | ||
| Because how much is the higher risk? | ||
| What does it mean 3.1% of them who are born female? | ||
| Well, some of them were born female and the other ones were born male. | ||
| The males that transition to females is what it's saying. | ||
| It's only saying a small percentage of them were born female that transitioned to male, but the larger percentage was males who transitioned to female and that the surgery that they received was associated with considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behavior, and psychiatric morbidity than the general population. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So that's not healing them. | ||
| That's saying that having that surgery is associated with higher risk of mortality, suicidal behavior, and psychiatric morbidity. | ||
| But it also says above, following surgery, patients report lower gender dysphoria and improved sexual relationships. | ||
| Right before they kill themselves, everything's awesome? | ||
| Well, this isn't saying that people are killing themselves. | ||
| You're looking for something that confirms a previously established... | ||
| And as are you. | ||
| We should always be careful of drawing too much from a single study and look at it widely, right? | ||
| What was the point I was about to make? | ||
| It fled my head. | ||
| I'm sort of at the, oh, here's what it was. | ||
| Surgery, another thing I know from speaking with trans folks is that surgery is overemphasized, right? | ||
| 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? | ||
| And really it's more about what are you living as and what sort of set of hormones do you have, right? | ||
| But I would really... | ||
| I've sort of reached the limit of my facility with this topic. | ||
| I really want to shout out videos made by a friend of mine. | ||
| Her videos are called ContraPoints. | ||
| Her name's Natalie Nguyen. | ||
| She's a former philosopher, former philosophy PhD. | ||
| And she does these incredibly funny videos about... | ||
| Not just about transitions, about all types of things. | ||
| She had a really great one about comedy recently. | ||
| But she really breaks down like a lot of these, a lot of misconceptions, right? | ||
| And has really changed. | ||
| Every time I watch one of her videos, I'm like learning new things and like new ideas are like pop, pop, pop in my head, you know? | ||
| And I think you should check them out. | ||
| You might enjoy talking to her on the show. | ||
| She's like a really fascinating person. | ||
| ContraPoints. | ||
| It's an incredibly complex subject. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| I've had Buck Angel on the podcast before who transitioned from female to male, which is also a different and interesting thing. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It didn't make sense. | ||
| And then once he transitioned to being a male, then he felt complete. | ||
| I don't deny that. | ||
| My entire concern is that you're making decisions for children and that this is a completely new thing with no historical precedent. | ||
| We've never done this before. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I feel like if a child thinks they're a girl, Let them live as a girl. | ||
| But you don't have to hormonally engage with their body with chemicals. | ||
| It just seems crazy. | ||
| It seems ill-advised. | ||
| It seems like this movement of acceptance and progressive thinking in many ways is a fantastic thing. | ||
| It's a fantastic movement. | ||
| But this seems to me to be a leap, and that you're making this leap to confirm your ideology, and to confirm that you're 100% cool with trans people, and you're 100% cool, and you're going to recognize this child is trans. | ||
| But you're doing something to this child's body that you can't turn around. | ||
| And if this child decides at... | ||
| Whatever age we decide that you can make rational decisions to transition as trans, let them fully develop first. | ||
| Let them be a person. | ||
| Let them make these decisions. | ||
| If you want to identify as a woman and you want to keep your penis, that should be fine too. | ||
| There's nothing wrong with that. | ||
| If you want to keep a functional penis, you want to identify as a woman and not even take hormones. | ||
| Who cares? | ||
| Do that. | ||
| Do that. | ||
| But when you're stepping in to a developing baby that's only been alive for six years, and you're shooting chemicals into its body to change the way it develops, show me the research. | ||
| 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. | ||
| What evidence do we know? | ||
| What evidence do we have that this is a powerful, absolute, intelligent, smart way to handle a child's life over the long term? | ||
| 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. | ||
| There's nothing like that. | ||
| But yet people are jumping into it because it seems like the thing to do. | ||
| Because it seems like the tide of society is moving in that direction. | ||
| Well, I don't jump into it for that reason. | ||
| I do think that when we're talking about an issue that affects those people, right, the first thing we should do is listen to those people. | ||
| Listen to the children. | ||
| Listen to the children and listen to the adults, right, who said, I used to be that child. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But they are not that child. | ||
| And, you know, to you said, look, everyone's different. | ||
| So for them to say, I was that child, that's nonsense. | ||
| You were a similar child in a similar situation. | ||
| You were not that child. | ||
| They're not literally saying they're that child. | ||
| But they don't know how that child is feeling. | ||
| They don't know how much that child's being influenced by its environment. | ||
| They don't know how much their thoughts and their expressions are being encouraged by their parents. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So, my point is, when you and I are talking about this right now, we're speaking pretty hypothetically, right? | ||
| We're talking about a child that is not in the room that we don't have. | ||
| We're talking about a fictional child, right? | ||
| So, what we really care about are the actual people. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And when we talk to the actual trans folks, right, and talk to, you know, say, hey, what do you think? | ||
| You know, how do you feel? | ||
| And, you know, include them in the conversation. | ||
| I think we have a different conversation about it, you know? | ||
| We do have a different conversation, but we also have a different conversation. | ||
| We talk to people that have regret from transition surgery, because there's a lot of those. | ||
| Sure, but we're not, we don't have either of those folks in the room. | ||
| Right, but we have to acknowledge that they're real as well. | ||
| Yeah, I don't... | ||
| I'm not dismissing that those people are real. | ||
| Right, but when we say, if you talk to trans folks, you get this impression. | ||
| That's not necessarily true. | ||
| You get a wide range of impressions. | ||
| I wasn't just... | ||
| I wasn't talking about specifically the impression that... | ||
| I wasn't saying we should reason from anecdotal evidence, right? | ||
| I'm saying that... | ||
| Look, the last conversation I had with a person about this was a trans military veteran who is a researcher who wrote a book on these issues, right? | ||
| 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. | ||
| About children transitioning? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that is my understanding. | ||
| I have not looked at the research myself. | ||
| I don't think there's research that shows the positive benefits of children transitioning. | ||
| I don't think that exists. | ||
| Well, we can't solve that in this conversation right here. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Because I'm not an expert on the subject. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But I can tell you what I have been told exists by people who have made it their business to know, you know? | ||
| So, you know, that would be my next step in the conversation. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| But it's a conversation the world needs to have, for sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think it's one that we will have. | ||
| And, you know, again, just to bring it back to athletics, right? | ||
| 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. | ||
| You know, I don't think there's going to be easy answers to it. | ||
| And we're grappling with it right now. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think the real, the legitimate solution is a trans league or a trans division, to have a male division, a female division, a trans division. | ||
| If you want to compete athletically, that's fair to me. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| Well, I hope that there's, you know, like, say with the, you got the Paralympics, right? | ||
| And the Paralympics is really, like, it's divided. | ||
| Do you know how they do it? | ||
| Where they do, like, they've got all the different levels for you've got this much amputated or you're this mobile and you can compete in this way, you know? | ||
| And so that's really great to make a way that, you know, those folks can compete on as level as a playing field as we can be, you know, given the manifold variations in human bodies, right? | ||
| But the fact that Oscar Pistorius, which, by the way, we should bring up again, he killed his girlfriend. | ||
| Oh! | ||
| Which is a very weird part of the story. | ||
| He said he thought she was a robber, right? | ||
| Bizarre. | ||
| Completely bizarre. | ||
| But the fact that he was able to compete in the Olympics, right? | ||
| Not just in the Paralympics. | ||
| I think it's such a wonderful thing, you know? | ||
| And so I would hope that whatever organization we come up with, you know, allows for humans in all their variations to compete in the main league as well. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| I disagree. | ||
| Because I think if they come up with bionic legs like Steve Austin from The Six Million Dollar Man, dude, there's some people out there that'll cut their fucking legs off to run faster, and that's real. | ||
| There are people that want to win so bad, they would cut the bottom of their legs off to get bionic prosthesis. | ||
| They would. | ||
| Really? | ||
| For sure. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| Would you? | ||
| No, I wouldn't, but I'm not crazy. | ||
| Look, this There's people that amputate their hands just because they are... | ||
| It's a little bit... | ||
| Do you know that people have that feeling that they're supposed to be disabled? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So they amputate their hands? | ||
|
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Yes. | |
| There's people with all sorts of psychological disorders, but the need to win is so insanely strong in some people. | ||
| And if they found out that, hey man, who gives a fuck about your feet and your calves, man? | ||
| They're going to look just like feet and calves, except they allow you to run 45 miles an hour. | ||
| You don't think people would do it? | ||
| Isn't that a little similar to the argument where people say, Oh, trans bathrooms, it's just so men are just going to lie about it so they can go in the bathroom and peep at women. | ||
| And then when you actually expand that, right, and you're like, hold on a second, you're telling me a dude is going to tell the entire world, I am 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? | ||
| They're going to, one of the most stigmatized type of people you can be in America today as a trans person. | ||
| They're going to live with that stigma, they're going to change their whole lives, and they're going to do all of that just so they can peep at women in the bathroom? | ||
| That doesn't make any sense. | ||
| Highly unlikely, and it doesn't make any sense. | ||
| But it also, that's not entirely what could happen. | ||
| What also could happen is you could get some creep who dresses up like a woman and goes to the women's bathroom. | ||
| You can get that. | ||
| I mean, I'm all for trans people. | ||
| Listen, but it can happen now. | ||
| But if you have a bathroom that allows trans people and you get some creep who says, I'm just going to pretend to be trans, if you don't think that's real, then you're crazy. | ||
| Of course people do that. | ||
| Of course there's... | ||
| And people have been arrested. | ||
| There's not a... | ||
| No, no, no, there is. | ||
| 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. | ||
| There's already been arrests. | ||
| But it's not because... | ||
| But Lisa, these aren't trans people. | ||
| But here's the thing, they're not trans people. | ||
| People that are taking advantage of a loophole, and they're creeps. | ||
| And they probably wanted to go into the female bathroom anyway, but they just couldn't do it before. | ||
| And now that there's trans-inclusive bathrooms, some creeps have been arrested doing that. | ||
| They're not trans people. | ||
| The real problem is the creeps. | ||
| The real problem is not the trans people using the women's room. | ||
| They should, of course, be able to use the women's room. | ||
| Yeah, but the creeps can go, like, you don't need a law for it. | ||
| So, if they're not trans people, right, they are not supposed to be in the bathroom, right? | ||
| Right, they're pretending to be trans people, and this is what people are worried about. | ||
| They have arrested people doing that. | ||
| But so they could also do that even if it was not a gender-inclusive bathroom, right? | ||
| Because they would be breaking the rules of the bathroom in exactly the same way. | ||
| But everybody would know that they're a man in a dress versus them being trans. | ||
| See, if you see a trans person, oftentimes trans people look very masculine. | ||
| There's no need, if you're just going to pretend to be trans, there's no need to hide. | ||
| What we have to ask ourselves is if the... | ||
| Hypothetical, or if the extremely, extremely rare situation that you're discussing, right, is so horrifying to us and such a big problem that it's worth disenfranchising millions of people from the ability to simply go to the bathroom when they need to, you know? | ||
| Extreme edge case or hypothetical case. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And I don't think I don't think it is. | ||
| We can talk about that one edge case all day long. | ||
| I don't think it's just one. | ||
| There's been more than one case, but I think... | ||
| Here's the question. | ||
| What are there more of? | ||
| Are there more trans people or are there more sexual predators? | ||
| 100% more trans people than sexual predators who are specifically going to put on a dress in order to go into a bathroom specifically. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, I would agree with that. | ||
| 100% there's more trans people. | ||
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Yeah, I would agree with that. | |
| Like by a factor of a million. | ||
| Well, I don't know about a factor of a million. | ||
| I mean, how many people are trans? | ||
| What's the numbers on that? | ||
| 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. | ||
| I guess she wrote a book that breaks down all these statistics. | ||
| This is such a minefield of a subject. | ||
| You know, as soon as you start bringing this shit up, people go crazy. | ||
| Because it's complicated, and people, they dig their heels in the ground on both sides. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But my basic principle is, man, I just want to defer to the humanity of the people that I'm talking about. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And rather than say, oh, well, here's my idea. | ||
| Here's my concern. | ||
| What about the – what if a space alien were to come down to X, Y, Z? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Rather than try to come up with thought experiments about it. | ||
| It's like, hey, there's some people in America. | ||
| They're making a polite request. | ||
| Can we use the bathroom, please? | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| That's what I default to. | ||
| We've got to just kill the perverts. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| You kill the perverts and you don't have any issues. | ||
| I think there's a way with sports again, right? | ||
| I genuinely think, hey, my default is I understand this problem. | ||
| I understand you're going to have female athletes who say, hey, wait a second, is this fair, right? | ||
| I think we can go forward with good faith and find a way. | ||
| Let's find a model that works for everybody. | ||
| I think we can do it in a way that respects the humanity of the trans athletes and the cis athletes. | ||
| I think that we can do that. | ||
| And that'll always be my... | ||
| I think it's easy to say as an outsider, if you're a female athlete that's being forced to compete with trans women who used to be men for most of their lives, I think you'd have a different opinion. | ||
| Because I think they have a distinct physiological advantage that's been expressed many times. | ||
| I mean, there's a lot of records have been broken by trans women who are now weightlifters. | ||
| And there's that one who's the fucking dirt biker who was a professional dirt bike, professional rider before as a man and then transitioned over to a woman. | ||
| It's just dominating these things. | ||
| It's just, I don't necessarily think it's fair. | ||
| I think just like it's not fair for a man to compete as a woman, I don't think that all those disadvantages, or those advantages rather, go away when you transition. | ||
| Especially in a short time period. | ||
| I just don't think they do. | ||
| And I don't think there's any evidence that shows they do. | ||
| There's a diminishing amount, but how much so? | ||
| And in fact, There's a doctor, a board-certified endocrinologist, Dr. Ramona Krutzik, I think is her name, who did a whole article on this about fighters, about male fighters transitioning to becoming female and competing as female, which has happened. | ||
| And they're saying that not only does the estrogen therapy, it actually preserves bone density. | ||
| It doesn't just turn them into a woman. | ||
| or turn them into female or so their hormonal profile similar to females but also preserves their masculine bone density because one of the reasons why women lose bone density as they get older is a lack of estrogen that's part of the reason why osteoporosis kicks in that they that stops it in its tracks when you're you're injecting female hormones into a male's frame so So they maintain this male bone density. | ||
| Now there's also arguments that African-American female bone density is in many cases similar to white European male bone density. | ||
| So that's the argument about the outliers and about whether or not it's a level playing field, because it most certainly is not. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, so that's where I get back to the idea that, look, could someone show that a trans athlete who wants to compete is going to have a physiological advantage because of their history of transition, right? | ||
| Could that be the case sometimes? | ||
| Probably so. | ||
| How about this? | ||
| Because I actually don't want to know one way or the other because I have not looked at any research on this, so I don't want to make any claim. | ||
| So let's just grant that for the sake of this thought experiment. | ||
| So that being said, let's compare that against every single other advantage that every other competitor could have. | ||
| Socioeconomic advantage, right? | ||
| Country of origin. | ||
| Whether or not they live in Denver or if they live below sea level. | ||
| All those different things, right? | ||
| Is it humane to draw a line around that one unearned advantage against all those other unearned advantages? | ||
| At what point does our fantasy of having a true level playing field end up hurting people? | ||
| End up excluding people? | ||
| And that's the conversation that I think we could have. | ||
| I heard a really great... | ||
| This is just the beginning of a thought, right? | ||
| But it came up just somewhere. | ||
| I was talking to some people about this. | ||
| And in sports, one of the things... | ||
| 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. | ||
| They're optimized for male bodies. | ||
| Basketball, for example. | ||
| How is that optimized for male bodies? | ||
| It's like the height of the basket, you know? | ||
| The way that the ball moves around. | ||
| The way the ball moves around? | ||
| If we're going to say that men and women have physiological differences, right? | ||
| And then we're creating sports, and the sports are sort of tuned to the physiological differences of men rather than women. | ||
| I think we're splitting hairs here. | ||
| We're talking about power, speed... | ||
| Athleticism, all those, there's an advantage that males enjoy. | ||
| Okay, so when you look at, say, gymnastics, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I would say that, like, women, for the events that are in a women's gymnastic competition, right, have an advantage over men, right? | ||
| They're lighter. | ||
| Women don't compete on the ring hold thing, you know what I mean, right? | ||
| Men don't compete at some of that crazy, you know, bar shit, you know what I mean? | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's larger. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| It's height. | ||
| It's flexibility. | ||
| It's like there's a lot going on, right? | ||
| So that's a rare case where women's gymnastics, we've actually created events in that and like competitions that like only women can do, right? | ||
| And so we sort of optimize that sport more for a female body. | ||
| What if we did that with a lot more sports? | ||
| And how about this? | ||
| What if we were able to... | ||
| Because again, the rules of the game are not absolute. | ||
| The rules of the game are things that humans create. | ||
| And so why do we... | ||
| 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. | ||
| That sounds ridiculous. | ||
| First of all, The reason why women are good at gymnastics, first of all, their flexibility, their lightness, all those things. | ||
| Also, they're not competing against men in a one-on-one type of situation. | ||
| One's trying to defend, the other one's trying to attack, like a game of basketball, or a game of football, or any other sort of team sport game. | ||
| I think if you take any male gymnast and try to have them compete against the female gymnast, they're not going to be able to do those things. | ||
| It's a physical event as opposed to a sport. | ||
| So a physical event is you have to do this thing. | ||
| It's very athletic. | ||
| It's an athletic endeavor. | ||
| You do it, you bounce, you land. | ||
| No one's trying to stop you from doing it. | ||
| When you're shooting basketballs, you're not just shooting basketballs. | ||
| You're trying to shoot a basketball while people are trying to defend. | ||
| You're trying to juke left and then go right. | ||
| You're trying to be sneaky. | ||
| You're trying to shoot from the outside. | ||
| There's all this shit going on and a lot of it involves your ability to move fast. | ||
| To close distance, to have the physical strength to leap up in the air. | ||
| There's a huge physical advantage that men enjoy. | ||
| And this is not because the sport's designed this way. | ||
| It's because the sport is very simple. | ||
| There's a basket on one side, a basket on the other side. | ||
| You gotta get it in here. | ||
| They gotta get it in there. | ||
| Ready? | ||
| Go. | ||
| If you're faster and you're stronger, you'll be able to accomplish that better. | ||
| Males are faster and stronger. | ||
| There's a reason why there's a male and a female division. | ||
| It's not that these sports were designed for males. | ||
| It's that men are physically bigger and stronger and faster. | ||
| Physiological advantages. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But that's rare. | ||
| That's the outlier. | ||
| Yeah, I don't think we actually disagree that much. | ||
| The reason it's rare is because historically we've created most of our sports around things that men have the advantage in. | ||
| You're not wrong. | ||
| But sports are, most sports involve speed and power. | ||
| Most sports, men have an advantage in speed and power. | ||
| I know, but we created those sports, right? | ||
| What would we possibly be able to create where women would have an advantage that is an athletic event where a man's speed and power does not give him an advantage? | ||
| I mean, look, man, this is not, again... | ||
| Like I said, this is the beginning of a thought, right? | ||
| I'm trying to use this as a thought experiment as sort of like a possibility opening device, right? | ||
| 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? | ||
| And so, again, I'm thinking this through myself as I'm talking about it, right? | ||
| But... | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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? | ||
| There's also... | ||
| What could it be? | ||
| I mean, well, here's an example. | ||
| For instance, I believe, I'm not sure... | ||
| I'm not 100% sure, but I believe in shooting events, for example, that women and men are on a level playing field, correct? | ||
| Or that air rifle sort of thing. | ||
| There are events, right? | ||
| There do exist athletic events where you can have men and women in direct competition with each other, right? | ||
| Where that event is not designed around a particular facet of a... | ||
| You know, male or female body, right? | ||
| So, my point is, look, men have... | ||
| Do you agree that men have run the country and the world for, like, most of civilization? | ||
| Almost every country. | ||
| Okay, great. | ||
| So, men have been the ones setting up the sports. | ||
| So, the fact that, as you say, it's rare that we have sports that are sort of more designed around a female, you know, the differences between women as opposed to men, right? | ||
| I think that might be because men have been setting up all the sports, right? | ||
| But there's a lot of sports that women gravitate towards. | ||
| How do you mean? | ||
| There's sports that women gravitate towards, that they really enjoy. | ||
| Like women's volleyball, it's huge, right? | ||
| There's many sports that women have traditionally gravitated towards. | ||
| Gymnastics, as you said earlier, is a perfect example. | ||
| There's probably way more women involved in gymnastics than men. | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| But those are the sports that get the less attention, right? | ||
| Gymnastics get huge amounts of attention. | ||
| It sure does. | ||
| It's one of the rare examples of ones where that is a real female-first sport, right? | ||
| You know what one bothers me the most is the volleyball. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| Because the girls have to dress like hoes. | ||
| Even in the Olympics, they wear thongs. | ||
|
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Come back! | |
| Can you imagine if fucking basketball players had a dress like that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's fucked up, man. | ||
| Well, I think they can choose what they're wearing. | ||
| Well, they can. | ||
| The Egyptian team, the Muslim Egyptian team, they dress in traditional garth. | ||
| What's the name of the volleyball player who has the black tape on? | ||
| Very famous. | ||
| You know, the two women from the U.S., they're very famous volleyball players whose names I can't remember. | ||
| They probably aren't complaining about what they're wearing. | ||
| They're probably choosing what they're wearing. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't think anyone's forced them to wear that stuff. | ||
| But I mean, when I tune into Olympic volleyball, I'm like, damn, look at these girls in their underwear pretending they're at the beach. | ||
| They're not even at the beach. | ||
| It's a choice, apparently. | ||
| They want to wear it. | ||
| They want to wear it. | ||
| Good move. | ||
| Okay, but is that a choice for the men basketball players? | ||
| Can they wear thongs? | ||
| They can wear short shorts if they want to. | ||
| Can you imagine if they decided to wear a cutoff with a midriff showing and little booty shorts? | ||
| They might be allowed to if they wanted to. | ||
| Speaking of narrow masculinity, they might get shit in the locker room. | ||
| Maybe not. | ||
| Maybe they make a point. | ||
| I like the short shorts that they used to wear a couple decades ago. | ||
| Larry Bird style? | ||
| You know, one of the things I love about baseball, when I started watching baseball, is you get to choose your own baseball pants. | ||
| You ever notice that? | ||
| Do you? | ||
| When you look at them, some of them wear really tight baseball pants, and some of them wear really baggy baseball pants. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right, show a little swag, but you don't want to impede your performance. | ||
| Do you think the tight would be better as you're running? | ||
| Like, if swimmers shave their bodies to be more aerodynamic, I mean, how much, really, if you're just running to first base, how much does, like, baggy pants, the wind catching the baggy pants, could that be? | ||
| For real. | ||
| Well, you look at, like, Manny Ramirez had, like, the baggiest pants, I remember, and, like, you had to imagine that guy was, like, a little bit suboptimal with his baseball pants, you know? | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Maybe he just had big-ass thighs. | ||
| Maybe you have big ass thighs and they only feel good with baggy pants. | ||
| Let me just put a bow on what I was trying to get at earlier, right? | ||
| Because I know I was sort of like getting to a pretty spacey place. | ||
| My point is just what our show is about so much is about showing how the things that we take for granted in our world, like the way the world is, so much of the time is just something that we built, right? | ||
| And we can question it. | ||
| And so when we say men have advantages in women over sports, I'm like, well, hold on a second. | ||
| Let's look at how we set the sports up. | ||
| And Is it possible that we could set it up in a different way that would allow more people to compete in sports? | ||
| It might not be the same sports. | ||
| I'm not going to say that women should play in the NFL against men. | ||
| I don't think that would be safe. | ||
| I don't think anyone should play in the NFL, frankly. | ||
| I think it's way too dangerous. | ||
| It's very bad for people. | ||
| Is it, like, is our assumption just based on, hey, these are the sports that we invented? | ||
| We happen to invent sports that where men have the advantage. | ||
| Can we imagine a world where 90% of sports are ones where women have an advantage or would we be having a different conversation? | ||
| And if that's the case, could we come up with some sports that, like, everybody could, you know, where there's no... | ||
| It would have to be non-physical sports, I think. | ||
| But I think, yeah, you could come up with competitions where women and female... | ||
| Traditional female characteristics would have an advantage. | ||
| For sure you could. | ||
| I mean, it could definitely be done. | ||
| You know, it's just the ones that exist now that involve running and lifting things and moving fast. | ||
| Physiologically, males have an advantage. | ||
| That's why we have these distinctions. | ||
| That's why we have men's divisions and women's divisions. | ||
| Over hundreds and hundreds of years, they go, you know what? | ||
| This is just not fair. | ||
| It's not fair. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know? | ||
| But, you know, I mean, is it the, like, that's the notion of fairness we have now. | ||
| I think the interesting thing about the question of trans athletes is it's going to challenge that notion. | ||
| It's going to lead to conversations like this one. | ||
| I think that's really cool, and that's what I think we should be down to have as a society. | ||
| Talking about things, especially when there's a disagreement, is the only way to solve them. | ||
| But, you know, I think these conversations oftentimes become the shouting matches and I, 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 religion or identities about politics. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I mean, that's why when you were talking about alphas and betas, people are like, why is this show getting political? | ||
| This is how dorky people get. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| There's nothing political about that. | ||
| Yeah, but you think it's political because it represents these rigid ideologies. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| 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 to their national politics into their sex gender politics and everything. | ||
| And it was just like, just the idea of questioning that really set them off, right? | ||
| But what I'm about is questioning all these things. | ||
| 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? | ||
| And I'm always... | ||
