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In April 2025, the Secretary of Health and Human Services went on Fox News and said this
quote A teenager today, an American teenager, has less testosterone than a sixty-eight

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year old man, end quote.

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Hold on to that sentence.

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By the end of next week's episode, you'll know exactly how much weight it can carry.

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This is

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is raising men.

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Now, this is a new kind of episode for us, and we're probably gonna do more of it.

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I think maybe one of the most challenging and important skills in modern masculinity is
knowing what's actually true and knowing why you believe it.

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And that's hard right now.

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Our boys are gonna meet claims like this on their phones.

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And we might never even know.

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We might never even get the chance to help them address it.

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So we need to give them that skill.

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Let's practice evaluating claims like this.

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And frankly, I'm making claims too.

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And you should catch me when I get it wrong.

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And I do.

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For years, I was an avid drinker of Diet Coke.

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I loved it.

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I drank tons of Diet Coke.

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And I really bristled when people told me that it.

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Caused cancer or whatever.

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I reviewed the studies.

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I knew the science down pat.

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And then one year I went to the doctor, and my blood work came back with elevated A1C
numbers.

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And A1C numbers mean that, and in my case, it meant that I was getting close to being
diabetic.

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Now my diet at the time was very low on carbs and sugar, but it was very high.

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On Diet Coke.

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And that was the only explanation I could think of for those numbers.

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So I researched it again.

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And the research in that intervening time period had moved.

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On their own, artificial sweeteners mostly don't raise your blood sugar the way that sugar
does.

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But in a 2022 trial, all four sweeteners that they tested changed people's gut bacteria.

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And in two of them,

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Sucralose and sacchar made people's blood sugar responses worse.

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And not the same way in everybody.

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A 2025 trial found that a month of sucralose cut insulin sensitivity by about a fifth in
healthy lean adults.

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So the naysayers all that time ago had a point.

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Artificial sweeteners might not be the free lunch I thought they were.

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But, and this is important, it wasn't.

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For the reasons they thought.

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The direct effect on me was that it made it easy for me to quit Diet Coke, and I did, and
my A1C numbers went down.

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So hooray for science.

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Now, when I was a kid, there was a moral panic about subliminal messages, records played
backwards, a tenth of a second image that your conscious mind couldn't see, but somehow it

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reached in and changed how you behave.

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There was this huge uproar about it, and it turned out not to be real.

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But I've also watched worries that sounded like panics turn out to be at least partly
right.

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So doubting everything doesn't get you there either.

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You have to go and find out for yourself.

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You have to check.

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Epitetis had a line for this.

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He called these things harsh appearances.

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And he told his students to remember you are but an appearance and not absolutely the
thing you appear to be, and then to examine it.

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It's the same move that I talk about when I talk about the Conan brain and the Sherlock
Holmes brain.

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A claim like this hits the Conan brain first.

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It's designed to do that.

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That's the whole point.

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And our job is to hand it over to Sherlock.

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Before we do anything with it, and to teach our boys to do the same.

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So, this is how these episodes are gonna work.

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This week, I'm gonna talk about the claim.

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I'm gonna talk about who's making it.

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And then next week, I'll show you how to check yourself step by step, and how you can get
the highest quality knowledge that humans have on the subject.

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So let's start with the claim itself.

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And

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When you do this, it's tempting to kind of create a straw man, to create a an easily
defeatable.

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Well, it depends on what you want.

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You either create a straw man, which is an easily defeatable version of the claim, or you
create a steel man, which is a one that's very difficult to defeat.

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Whenever you're doing it, you should always look for the steel man.

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What is the hardest to defeat version of the claim?

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So this is what I'm gonna try to do here.

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It goes like this: men's testosterone has been falling for decades.

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A man today has less testosterone in his body than a man that same age had a generation
ago.

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In fact, that extends to teenagers.

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And teenagers today have less testosterone than old men today.

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It's a bold claim.

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It would matter.

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Testosterone does a lot of work in a man's body.

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It promotes muscle, bone, energy, sex drive, mood, and

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That serious version of the claim has serious people behind it.

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In July 2026, a team of researchers presented an analysis at a big European fertility
conference and it pooled studies going back to 1972.

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And the headlines said that men's testosterone had fallen by half.

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And some of the people on that team also led big studies on falling sperm counts.

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They described what they found as a serious deterioration in male reproductive health.

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Now, if that's true, it's one of the biggest health stories in the world.

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So you can see why people are really passionate about it.

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And I think that this kind of headline hits differently if you're a man past 40 or if
you're raising a boy, because it might even read like a verdict or an admonition on you or

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on him or on our culture in general.

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And that's exactly why it's worth slowing down.

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and figuring out what's really going on here.

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So there are three camps that I see in this fight, and I want to give each one of them its
best case.

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The first camp says that this is a crisis and that it explains a lot of what's going wrong
with men.

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For example, in 2022, Tucker Carlson made a special called The End of Men.

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One segment featured red light therapy aimed at a man's groin, which Carlson called
testicle tanning.

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In 2025, Robert F.

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Kennedy made the teenager claim in a segment about artificial.

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Food dyes.

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So the implication was that artificial food dyes were causing testosterone decline in
teenagers such that their level of testosterone was less than a 68-year-old man would be.

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In the same appearance, he said testosterone levels had dropped 50% from historic levels.

