“They're the REAL FASCISTS" - EXCLUSIVE Adam Carolla Interview on Democrat CRAZY COVID Lockdown
Download BUNKR from the AppStore or PlayStore using Offer Code "Brand" to get the first year for free.
Go to http://twc.health/BRAND - code BRAND saves you over $30 off at checkout PLUS free shipping.
⏰ BE HERE AT 12PM ET / 5PM BST ⏰
In this in-depth interview, Adam Carolla and I expose the authoritarian impulses behind COVID-19 lockdowns, the media's manipulation of COVID narratives, and the decline of meritocracy in entertainment. Carolla shares his scathing critique of California's governor Gavin Newsom, and how censorship of comedians has caused comedy to get EVEN more brash. This no-holds-barred conversation is a must-watch for anyone seeking to understand the forces shaping our turbulent times.
Adam Carolla on X -https://x.com/adamcarolla
The Adam Carolla Show - https://www.youtube.com/@TheAdamCarollaShow1
Check out my social medias and more - https://linktr.ee/RussellBrand
Hello you Awakening Wonders there on Spotify, Apple, Stinkwhistle, Gurgledot, or wherever you download your podcasts these days to remain at least peripherally connected to some tendril of truth in a bewildering miasma of lies and propaganda.
We appreciate you, and we love you.
You're part of our community.
So that's why we're very happy to give you an audio version of our live Rumble Show five days a week.
It's on Monday to Friday.
We decipher the latest news stories, we break down current topics that the mainstream media should be covering, and if they aren't, Then we critique why they're not and what they are covering.
Every week as well, right?
We do brilliant conversations with people like Jordan Peterson, RFK, Tucker Carlson, Sam Harris, Vandana Shiva, Gabor Mate.
These things are already up and you can listen to them now.
So remember, this is an audio version of our daily live show.
To tune in live, go rumble.com.
Humble.com forward slash Russell Brand.
You'll find it easily and I hope that you will love it.
Now please enjoy this episode of Stay Free with Russell Brand.
Thanks.
Thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
Thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
We're for a conversation with that great innovator in this field.
If you've not heard of Adam Carolla, well you should have been paying attention to the inception of the medium that you're currently watching now.
Before there was Rogan, before there was Ricky Gervais, before there was even old Russ, me that's who I am, There was Adam Carolla.
This is a fantastic conversation about how being an online presence has become a fraught and political endeavor in and of itself.
We'll be on YouTube for the first few minutes but then we'll be exclusively available on Rumble and it's worth noting that like many of our conversations this was first housed within our Awakened Wonder community Locals.
And, of course, if you are a member of Locals, do know this.
You can come and see me live anywhere in the world whenever you want.
As long as I'm performing a show.
I don't mean like when I'm laying in bed sleeping or when I'm at worship or at prayer.
But when I'm performing live, like I am in the UK and in the United States later this year, you can get a ticket just by emailing tickets at Russell Brand, your identity within Locals, and we will sort you out with tickets.
Without further delay, ado, or hullabaloo, here's me and Adam Carolla.
I hope you enjoy it.
Adam, thanks for joining us tonight.
My pleasure.
I got sort of fascinated with you again after watching a couple of your conversation stroke confrontations with Gavin Newsom, but then also you continue to be a resident of California, so I figured that Gavin Newsom must be some sort of perpetual nemesis in your life.
Is that right?
The key is, I mean, to live in California, for me, it's basically like somebody said, let's create a fictional character that would go against every thought you've ever had.
And who would annoy you the most?
Like, I've often joked that I think Gavin Newsom wakes up in the morning and thinks, what would annoy Adam the most?
And whatever it is, that's what I'm going to do today.
But that's kind of what it's like living In Los Angeles especially, but certainly California.
Whoever's making the laws and the lawmakers, just do the stuff that would piss you off the most and be the antithesis of what you would do if you were in that situation.
So is that what the culture of war has become?
That there is now this charged polarity with one side feeling that common sense dictates that this should be the direction of a state or a nation and then this Like, you know, this, yeah, odd perspective that seems like it's designed to be antagonistic.
Do you mean things like, uh, kids, like, because I was trying to think of what the counter-argument is for not, for kids, uh, for, you know, the school not having to tell the parents information about their kids.
I presumed that a good faith argument for that would be, oh, what if a kid is being abused or mistreated at home?
But I suppose that can't be the starting point for legislation.
Like the worst case scenario in a family dynamic cannot be the point from which a legislation is formed.
Can you see what the counter argument is?
Because it can't be just to annoy Adam Carolla.
That can't be their ideology.
Yeah, I mean, I think what they do is they take an outlier in a worst-case scenario and then they prop it up and they do a sort of what-if.
So when you say, hey listen, I'll tell you what would help the black community.
Family.
If the dad stayed around and they raised their children in an intact family unit that I think the black community would find.
And then someone always raised their hand and go, I know a black guy.
He went to Harvard.
He never met his biological dad.
And I'd go, okay.
Fine.
I'm not saying it can't happen.
I'm just saying, in general, this would be better, you know?
And then you go, I think they should reopen schools.
These kids are suffering.
Well, uh, what about COVID?
And then you go, well, the teachers are young and they're healthy and they're fine.
Uh-uh.
Yeah, but...
What if a kid goes to school, gets COVID, and brings it back to his nana and his grandpa who he's living with?
And they're elderly and compromised.
And I go, okay, now we're just going off into some direction.
That is a worst-case scenario, and what I'm saying is you're shutting down schools and or fighting for black families, staying intact, or whatever it is.
You can't go worst-case scenario, you know somebody.
That's not how policy works.
Policy needs to be made sort of for the masses, and just being antagonistic and the antithesis of doesn't work either.
So that's where Biden came in and he just said, whatever Trump's doing, I'm undoing it.
So he just went right down to the border with Mexico and said, what's Trump's policies?
Well, Trump's policies are remain in Mexico and many other policies.
And then he went, all right, undo it!
Because that's his policies.
And my thing is, your predecessor, Who you may loathe and despise may have been right on a couple of occasions and for those policies you should leave alone and then enact your new policies.
Biden got into trouble.
He just said we're going to undo whatever it is Trump did.
I sometimes feel that reflexive authoritarianism poses as rationalism when actually it's a kind of veiled hysteria.
And a personal example of that kind of control masquerading as care in my own life came when I was the parent on a school trip.
You know how you can volunteer to go on a school trip with your kids?
When I went to get on the minibus there was two minibuses and I went to get on the one that my kid was on of course because for what other motivation could I have for going on a school trip other than I want to spend time with my own kid other than I want to hang out and meet Strangers kids, which seems like a motivation worthy of inquiry in itself.
When I went to get on the same minibus as my kid, they went, oh no, you can't get on the minibus with her.
And I went, why?
And they said, oh, in the event that there's a crash, you would prioritize your own kid over the lives of the other kids there.
I was like, that's the scenario that you're regulating from.
We're already in a crash, there's kids dead on the floor, and I'm prioritizing my own kid.
And it's, what's interesting is that a rule has been made of the basis of conjecture that's pretty hysterical in the first place, and that's obviously just within one school, within a little institution, and it's annoying enough.
So when you see it happening in states and nations, it's difficult to, I suppose, uh, not Or inquire as to whether what's really behind it is legitimising more and more authority.
And is that basically what you believe?
That they find ways to justify authority?
Well, I believe that COVID was a test to see who wanted authority the most, you know.
And there are certain states and municipalities where the people in charge went, you know, it's not my business to shut down the beaches and it's not my business to shut down schools or lock you in your house or force you to wear a mask or force you to get a vaccination.
Like, that was their impulse.
And I think that would be my impulse, too, which is I don't want to tell people what to do.
It feels like an uncomfortable position to be put in.
On the other hand, many are attracted to it, and COVID to me was just a test To see who was most attracted to authority and being the authority, you know?
So, COVID came and many Democratic governors and mayors jumped into action and their action, you know, in California Newsome shut down outdoor dining.
There were no tests, there was no history of any spread of COVID through outdoor dining.
He just did it, you know, and he just stormed forward in his authoritative Regulatory bouillabaisse that he'd cooked up, and they did it with everything.
I mean, they literally arrested a guy paddleboarding in the ocean in Malibu alone.
They arrested that guy.
So, they cut down the volleyball nets at the beach.
They took pipes and welded them in basketball hoops so kids couldn't play outdoors basketball.
They shut down parks.
I belong to a beach club in Malibu, and they had a swing set that was outdoors in the sand, and they had police tape around the swing set.
So Newsome likes it.
He's attracted to it.
That's what I'm trying to explain to everybody.
And then everyone, I live in California, so everyone's going, oh, Trump.
You know, everyone in California hates Trump, right?
Trump's a dictator.
Trump's, and I would say, Trump's not the one who shut our beaches.
Trump's not the one who shut our schools.
Trump's not the one who shut the hiking trails.
That's not Trump.
That's your guy.
Who did this?
Why are you blaming?
Trump's the authority.
He's the, you know, Hitlerian authority figure except for he's not shutting down anything.
Your guy's shutting down everything.
Just a weird mindset for them to be at and they don't buy it.
It doesn't bother them.
They rationalize it and they justify it and then they vote him in again.
I don't know how we've gotten to this point where it seems to me as you know I'm not from your country I don't know how we've gone to the point where we're presented with the specter of the terrifying strongman as a reboot of 20th century despotism, like that Trump is this authority
figure, he's a monster, he's a racist, he's a sexist, he's a rapist, he's all of
these things, and it doesn't alloy to what we're seeing, which is a kind of peculiar
liberal authoritarianism in the way that you've described it.
The actual use of authority to prohibit, inhibit, control, restrict, surveil, censor, shut down, close down free speech, shut down comedy, shut down communication, impose and justify technological dictatorships.
And the thing I've been thinking about for a while, Adam, is that new forms of dictatorship will not resemble the 20th century model, but will more likely have been Previewed for us in literature in like obviously Orwell but also Huxley and even Kafka the idea of sort of bureaucracies that are amorphous and difficult to read and difficult to know they're actually quite friendly and benign whether it's like what you've described that ridiculous paternalism which is a type of authority that legitimizes itself through protection like you've described or whether it's like
What it's like to deal with YouTube or any bureaucracy, like ten years ago we would have all talked about, oh man, you try and ring up, you know, to complain to the bank or an energy company and it's a call centre and you can't speak to a real human.
Well look at it now, if you have a dispute with YouTube, there's just this sort of anodyne friendliness.
The team will get back to you on your complaint.
It's like Hal, it's like sci-fi, it's inaccessible, and it seems odd to me that, as you've described, that what we are being taught, primed to fear, is Trump because of, I don't know, charisma is it?
Vulgarity?
Clumsiness?
Wealth?
Conservatism?
Capitalism?
I'm not sure.
When the real march of power, particularly through the pandemic period, has been this rather banal, creeping, insidious paternalism like we've described.
How's it happening?
Well, I agree.
So first off, everything is done under the guise of safety, right?
It's a safety issue.
So we have to regulate this and we have to control you.
I mean, once they bring up safety and everything is done in the name of safety.
I mean, all of COVID, every right you got stripped away was in the name of safety, right?
But also, when it comes to regulations, it's always just, you can't do this because there's a safety issue, and now we're going to impose ourselves because of safety.
First off, they come at it from safety.
Now they end up with authoritarian, but they're coming with safety, you know?
So you're right, it's a completely repackaged, it's like they got a publicist, you know?
And so what they do is they turn Trump into a caricature From the 40s, you know, and and it used to be goose stepping and uniforms and heil hitlers And it was very structured and you could see it from outer space Now it's a slow creeping
Dipped in estrogen kind of look.
We're worried about the kids.
So that's why we're implementing these, you know, it's a lot of women and a lot of women talking about safety and stripping away your rights simultaneously.
With a lot of like, what's wrong with you paying a little bit more so people that don't have, you know, and now we're getting involved.
Because we just want to take a little more of your money and give it to people that need it and could use it and it's a safety thing and you know they have children and we just want to give the children a little bit so they can have a hot meal so they don't have to go to bed with food insecurities.
So it is the exact same authoritarian but it's packaged in a matronly woman with a sweater who's talking about safety with sort of sensible frames.
We can't make this content without our partners.
Here's a quick message from them now.
Stay with us.
Cybercrime is the third largest economy.
I wonder what the first one is.
Military industrial complex.
Big pharma.
Is it big tech?
I don't know.
But the third biggest one is cybercrime and it targets like email, social media passwords.
Even AT&T announced that hackers have compromised all of their customers text and call records.
That's us.
That's me.
That's you.
Bunker is an affordable all-in-one app protecting you and me against identity theft.
Fraud, surveillance, all stuff that you don't want, including patent pending, secure messaging, password management, and secure cloud storage.
Why pay for different applications when you can protect yourself with Bunker for $12 annually?
It's not much is it?
That's a dollar a month.
We divide that into Weeks, it's not much.
Bunker is owned and operated by security professionals with a history of protecting the public against cyber criminals and surveillance.
Bunker, they believe that people should be empowered to focus on what matters most, security and privacy and day-to-day life.
For a limited time, Bunker's offering A one-year free trial for you, friends, and family.
That's if you sign up today.
You gotta sign up today, you can have it free for a year.
So download Bunker from the App Store or Play Store using the offer code BRAND, all caps, to get the first year for free.
Thank you.
Interestingly, just behind safety, as it's, uh, the legitimization of safety requires fear.
Like, if you're frightened, if when I'm frightened, I'm more, uh, concerned about safety, obviously, and probably more open to safety measures.
You're malleable.
I'm malleable.
Right.
Yeah, if you, if you were running out of a theater where someone was shooting and someone said, this way, this way, you know, you just follow them.
Because you're in flight, you know?
And yes, people are much more malleable when they're fearful, and that's why they work the fear first, and then the next thing after the fear is, here's what I need you to do, and here's what I'm not going to let you do, because of the fear.
Because the legitimization of safety measures ought really come from, forgive the word, love.
That if it was like, because we love you, we want to protect you.
And I thought about the ethics and morality of the pandemic and felt that, Adam, that The initial idea that undergirds all measures is life is sacred.
Like, if you take away the idea that life is sacred, who cares if people die?
Because life is sacred, everyone should take this medication.
Because life is sacred, all of us should go in home.
All of us should stay home, all of us should wear masks, you should certainly not paddleboard, because life is sacred.
But what's curious is that simultaneously the idea that life is sacred, or that there is a God, or that there are universal principles, is simultaneously being extracted.
We're simultaneously seeing the idea that human beings, rationalism and materialism, are the apex of our systems of thought, philosophy and control.
That you can change your identity, you can manipulate nature, We are progressing technologically and medically and that is our shared project.
There's, as is so often the case, a hypocrisy at the heart of the ideology.
I wonder how you think that sort of tracks on to national politics in your country right now, and also this Hastening and relentless state of crisis that, I don't know if this is just a sort of back of an envelope analysis, but it feels like, you know, Berlin Wall comes down, 9-11, financial crash, Brexit, Trump, pandemic, then it's just everything.
It's just an omni-crisis that never ends, which provides the cover for this escalating authoritarianism.
And I wonder how you think this sort of hyper-crisis state, where even in just the last few months we've had the debate and the sudden and extraordinary acknowledgement of Biden's decline, which was obvious to any of us that were operating in this space for some years, but we weren't allowed to talk about it, and suddenly there was this repackaging and it's acceptable now and we've got to get rid of him, and And I wonder how you, and then the assassination attempt, and then the resignation of Biden.
I mean, is every election cycle in your country like this?
Or are we in some sort of weird hyper-reality moment?
It definitely moves toward more aggressive, and more vulgar, and less civility, and it's just more.
But it's kind of a thing.
So, you know, if you If you took a look at the NBA in the 60s, you wouldn't see a lot of slam dunks, and now you see double tomahawk dunks everywhere.
You know, if you took a look at skateboarding from the 70s, you wouldn't see guys doing 980s on vert ramps and stuff.
Now there's 13-year-olds doing it and 11-year-olds doing it.
You know, things have a way of ratcheting.
They just ratchet up.
It's a societal thing, you know?
It's not, you know, pornography used to be two people, missionary position.
Now God knows what you can find on the internet.
I mean, It just keeps going.
It's like when I was a kid, Jack in the Box had a jumbo jack.
That was the biggest hamburger you could get.
It was one patty that was marginally medium-sized, but that was the jumbo.
Now it's triple patty, baconator, guacamole.
It just We just keep going, and so I don't know that, you know, back in the day, when you see Evel Knievel, he would jump 10 cars on his motorcycle, travel about 80 feet in the air, get about 14 feet in height, and land on the other side.
Now, guys, you're doing double backflips with a full Superman grabbing onto the rear fender.
I mean, this, it's all miraculous.
It's kind of insane, but if you think about it, We as Americans, we really only go one direction, and that's more, faster, sort of more vulgar, and bigger, and
With more sort of noise, you know, and in a weird way our politics has just followed the NBA and, you know, professional sports, pornography, the X Games, they've all gone the same, hamburgers, fast food, they just, everything's just bigger and more.
Yeah, I've been saying a lot lately that it is often said that politics is downstream of culture and I've been saying that culture is downstream of technology and in the sort of tech space, which I'm by no means an expert, it seems that one of the Conditions of this excessive extrapolation and hastening of the rate of change is that the new technologies themselves create new technologies, so the exponential growth explodes.
And I wonder if that too in part is a result of the kind of evangelical zeal that is behind this kind of godlessness.
Unless there are some, you know, I guess a secularist might say common sense values and a religious person might say universal principles, then the only thing, the only guiding principle is more and more excess.
And now we have this fully immersive information sphere where the advantages of which it seems to me that That you can gainsay and contradict untrue narratives almost immediately.
That pipeline was blown up by Russia.
No, I don't think Russia would have blown up their own pipeline or the, you know, the assassination attempt immediately.
You know, if X hadn't been acquired by Elon Musk, I wonder how different this post assassination attempt Space would be how people would discuss the various theories, anomalies, peculiarities, failings of Secret Service, withholding of information by the FBI, apparent communications.
What do you think is the impact, and given what you've just said about pornography and skateboarding, how is this likely to crescendo?
Well, what I've experienced, because you brought up the fact that we can debunk things in high definition in real time.
So, you know, I was exploring it a little on my show, and I was thinking about, you know, back before this moment, we had lore.
That's all we had.
We had people in the Old West, on prairies, telling stories, you know.
And every story you've heard about some Old West Gunslinger or Indian Chief, it's all lore.
It doesn't mean it didn't happen, but it also doesn't mean we can confirm that any of this happened, you know?
It's storytelling, campfires, and lore, and that's all we ever had.
And there was no way to really fact-check lore, per se.
Now, we have high-def footage of everything.
And, but we still have lore, and as a matter of fact, the people that create the lore have to go harder to combat the actual footage and recordings of these people.
So we have, you know, In the United States, half the country thinks Donald Trump told everyone to inject bleach to get rid of COVID.
Now, he didn't say inject bleach, and there's footage of him not saying inject bleach, but the people who say he said to do it do not care that there's high-def video of him saying something different than that, but they must double down on it.
So if you think about The things we have here, you know, January 6th, deadly insurrection.
It wasn't deadly, there was one person that was killed and that was one of the insurrectionists.
It was a woman who was shot by a black man who was a guard.
That's not part of their narrative, so they just call it a deadly insurrection except for nobody died and it wasn't an insurrection.
So they have to go harder on it now because back in the day before cameras and before recordings that it would just be lore and we could leave it alone.
So the people that are working on the narratives, you know, Trump said he was going to be a dictator day one.
There's footage of him laughing about it, saying all he was going to do was drill and close the border and then he said he wasn't.
It's him saying they're good people on both sides.
I mean, Biden to this day says good people.
It's been completely debunked.
There's footage of it.
So the people that are in charge of the narrative have to work harder at narrative versus being coached up and tuned up by seeing the actual footage of it, which is an interesting time to be in because people like you and people like me think we could go to these people and go, look, you keep saying this thing.
Pull out your phone.
Let me show you the actual footage and let me show you the actual verbiage that the person used because it's not what you're saying.
And they go, okay, there's something that exists out there that's going to debunk my lore.
I'm going harder with the lore now.
Everyone's got to get on the same page.
And that's the era we're living in, which is pretty incredible for those of us who think in a rational and linear way.
I saw Barack Obama, and this footage exists in high definition, at Stanford University say that the reason that it's important that we control, this is him now, control and censor misinformation, malinformation, disinformation, is not just because you can't discern for yourself truth by watching things and come up with your own opinion and conclusions.
No, he said, that's not the reason we need to be able to censor.
We need to be able to censor Because all of this information, it murkies the space, it muddies the water, even if you don't believe it.
It was an attempt in fact, Adam, to continue to assert the legitimacy of an authority that has the right to censor, even though this authority is starting to break down and increasingly there is no consensus or mandate around what that authority would look like from where that authority is derived and the pandemic and numerous recent events have contributed to the Uh, decay and decimation of that authority and Barack Obama has sort of politically did what you just described.
He doubled down on law live.
He doubled down on it even though you probably can tell for yourself whether or not it's true or you can go check for yourself and decide for yourself because of course the main argument against censorship is I'm an adult.
I'll decide.
Let me have access to the information and I'll decide what I believe for myself.
And he tried to gainsay that by saying that even if you are the type of person who can discern, we still have to censor because it muddies the water.
And that's when I realised, like, the creation of these categories, misinformation, malinformation and disinformation, was a necessary response to the technology and the ability to proliferate and disseminate information that didn't exist previously.
And I wonder if you thought, as perhaps the The earliest person doing what we all do now, podcasting, responding through conversations and punditry and chat and joking around.
Did you imagine that it would become, and could you have imagined, so politically charged?
And what have been the significant gradient points or stations on the cross as you've gone from something that was presumably broadly predicated on entertainment to something that now is, by its nature, political?
Well, a couple things, because there's a lot to unpack there.
One is...
Literally three weeks ago, we were calling footage cheap fakes.
Footage of Biden looking addled, looking confused.
At the end of the day, we're all human beings and when you see somebody who's off, you know it on an animalistic level.
You know, when you're walking with your child down the street and you see a guy on the corner and he's not moving in a regular way, he looks off.
You know, whatever.
Maybe drunk, maybe high, maybe schizophrenic.
But you can see, as an animal, as one animal to the next, we see movement.
We see looks in eyes.
We see vacant stares, you know.
And we're pretty tuned up as human beings, just instinctively.
No, honey, we're gonna cross the street.
This guy's moving in a weird way over here.
And so we all saw Biden moving in a weird way, walking in a weird way.
We all saw it not as physicians and not as Democrats and not as Republicans.
We saw them as a human being.
I was like, that person is struggling.
That person is off.
And then there was footage of it.
Footage of him in many different locations acting in a Parkinsonian way or acting in a way that we've all understand that's what he has now.
That was about three weeks ago.
The media labeled it a cheap fake.
said it was edited, and it is edited in the sense that P. Diddy punching that chick in the hallway of the hotel is edited video.
We're not watching 219 hours of an empty hallway, or just folks getting on and off the elevator for 26,000 hours.
Yeah, it's edited.
We took a piece of a video.
That doesn't mean it's edited.
It doesn't mean P. Diddy Didn't smack that woman in a hallway, but still it is edited video.
It's a piece of a longer video.
The Joe Biden videos weren't edited.
We weren't going to watch the entire Juneteenth celebration.
I like Patti LaBelle, but not that much.
I wasn't going to watch three hours of Patti LaBelle singing hymns from a stage.
We saw one minute of Biden looking very off and very affected.
That was three weeks ago they were trying to pitch that as a cheap fake.
When I say they, I don't mean some sort of deep, dark, you know, lefty operative.
I'm talking mainstream, CBS, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, all of them.
They all got coached up, tuned up, got their talking points, and labeled something we all saw with our eyes As a deep and cheap fake.
So, they're up to it.
I mean, they're trying.
Now...
Again, back to, you didn't think they were going to do this in the day of video.
We're sitting there staring at a video and they're telling us what we're staring at isn't happening.
By the way, it takes a lot of hubris to do that.
I don't know why they want to play so fast and loose with their reputations because now I do not believe them anymore and that's really about the worst place you could be in.
If somebody said, you know, Adam is wrong so much and talks so much shit, I just don't believe him anymore when he talks, that's the end of my career.
It would be the end of your career.
That's the end of anyone's career.
Like, I have no idea whether Adam believes what he's saying.
Maybe he's just lying again.
He's been wrong about everything.
But they will play fast and loose with their reputation and they will try.
And I don't think they can unring the bell now.
Now what they say is we want you to have the truth because you're getting misinformation and that could be dangerous.
But if you really think about it, it's only dangerous to them and their You know, a way of living and their control.
It never goes the other way.
You know what I mean?
So they go, listen, we're going to do some fact checking.
And then they'll go, this guy lied about this and Trump lied about that and Okay, that's all our fact-checking.
They never go, we're going to do some fact-checking.
Trump never said good people on both sides.
He wasn't talking about Klansmen and he was talking about a separate group.
We fact-checked.
They never fact-checked that way.
So what they are And it's what social media is and big tech was before Elon Musk.
What they do, it's like you go to a store and you pay for your milk and they shortchange you.
And then every time they shortchange you, you go, oh, you shortchanged me.
And they go, oh, I'm sorry, the cash register is broken.
Sorry, sorry.
And I would say, if the cash register's broken, then wouldn't I get more change sometimes?
If it's just broken, then I should get more every other time I come in.
But it's always short.
But it's always just because something's broken and they made a mistake and whatever, and they're going to be in charge of the truth.
Yeah, Obama wants to be in charge of his truth because our truth is not good for his business.
And I would argue that when you're right, when you have logic and reason and accuracy on your side, you don't need to monitor what the other side is saying.
You have facts and data.
And they don't have facts and data.
They never had it with COVID and that's why they needed so much monitoring.
You know, why weren't they ever agnostic?
That's my whole thing.
I didn't hear one person from CNN go, Ivermectin?
Hydroxychloroquine?
I'm not a doctor!
I don't know what that stuff does.
I just heard, I learned how to pronounce it 10 minutes ago, so I'm not weighing in on what this does or doesn't do.
Maybe it's effective, maybe it's not.
You should talk to your doctor and draw your own conclusions.
No, they all became experts, and expertise only went one direction.
Ivermectin, bad.
Hydroxychloroquine, bad.
Social distancing, good.
Shutting down schools, good.
Masking up, good.
Why wasn't there debate?
Why wasn't someone going, you know, I don't think shutting down schools is a good idea.
It could have some long-lasting effects on, it could be, it could be negative, very negative effects on kids.
How, where was the, I don't know, I'm not an expert, consult your doctor.
Nope, they are all 100% on the same page, going 100% the same direction.
How did that happen?
We can't make this content without our partners.
Here's a quick message from them.
The Wellness Company are some of my favourite partners.
Will your doctor even prescribe you Ivermectin or Hydroxychloroquine?
Hey, I did it.
The Wellness Company's Prescription Contagion Emergency Kit is unique, providing carefully selected effective medications for COVID-19 and respiratory illnesses.
Ivermectin, Hydroxy... Ah, it was a fluke.
Hydroxychloroquine, which some people call HCQ.
Don't know why.
Z-Pak.
And butanide, along with a nebulizer and guidebook for safe use.
Do not muck around with a nebulizer.
This is, of course, backed by research and endorsed by experts.
Specifically, Dr. Peter McCulloch and Dr. Harvey Rich, both friends of the show.
Avoid the chaos, wait times and price of the hospital.
Get the entire kit for the cost of a single doctor's visit.
It is only available in the USA.
Every American home should have one of these, don't you think?
Visit twc.health forward slash brand and use our code brand to save $30 plus get free shipping on your Contagion kit.
Okay, back to the content.
There was an extraordinary degree of certainty and I saw an amazing clip with Morning Joe having Fauci on.
It was a sort of repackaging in the light of everything subsequently learned.
And the kind of image system they learned and used was like, that was during the fog of war.
Andy Fauci was saying, this is the fog of war!
And like in the Morning Joe guy was like, you know, You did a good job and you know I have to ask you this and like it was a so such a sort of cozy reappraisal of the time when we were talking just then you sort of talked about authenticity and how on a personal level that you would be held to account if you kept lying made mistakes as you know and of course everybody does make mistakes certainly part of that really long question I asked you a minute ago was how you would observe this space change since the time when you started making this kind of content prior to a lot of people
and quickly it becomes clear that authenticity and integrity are necessary in this space,
because you can't create this amount of content if you're lying and it's exposing,
and it's so risky. You're talking about a whole bunch of stuff. So I wonder how you noticed
how it all are, and what the pivotal moments were. I'm assuming COVID was one of them,
and now that I'm reframing this question, I wonder if you've noticed other cultural changes around,
as we all have done of course, around which party is free speech, which party is anti-war.
How that has impacted you personally from your position as an early voice in this space?
Um, yeah.
You know, ostensibly I would like to entertain people and sort of make them think, you know, simultaneously.
That's all I've ever wanted to do, is to sort of put my thoughts into people's heads and earbuds.
Seems to be an effective way of doing it, but I'll write a book or make a documentary or something like that as well, which is, I just want to Sort of take my ideas and I'd like to transfer my ideas to other people.
So that's, you know, the basic mission statement for me.
As I went on, I felt like there was more going on than what was going on 15 years ago when I started.
And also I realized that The podcast became a sort of underground voice of freedom from World War II, you know, some sort of underground radio French resistance sort of thing, and the people who were in charge didn't like
The idea that people could sort of go rogue, you know, because that's what they looked at.
I mean, they sort of treated it like citizens gone rogue, conveying their ideas to the populace.
And so they started to notice that the podcasts were popular and they were pretty effective at sharing these ideas.
And you felt the brunt of this yourself.
They started going after People that were sharing ideas that they labeled dangerous, but it's always just an idea that they're not having, and all it is is different.
Now, they essentially label it as dangerous, but they never can prove the dangerous part of it.
You know, like they would say Trump Trump voters are fanatics and they'll do whatever this guy says.
He's like a, you know, Hitlerian, you know, Stalinist dictator.
And Trump voters and Trump followers will do whatever that guy says.
And that guy said inject bleach.
Except for nobody injected bleach.
So, which is it?
Did he say inject bleach and his followers who will do his or sycophants will do anything he tells them to do but that's how dangerous he is but then none of them injected bleach.
So either he didn't say inject bleach or they're not listening to him like you say they are.
So there's a lot of with a lot of that going on and what I was doing is just kind of Breaking down our society and thinking about it.
And then when COVID kicked in, I always say I didn't learn anything about viruses all throughout COVID, but I learned a ton about humans.
And it was disappointing.
Like, it scared me.
The COVID didn't scare me.
People and people's reaction scared me.
And it made me worry that, wow, this is what lurks inside so many human beings from the You know, from the woman in Venice yelling at you to pull your mask up when you're jogging down the boardwalk, to Sotomayor, Supreme Court Justice, saying tons of kids are sick and they're on ventilators and that's why we need vaccine passports.
Anyone who has a company with more than 99 people needs to get their employees vaccinated.
The military and firemen and policemen and all children going back to school.
I went, oh wow!
This is scary.
But for me...
Podcasting, when I started 15 plus years ago, was not really a job.
It wasn't a viable job.
It was just something I did because I want to communicate with people and I'll do it for free.
It didn't need to be a job.
It's something that I do.
You know, when I first started in radio, In the mid-90s I got a job and the program director said to me
I was hosting Love Line with Dr. Drew.
It was a popular radio show that became syndicated and was on KROQ in Los Angeles and was a popular station and so forth.
And the program director was cheap, or the general manager was cheap, and he came in and it's a two-hour nightly radio show.
And he said, it was a popular radio show, and I'd just become the host, and he said, I'm willing to pay you As much as our highest paid part-time employee, which was like, I don't know, janitor, van driver, something like that.
And I remember, even though I was young and I was barely in the business, 10 minutes in the business, I just said to the guy, his name was Trip Reeb, I said, listen, Trip, I didn't get into this to make money.
And if you tell me there's no money, then I will do it for free.
But if there is money, then I want a percentage of the money that the show generates, not getting paid what the van driver gets paid.
But if there is no money generated from the show, then I will show up every night and I will do it for free because I want to communicate with people.
And when I started podcasting, Bandwidth cost me, because my show is popular, about $10,000 a month to pay for bandwidth.
That's how much it costs back in the day if you had a popular show.
So not only was I not getting paid to podcast, I was paying $9,000 or $10,000 every month to podcast for free.
So, that was always my approach to it.
I did not have a lot of faith, per se, that money would follow or that it would turn into the industry it's turned into.
I used to talk to comedians who would come on the show, you know, years ago, and I'd say, you should podcast!
And they'd go, I don't want to.
I don't got time for that shit, you know.
Like, they're all doing a podcast now.
But I would tell them, yeah, you should do this.
And So I just did it for the love of the game, and I'm not trying to sound virtuous, but I've always enjoyed a conversation.
You know, I'm not getting paid to talk to you.
I'm enjoying talking to you.
How did comedy become reformed?
And is comedy going through a kind of renaissance now?
I was just thinking, like, in my country, when I was growing up, there was the emergence of what was called alternative comedy.
It's where, like, comedy had been sort of, I guess, conservative by default, and alternative comedians came out of, like, the Thatcher, Margaret Thatcher era, so Reagan, I guess, in your country, that were political and left-wing.
And then that became kind of surreal.
And then sort of like more than I go into comedy and it was so very so I don't know biographical and that all sorts of different components to it I guess but I what I'm witnessing what we saw recently witnessed was a kind of heavily censored prohibitive Uh, movement through comedy, comedy becoming virtue signaling, comedy that just weren't funny no more, and now there seems to be a reaction to that, and a response, and the emergence of new comedians, and I think the person that, sort of, is easiest to, sort of, uh, tag it on to, and understand it through, is someone like Shane Gillis, who, as an SNL comic, was of course cancelled, but due to, sort of, technology, and his great ability, has sort of re-emerged, and, and I think that there's something very, there's some, loads of interesting things about Shane Gillis, of course, but one of them,
Is that say when he does an impersonation of Trump, I sense that there is a affection for the comedic nature of Trump that is neither an endorsement nor a disavowing of Trump as a political figure, just a joy in what is funny about Trump.
And previous impersonations or takes on Trump, I've always had to Bake in condemnation of him because the political space, the Hollywood space, the entertainment space was owned by a certain political purview.
Do you think that comedy by its nature has to be somewhat anti-establishment, has to be willing to enter into controversial spaces, and above all has to have a kind of a spirit of joy in it?
And I wonder where you stand on that and what kind of movements you've noticed.
Yeah, I think that's a real astute point you just made.
When Alec Baldwin would do Trump, we all knew he hated Trump, and so what we got is a cartoon caricature version of bad Trump.
And when Shane does it, there's more affection there.
Also, Shane, there's a lot of guys who do impersonations, and they do great impersonations, but they're not particularly funny.
Outside of the personation.
Shane is funny and does the personation.
And that's why the impersonation springs to life.
Because there's a comedy brain driving the tone that is dead nuts on.
But you got the 200 horsepower comedy brain behind it.
Other impersonators are just acts who do the tonal sound and read, you know, read the teleprompter.
So I think that's what you're getting with Shane.
Yeah, I think you really get to see that horsepower as well as the spot on impersonation in these viral and fantastic Kill Tony moment.
This is where I really think you see Shane Gillis' affection, but also his comedic ability.
Have a look.
I think what we do as a society, and I've sort of broke it down in this metaphor so that people could sort of visualize it.
If you take music, what we had in the early 70s, we won't keep going back, but let's just start in the early 70s.
You had Crosby, Stills, and Nash.
You had all, you know, Creedence, Clearwater Revival.
You had a lot of anti-war, sort of very Joni Byas, Joni Mitchell, very folksy, Grassroots-y, people getting on stage in tattered jeans and belting out their anthems that were anti-war and anti-government, right?
Okay, by the mid-70s, we got into disco.
There could be no further two genres of music than, you know, Crosby, Stills, and Nash singing about four dead in Ohio and the village people.
Right, I mean here we were in the 74 still talking about anti-Vietnam protest songs and by 75 and a half it was Donna Summers in mirrored balls and platform shoes and spandex.
Okay, so we did that and we had like five years of disco and then what followed disco immediately?
Punk.
Well, what's the opposite of disco?
Well, the opposite of disco is the Sex Pistols.
It's a bunch of guys spitting, who don't care, with clothespins through their nostrils, who can't play their instruments.
But it was not disco.
Certainly not disco, you know?
And then, we had sort of punk and new wave.
Don't worry, one of my favorite guys is Graham Parker.
I know he's a countryman, so.
And then we had New Wave and punk, right?
And then what happened?
Well, now we get to the mid-80s, we get hair bands.
We get Cinderella, and we get Warren.
We get guys who are dressed like women with hair out to here, wearing the spandex, which would be the opposite of punk.
And then hair bands go on for about five years, and then we get grunge.
So we get Nirvana and Soundgarden, which are the opposite of hair bands.
So what we do is we go salty, sweet, salty, sweet.
We go hard, and then we go the exact opposite direction.
We don't sort of drift into a middle ground.
We just go back.
Hard, you know.
So we got into a weird comedic censorship and a politically correctness and you can't say that and blah blah blah.
Five years ago, we're going hard and it gave birth to Shane Gillis and others who now went, fuck that!
We're going punk.
We're going from your disco to your punk.
Yeah, that's a lovely bit of cultural analysis.
That's lovely.
That really makes sense and shows sort of what the cultural rhythms actually might be.
It feels interesting too that in a fractured culture, the generation of Stars is sort of in itself in decline.
It feels like, because the culture is fragmenting, right, for example, this is a good way of saying it maybe, like Glastonbury I feel like, you know, this year didn't pay enough attention to it, but the year before it was like Elton John is headlining and my kids, my daughters are like six and seven years old and they like the Spice Girls.
It feels like the culture can't anymore generate Authentic movement, certainly not in the top line way.
Perhaps it's now become so fragmented because of the technology and the access that you could just watch all day long very niche stuff if you wanted to.
There's no need for a centralised culture other than economic requirements and the requirements of control to create the kind of mandates that are necessary to, you know, from the political part of our conversation, i.e.
to generate consensus through strong messaging, through censorship, There, there seems to be a central culture, but it's a very fraught one.
But when it comes to entertainment, it feels like there is no unified culture anymore.
Would you agree with that?
Like, say when you watch something like the Oscars now, I don't know if it's like a personal thing because I've been cast out of that world, but it seems sort of like ridiculous now.
I don't know.
Is that a general view, do you think?
I think...
What we're going through is you will to bring up the Oscars for example which I've written on for a few years because Jimmy Kimmel's a friend hosted the Oscars.
I think there's a couple things.