| I'm testing what I think I know and trying to sort of undermine it and say, do I know this for sure? | ||
| I mean, dude, on our show, we have done more than one segment. | ||
| We have another one coming out later this year where we go back and we correct our own mistakes. | ||
| We correct the things that we've done wrong on our show. | ||
| What was a big one? | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| A really big one that we have coming out. | ||
| I'll give you a preview. | ||
| We did one about... | ||
| We did a topic about sugar and fat, about how Americans were obsessed with cutting fat, the low-fat craze. | ||
| And a lot of that was... | ||
| There was early research by this one researcher who showed that sugar caused a lot of heart disease and obesity and stuff like that. | ||
| And basically, the sugar lobby shut him down and were sort of funding research that really showed that that was the problem. | ||
| And that research sort of took over and that really led to the sort of anti-fat craze, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| We did a story on that topic. | ||
| We later found out that, like, sort of the way that we had characterized the story of that happening was not accurate, you know, was or does that make sense? | ||
| Like the the narrative part of it, like, it's true. | ||
| This guy's research existed. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's true that the sugar lobby hated it, you know, but the research that showed that fat is bad, you know, that fat causes heart disease as well, it wasn't like totally shitty research and like this sort of narrative isn't the only reason that that other research fell out of favor. | ||
| Does that make sense? | ||
| And so 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. | ||
| A little too simplistic. | ||
| It's more complicated than that. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And that's what happens when you're doing a show that has, you know, six minute segments, right? | ||
| Yeah, that's what I was getting at. | ||
| It's like when we were talking about earlier, like the time constraints on some subjects, like think about how much time we spent just talking about trans people and trans athletes. | ||
| Yeah, a good hour at least. | ||
| Two cis males, you know, talking about something you have no personal experience in. | ||
| And that's one of the reasons we've wanted to do that topic on the show, but we're like, man, we really want to do justice to it, and it's really hard to do in six minutes. | ||
| Well, it's not just that. | ||
| That's why I'm looking to go longer in my career. | ||
| I'm looking to find ways to go longer. | ||
| Well, why can't you do it online? | ||
| Say it's that NCAA thing. | ||
| Doesn't pay as well. | ||
| But do you have a clause in your contract to take some issues that you would like to talk about and that the network wouldn't let you talk about, like NCAA? Couldn't you do your own version of it? | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| I mean, I'd have to find a way to fund it, you know, like... | ||
| You just call it, definitely not Adam Ruins Everything. | ||
| Yeah, I totally could do that. | ||
| Totally different show. | ||
| I mean, so far, I've talked about it here, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I do want to say, by the way, we talk about the thing that... | ||
| We have a very cool network. | ||
| That was the one time they ever killed a topic. | ||
| And what they did allow us to do was, in an episode we have coming out later this year, we talk about, on the show, the fact that they killed that topic. | ||
| And we talked about how... | ||
| You know, we're on advertising-supported TV. Right. | ||
| And occasionally we tear into advertisers, you know, and occasionally we have to have a conversation with the network where the network says, actually Gatorade kind of sponsors the network and you're talking about Gatorade. | ||
| And then we have to have a conversation. | ||
| We still did our Gatorade topic, but we had to have a talk or two, you know. | ||
| Could you say sugary sports drinks? | ||
| We said, okay, all of the sports drinks overemphasize hydration as a problem. | ||
| And so we did a whole segment examining how much does advertising affect the show, right? | ||
| And as a result of the NCAA, we had to kill that segment. | ||
| And the network let us say that on TV. So that was really cool that they allowed us to bring up that conflict on the show. | ||
| But yeah, no, there's nothing stopping me from going on the internet. | ||
| It just so happens that I'm a comic and I had the wonderful opportunity. | ||
| I've always wanted to have my own TV show and I had the wonderful opportunity to create one. | ||
| If I hadn't had that chance four or five years ago, I would probably be on YouTube right now doing hour-long explainer videos with me doing jokes straight to camera. | ||
| And I love folks who do that. | ||
| And maybe I'll find myself doing that again someday. | ||
| But right now I'm just too busy making... | ||
| It's hard enough doing 16 episodes of TV a year to also figure out how to write and research a thing that's straight to camera. | ||
| I can only imagine. | ||
| You did start out doing that, right? | ||
| You started out on YouTube? | ||
| Yeah, on College Humor. | ||
| I was a writer there and I developed Adam Ruins Everything while I was there and then we sold it to TruTV. | ||
| I will say, on my live shows now, I've just been on tour with my new show, Mind Parasites, which is like me trying to figure out how to do what I do in a stand-up context, right? | ||
| And so I took that all across the country. | ||
| I'm hoping to set up some more dates soon. | ||
| 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... | ||
| A lot of weird things. | ||
| It's like literally their minds become controlled by this parasite that infects them. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I quit drinking recently. | ||
| How long ago? | ||
| About a year ago. | ||
| Did you miss it? | ||
| No, not at all. | ||
| Not at all? | ||
| Not at all, man. | ||
| I'm really sorry. | ||
| I know you'd love to get me in a Musk moment. | ||
| I know it would make a lot less news. | ||
| You look very happy not drinking. | ||
| I lost a ton of weight right away. | ||
| Did you? | ||
| Alcohol is bad for you. | ||
| But yeah, so that show is me going longer, right? | ||
| That's cool. | ||
| So it's a theme, essentially. | ||
| It's a theme, yeah. | ||
| It's got a title, it's got sections, and I'm up there. | ||
| Did you write it out as a theme initially? | ||
| Did you have a framework for it to do as a live show? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I did. | |
| I did. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh, that's a chunk. | ||
| And then I'll combine it with that other chunk. | ||
| And then that's my special, right? | ||
| But I was like, hey, I want to figure out a way to do what I do, which is like come up with an argument and some information and put it in a framework. | ||
| So I was like, all right, mind parasites. | ||
| I'll talk about these biological parasites. | ||
| I also want to talk about advertising. | ||
| Time to write some jokes. | ||
| And that was hard as hell. | ||
| It felt like doing it backwards. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ah. | |
| But I worked it out a lot on stage and eventually found it, and the show's really clicking now. | ||
| I'm really happy about it. | ||
| Ari Shafir and I were just talking about that, because Ari Shafir is doing that with his most recent hour. | ||
| His most recent hour is entirely about his history in Orthodox Judaism. | ||
| He was a serious Orthodox Jew, spent a lot of time in Israel, living in one of those... | ||
| Religious commune-type deals. | ||
| What do they call those? | ||
| Yeshivas? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| Is that what they call it? | ||
| Yeah, I think that's what it's called. | ||
| I mean, he studied the Talmud and the Torah. | ||
| He studied it all day long. | ||
| I didn't know that. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, he's 12 hours a day. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And then said, this is nonsense. | ||
| What the fuck am I doing? | ||
| And then became Ari. | ||
| And so his most recent special that he's in the middle of creating right now is called Jew. | ||
| And it's the first time that he's ever done... | ||
| top to bottom on one subject and he's piecing it together like sort of in many ways it was influenced by some of the hours that he saw when he went to Edinburgh and saw the festival but he said that he wanted to do it American style whereas they had these themes but they didn't necessarily emphasize the punchlines and the stand up and the left. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You're like, alright, that joke was pretty good, but I could juice it more, but I need to get to the next point. | ||
| 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... | ||
| I'm not going to say I'm the funniest motherfucker ever, but it's got the punchlines I want it to have. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| It's cool to think about it that way, too, as a framework and then start from there. | ||
| I know Chris Titus does it that way, too. | ||
| A lot of guys do it that way. | ||
| They'll try to make a framework and then have all their ideas fit inside of that framework. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, the thing that I found out is, the reason people ask me how I got into this, you know, and I was just a comic in New York just going up on stage, and, you know, after a while you learn how to make people laugh, but you don't know how to make people give a shit about you, right? | ||
| Like, okay, Greg, I'm forcing an audience to make a noise all at once, you know what I mean? | ||
| But I can't make them remember me. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And so when I started talking about the stuff that I've learned, you know, I'm just an information sponge. | ||
| I just pick up shit like this, you know? | ||
| And I started talking about, you know, oh, do you know that the diamond engagement ring was a scam on the part of the De Beers Corporation in the 30s and everyone just forgot and now we think it's tradition, right? | ||
| That was the first bit I ever did that with. | ||
| That was my most sort of famous signature bit. | ||
| People start paying more attention, you know? | ||
| And like, oh my god, I didn't realize that, you know? | ||
| And now I'm in this weird niche. | ||
| No one else does what I do. | ||
| I do like educational investigative comedy, right? | ||
| When you watch me, you laugh, and then also you learn some mind-blowing shit that you're going to remember a year from now, you know? | ||
| And no one else is doing it. | ||
| And so the cool thing about it is when I go up there... | ||
| I'm not running in this, you said earlier, make your own race, you know, or like don't run the same race as everybody else. | ||
| Every 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? | ||
| That's Bill Burr or whoever, you know what I mean? | ||
| Usain Bolt's trying to beat him and they're like, fuck, I can be pretty fast but I'm never gonna be number one, you know? | ||
| I'm running a race, I'm the only person doing this. | ||
| You know, like, I'm 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. | ||
| For sure, right? | ||
| But at my show, you're going to learn about some weird bugs and you're going to think differently about social media. | ||
| You know, you're gonna come away with a new idea. | ||
| And so that's what I have to offer. | ||
| Yeah, I've engineered it that way. | ||
| And so that's what I try to tell other comics when they're just talking, you know, when people see my show and they're like, how'd you write this? | ||
| I'm like, dude, just figure out what you can give people that other people aren't giving them, you know? | ||
| And like, it's possible to write in a different way, you know? | ||
| I miss doing straight stand-up. | ||
| I have my straight stand-up hour where I just go and I tell you my stupid observations about shit. | ||
| And I love doing that material, but that material is not going to get me a Netflix special because it's not different enough. | ||
| I see what you're saying. | ||
| So you have a strategy. | ||
| For a little bit, yeah. | ||
| That's also what I want to talk about. | ||
| It's not just cynical, but yeah. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's not like you're being disingenuous. | ||
| This is who you are. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's cool that you found a niche like that. | ||
| You found this little groove that you could cut into. | ||
| I'm just working on it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But Mind Parasites is one we've brought up in this podcast a fucking thousand times. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| We had Sapolsky on, Robert Sapolsky from Stanford, who's the top researcher, and one of the top researchers is toxoplasma. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I talk about that a little bit in my show, yeah. | ||
| Listen to his lectures on it. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| No, that stuff is nuts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Crazy. | |
| The toxoplasmosis is wild. | ||
| 50 million Americans have it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Probably me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think I have it. | ||
| In your brain, the cat parasite. | ||
| And my understanding, I want to check out this guy's research. | ||
| The research that I saw was not quite definitive enough to be able to say, this affects your behavior. | ||
| It's like they think maybe, probably, so I was like, that's not enough for me, for my show. | ||
| But what I talk about is the way that the social media algorithm... | ||
| Is designed, it's just like evolution, right? | ||
| It's just testing on you. | ||
| Every single second you're online, instead of trying to see whether the genes perpetuate themselves, this test is saying, can I get you to click? | ||
| Are you interested? | ||
| Are you upset? | ||
| Are you going to engage? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And the best way to get you engaged is to piss you off. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And if I can get you to click, all they do is they just reproduce that same stimuli with little changes, just like evolution. | ||
| And by doing that, they're able to control our behavior in a real fucking way. | ||
| way and people know this you know but it really is happening to you do you um listen to sam harris's podcast uh i've heard a couple times yeah he's got a great one i'm pulling it up right now that i just recommend yesterday but i'm going to recommend it again because it's that fucking good and it's about facebook and about how this is all set up it's called the trouble with facebook and uh the guy's name is roger mcnamee mcnamee mcnamee McNamee. | ||
| 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. | ||
| The best way to collect your data is to get you to engage. | ||
| The best way to get you to engage is to put things in your news feed that are going to piss you off. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's like this division that's rising in this country coincides with social media and it's not coincidentally. | ||
| And here's the thing. | ||
| They don't even... | ||
| The really fucked up part is the people who created these algorithms... | ||
| That is not their intent. | ||
| They're not trying to piss you off and they're not trying to create division. | ||
| All they're doing is they're like, look, we just want people to spend as much time on the site as possible. | ||
| Algorithm, watch what they're doing and give them more like that. | ||
| And then so it's happening accidentally. | ||
| And so then when we're all looking at Facebook going like, look what Facebook's doing. | ||
| They're like, what are you talking about? | ||
| It's just about, we don't need to change anything. | ||
| We just have an algorithm that rewards engagement. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I know that you had Jack Dorsey on. | ||
| I did not hear that interview. | ||
| I just know you had him on. | ||
| I had him on a couple times. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And that's not just – I don't want to just focus on Dorsey. | ||
| Zuckerberg is the worst with it. | ||
| That they... | ||
| These algorithms are causing these behaviors and then they're saying, oh, that's not... | ||
| No, we're not doing that. | ||
| We've just like... | ||
| We're just trying to get people to be on the site more. | ||
| Like, it's not that bad. | ||
| We're trying to connect people, you know? | ||
| And so they don't change it. | ||
| But what if they had no algorithm? | ||
| What if they just allowed it to exist as just a virtual message board with no moderators? | ||
| Twitter... | ||
| Well, that's a problem itself, right? | ||
| Because that's like... | ||
| Okay, a virtual message board with no moderators is like... | ||
| Let's just talk about fighting, for instance. | ||
| 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. | ||
| No moderators, that's like, hey, let's have a street fight with nobody watching. | ||
| Right? | ||
| There's no rules. | ||
| There's an unlimited number of people in there. | ||
| It's just people wailing on each other. | ||
| Well, people are going to get hurt, you know? | ||
| So, like, I think when you are creating the platform, you're creating the place where the discussion is happening, you have a responsibility for what kind of discussion happens in that place, you know? | ||
| Because you're the one who set up the ground rules. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| They were trying to do that with YouTube for a while. | ||
| They were trying to say that, like, if you have a YouTube page and your comments are filled with anti-Semitic hate, that you can get in trouble for that. | ||
| That you were supposed to clean up your comments. | ||
| And then people went, what the fuck are you talking about? | ||
| And YouTube was like, ah, forget it. | ||
| Yeah, so I think that should be on YouTube, right? | ||
| That's YouTube. | ||
| YouTube is the one that allowed that to happen in the comments. | ||
| YouTube is the one saying that we're not going to moderate anything. | ||
| How could they? | ||
| How can they? | ||
| I mean, you literally need physical moderators. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| That's the contradiction that they're faced with. | ||
| There's so many people. | ||
| And this is the issue with Facebook. | ||
| This is the issue with Twitter. | ||
| The real question is, like, who gets to decide what is offensive and what is not? | ||
| I'm sure you're aware of the learn to code fiasco. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, I kind of heard about this. | |
| People are getting banned for saying learn to code. | ||
| And it was really mocking this idea that people were telling coal miners who are losing their jobs, you know, hey, there's jobs in computer programming. | ||
| I tuned this out. | ||
| You should learn to code. | ||
| And so people started mocking people by saying learn to code. | ||
| And then learn to code, apparently according to Jack Dorsey and Vidja, it got connected to anti-Semitic remarks and hate remarks. | ||
| I try to tune out this level of internet nonsense. | ||
| But it's fascinating because that doesn't mean anything. | ||
| Learn to code is not offensive. | ||
| It's like, well, it's ridiculous to ask a 50-year-old man who's a coal miner to learn to code and doesn't have a formal education. | ||
| That is ridiculous. | ||
| But I mean, the fact that you get banned for life from saying that, that's actually even more ridiculous. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, but then there are cases where people go and they try to create, like, a... | ||
| If someone who... | ||
| Look, there are anti-Semites out there, right? | ||
| They do try to come up with, like, ways to indicate anti-Semitism to each other that other people won't detect. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Via, you know, slang, basically. | ||
| Inner slang, right? | ||
| And at some point, someone needs to be able to say, okay, wait, hold on a second. | ||
| We figured out this is anti-Semitic slang, so we're not going to allow you to say it. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's like shit like 88 or what? | ||
| Isn't that a thing where it's like... | ||
| Yeah, HH. This is the problem, right? | ||
| This is the exact problem that you're talking about. | ||
| But the contradiction that all of these platforms have is the early days of the internet. | ||
| Remember the early days? | ||
| It was like people were really concerned that People would start suing websites because of what was on the website. | ||
| Like the Pirate Bay, the big torrent site. | ||
| You're going to get sued because you've got DVD screeners on there. | ||
| No, hold on a second. | ||
| This is just where people can upload the shit. | ||
| Google getting sued because they would direct someone to the DVD screeners. | ||
| They searched for leaked DVD screener. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And so that was a big concern in the early days of the internet. | ||
| And so we established this precedent that like, no, no, no. | ||
| These sites don't have a responsibility for that. | ||
| They're just how people are connecting to things. | ||
| They're not the people doing the bad shit. | ||
| You go after the people doing the bad shit, not the people who made it possible to find the bad shit. | ||
| Now, though, we're in such a place where – so all these businesses built themselves on the idea of YouTube. | ||
| We don't make anything at YouTube. | ||
| We just give you a place to upload your videos. | ||
| So at first, that's fine. | ||
| All right, just take down the anti-Semitic white supremacy videos or whatever. | ||
| But now there's so, so many of them. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And also, not only that, YouTube's algorithm is directing people towards them, and YouTube is selling ads against them and making money at them. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And at the same time, like, you know, these videos exist, right? | ||
| And at the same time, they're still trying to say, well, we have no responsibility for that happening. | ||
| It's like, Hold on a second. | ||
| You guys built a system where any kind of content is allowed, and you've also built a system that's directing people to that content, and you built a system that's making money off of that content. | ||
| I think you guys have a little bit of responsibility. | ||
| Now, I agree that the question of who polices it or whatever, that's an extremely complicated conversation, but that's what I'm just saying about these companies trying to have it both ways. | ||
| They're trying to say, we have no responsibility for what's on the platform, but also we've allowed... | ||
| This kind of content to go up, you know? | ||
| I don't know if YouTube profits on anti-Semitic videos. | ||
| I don't know if that's true. | ||
| They have in the past. | ||
| I talk about it in my show. | ||
| They have a demonetizing aspect of YouTube that affects people whenever anything's even remotely controversial. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| So their algorithm was causing this to happen? | ||
| Their algorithm was causing that to happen, right? | ||
| And these were videos getting 100,000 hits, and it was like major brands, and those brands found out. | ||
| What was the title of these videos? | ||
| Did they say obvious anti-Semitic things in the title? | ||
| These were obvious enough that anybody would be pissed off about them, yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And so that's where the demonetization thing came from, right? | ||
| Because they're like, oh shit, now the people who actually pay us, the advertisers, are pissed off, right? | ||
| So okay, let's put a band-aid on the problem and let's demonetize videos, right? | ||
| Here's the problem. | ||
| Now they're just doing that algorithmically, right? | ||
| They're choosing which videos to demonetize algorithmically. | ||
| So sometimes they demonetize stuff that they shouldn't. | ||
| That's definitely happened a ton. | ||
| And a lot of shit is still getting through the cracks, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And again, they're saying, okay, we did what we had to. | ||
| No, you guys didn't solve the fucking problem. | ||
| Because now people are pissed off again, right? | ||
| So that is the bind that these companies are in. | ||
| They're based on this premise of we don't moderate anything. | ||
| But when you do that, a lot of shit comes in. | ||
| And now you're in the position where, sorry, it's still your house. | ||
| The shit's happening in your house. | ||
| You threw the house party, dude. | ||
| Like the vase got broken. | ||
| It's your fault at the end of the day. | ||
| You have to take some responsibility for it. | ||
| And they're like, well, how am I supposed to police 200 kids? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You're the one who threw the party. | ||
| Yeah, that's a good analogy because it's the scale that's the problem. | ||
| It's probably more like 200,000 kids in a house. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Because it's unmanageable. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When you think about how many different people are on YouTube and how many different countries are uploading videos, and some of them are ISIS beheading videos. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a bunch of cartel videos that people have sent me to on YouTube, and they stay up for a little while. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You get to watch some horrible shit for a little while before they catch on. | ||
| 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? | ||
| And, like, Spider-Man Elsa videos, or, like... | ||
| Those are so strange, though. | ||
| There's so many... | ||
| If you look at kids' YouTube, it's still so full of it. | ||
| They've tried to stamp it out. | ||
| There's still tons of it. | ||
| And these videos... | ||
| Literally, I show a video which is just total nonsense. | ||
| It looks like it was made by a computer. | ||
| It's just weird garbage. | ||
| It doesn't look wrong until you actually watch it closely and then you're like, this video is saying weird nonsense. | ||
| The video has 600 million views. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And it's just garbage, right? | ||
| And I have literally spent my whole life trying to make good internet content. | ||
| Make content 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? | ||
| And the algorithm is directing people towards nonsense. | ||
| So people are watching this because it has Elsa or Spider-Man, or they're watching this... | ||
| They're watching it because they're a five-year-old, and the video was given to them up next by YouTube, and the video's title and keywords and content has managed to hack the algorithm, find the weird edge case in the algorithm that put it in front of those kids over and over again. | ||
| You've seen the ones where they break down those videos, where it's weird, like there's always a baby, an alcohol... | ||
| And someone always gets hurt from a broken bottle. | ||
| Over and over and over again, these things happen. | ||
| They do that because it's sort of like the people who make those videos have found how to hack the algorithm. | ||
| Because algorithms are not that smart. | ||
| They're not brilliant things. | ||
| They're just like a little bit of code. | ||
| It's just like in a video game. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right? | ||
| I can figure out how to freeze that guy in place. | ||
| Or just like when you were a kid and you could figure out how to scroll the enemies off the screen in NES games. | ||
| Go left and then right. | ||
| Oh, they disappear. | ||
| You know? | ||
| You figure out how to hack the algorithm. | ||
| That's what the people who make these videos have done with the algorithm as well. | ||
| They figure out the little hole in the way that it works. | ||
| And they figure out, oh, if we just do this, the video will get shown again and again and again. | ||
| And here's the thing. | ||
| 70% of all videos watched on YouTube are being served by the algorithm. | ||
| 70%. | ||
| And people are watching a billion hours of YouTube a day. | ||
| So people are not choosing what we're watching. | ||
| The algorithm's choosing. | ||
| And the videos the algorithm is showing us are the ones that people are hacking. | ||
| Like these weird, fucked up videos. | ||
| To tap into this algorithm. | ||
| Yeah, that is really interesting, and it's also interesting these companies have figured this thing out. | ||
| 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? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| And you're like, what is this? | ||
| And you go to it and it's some weird, sneaky, sort of computer-generated thing where it'll say it with a bunch of different accounts, the exact same thing with emojis, and then you go to it and it's some ripped-off pictures of some girl with a big ass. | ||
| And then somehow or another they're trying to get you. | ||
| But they've capitalized on this comment section to find people that have posts that get a lot of comments and get a lot of views, and then they go right to it. | ||
| And then that's how they tap into it. | ||
| And that's my point of how this works, right? | ||
| So Instagram set up a comment system. | ||
| These people have figured out how to hack the comment system to get their bullshit spam on the top. | ||
| Within seconds, I mean, so fast, they couldn't possibly have written it. | ||
| Like, it has to be a program. | ||
| And that's Instagram's fault for allowing that to happen. | ||
| At the end of the day, you know what I mean? | ||
| Like, that's Instagram's problem to solve, you know? | ||
| And that's the problem all these platforms have. | ||
| That's the problem YouTube has. | ||
| That's the problem Twitter has. | ||
| And so whenever they say, oh, no, it's just a couple bad apples, it's like, you guys threw the party. | ||
| You guys figure out how to fix it, right? | ||
| You got a shitty orchard, son. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, exactly. | |
| Just a couple of bad apples. | ||
| I mean, YouTube's amazing in that you really can be entertained with things. | ||
| For someone who's into obscure things in particular, it's one of the best resources ever. | ||
| I made my career off of YouTube. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's also like if you want to watch old things, you want to watch interesting things, you can find almost everything. | ||
| On YouTube, including things that are not true. | ||
| This is like where they're cracking down on certain things like flat earth videos. | ||
| It's the Library of Alexandria, man. | ||
| Like, I remember there used to be, like, in New York, I never actually went and did this, but there was, like, a museum that had, like, lots of old archival TV. You know, you could go back, you could watch, like, the first episode of Johnny Carson or whatever. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I was like, oh, that's so cool, right? | ||
| Now you don't need to go to that library. | ||
| You can just, it's literally on YouTube. | ||
| The first episode of Johnny Carson ever is on YouTube. | ||
| Who was the guest? | ||
| I don't remember. | ||
| I don't think I'm exaggerating. | ||
| I have seen it on the web. | ||
| I saw his very first appearance. | ||
| I'm sure it's up there. | ||
| Or at least the early ones, because maybe the early ones weren't taped, but it was super, super early. | ||
| He's got black hair. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And so every episode of The Daily Show ever is on the internet. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| You can watch The Lonious Monk, close-ups of his hands. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| 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. | ||
| My videos do pretty well on YouTube. | ||
| My videos aren't white supremacist Spider-Man nonsense. | ||
| They're good. | ||
| So hopefully they're doing some good in the world. | ||
| So I hope in my heart of hearts that this is still a positive force for humanity. | ||
| I think it's a positive force. | ||
| But I think overall, the problem that we're talking about, whether it's a problem with YouTube or the problem with the Facebook algorithm or any of these things, it's people that suck. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| It's not... | ||
| is a Thelonious Monk. | ||
| It's not someone making something educational on vitamins or something like that. | ||
| It's bullshit. | ||
| The bullshit's the problem. | ||
| The problem is people exploiting the system and using that system to stick nonsense or bad things up there. | ||
| But if you're the company that's allowing that bullshit to happen and you make money off of it, Yeah, it's an issue. | ||
| It's an issue, but part of it is really interesting to me. | ||
| 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! | ||
| That's not true. | ||
| I'll show you how. | ||
| This is how you do it. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| There's the data. | ||
| Okay, next. | ||
| Keep going. | ||
| Stop. | ||
| That's not true either. | ||
| You don't know what the fuck you're talking about. | ||
| Of course it works like that. | ||
| This is why it works like that. | ||
| And this is what it means. | ||
| Did you see our video on the moon landing? | ||
| No. | ||
| Oh, this is one of my favorite videos we ever did. | ||
| So, you know, it's about how the moon land... | ||
| The thesis is the moon landing could not have been faked. | ||
| It would have been harder to fake the moon landing than it would have been to actually go to the moon. | ||
| Because the technology to fake it did not exist. | ||
| Like when we talked to a forensic film guy... | ||
| He's got a fucking Oscar for analyzing old films. | ||
| And he walked us through it. | ||
| He's like, look, the shadows are parallel. | ||
| They're not diverging. | ||
| A close light source, the shadows would diverge. | ||
| Wait a minute. | ||
| You know that that's one of the big arguments for the moon hoax? | ||
| Is that the shadows intersect? | ||
| The shadows indicate multiple light sources? | ||
| Well, that is because when... | ||
| That's one of the main arguments. | ||
| That is a... | ||
| I believe that's reflected light. | ||
| Okay, I'm getting past my memory of this segment. | ||
| Dude, I used to be a full-on moon hoaxer. | ||
| I fully believed we never went to the moon. | ||
| I shouldn't have brought this up. | ||
| I watched the documentary that was on Fox TV while I was on news radio. | ||
| It was like 1995 or something like that. | ||
| I was fucking convinced. | ||
| Can I just say news radio is one of my favorite sitcoms ever, by the way. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Unacknowledged classic. | ||
| I have watched the whole series like three times. | ||
| That show is so—I'm sorry, just go ahead. | ||
| I just had to say that much. | ||
| Well, anyway, back then, Fox News actually aired a full one-hour show called Conspiracy Theory, Did We Land on the Moon? | ||
| And it had me fully convinced— Yeah. | ||
| There was all this shit that they showed, like the same background being used in multiple moon missions that were supposed to be on completely different parts of the moon. | ||
| Like, how is this possible? | ||
| They're supposed to be like nowhere near each other, but they have the same background. | ||
| And that is, it looks like the astronauts are on wires, and it looks like the light sources are, there are multiple light sources, and the shadows are intersecting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, all the fucking astronauts, when they came back, they did this Apollo 11 post-flight press conference, and it looked like they're completely full of shit. | ||
| I was all in, dude. | ||
| All in. | ||
| All in. | ||
| And now you're all out? | ||
| No, I realize I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. | ||
| That's one of the real problems with being all in with anything. | ||
| But we also found that they did fake some things for publicity purposes. | ||
| Photographs that were used, that were photographs from tests that they did inside a warehouse with all safety equipment, and then they blacked out all the safety equipment in the background and pawned those photos off as spacewalk photos. | ||
| But I think that's overzealous publicists. | ||
| It doesn't mean no one went to space. | ||
| It's like making leaps. | ||
| What's the simplest explanation if they did fake some footage? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Maybe the photos didn't come out so well, so they fake some of them. | ||
| Well, let me... | ||
| The thing about the shadows diverging, my memory of this is, we don't talk about that... | ||
| When people say they see the shadows diverge, right? | ||
| If you actually go outside on a sunny day when you have a single point of light like that, with light reflecting, you will see two shadows of yourself going in different... | ||
| There's one dominant shadow, and then there's a secondary one, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But... | ||
| If the sun is actually far away, right, for the main shadow, you will see the same shadows be parallel, right? | ||
| If you had a close light source like on a film set, you see the shadows diverge, right? | ||
| So we had this film forensic guy come on and tell us, look, if you wanted to get perfectly straight light like that, you would need lasers. | ||
| But you'd also need multicolored lasers because at the time, all that existed were red lasers, right? | ||
| They had not invented anything other than red lasers, right? | ||
| So NASA would have had to have multi-decade advanced laser light technology in order to fake this. | ||
| Another part of it is that- Do you think you've figured it out? | ||
| No, I mean, this is what we demonstrate in our segment. | ||
| 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? | ||
| And at the time, that was something you could do with TV, but you literally couldn't do it with film, right? | ||
| There was no way to record film. | ||
| Sorry, there was no way to record TV at the time. | ||
| You had live TV and you had recorded film. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So if they were going to record it in advance, right, and then play it back, they would have needed a six-hour-long reel of tape, right? | ||
| There was no commercials? | ||
| I don't believe so. | ||
| And so they would have had to... | ||
| What did you say? | ||
| So we should probably know if there was commercials, because that changes the game. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fair point. | |
| But, you know, you would have needed, like, an enormous film canister, you know, that also didn't exist at the time. | ||
| But if anybody was going to have an enormous film canister, it would be those fucking hoaxers at NASA. Well... | ||
| 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? | ||
| But it's like, okay, well, if you have to postulate that they had decades ahead of its time filmmaking technology, why can't you accept that they just went to the fucking moon, you know? | ||
| So at the end, when you go through all the things that would have to happen, right, in order to make it happen, you really go through it and look at what is the simplest explanation? | ||
| The simplest explanation is that we went to the moon because it would have been fucking easier. | ||
| I don't know if it would have been easier if it was impossible to go to the moon. | ||
| It would be insanely difficult to fake, no doubt. | ||
| But if you had an incredible budget, and if you had someone who really had the very top of the food chain knowledge in terms of special effects, what Kubrick did in 2001, when was that? | ||
| When did 2001 come out? | ||
| I want to say like 71 or some shit? | ||
| Yeah, something like that. | ||
| When did that come out? | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| Yeah, look it up. | ||
| I think it was earlier than that, maybe. | ||
| 68. 68. Okay, so we're talking about before the moon landings. | ||
| Kubrick had some pretty astonishing special effects in 2001. Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Another part of it is, for instance, the slow jumping, right? | ||
| The slow boom, boom, you're on the moon, right? | ||
| The big argument that the moon truthers make is that it was regular speed footage and it was slowed down, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| 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? | ||
| 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? | ||
|
unidentified
|
They couldn't air things in slow-mo back then? | |
| 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. | ||
| But that's the argument that the dude makes. | ||
| It's not one of the arguments that we make specifically on our show because we only had six minutes so we did the best ones. | ||
| It's always an interesting argument when you're talking about the moon landing. | ||
| I also know about how much 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. | ||
| Like 15%. | ||
| That was exactly going to be my guess. | ||
| There's always a number, man. | ||
| There's a number of people that think that vaccines cause autism. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They've isolated genes. | ||
| They think they've got an understanding of what's causing this or how at least it's happening, but it's happening in the womb. | ||
| they don't think there's any connection yeah vaccines and autism they think there's people who have autism who get vaccinated in their autism symptoms show up but they were probably going to have those symptoms anyway yep and there's a human correlation that they make yep it doesn't mean that some people don't get adversely affected by vaccines because people have very strange reactions to all sorts of things because we vary biologically it doesn't mean that vaccines are giving people autism and And when you say that, people go fucking ballistic. | ||
| And the comments fill with hate and Zionist shill and this and that. | ||
| Yeah, it's wild. | ||
| I get that shit a lot. | ||
| But what we're doing here, you and I, even if we disagree, this is what I think is one of the most important things of our time, is the ability to have reasonable conversation. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| And I try to tell people when they disagree with me, because when people come at me with a lot of heat on the internet, You know, a lot of times I don't have time to get into it, you know, but I do like to occasionally, you know, reply and say, you know, someone's like, oh, you're so full of shit, like you lied about this and that, 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? | ||
| You know, and I try to take their temperature down, you know, and I don't match their anger is the most important part. | ||
| I'm like much nicer than their anger demands, you know? | ||
| And that usually cools them off right away, and then we have a conversation. | ||
| And a lot of the time when I do that, they leave going, okay, you know what? | ||
| We don't disagree that much. | ||
| Or, okay, thanks for talking to me. | ||
| But the most important thing I say to them is, even if I don't turn them around on whatever the issue was... | ||
| I say, okay. | ||
| They say, I'm never going to watch your show again because you lied about this. | ||
| Because I disagree. | ||
| You're wrong about this. | ||
| I'm never watching your show again. | ||
| And I say, okay, why would you never watch the show again just because you disagree with me about one thing? | ||
| I watch tons of stuff with people I don't disagree with. | ||
| Well, they don't really mean that. | ||
| They just want you to feel bad. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're not a child. | |
| You know what they're doing. | ||
| They're playing childish games. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Unfollowed, Adam. | ||
| I'm never watching you again. | ||
| Unfollowed. | ||
| Like, does anybody think it's a good idea to only consume shit that you already agree with? | ||
| I think it's better to challenge yourself and to watch things that you don't agree with all the time, you know? | ||
