Bill Maher and Neil deGrasse Tyson Spar Over ‘Woke’ Colleges and Trans Athletes

Talk show host Bill Maher and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson discuss the state of comedy and trans rights on the latest episode of the Club Random podcast.

In the hour and twelve-minute video, the two friends drink and smoke cigars as their heated debate jumps from topic to topic, and Tyson directly asks the comedian why he's "abandoned college campuses in your standup."

"Every comedian has," said Maher. "I have given up on any place that doesn't even remotely attempt to believe in free speech. And thinks that anything they hear that they don't like, that they don't agree with, is violence. These people are f---ing nuts and you should be calling them out," he told Tyson. "Somebody like you who has standing with kids."

Tyson snapped back with advice from his father. "It's not good enough to be right, you also have to be effective. If you eject the college campus, then you have no influence on them. They're not going to say, 'Oh we're not going to get Bill, maybe we should change.'"

"Sweetheart, I can wait 'til they grow up a little," Maher replied. "You don't know what you're talking about."

Maher stood firm in his belief that "the kids were raised wrong" while Tyson maintained that "if you want to influence that generation, then you navigate it."

The conversation then moved over to the debate around transgender people participating in sports.

"In this emergent space where you have people expressing themselves on a gender spectrum and you want to now compete in sports, that's still a frontier to be solved and I don't have the answer but I can suggest one, whether or not it will work," reflected Tyson. "Maybe we don't compete by gender anymore, we compete on hormone ratios."

He then shared an example of "a woman who had uncommonly high testosterone levels and they wanted to disqualify her because of how manly she was when she was born a woman, competing as a woman." Tyson concluded, "What you really want is an interesting contest between people who are similarly talented. The least interesting Super Bowl you could ever watch is a blowout by halftime."

Maher disagreed. "This attempt to reorganize all of society around a very tiny percentage that we can protect and respect without pretending that every baby is a junk ball," he said. "We have men's sports and women's sports, and if the best team in the WNBA played the worst team in the NBA, the score would be a million to zero. Can we organize society around that basic point with the proviso that we protect and respect these people who do not fit into it?"

Tyson quipped back sarcastically, "Let's segregate society between dark-skinned people and light-skinned people because nature made it that way and that's how it is."

Watch their full conversation below: