The Big Gay Myth of Masculinity in Sports, with Mississippi's Own Jay Jurden

Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out, presented by eBay Live. I am Pablo Torre, and today you're going to find out what this sound is. Ole Miss versus Miami, someone was like, who do you think is going to win? I was like, the Coke dealers, that's who's going to win. I don't know. Bolivians and Colombians. Right after this ad. Prime Video biedt het best in entertainment. This should be fun. Jason Momoa and Dave Bautista gaan helemaal los in de hilarische nieuwe actiefilm, The Wrecking Crew, inbegrepen by Prime. Yeah, I'm pumped. Find the new Game of Thrones series A Night of the Seven Kingdoms. Based on the bestseller of George R.R. Martin. Look by being a member of HBO Max. So be brave, be just. So what you also seek, Prime Video. Here you look at everything. Abonnement is delayed. Beholds and conferences. 18+. All the rules are of use. I feel like you do a bit of the math that I do sometimes, which is how much do I sports it up right now? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And your dial on that goes so much higher than I think people are ready for. Pablo, it can go from full on like, you know, Hell's Kitchen game, which is close to zero, all the way to like, if I go to Oxford for a game, if I go to Tuscaloosa for a game, I'm turning it all the way up to SEC. Full SEC is a dangerous—I don't think New York City in general is prepared for full SEC. I think that if people understood how much energy, time, money, and cultural identity was rooted in these 18-year-old black kids across the Southeast, they'd be like, oh, it's the 1840s again. I mean, these young, strong black men in the South are propping up economies. I mean, you've done the research. You know, a lot of these SEC football coaches are the highest paid public officials in their state. The SEC football is so important that Tommy Tuberville is a senator. And he wasn't a great coach. Tommy Tuberville is being asked questions about Iran right now because he kind of went 500. Exactly. Tommy Tuberville is being asked about Iran. And he goes, Iran, well, we do a play-action pass and they'll respect the run. Like, that's what's happening right now. That's the world we live in. And I think when people are kind of surprised by it, it's because like I was born and raised in Mississippi. I spent the majority of my life in Mississippi and Alabama, and then I moved to New York in 2015. So I know how to like really sort of swing it in a very sort of, I think, American way. That's some of the most American shit ever. You just sort of like rolled your eyes and sort of like, you know, shook your head a bit when you said something that is so sincere. And I feel that all the time, which is that sports is my passport to everything else. Oh, my God. Whenever people kind of dismiss sports, I go, you are dismissing one of the cultural prisms that people filter everything through. Everything. The only way you can reach a certain demographic of young men is you have to filter it through sports. The reason Shane Gillis is the most popular stand-up comedian right now is because he's a boy from Philly who loves Notre Dame and who loves the birds. He loves the Eagles. There's a world where people go, why do these people fall in love with these men? And you go, oh, it's because there's these cultural signifiers that let them know you're part of this in-group. And we're going to have conversation. We're going to have jokes that only we can get. And it amasses this following. There's a reason why people love Stavros. They go, oh, I love him so much because he's so funny. But also he reminds me of every one of my friends from Baltimore who love the Ravens. Like there's this connection that I think sometimes people dismiss, even queer people. But then queer people realize that we just do it for divas. Like, I love sports. I love sports. And the reason I'm a Yankees fan is because the Yankees are great, but also because Mariah Carey. Mariah Carey dated Derek Jeter. We don't get the album Butterfly without Derek Jeter. And that, to me, is why he's one of the most important baseball players of all time. Because he broke Mariah Carey's heart, and we got my all. We got the roof. We got Baby Doll. We got Breakdown. I grew up a Yankee fan. I grew up a Derek Jeter fan and against all now sophisticated sports like nuanced sort of perspective that I aspire to have. I grew up like such a normie. Yeah. He's winning. He's the winner. He's the captain. He's my captain. Yeah, he's the captain. No captain, my captain. There's this beautiful also synergy between Mariah Carey and Derek Jeter because he represented kind of Manhattan in the Bronx and then she represented Long Island. So to me, they were like this perfect New York couple that kind of represented everything. A relationship that was itself a bridge and a tunnel. Yeah, a bridge. You're very good. Very good. So I grew up really liking sports. My first formative sports memories were more sports entertainment memories. And this is in my new hour. I talk about how important professional wrestling was for me starting around 1999. But then I go to middle school. I want to play basketball. I go to basketball tryouts. I don't make it. But I just kind of really want to like kind of get engrossed with sports. And it's around the same time that all of my homeboys, Eric and Evan and Benji, they're all watching SportsCenter every morning before school. So then I have to start watching SportsCenter so we can talk about the top 10 when I go to school. So now kind of coupled with like my burgeoning idea of queerness. I don't know that I'm queer. I know I'm different. I don't I don't have the words. I don't necessarily know how to articulate them bisexual, but I do know something's going on. But I know I can at least continue to have these male friends and these male relationships if I know how to talk sports with these guys. So I end up really kind of falling in love with the NBA and the NFL. There was a moment a couple, you remember a couple months ago when someone asked Jalen Brunson if he knew his starting five for the 99 Knicks and he didn't know? Oh, God. He didn't know. And my gay ass knew. I was like Charlie Ward, Kurt Thomas, Latrell Sprewell, Larry Johnson, Patrick Cohen was injured. So it was Marcus Camby, Allie Houston. I think Chris Dudley was coming off the bench. Chris Childs was punching Kobe Bryant in the neck. Kobe Bryant, I think Shaq dunked on Chris Dudley and air humped him. And Chris Dudley threw the ball at him. Yeah. Chris Dudley later ran for Senate. Yes, Van Gundy. I mean, that was the NBA that I was introduced to. and so man I was radicalized at the same time yeah yeah so it's like I've always like tried to talk about sports I have sports jokes on my in my special I went to Ole Miss so one of my favorite jokes is I have a joke where I say I went to Ole Miss and people go yeah and I go you know about Ole Miss because of what movie they say The Blind Side they go if you don't know The Blind Side is this documentary about this rich family from Memphis who kidnapped this large African American man in the hopes that Sandra Bullock could get an Oscar and to me that's like a very, that's a fun gay joke. That's a fun race joke. That's the history of Mississippi joke. But at its core, it's a joke about the Blond's Eye, which is based on the book, The Meat Market, which was about the SEC football economy. So it's such a, to me, sports sometimes is this really cool entry point into culture and race and sexuality and masculinity that I think sometimes people just kind of eschew because they think it's for dumb meatheads. And it is, but it's also for everyone else. How much did you enjoy going to Ole Miss? I really enjoyed going to University of Mississippi because it is where I met my husband, but I also enjoyed it because it really gave me an opportunity to be both like traditionally Southern and this like very aberrant form of like, you know, progressive Southerner. So I was at this huge football SEC school, but I also was in the theater department and hanging out with like the English majors and doing this silly ass theater but also still making, I mean, still making sure we went to the Grove on Saturday. We would go to the Grove. So the Grove, people don't know. Please explain the Grove visually and just like the sights and smells. Okay, so it is tailgating, but not tailgating the way that a lot of non-Southerners think about it. So you dress up. And part of this, it's always either tied back to the Civil War or slavery. So you dress up. And the reason why a lot of the students dress up is because at one point, they were sending some of their boys off to literal war. So now people will, like, dress up for the football game because the football players are going to war. Whenever people come from outside the South, they go to, like, an Ole Miss or an Alabama game, and they go, why is everyone dressed up? Because in every other place, you wear, like, a hoodie with the mascot on it. You wear the colors. You're not trying that hard. If you wear jeans to the Grove, oh, my God. People are going to say, this boy ain't got no home training. This boy wasn't raised right. You can't wear jeans. People, I mean, because there's a crazy amount of money also, like, involved. That's the key part, I think, is that there is, I mean, almost ancient American wealth in the way that I only saw in movies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm like, oh, f***. Is that a parasol? Yeah. You'll be wearing a cotton shirt and you'll be like, oh, yep. Ironic. Like, they're these huge sorority houses, these, like, huge but disgusting on the inside frat houses. And they all have tents in this kind of, like, area of grass right in front of the student union. And everyone tailgates before the game. And Ole Miss has always been a party school. I mean, it was Ole Miss versus Miami. Someone was like, who do you think is going to win? I was like, the Coke dealers. That's who's going to win. I don't know. Bolivians and Colombians. So it's always been like this very flashy, hoity-toity, southern. I mean, think like full-on Blanche Devereaux, Golden Girls level. Turn it up. Like they go, Pablo Torre, I'm so happy to be here. I thank you so much for having me on your podcast. I can't believe that we could discuss the beauty of SEC football. You know, it's the kind of person who says, well, you know, your great-great-granddaddy, the colonel, that kind of person is attending this game. And they go, for the longest time, they watch Ole Miss lose. They watch Ole Miss lose. Wait, so when you were there, how was the football game? Okay, so I was there for Ogeron. Oh, yeah. So my first year was Patrick Willis' last year. P. Willis, they got to see P. Willis play. Seeing the linebacker that good, that fast, that strong in person. and when you're an 18-year-old freshman, you go, we're two different species. That's a man. I'm a child. I am but a boy. That is a man. So we had like Ogeron and then, you know, we had, I want to say, it was at Houston Nut, Hugh Freeze. I was there through all of that. Just some, by the way, incredible names and incredible faces that you just rattled off that just surged into my brain. I saw Hugh Freeze the other week. It was at a strip club, but I saw Hugh Freeze. You saw Hugh Freeze? No, I'm joking. I was going to say, If you saw Hugh Freeze in the wild, probably people are spotting Ed Orgeron in the wild. Or at least they're posting videos of him jogging shirtless and very angularly. Yeah, yeah. Because he's like a... He's Justin Adam Sandler character? That is my Ed Orgeron. But by the way, that is a dead-on Ed Orgeron. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Give credit to Alabama. They came back. They're a championship football team, but we knew we was going to win that game today. There are going to be fans of mine who go, who is this version of Jay that I'm seeing? This is why I wanted you here. There are going to be fans of yours who go, I have to look up this comic and then go watch myself. They're going to be like, a lot of d*** jokes. I thought we were coming here for sports. Yeah, a lot of nuts. Houston nut of a different guy. A lot of Houston busting nut jokes. We see you next time This is before Eli This is after Eli. Oh, this is, wait, yeah. This is after Eli. Eli was there in 03. Eli was there 03. Eli is also part of the reason why, like, I could ever even root for the Giants. I remember one of the biggest things ever was in Oxford. they had like a couple of big screen showings of that very important NFC divisional or championship game. It was Packers versus Giants because it was like, it was the Mississippi Bowl because it was Favre versus Eli Manning. And that was before Brett Favre showed his dick and stole all that money. But yeah, this was 2008. So I remember that being a huge deal because Mississippi is, it's so sh** upon that whenever there's any sort of like semi-national spotlight on the state, people really do take pride in it. The reason people say, oh, Oprah's not from Chicago, she's from Mississippi is because we don't get anything. We really don't get it. The reason why I love sinners so much is because that's Mississippi. It's a sad part of Mississippi. It's a kind of really interesting portion of Mississippi history. It's basically the 30s when everyone was sharecroppers. That's when my grandmother was born. So Mississippi, specifically black people's interaction with Mississippi is this very fraught but just so culturally rich history. And so that's another reason why some people would be like, oh, Jay, why do you talk about University of Mississippi? Why do you say Ole Miss? Because some people don't like it when you say Ole Miss. Could you explain the name Ole Miss? But my name has talked about this. So Ole Miss is kind of connected to slavery and plantation jargon because on the plantation there would be Old Massa, the person who owned the house, and his wife or the slave master's wife would be Ole Miss. But then people kind of said, oh, University of Mississippi has a lot to say. We're going to call it Ole Miss kind of as this like warm Southern thing. But it's related to slavery. But I mean, like, sometimes whenever, I don't know, I'll get a comment because I have like a couple of clips about Ole Miss. People are like, Ole Miss is racist. I'll be like, well, I mean, the LSU Tigers were a battalion in the Confederate Army. So not to be glib, but we're all racist, baby. Well, but it also reminds me, like, if you really thought that people talked about race too much, you have no idea what people could be talking about all of the time. Oh, my God. You have no idea how hard it is to be a black SEC football coach. That's what I'm saying. I mean, James Franklin, I look at the world that I sort of like wink and nod at. And I understand that there are these horrors and these atrocities that I'm trying to be both like cheeky about. But if someone wanted to have a real conversation about me, I'd be like, oh, it's terrible. It's scary. And I hate the fact that we can finally, you know, we can finally have these conversations and people are still scared to. But once again, sports is an entry point for that kind of stuff. The statistic that made me think of you in ways that I'm not necessarily proud of, because I was like, how many people can I talk about this statistic with? And I was like, oh, Jay Jordan can talk about this with me. Yeah. Just the fact that there are zero out NBA, MLB, NHL, NFL players. Yeah. Well, they always come out after they retire. They always come out after they retire. Or, I mean, we had the Michael Sam situation. Michael Sam, interesting. I mean, I had a joke whenever that was first going on where I was like, oh, I mean, it's really tough. It was tough for him to, like, find his way in the league because for his position, he was undersized and he had trouble penetrating, and he wasn't that good of a football player. That, to me, is kind of, like, the sweet spot of where I like my jokes to go. If I'm, like, hanging with the boys, if I'm trying to get on barstool. But, like, I'm kidding. But there isn't... Me and Dave Portnoy do not get along. I am shocked. Oh, yeah, yeah. I am shocked. I challenged him to a foot race the other day. No, but there is this idea that there are no gay people in sports. Well, by the way, that's what that statistic is declaring. But then flip it. Because any women's sports league has anywhere from 20 to 40% of people who are out. And then another percentage of people go, I'd rather not say. So something is amiss. And maybe it's how people self-identify. Maybe people go, oh, I do gay s***, but I'm not gay. Maybe they're just waiting for Dwight Howard to come back into the league. I don't know. I don't know. I'm sorry, Dwight. I know you're tall. But it is—I've been to Atlanta. It is such a weird lie. It's such a weird lie. And I think it makes a lot of queer people, gay people, queer men specifically, never come out or just not get into sports. And like the gay boys who do know sports, they go, oh, you're an anomaly. Oh, this is so crazy. But I go, if it's all these men and they've been around nothing but other men since now, like since they were like six, if you start with like all of the feeder leagues and AAU stuff, there have to be people who have experimented and or found love in these spaces. It's the reason why he did Ralfrey is so crazy. Oh, my God. This is insane. What? What? Oh, all these hot men sometimes j*** off together. Can you believe it, Pablo? I've been thinking about it. I did some research in the car on the way here. The heated rivalry thing, this is the part of the conversation that I feel like I hopefully can bring something to, which is that if you do enough reporting around the athletes who have dared to come out of the closet and then have sometimes gone right back in. Yeah. There was a college basketball player named Derek Gordon, And he was not, he was the first D1 men's college basketball player to be out and active. Yeah. And I interviewed him. And this was, he went to UMass and he was out and then he transferred to Seton Hall. Yeah. And he stopped talking about it. Yeah. And I interviewed him in between. Yeah. And Seton Hall Catholic School in New Jersey. Yeah. I profiled him. And part of the premise of the profile was, however, however comfortable or safe you thought it was because this guy existed, just know that he's basically decided I can't be out anymore. Yeah, and what a shame, right? Seton Hall Pirates. He couldn't even go after that booty. Couldn't even go after that booty publicly. That's a shame. That's a shame before that. So tri-state. Tri-state. Yeah, try it. Now, imagine that being able to be gay in Jersey. That's wild. That's wild. I think that there is this like, there's this idea you'll be a distraction to the team. And like, I don't college teams hate distractions. Pro teams hate distractions. But also they hate this idea that any one of their players could jeopardize the masculinity of the team. He's not out, and I don't know if he's queer. I don't think he's queer. But we're seeing this. We saw this happen with the Sixers and now with OKC, with McCain. So, yeah, with Jared McCain. We see people, and we saw it happen a little bit with Caleb Williams. There's this idea. Both fingernail fingers. Both African-American men who paint their fingernails and who are younger, who also are not necessarily locking themselves in these boxes of masculinity the way that a lot of players have had to for the past however many years. And we see this huge backlash from fans of theirs who go, oh my God, why you gotta be gay? Why can't you just throw that football and put your hands underneath that big guy's nuts and butt? Why are you doing gay s*** as a quarterback when you're supposed to be touching your center's ass? You're doing all this gay stuff. No, I need to see you in a jockstrap in the locker room afterwards. Why are you being gay, man? And that, you know, that sort of cognitive dissonance really, it really infects the league. And people get so much hate and people get made fun of. Jared McCain has done an amazing job of trolling the haters and crushing it. I think SGA also has to deal with it. Well, there's a queer-coded mess. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That the younger athletes are enjoying in ways that our generation are f***ing too afraid to. You get to see Cal Kuzma coming down the tunnel in any sort of outfit. It's that giant Dr. Seuss sweater. The pink sweater. I mean, I think part of it is there's a generational kind of like unburdening. for these young men because they don't, it's both style of play has changed a bit. The idea of what an athlete is and the idea of how tough an athlete has to be has also changed a bit. Also, these athletes, they want to be fashion girlies. They want brand deals. They want sponsorships. They want GQ covers. And there's also a lot of like, I learned it from you, Dad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like they saw all of their, all the previous generations. Dude, we saw the NBA that we grew up watching You go from, you know, the too tall tees to the dress code. Yes. To then the people wearing polo and preppy and wanting to be on G2. You got to look at that first. You got to look at LeBron's draft outfit to him wearing a Tom Brown shrunken suit. There was those shorts. Yeah. And you see it. LeBron wearing the suit, Patrick shorts. But even LeBron, there's a recent clip of him getting shorts that were too short. He was like, no, give these LeBron. These are a little bit too short for me. So I think as the NBA continues to move forward, I think the shorts will get shorter. And eventually we will get some booty shorts. And that's when I'm going to be, hopefully that's when I'm famous enough to play in the All-Star game. That's when I want to be in the Celebrity All-Star game. The Ruffles Celebrity game is ready for Jay Durdas. I'm opening up crossplay. I've been playing against Dan, my colleague at the New York Times. I'm going to play Stoop, S-T-U-P-E, across the triple word multiplier square. Kat's played another move. Ugh, and she did have an S. She played Stoop for 36 points. I've got a Z, which is 10 points. If I can put my X over there, I can make box. I have two A's, N's, and T's. I'm guessing tanga is not a word. Let's see. Tanga is a word? Oh! I don't know what tanga means, so I'm going to press down on the word and oh! Definition popped up. Former monetary unit of Tajikistan. Learn something every time I play this game. Even though I'm about 50 points ahead, one thing I've learned in Crossplay is that the game is never over. I just got a notification and Dan played his last turn. Let's see who won. It's so close, but I did win. New York Times Game subscribers get full access to Crossplay, our first two-player word game. Subscribe now for a special offer on all of our games. a horrible player. And by the way, as much as Kayla Williams is doing some of the coolest things you've ever seen on a football field while painting his nails and crying and presenting in all of these ways that are traditionally femme, he still is, I mean, and he has a girlfriend and so good for him. But the point being, there still aren't any out athletes. No one's out. And the comeback that calling someone a gay slur has made in the last couple years. Yeah. It's, it's, it's, I'm back in high school. Well Pablo I know I said sports is kind of one prism We filter everything through But the other one for me is comedy So sports and comedy are in this very interesting battle where they're both trying to progress but also regress because there's this idea of this kind of idyllic Eden back when you used to be able to say whatever. We used to be able to be men. We used to do all this stuff. So people who want to bring back the R slur, they are kind of saying, oh, if we go back to saying these things, then people will be normal and their behavior will be modified because they will have the fear of being called gay, the fear of being called intellectually different. So they think it's going to help them. And part of the reason that's happening with comedy and with sports is because the one sport that comedy seems to be obsessed with, it's not the NFL. It's not the NBA. It's not the MLB. It's not hockey. It's MMA. Yeah. And it's so funny that a lot of these white boy comedians, the two things they love the most are like MMA and pro wrestling. One is so real. And one is so fake. It is. For people who don't know this, like Joe Rogan, to go back to the point you made earlier, Joe Rogan started his podcast, started his whole career in media as the MMA guy. Not just as an MMA guy. MMA enthusiast, MMA announcer, color commentator. He wasn't just a guy who watched MMA. He analyzed MMA. He was the person who made everyone start taking BJJ. He was an acolyte of the Gracie School. He was one of these people who like was an evangelist. He was an acolyte of MMA for the masses. And so he has also captured this huge group of young men who think that now they all have to grapple, that they all have to learn how to strike, that they all have to learn how to be MMA fighters. And they go, oh, because like someone's out to get you. And it's so funny that that specter of someone out to get you has now infiltrated their minds. They actually think that. It's a fascinating cultural case study if it wasn't so, like, messed up. But there's also a lot of just, like, you know, me thinks the podcaster doth protest too much. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, look, in MMA and wrestling, as much as those are some of the most homophobic sports, in terms of the physics. In terms of the grappling, yeah, yeah, yeah. In terms of just, like, the sheer, we're going to hug each other. This is an exclusive I'm going to give you. I'm doing my new hour currently, And one of the things I do say is that controversially, I would hook up with Joe Rogan. Not because I want to, but just to ruin his reputation. And we do a little MMA of our own. MMA stands for mouth, meat, ass. We do a little BJJ. We do a little ground and pound, if you know what I'm talking about, Pablo. You understand? Like, that's in the new hour. It's in the new hour. But there is this idea that— But rear naked chokes is like, that's not even a—that's just a term. Rear naked chokes. Baby, were you an animal with me last week? Like, rear naked choke, this horse meat disco. So I know that these men understand both, like, the power and the beauty of the male form. Yes. There's an appreciation of men, of masculinity, of perfect male bodies. So it is very funny to watch as an out queer man see these people be so homoerotic but also so homophobic while also, and this is the funniest part of me, while also pursuing the arts. At the end of the day, if you want to be a stand-up comedian, you are a person doing a monologue. You are a couple of traumatic stories away from doing a one-person show. Yeah, you're basically actually doing Shakespeare. You're doing Shakespeare damn near. You're soliloquizing. You're monologuing to these people. And there is this idea that what you're doing is so different and so manly. And I think that's a crack of s***. It's so funny. Oh, it's exit pursued by a bear, but just in a different way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've been pursued by some bears, Pablo. I was going to get cruised for a week. Polar bears are not extinct. They are thriving with their Cambodian boyfriends. Oh, God. It also makes me think of, by the way, when I'm watching Tom Brady. Yeah. Oh, Tom Brady. Tom Brady. Speaking of, I'm not saying Tom Brady's in his bear phase, but there's something happening. He's not a bear because he's so hairless. Tom Brady is in his older, wealthy, bachelor of a certain age phase where I see pictures of Tom Brady. And if I saw Tom Brady and it didn't say Tom Brady said a different name, I'd go, I saw that man on Fire Island buying art. I saw him buying erotic art, which is just these beautiful kind of like silhouettes of the male form to put up in his second Fire Island house. His face is so structured and gorgeous. He's constantly posting shirtless. I think I've seen his nipples more than I've seen his eyes lately. he is in this very sort of like like sexy older very divorced very single very publicly sort of like I don't know attractive older man face and these men they love Tom Brady in a way that is just so you know for lack of a better word and I mean this in the most objective way gay they're in love with Tom Brady Tom Brady can do no wrong to these men and this is why like why is the why is the F slur making a comeback. It's because in many other ways, guys have been never more open about what they think is beautiful when it comes to certainly athletes. Yeah, athletes. I mean, it's, you see with the younger generation with the clavicular of it all, but there's always been this appreciation and this kind of like judgment of the male form. Perfect, perfect segue. It's happening right now. It happened less than a couple days ago. One of the most watched events of the entire sports year is, oh, let's get all these sexy 22-year-olds together and put them in some underwear and make them run and jump for us and let's measure them. No, we should put them in baggy shorts, though. No, no. Pablo, what's wrong with you? I want to see that butt. I got to see that bubble butt move. I got to see the intangibles. I got to see these young men working sweat for a living. Like the combine. The actual auction that you're referring to. The actual slave auction, yeah. Well, the funniest thing about the combine is there's this part of me that my friend Henrik Blix, he was a writer with me at the prom with Jon Stewart. Shout out Henrik Blix. He was like, there's this part of you, once you get into your 30s, where you go, I kind of want to do a combine. I kind of want to see. And you always see the clip where some sportscasters, some, you know, sports media person, some sports writer, some person who's covering a specific beat in the city, they have their combine. It goes terrible for him. It goes terrible for him. You're like, I was in the gym the other day. I was like, let me make sure I can, like, get up 185s. Just because I don't want to be Kevin Durant. Let me make sure I can, like, do some of this, do some of the stuff that I'm, like, judging people for. But, yeah, the combine is another celebration of how strong and fast and sexy and talented men are. I did a story on this when I was at ESPN. There is, this is not an exaggeration. There are many, many professional scouts whose job is to assess these young men's butts. Yeah, yeah. Because the butt, as you know, Jay. Pablo, that's what I'm doing after I retire. It's a power center. It's a power center. It is where you derive so much of your athletic greatness. Oh, my goodness. Leverage, power, control, speed. I mean, do you remember DK Metcalf's Combine? Of course. And people lost it. Because, oh man, once again, people went, who is this? They said, oh my God, who is this being, this Adonis? I've never, because the really interesting thing about sports is that you have to cover it in a non-gay way. But the conversations you're having are very homoerotic. Well, this is what I mean. I think that it's happening so homoerotically in terms of what's happening in the actual action that you're watching on camera with other men surrounding it. Of course. As well as the actual analysis. Yes. People are just like, we got to throw in some slurs. Yeah, oh, to balance it. Just to draw a line somewhere. We got to throw in a pause. I mean, some of my favorite compilations are whenever Charles Barkley says, Shaq, them young boys, they coming. Them young boys. Them young boys coming. Oh, my God. SEC, by the way. More SEC everywhere. LSU, Auburn. But it's like such a funny. It's why I want to do College Game Day. I mean, I hope I have this sort of career where I eventually do get to do something fun and silly like that. Because I do want to throw Nick Saban and Kirk Herbstreet off. So I'm like, whoa, I'm like, yeah, let's be a little silly. Let's have a little fun. Because people were surprised that to kind of reclaim your heterosexuality, you do have to go on something like that. There were people who were like, oh, now I respect Timothee Chalamet because he had a great college game day. What did you get? What was your scouting report of Timothee Chalamet's performance? I'm going Jackson State. Eight wins in a row. Eleven all-conference players. It should be a comfortable, easy win for them. Breaking it down. People don't understand that he is a New York theater kid. but he's more specifically a New York straight theater kid. So he loves the Knicks. I truly believe that. And I think he also loves watching football because he gets to have all of his kind of like, you know, artistic endeavors fully expressed. So he gets to do all of the theater kid stuff and then go be one of the dudes. He gets to do both and he gets to have this beautiful balance. So I love that for him. To me, that's the perfect sort of actor. That's what I want to see from more men. I want to see more men who feel free enough to be fashion girlies and sports girlies and, like, address all this stuff and, you know, have other interests. Like, if people ask, oh, what's Jay's top three interests, they probably go like, oh, Jay loves comedy. Jay loves X-Men. And then Jay also. Yeah. And then Jay also. they'll put sports somewhere in the top five. But, like, that's, like, I think a well-rounded approach to life. We have a pretty similar top three in some order, honestly. I mean, one more thing on the Chalamet was just, it did feel like a guy who knew he needed to turn the dial all the way right. Yeah, yeah. So to speak. Yeah. And he was like, yeah, you're not going to, I'm not going to sit at this table and have Nick Saban think of me as the call me by your name kid. Exactly. And I think that his ability to kind of code switch, really, that's what it is. That's what we're talking about. And him to be able to exist in both those spaces really made people go, oh, okay, I like this guy. Oh, I really respect this guy. And it's why he's a star because a lot of boys can map their personality onto him. Yes. You know, in X-Men, in wrestling, in the Combine, we're talking about spandex. Oh, yeah. We're talking about Lycra. We're talking about spandex. Yeah. And again, like these are some of the straightest boy interests. Yes. Yes. Well, it's because there's hero worship there. It goes all the way back to Joseph Campbell and myth. It goes even further than that. It goes all the way to like, you know, Hercules. There's this idea that there's this part of you that can become this larger than life man who does all of the things that men do. and what's so funny about the Greek tradition is a lot of those men, while they did get married, they also had male lovers or male contours or people that they loved so much that they were heartbroken about Achilles Achilles was so heartbroken at the death of Petroclus that he killed Hector and dragged his body around for days because he killed his lover. And then people were like, it wasn't his lover, it was his cousin. Sure, I'm from Mississippi, same, same, okay? But even there, I just love the idea that, no, no, no, you don't get it. What's more straight than murdering someone and dragging their body around? See, now you balance it out again. Yeah, do you understand? You did some gay stuff, but then you murdered someone and paraded your masculinity. What's more straight than circling back on the ops for your boy? I gotta kill him. Spin the block. It is the biggest time of year for college basketball. it is, in fact, March. The time for busted brackets, underdogs that become legends, and game after game after game after game that feels like it'll come down to the final shot with surprises and comebacks and upsets. It is anyone's game. And regardless of who makes it to the final round, one thing is for certain. It takes the most talented people to build these incredible teams. And the same goes when you're hiring. So if you want your business to be at the top of its game, you need the best people on your team. And the best place to find them is ZipRecruiter. And now you can try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash PTFO. It is no wonder that ZipRecruiter is the number one rated hiring site based on G2. 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Yeah, yeah. Like presses. Yeah, RFK Jr. choosing to do— I mean, we're going to call them partial reps in genes is— I mean, I think it's indicative of this culture. It's a man who has a legacy and who has like tons. He's a Nepo baby. Telling us what we should do all while showing us that he doesn't know how to do it. And he's doing it so poorly that he's a danger to himself and others. It is a perfect encapsulation of what's going on with the American experiment right now. That's like what I saw in that clip. The other thing about RFK Jr. is this faux approach to health just through this like hyper masculine coded sort of like facsimile of what they think healthy is. So instead of saying, hey, make sure you have enough protein and enough fiber and enough vegetables. But also you might need a little bit more protein if you're trying to work out because you're undergoing like muscular synthesis. So maybe you need a bit, maybe you need a bit more protein if you're going through all this microtrauma when you work out. Instead of saying that, instead of being very specific and nuanced, he just goes, hey, flip this pyramid upside down. Eat more meat. Cook it. You don't got to cook that shit. Raw milk. Raw milk. Hell yeah. Swim in sewage. There's this kind of glossing over of the details because, once again, Pablo, details and specifics, they gay. Details and specifics, that's gay. I don't got time to be detail-oriented. Just eat more meat. Like it's such a, and then the thing about RFK Jr. that no one really wants to kind of talk about is that if you were to say, hey, if you're an older person, an older American, I want you to work out specifically if you're an older woman for bone density issues. I want to prevent osteoporosis. I want you to be healthy. I want you to be able to be mobile. I want you to be able to have, you know, a healthier life well into your 60s and 70s. No one's going to be mad at that. No one was mad at anyone telling older people they should stay physically fit. We're mad now because it's just a meme. It's the memification of everything. And that's kind of what he ran on, I guess. It was him doing incline press and muscle beach. But the jeans, I think, are this very sort of, I think there's this idea that like, you remember when everyone was obsessed with Chuck Norris? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what it feels like. The joke generator. Yeah. You remember when everyone was obsessed with bacon? That's what the jeans, that's what working out in jeans kind of feels like. It feels like it's just a meme turned to life and he saw that there was some sort of like humor in the meme. It's kind of when you don't know that you're being made fun of at first and then you keep doing the thing and then people keep making fun of you, but you also just feel like, oh, this is some sort of attention. I got something from it, so I'm going to keep doing it. If RFK Jr. wanted to work out in regular workout clothes, fine. cool. I would also love it if he didn't give everybody in their goddamn mama measles. So this body worship that these men are doing, it's like a lot of straight trends. It's gay, but it's just 20 years late. Well, it's also, I