| I watch Fox News at least one hour every week. | ||
| Do you really? | ||
| Yeah, I try to get an hour and just go, what the fuck are you doing? | ||
| What is happening? | ||
| I want to know what white people are really up to. | ||
| They're scared all the time. | ||
| When they're around me, they lie. | ||
| I need to know. | ||
| I would love to get high with Laura Ingraham. | ||
| You see how she's getting in trouble for laughing at Nipsey Hussle's funeral? | ||
| That was very bizarre. | ||
| Strange. | ||
| It's very strange to be that... | ||
| To be so dialed in to that... | ||
| Look, I understand when you're one of those hosts, right? | ||
| You have a message. | ||
| You're dialed into it. | ||
| You've got to say that message every single day, every single time. | ||
| You're a monomaniacal about it. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| But to do that about someone's death specifically? | ||
| Bizarre. | ||
| And that sort of gives you... | ||
| Sometimes I think that TV shows are like a curse. | ||
| I feel for anybody who has to be on TV every day. | ||
| Because their life narrows down to that little camera lens, and they can't have a thought outside of it. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| So all those people, Tucker Carlson, Rachel Maddow, Laura Ingram, you know what I mean? | ||
| Echo Chambers. | ||
| Yeah, apart from me disagreeing with some of them on various things, I disagree with all those folks on occasion. | ||
| Like, to live your life... | ||
| Right in that lens saying the same thing every night. | ||
| It must really impoverish your point of view in a way that's really a bummer. | ||
| And me seeing her do that was like, yeah. | ||
| That's a great perspective. | ||
| Impoverishing your point of view. | ||
| I think you're on to that. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I mean, that's when I saw that clip of her. | ||
| I was like, I can't. | ||
| I can't believe, but being on TV makes you a crazy person. | ||
| It probably does, man. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And they were mocking the song and laughing about it. | ||
| Like, look, it's not about the guy's art. | ||
| The guy's dead. | ||
| He was murdered in Los Angeles. | ||
| And obviously, you look at all the hundreds of thousands of people that are mourning him in the streets. | ||
| They loved him. | ||
| Why did they love him? | ||
| Maybe look at that. | ||
| Maybe because he was giving back to the community. | ||
| Maybe it's because the guy became successful and still wanted to be in the community and help people out. | ||
| Maybe because he was a positive influence on a lot of young people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So he had a song called Fuck Donald Trump. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| And you know, the worst thing I think... | ||
| What's that? | ||
| He's on that song, but it's not his song. | ||
| Oh, it's not his song? | ||
| Whose song is it? | ||
| YG. What is the one that Ice Cube's got a dope song about the president? | ||
| It might be like, Arrest the President. | ||
| It might be called Arrest the President. | ||
| It's pretty fucking good. | ||
| You know, the worst thing that I think is... | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's good. | |
| It's Ice Cube's new shit. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I'm not going to be sad he's dead because he said something mean about Donald Trump. | ||
| That is such a malignant version of the way that so many people feel. | ||
| The most frustrating thing people say to me is on our comments page on our YouTube page, This guy's a liberal. | ||
| This guy's a Democrat. | ||
| So I'm not going to listen to him. | ||
| I'm like, okay, well, first of all, we criticize Democrats and liberals all the time on the show. | ||
| Sometimes people do a responsibility. | ||
| They're like, doesn't Adam Conover realize he's criticizing a Democrat priority? | ||
| And I'm like, yeah, all the time. | ||
| We do not do a political show. | ||
| Look, I live in Los Angeles. | ||
| I went to college. | ||
| I didn't vote for Donald Trump. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like most people who didn't. | ||
| Alright, so I'm gonna fess up to that, right? | ||
| Why does that mean that you would never listen to anything I ever had to say? | ||
| Or that you would treat me with disrespect, right? | ||
| Because they're trying to make you feel bad, bro. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And you're talking about it right now, so they win. | ||
| Oh, fair enough. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| Alright. | ||
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| Okay, we can move off of it. | ||
| But you know, that idea of someone who disagrees with me is like not a person who I'm going to listen to anymore. | ||
| What a bummer. | ||
| I listen to people from all perspectives and all backgrounds. | ||
| That's my goal. | ||
| Even more insidious, what they're doing is they're trying to say this whole life that was just lost is this one clip that says, fuck Donald Trump. | ||
| That's so stupid. | ||
| There's obviously a lot of things. | ||
| Like, that's quote mining. | ||
| You're taking a little tiny piece of some things that he did out of context and you're putting it on your show and then you're mocking his death. | ||
| And it's unfortunate. | ||
| But again, I think it's these echo chambers. | ||
| These people think it's okay to do that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| They know that the other people that are like them are going to react the same way. | ||
| Like, what? | ||
| The guy had a song called Fuck Donald Trump. | ||
| I mean, hey, fuck you. | ||
| And then they all just repeat that. | ||
| That's like the people that were shocked that Trump won. | ||
| They couldn't believe anybody would vote for Trump because everybody around you would not. | ||
| So you get stuck in these echo chambers. | ||
| You don't understand how other people outside see it. | ||
| And I think that's what's happening with this. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| It's sad. | ||
| The guy's fucking dead. | ||
| The guy was murdered. | ||
| Yeah, we did a segment on guns, right? | ||
| We did an episode on guns, and I always thought that... | ||
| I said at the beginning of our show, we'd never do an episode on guns, because it's too divisive, and as soon as we did the topic, everyone would fold their arms, and they'd say, are you going to do an episode on guns? | ||
| Well, you better say what I want you to say, or I'm changing the channel, right? | ||
| But we'd been doing the show for four years. | ||
| I was like, I think we can finally do it. | ||
| And here's the thing. | ||
| Everybody is wrong about guns. | ||
| That's the premise of our show. | ||
| Everyone's wrong about everything. | ||
| If you think you know about something, you probably don't. | ||
| And any topic that I do, I'm going to tell you something you don't know. | ||
| And so we specifically did an episode that's about, you know, we had a gun rights advocate, a gun control advocate. | ||
| I'm talking to both of them. | ||
| And they're both making mistakes, right? | ||
| About it. | ||
| And that was the point, was that, like, the thing that liberals... | ||
| No, I don't want to say liberals. | ||
| The thing that gun control advocates, right, often fail to do, is they fail to take seriously that the gun rights advocates are, like, real people who live in the same country as them, who they need to deal with as humans, right? | ||
| Like, the NRA has a lot of... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| that is not productive, you know. | ||
| But like the average gun owner in your community, right, is a real person you have to deal with, right? | ||
| And if you're just in your echo chamber and you're not taking that person seriously, then you're not gonna make any progress, right? | ||
| And so you need to, you know, gun control advocates are in just as much need of correction, you know, and just as much need of checking themselves and, you know, examining their own biases and, you know, getting closer to the truth as gun rights advocates. | ||
| Well, particularly if you want to ever resolve it or come to any sort of an agreement, you can't treat the other people like they're stupid. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, you fucking morons don't get it. | ||
| Okay, that's not helping anybody. | ||
| And that's the issue with people that also get angry at people who voted for Trump. | ||
| They want to say they're all stupid. | ||
| Okay, you want to say that half the country's stupid? | ||
| That's not a good idea. | ||
| That's not smart. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I want to say, by the way, the reason I said I 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. | ||
| The trend is that they didn't vote for him. | ||
| So I was trying to say I'm in a different demographic, but I don't want people to think I was implying... | ||
| I believe so, yeah. | ||
| I mean, that's sort of how it breaks down. | ||
| People with BAs or higher tend to vote for Democrats. | ||
| So I'm just giving a nod to the demographics here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is how it breaks down. | |
| Right, right. | ||
| I've got to wrap this up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, man. | |
| Listen, man, that was a lot of fun. | ||
| It's already up to 3 o'clock. | ||
| Can you believe it? | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's 3.05. | |
| Not for a while. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Oh, you got the... | ||
| I was wondering what time it was. | ||
| Well, hey, this has been a real... | ||
| I really appreciate the... | ||
| We got deep on some shit. | ||
| Yeah, it was fun, man. | ||
| Thanks for coming on. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| And tell everybody when your show is, when they can watch it. | ||
| Adam Ruins Everything is on True TV. We've got episodes on Netflix. | ||
| New episodes are coming out probably around August. | ||
| Don't have an exact date yet, but we're having our next run of eight coming out then. | ||
| How many more years do you think you're going to do this? | ||
| You know, hopefully pretty soon. | ||
| Never run out of stuff. | ||
| And check out my new podcast, Factually. | ||
| Hopefully pretty soon you'll end it? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| Hopefully pretty soon we'll know whether we're going to keep doing it. | ||
| We're between. | ||
| We're waiting for a pickup right now. | ||
| We have to keep doing it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I love doing the show. | ||
| Look, I'm going to be doing what I do for the rest of my life no matter where I'm doing it. | ||
| Oh, that's a good way to look at it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Awesome. | |
| Either way. | ||
| Adam, thank you. | ||
| Thank you so much, man. | ||
| Thanks for being here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bye, everybody. |
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