Adam Conover joins Joe Rogan to challenge rigid social norms, like trophy hunting’s conservation role and the myth of alpha/beta males, debunking biological determinism while critiquing toxic masculinity’s health toll. They expose NCAA football’s exploitation—1.6% of players earn pro careers amid concussion risks—and clash over trans athletes, with Rogan citing testosterone-linked advantages (e.g., bone density) and Conover advocating inclusivity despite historical male-designed sports biases. The duo also dissects YouTube’s divisive algorithms, comparing them to De Beers’ propaganda, and warns how polarized debates—like vaccine misinformation—stifle nuanced dialogue. Concluding, they stress respecting opposing views over ideological dismissal, even as Conover’s Adam Ruins Everything faces uncertain future amid contract talks. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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?
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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?
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?
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?
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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?
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.