mean, to summarize this all in a very simple way, it's all dudes. Yeah. We're all dudes doing dude sh**. Have you seen the meme where it's like whenever a guy starts working out, he thinks it's gonna be all this attention from women being like, oh my But then the minute you get big enough, it's a bunch of dudes being like, hey, so like, what's your split, bro? What's your split? What's your, hey, what's your dose? What's your split? What's going on? But there's all, I mean, I just need to say this. Say it. As somebody who has always marveled at his gay friend's use of Grindr. Yeah, yeah. Grindr. Yeah. Is what straight men. Yes. If they were truly honest. Pablo. Would be f***ing using. Pablo is some straight men on there right now. But again, what's the difference? It is honest and clearly here. Well, it's not that honest. Well, okay, fair enough, fair enough. Honest in the sense that we're all here for the geographic proximity of f***ing. Yeah. Can we optimize? Yeah, I'm going to, and you know what? I'm going to help you and give you the newest version of that, Sniffies, which is even crazier because Sniffies is just a website. I shouldn't even. Ah, I'm blowing our spot up. I'm sorry. The PTFL audience. Listen. What a treat. There's a newer app that is even more direct. How can you be more direct than what I understand Grindr? Because Grindr is a tile with a bunch of different bodies. Please explain if you've never seen Grindr's UI works. It's like a tile situation with a bunch of different profiles. and you can kind of see where they are in proximity to you. So it's a tile. Sniffy's kind of reverse engineered it. And so instead of seeing the profiles first, you see a map first and you see them all pop up on the map. So that's like, that's been a crazy innovation. That's even more sort of like, how far? You guys invented the Cerebro for f***ing? Oh, yes. Yes, the helmet comes down. Yeah, you see it. Everyone's there. It's very Professor Triple X is what it is. It really is. Yeah. The joke is like, of course, if straight men could have this, they would want it. The problem is that I don't think the women would want the men to have it. The women cannot have— That's the key part of being gay, I feel like. Give their location to men because men are prone to murder these women and kidnap them. I have this very interesting relationship with queerness and male spaces because in comedy, there weren't always a bunch of out queer men. There were more lesbian and lesbian coded comics for the longest time who could achieve varying levels of success, primarily because people at least could filter them through a male lens. they go, oh, that's a female comedian, but there are parts of her that feel a bit more masculine, and she is talking about dating women, so we can't approximate some of these things. With queer men, it's an aberration from the norm, and it's sort of this, like, desecration of, like, all these things are supposed to be manly, so people don't know how to deal with us. And so a lot of times, when there's any sort of representation, straight male comics over the past 10 years, they go, oh, well, yeah, Jay, I'd be more famous too if I was gay. And to those people, what I usually say is, you'd be more famous if you were gay. When I'm saying this as business advice and career advice, suck my d**k. No, no, no, homie. I'm helping because I want you to get a special. So suck my d**k real quick. I'll tell some execs, you gay as f**k. You'll get it. No? Okay. Well, then I guess you can just suck my d**k metaphorically. Like, I have a great relationship with so many of my straight comedian counterparts because they've had to grow up and because they've basically realized that on the totem pole of men, they're not at the bottom, but they're still very low. Because every comic was like, I'm a man, I'm a man. Guess what? You don't work an oral rig. You don't drive a truck. You're not a professional athlete. You're not an MMA fighter. You're still a comic. Your goal, your biggest goal is to talk for an hour like a woman while wearing makeup. That's your bar. so it's funny that this idea that straight men both want all the gay benefits but none of the gay fear because that's kind of a tale that's all this time the fear that all these guys apparently feel in sports, in comedy, in politics in just whatever is not being man enough not being man enough damn I think there's a wonderful balance that you can achieve when you can talk with Pablo about sports and talk with Pablo about sniffies. I think there's a dance that more of these people can do that they would feel freer in if they allowed themselves to enjoy sports on Sunday and enjoy a play on a Saturday. I want that for them. I want that to be the case. Yeah. Caleb Williams is throwing touchdowns with painted nails. That's right. Saying sniff this. Saying sniff this. I want that. And what's cool, what does give me hope, is that men in Chicago were going and getting their nails painted in support of their quarterback. And some of those men also, they didn't just get manis. They got petties. And someone said, he didn't tell you to get petties. And they're like, I kind of just wanted to. They go, actually, Jay, I've been dying to do this. That's right. That, I think, is in America. I want to believe that. Yeah. That's the future, I hope. An omega-level comic, Jay Jordan. Oh, thank you. The highest and definitely the straightest compliment I could pay you. Thank you. I love that. A lot of omegas are gay, but thank you, Pablo Torre. Thank you so much for having me. The pleasure was all fine. This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production. And I'll talk to you next time. Thank you.