Joe Rogan Experience #1282 — Adam Conover Transcript

Transcript

0:00 Yes. Hey, thanks for having me, Joe. I mean, I'm not the kind of person where I'm like, if you're pissing people off you're doing something right but there's some truth to that day where sure yeah yeah you you give them the truth i think that yeah i mean the the the thesis I mean, people get upset with us for a lot of different reasons. Because that's how they're able to sort of monetize in that place and get money coming in in order to protect the animals.

2:55 Yeah. to even go in there does that happen with old male elephants i know that was the issue with from having this woman come in and shoot it yeah that. That's what they did. Yeah. That's sort of, the place to care about the animals. fine. I don't give a shit about that. Now we've got a way to hire guards. of someone going overseas and killing an animal is not necessarily the worst thing in the world

5:51 Again, you know, people want to farm on that land. a hard question to answer and some places are having success with that strategy and that's one's got to be shot through the head with a rifle maybe i need to accept that it's weird great movie and it's really good it sounds odd and they have to they have to go after the lions He couldn't handle it anymore.

8:06 because it always starts a shit storm every time I do. We had an episode about dating. words yeah they're they're clearly men who are more aggressive and athletic and dominant and more confident and and then men alphas right um in animals what is that it's a social hierarchy right um when we're talking about al when you're talking about alphas right um in animals what is

10:38 there's alphas and there's betas and women are hardwired to be attracted to the alpha you know You don't think that women look at like pro athletes That's their argument. I think that hourglass shape is something throughout our recent cultural memory that we tell each other that men are attracted to, right? Having large breasts and a large ass would indicate that she's fertile and then she has ample fat storage in the right places if she's going to be pregnant and carry children.

13:40 that this is true i don't know if it's a scientific idea that's that's my you have i've had conversations with evolutionary biologists who explain the reason why men are attracted to right? don't think that more women would be sexually attracted to these tall handsome men with great Look, here's something that I was really influenced by. Right. Even someone who is the person who you posited, right? The person who is athletic and confident,

17:09 right or whatever uh you know and that kid sorry take the the quarterback character um and you know we talked about this later on the show there's this idea called the backfire effect right where Sean Hannity, Let's just say somebody who's made their whole career on climate change Actually, I'm convinced climate change is real. There's alphas and betas.

19:45 and humans not being scientific, right? It got the most YouTube response videos, they see it as part of like i don't know their whatever argument they're in their head they're i think obviously humans operate on a giant spectrum. And if you start going around saying alpha and beta and the, I have the biggest problem with like overconfident men's rights guys.

21:51 We had an episode on stereotypes called Adam Runza sitcom, where we talked about different, you know, we talked about stereotypes via, you know, sort of a cheesy 80s sitcom that had a lot of stereotypes in it. type dad you know and uh what we talked about is like those uh there are ways that men are being know, the Red Sox with him. Wow, really? they'll have physical close friendships like that and then they reach an age where that starts to

23:59 But it happens even younger than kids would even have a notion of that. It's very subtle, but it's universal? Yeah. There's that phenomenon of having a little bit of distance You've felt it, some people feel it more than women right that the man my dad's age is more likely to have less friends than a woman And those are dangerous. Right. Those are like hurt you physically and can lead to an early death.

26:38 Hey, men are like this. I mean, you clearly live exactly how you want to live, which is great. their country very much so um but are like men for instance encouraged to you know be emotionally And that sort of intimacy is what leads to long friendships, you know, that really, really last, right? You should figure your life out and man the fuck up and go do something,

28:34 that when you say that I think most men philosophize this it's a different one here i'll look up what it was um as i'm talking to you about it but um really wonderful podcast uh where uh they were talking to uh this guy who was in the If you have a problem, solve it yourself kind of thing, right? basically what we were just saying that you know you should be emotionally vulnerable and know how to express

31:19 hesitant to say man the fuck up because if it was a woman what would you say you'd say toughen up i was like damn you can't be hiking with And I remember when I was younger, you know, feeling, well, I want to, I really have this because otherwise you don't shut it down the expression manliness right that's the problem you know what i mean i like taking care of her that's like something that i enjoy right um uh

34:42 it wasn't what i was brought up with um and uh uh so to me it's important to like expand you know my notion of what it was really a big Dr. Phil, he does it a little bit. And I think the idea of manliness or what it entails and the problems that people would have about that on the outside, you know this is just shitty humans i agree you know i mean that's really where the problem and

37:09 about this she's not my type and i loved this guy's answer he wrote back and he said dude she's because she doesn't fit if you ask any woman, But deep down, do they maybe have a desire that is not being you I think back about like when I was 16 years old and yeah, I, you know, you're swimming Yeah. episode but you know when i think about in my you know when i was getting started in comedy in my

40:12 foot in a club because i was like i don't want to deal with anybody at the club thinking oh i'm at the people at people for no reason. you're watching little babies that good yeah what you're doing is not that good i know you think you have a point but what you're some of that aspect totally in yourself some some aspects of bad work in your own act and maybe you

42:28 You remember what it was like when you were- nonsense. And there was one night, I can't remember why the hell this happened, but my girlfriend Oh, And I was like, doing like they're like endurance training like they're doing something that is physically met like i was like my second open mic and it was like her third open mic and we saw each other at

45:36 it was great funny shit yeah she wrote it a bunch of our friends from those days anthony Give me a break. Yeah, yeah. the people in the room hated that too. bunch of things rolled up into one because he's a he's a legitimate catholic like he's really I'm not, you know, or it's me as my younger self. It's like very socially i'm a little oh sorry like it's a lot of up there you

48:39 a new character for late night and so he had the same writers from from the colbert report really impressive i like the guy don't get me wrong but i like him more on the colbert report But I understand why he couldn't do the Colbert. and so he could only do writing fan well for sure because the late night shows are just promotion shows that's all they are

50:28 that's what john oliver did instead so we're living in that alternate reality from john And so being on that weekly schedule, we we go into it thinking this is going to be our angle. And then we're, we're diving into the research. Do you ever feel time constraints? was we wanted to do something about the NCAA, They're making so much money off those kids.

52:45 I'm blanking on his name, It is bananas. and the president of the network told me no they're worried about pissing off to go to them. Yeah. that's functional yeah after four years of 600 fucking pound dudes I mean, you got to think of it this way. going to end up with CTE. So we're talking. And let's be honest, That's wild. have way higher percentage this This is our writing process.

57:16 Well, you can get hit in the head with a baseball. Yeah Yeah How many kids He's the Heisman Trophy winner That's cool Play baseball, man. Yeah, well, out of all the major sports, every night. the crazy thing about baseball this was pointed out to me the website deadspin did this thing Or they'd say one of the guys in the Yankees. baseball. Give him the steroids.

59:52 We've never done this on the show, so I'm not fully boned up. they're cheating right but well it's also but there's some drugs you can take that aren't cheating right like you could They live at a high altitude. It is an unfair advantage because not everybody can afford one of those chambers. And then we're just finding out now they don't test for EPO in everybody, that it's very

1:02:26 Can you uproot your life? That is a big one That in terms of They think that when you train altitude so you get you get up there and sleep and you don't have to train up there and if you at sea level they think that that gives you a slight advantage yeah because you can put more to me is that we have this idea that like there's some kind of level playing field that there's this like

1:05:21 like a olympics you know not qualifier but it's like the olympics caliber athletes saw her she's incredible just like one of the best in the world she's got um a uh uh she right? Where when you look at the generals, right? not fair right she's just an outlier she's a physical outlier she's a physical outlier and now the iaaf which people that's almost all we always need to look at that and say are we discriminating they're

1:08:05 trying to like are not paid I got a gold medal The most fucked up thing is when they let the NBA play. know at the pizza place. career for life. What your prospects are, right? Of all the sports Track or field? Curling is the top of the heap. just based off of a bet that he made with his drunk buddies. are so important. an air pistol which is like a shooting that's my shit shooting oh yeah no okay i'd never heard of

1:11:31 they got a billion people, We don't like performance enhancing drugs But to play devil's advocate, if you are a state-sponsored athlete from Russia or China, Those women who are running with her, they just, shit happens, bro. outliers you found it sorry you got an outlier might want to do something else yeah yeah or this opinion that there is no such thing

1:13:41 that's what makes me like sports more, you know, is those comparisons. Muscles convert food into Essentially the way No yeah except a muscle does give you more than you put in because a muscle converts food into energy for a things you've seen those guys well he could right but where's Yeah. I see what you're saying. to have you know what i mean right just like in baseball too many home runs move the mound up or

1:17:05 for three hours about like all the different ways that hormones might affect your body it might not and there's going to be a lot of arguments. a natural woman and you don't take any extra hormones or male hormones, you're not taking people who have been a woman their whole life it's not fair it's it's is as much cheating as taking steroids when the other person doesn't or taking performance enhancing drugs when the other

1:20:08 distinction may be breaking down a bit right and i think it may be time to break down that They're just people who are trans, you know, and this is something that we're going to accept and support, right? uh you know i have look if the question is how does you know how does a person who starts taking hormones at a particular age, frontal lobe is completely fully developed, which doesn't even take place until they're