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Then in 2000 and July 2026, Defense Secretary

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Pete Heggseth announced that the military would screen every service member over 30 for
low testosterone every year and offer treatment, offer gender affirming care.

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He called it the high T Department of War.

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His pitch was simple.

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It's about restoring and optimizing your natural capabilities, he said.

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Now, if you believe that the decline in testosterone is real and

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That it matters, and you believe that the future of war is going to be about physique and
bodies, well, then screening people like that and addressing the deficiencies are

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reasonable.

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So depending on who you listen to in this camp, the cause might be soy, or it's seed oils,
or plastics, or porn, or it's a culture that's gone soft on boys.

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And the f and the fix is usually.

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a supplement or a clinic or some kind of lifestyle change, sometimes all three of those
things.

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And it always it almost always involves writing some kind of check or another.

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Now, this is the part in this camp's claims that I feel is particularly weak because the
connection, I mean, even if the problem exists, and we're gonna assess that here in a

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minute, the connection to how to fix it or what the cause is is a totally different
question.

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So, and by the way, let's give you a fair warning here.

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Some of what these guys are saying is gonna hold up.

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So stay tuned.

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The second camp is that this is moral panic.

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And they hear this, and all they do is roll their eyes, and they think it's not a problem.

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When Hegseth announced his policy, Slate ran a piece by Christina Kattarucci, arguing that
this is just all part of a much bigger right-wing phenomenon.

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Her case is that testosterone has turned into kind of a magic potion for manhood.

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And low T is an insult.

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Doctors quoted in the in the coverage said that screening everyone is expensive and it's
unnecessary for most people.

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And this camp has a fair point about the insult.

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Nobody's hormones should be political scorecard.

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They also told you that the teenager line is just false on its face.

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Testosterone peaks at age 19.

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And in a national sample of lean, healthy American men, the ones over 60 had about a third
less than men's in their 20s and 30s.

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So typical older teenager has more testosterone than a typical 68-year-old.

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What RFK Jr.

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claimed on that TV show is just totally false compared to this camp according to this
camp.

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And if he meant that teenagers today

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Have less than teenagers used to, that's a different claim, and it's a much smaller one.

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Now, the study behind that, they did a study behind that too, and it changed lab tests
partly through, according to this camp.

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And so we're actually going to open up that study next week and look into it.

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Here's the rest of this camp's case, one argument at a time.

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Number one, it's overblown.

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A falling average isn't the same thing as men being sick.

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Diet doctors diagnose low testosterone from symptoms plus low results on

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Repeated tests, and experts don't even agree on a single number that counts as too low.

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Second is that it's a measurement problem.

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Different lab tests can give different numbers for the same blood.

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When researchers lined up four big studies of men, they found that a lot of the difference
between them came from differences in the actual tests.

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The third claim is that it's mostly weight gain.

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Obesity is a condition.

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That is most strongly linked to lower testosterone in men.

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And the share of American adults with obesity went from about 30% to over 40% in less than
20 years.

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A heavier country will show lower numbers, even if nothing else changed.

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And so when and when men lose weight, their testosterone levels tend to go back up.

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The other thing is it's political.

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The whole subject has become a story that one political

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Team tells about itself and the other political team tells about the other guys.

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And so that is just absolutely a recipe for disinformation, for misinformation, and for
people in bad faith all over the place.

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If you've ever felt talked down to about being a man, this camp might sound more of like
more of the same.

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It tends to make light of something that might.

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that that that could be a very, very major important thing.

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And I understand that.

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So stay with me on this because next week we're gonna find out that some of what these
people say holds true also.

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And then there's a third group and the third group doesn't care much who wins at all.

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They just want the controversy.

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Between 2001 and 2011, the share of American men over 40 using testosterone therapy more
than tripled

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Now there are telehealth companies that will prescribe it to you from your couch.

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And there's a whole shelf of supplements promising to boost it.

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So here's the pattern that I want you to notice about this camp, or about all the camps.

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Every camp gets something if you believe them.

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The alarm camp gets your attention.

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And a story about who ruined things.

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The skeptical camp gets your attention too.

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And they get a story about how silly and unserious the other side is.

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And the sellers get your money.

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So I've said on this show a lot that outrage is a business model.

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And that rule doesn't care what side you're on.

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They make money as long as you're talking about it.

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None of that makes anybody wrong.

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A guy selling umbrellas, talking about how if you walk outside in the rain, you're gonna
get wet.

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Is right.

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But it is a reason to bring healthy skepticism to the conversation.

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And if you're going to take that tidbit in as part of your corpus of knowledge, if you're
going to repeat it to other people, you need to go and check.

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So that's the claim, and that's the fight.

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I haven't yet told you what we actually do know, and I did that on purpose.

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So before next week, pick one version that you've seen.

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Post, a clip, a headline, forget who said it for a minute, and then chase down where the
number came from.

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Click the link and then click the link inside that one and see if you can make it the way
to an actual study.

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Next week, I will walk you through one click at a time how we can actually look into these
claims and how we can evaluate them, and I'll show you how you can find the real story.

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We'll open and read the actual studies together.

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So have a phone or a laptop handy because every link will be in the show notes.

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And I think you might be surprised, but what happens when you type that teenager claim
into a search engine built for scientists?

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This

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is raising men and you are a great parent.