1:22:50 So to touch on just my own experience and the research I've seen, the research I've seen is that trans kids from a young age, they are incredibly consistent when they're expressing their gender identity. friend who has a who has a trans kid um don't know the kid's exact age but you know in the age child to like in the same way that being in the same way that being gay isn not a choice in the on the uh on the part of the child to like in the same way that

1:24:58 you're saying that's not a choice. know uh seeing what other trans folks say um is that the you know experience of being trans and and the best treatment for that that we know exists is to uh you know have do gender confirmation via uh hormones um and you know military helicopter pilot i just interviewed her for my new podcast uh that's coming out soon called

1:27:34 about here is all of the medical science, your mind is formed but people change their mind they change their opinion they change their and I think it's correct, right? where they were talking about whether or not gender confirmation surgery and hormone blockers on young children is ethical because of this fact. um as an author become lesbians transition surgery and said i wish to god that i never did this there's a lot of those people too

1:30:35 to see how many are in each group, right? So that's people who got the surgery i am curious following surgery patients report lower gender dysphoria and improved sexual relationships right of straight cis people tend to put too much emphasis on like oh did you get the surgery yet about all types of things every time I watch She's like a really fascinating person. It's a points. It's an incredibly complex subject

1:33:51 And then once he transitioned to being a male, then he felt complete. It's a fantastic movement. you and you want to keep your penis that should be fine too there's nothing wrong with that if handle a child's life over the long term like when these kids grow to be 60 as know but they are not that child and you know to you said look everyone's different so for them to

1:37:25 You know, how do you feel? just i wasn't talking about specifically the impression that i wasn't saying we should reason this is something that you know if i if this were something we had done on our show and i had children to teenagers to adults right who want to compete right um and who make a got this much amputated or you're this mobile and you can compete in this way you know and so that's

1:40:40 But the fact that he was able to compete in the Olympics, right? out there of their legs off but I'm not crazy So they amputate their hands? they're gonna start dressing differently they're gonna take hormones they're gonna like live with That doesn't make any sense. If you don't think that's real, then you're crazy. But here's the thing. they're pretending to be trans people and this is what people were worried about but they have

1:44:20 if if that extreme edge case or hypothetical case. there's more trans people like by a factor of a million well i don't know about a factor of a uh that with you know with surety um and uh you know but my basic principle is man i just want to I genuinely think, hey, my default is, I understand this problem. 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

1:48:06 so their hormonal profile is similar to females, is in many cases similar to white European male bone density. because i actually don't want to know one way or the other because i have not looked at any research And that's the conversation that I think we could have. optimized for male bodies it's like the uh the uh the height of the basket you know the um uh

1:51:03 Okay, so when you look at, you look at say gymnastics right yes um i would say that like women for the events that are in a women's gymnastic competition It's like there's a lot going on, right? The rules of the game are things that humans create. I think if you take any male gymnast and try to have them compete against the female gymnast, When you're shooting basketballs, you're not just shooting basketballs.

1:53:16 sport is very simple there's a basket on one side a basket on the other side you got to get it in it's rare is because historically we've created most of our sports around things that men have the advantage in or something like that right and so um and again i'm thinking this through myself as i'm talking Or that, like, you know, sort of air rifle sort of thing.

1:56:07 So men have been the ones setting up the sports. It's huge, right? one of the rare examples of like ones where you know that is a real female forward you know female I think that What's the name of the Volleyball players They're not even at the beach. If they want to If they wanted to I like the short shorts to like the baseball tailor and being like dude dude, I want to like sag my pants. I want to, you know, show a little swag, but you don't want to impede your performance.

1:58:52 yeah maybe had big ass thighs and they only feel good with uh baggy pants let me just put a bow on I'm not going to say that women should play in the NFL against men, right? advantage or would we be having a different conversation and if that's the case could we moving fast, physiologically, males have an advantage. that's really cool and that's what i think we're sort of we should be down to have as a society right well talking about things especially

2:01:15 This is how dorky people get. and to their gender politics and everything. you know, We have another one coming out later this year where we like go back and we and, you know, were sort of funding research Like the the narrative part of it. of like stifled by the bad guy researcher in the lobby uh sort of misled us down that down that And that's one of the reasons we've wanted to do that topic on the show, but we're like,

2:04:18 have a clause in your contract to take some year we talk about on the show the fact that they killed that topic and we we talked about how ad all of the sports drinks overemphasize So that was really cool that they allowed us to, like, bring up that conflict on the show. I would probably be on YouTube right now doing like, and you know, You started out on YouTube?

2:06:47 like this fungus that takes control of an ant and like, like advertising, No, not at all. it out as a theme like in initially as you like have a framework for it yeah i did i did and and clicking now i'm really uh ari shafi and i were just talking about that because ari shafir is And then said, this is nonsense. and the left that's the same problem i that's the same problem i had because when you're writing

2:09:45 Yeah. you know, and I was just a comic in people start paying more attention you know and uh like oh my god i didn't realize that you know That's Bill Burr or whoever, I'm running a race. for sure. aren't giving them, like I have my straight but that material So you've kind of like, but yeah. Yeah, had sapolsky on um who's that uh robert sapolsky from stanford who's the top researcher and one of

2:12:50 The toxoplasmosis is wild. You know, that's not enough for me for my show but like so you know i talk about but you know what i talk I've heard it a couple times, yeah. into consideration is that this company facebook makes their money off of collecting your data the and then so it's happening accidentally and so then when we're all looking at facebook going like

2:15:31 oh, that's not, as just a So, Hey, people are going to get hurt, you can get in trouble for that that you were supposed to clean up your comments are filled with anti-Semitic hate that you can get in trouble for that. That you were supposed to clean up your comments. How can they? This is the issue with Twitter. anti-Semitic remarks and hate remarks.

2:18:02 and doesn't have a formal education. this is the problem right this is the this is the exact problem that you're talking about and so we established this precedent that like no no these sites don't have a responsibility for We just give you a place to upload your videos, right? you've also built a system that's directing people to that content and you built a system that's

2:20:52 even remotely controversial controversial they've started they've started doing that um up until Their algorithm was causing that to happen, right? Did they say obvious anti-Semitic things in the title? saying okay we did what we did what we had to no you guys didn't solve the fucking problem because 200 000 kids in a house totally because it's unmanageable yeah when you think about how many

2:22:48 in my show where like the, There's so many. It's just weird garbage. right so people are directing towards people towards nonsense so that people are watching They do that because it's sort of like they've found the people who make those videos have I can figure out how to freeze that guy in place. And here's the thing. be within the first second or two four or five of these accounts that like uh are you just going to

2:25:37 go to it and it's some ripped off pictures And then that's how they tap into it. they couldn't possibly Like, And so whenever they say, Just a couple of bad apples. Find almost everything It's the library of Alexandria man lots of old archival tv you know you could go back you could watch like the first episode of you know name uh sometimes i go sometimes i just go watch uh you know name an old jazz musician

2:28:02 My videos aren't white supremacist you know Yeah. watch a youtube video there's no one who is there while the guy was making the youtube video to go Who's like spends, he's got like a, when that's one of the main arguments. That is a... I was fucking convinced. and that is uh it looks like the astronauts are on wires and it looks like the light sources are, there are multiple light sources

2:31:20 Yeah. publicist it doesn't mean no one went to space it's like making leaps as opposed like what's shadows be parallel right if you had a close light source like on a film on a film set you Another part of it is that- people forget that was something You had live TV I don't believe so. 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?

2:34:37 food chain knowledge in terms of special effects what kubrick did in 2001 when was when was that when did 2001 come out i want to say like 71 or that it was regular speed footage and it was slowed down right and there's this dude on i can't argument when you're talking about the moon landing i also know about how much your audience do you think is going to be fucking furious at

2:36:35 or how at least it's happening, but it's happening in the womb. vary biologically. even if we disagree, you know and i try to get into it say and i and i say hey thanks for watching the show you know I say, okay, they say, I'm never going to watch your show again because you lied about this, at least one hour every week do you really yeah it's a watch yeah i get an hour and just go what

2:39:16 I would love to get high with Laura Ingraham. You have a message. like a curse you know um like i feel for anybody who has to be on tv every day because they their I think you're onto that. I can't believe, with, Yeah And obviously Maybe look at that It might be like, arrest the president. he's not worthy of respect right i'm not i'm not gonna be sad he's dead because he said something

2:42:13 doesn't Adam Conover realize to say or that you would treat me with disrespect right because they're trying to make you feel bad out of context and you're putting it on your show and then you're mocking his death and it's it's thought that i said at the beginning of our show we'd never do an episode on guns because it's too And here's the thing. And anything,

2:44:23 you know, Right. Is a real person you have to deal with. Right. to college i didn't vote for donald trump not because i a lot of college a lot of people went tend to vote for Democrats. that was a lot of fun. I was wondering what time it was. I appreciate it. but we're having our next run of eight Hopefully pretty soon Right now To look at it That was great Either way, Adam, thank you. Thank you so much, man. Thanks for being here.