A, you know, back when there were three networks and you just sit around and we'd have bad shows like the Dukes of Hazzard and they'd get 41 million viewers back.
And also people don't realize back when the country had 215 million versus 330 million, you know, not only were their ratings much higher, but there were many less Americans to watch a TV, you know, back then.
That's an era that will never happen again.
We'll never revisit really bad art being very popular.
I don't think we're going to do that.
I also think that a lot of these franchises like the Oscars hurt their brand by doing a sort of DEI version of their product and shoehorning a lot of films that nobody saw, that nobody really appreciated, into some sort of stratospheric level because they met the requirements, the cultural requirements of that group, you know?
Ultimately, the brand will be hurt just like Bud Light took a beating with Dylan Mulvaney.
And so what ends up happening with the Oscars and many of these other sort of cornerstone appointment viewing sorts of things, they sort of decline and kind of slough off and become semi-irrelevant because they have done away with meritocracy.
And so you're sitting there and it's going to be hosted by the three black chicks, you know, and then you think, are they the funniest or are they just doing it because they're women of color?
And Moonlight won this year and you go, is that really the best film or are they just doing it because it's a gay black guy, you know?
So, while they struggle to hang on to market share, the Super Bowl gets more popular every year.
Because the Super Bowl in professional sports and professional football is the last meritocracy.
It is not corrupted.
You know, right now, we have a black or a half-black female who's running for president, And half the country's going, is she really the most qualified or is she just there because?
Well, as soon as you start going, she's just there because you've hurt your franchise.
You've hurt your business.
You know, when, if you're walking through the, Quad at Harvard, and you see a young black student walking your way, and you go, I wonder if his SAT scores were as high as the Asian girl, or they're just putting him here because they're trying to fulfill some sort of quota.
By the way, which is unfair to the person, because that person may have earned their way there.
But the second you start doing that, the franchise falls apart.
And Oscars did that to themselves in many, you know, Rolling Stone comes out with their list of 100 greatest rock guitars of all time and, you know, 7 of the top 10 are women.
You know what I mean?
And you go, oh, come on.
Give me a fucking break.
And by the way, how come none of these women ever cracked your top 50 of the last 75 years?
Why are they all up there now?
You know what I mean?
Rolling Stone has, I don't know, the greatest artist of all time, the greatest album of all time is a Lauryn Hill album.
Oh, it's a black woman.
It's okay.
I don't believe Rolling Stone anymore.
And then Rolling Stone is going to weigh in on Ivermectin, and I don't believe them again.
And they've hurt and destroyed their own franchise.
Oscars have done that.
But when you think about the Super Bowl, the Super Bowl gets bigger and more popular every year because people crave meritocracy.
Because I suppose meritocracy is adjacent to authenticity.
I can see how that would become dismantled.
I'm curious sometimes about the motivations, because one thing I know now is that whatever they claim are the motivations, it will not be compassion and kindness.
It is not that.
That I know from just cross-referencing a variety of other things, the pandemic included, that this is not about protecting people and saving lives.
There is some other motivation.
Even if it isn't a conscious conspiracy, the convergence of interests are creating Power, opportunity, legitimization of authority.
And I do, I'm curious about whether with what was once political correctness, which is now DEI, that the motivations are not benign.
That whatever they are, whether they are economic and the various sort of incentives and imperatives that exist in the world of finance, whatever they are, It confuses me, Adam.
I find it... I find it confusing.
And to your point about sport and meritocracy, the same thing is happening in this country.
You know, like, football or soccer, as you would call it, continues to be incredibly popular, but it's full of contradiction.
It was a game that once belonged to a certain cultural group.
You would have to say, Working class males as they attempt to sort of repackage and repurpose the commodity there are sort of odd compromises that happen there are sort of like Instances of politicization and genuflection, but there are conversations to be had there even there I would say so for example like when athletes started to take the knee there are obvious questions because of
Well, you know, you're taking the knee, but the Royal Family are present, and how can we be talking about, you know, issues derived from racial inequality, slavery, colonialism, imperialism, and then take a medal from the Royal Family, who are the living epitome of systems of imperialism and colonialism?
Seems like we're only interested in gestures.
rather than addressing the actual power structures that possibly generate inequality.
Furthermore, there's the sort of sense that however much you commodify football,
you can take a World Cup, instead of having it in the summer, put it in the winter time to
accommodate having it in Qatar, have weird moments where, you know, people are going to wear rainbow
laces in support of, you know, sort of gender fluidity and various sexual identity groups,
and then sort of not do it because they're scared of doing it in Qatar.
The whole thing is very, very fragile, it seems, and difficult to hold together.
Well, some of the questions I have, because I am sympathetic to anti-establishment thinking, even if that establishment is tradition itself.
Like, one of the points that might be made is, Well, we all wear, like, athletes or, like, footballers, for example, always wore a poppy to commemorate war, and that is a political statement, so maybe they should be able to take the knee or wear rainbow laces or whatever, which is similarly a political statement.
But there is definitely the sense that our culture is being used to create something that I don't think is wholesome.
I don't buy that it's about supporting people or creating love or creating opportunity.
I don't fully understand its motives, but I certainly don't trust it.
It's a business to a very small group of people.
And the rest of us are just scared to be called racist or homophobic or misogynistic, so we go along with it.
So it's a large herd of sheep, that's us, and a handful of sheep herders who are profiting off of us who are telling us, you know, there's a wolf out there and you better do what I say.
So that's essentially what We have.
That's how COVID worked.
That's how Black Lives Matter works.
That's how many of what goes on works.
There's a part of it that I find insidious, which is all the messaging suggests there's a problem.
So in our American football, in the end zone, the words end racism is scrawled onto the grass, and you'll see end racism everywhere.
I drove here today.
There's a sign on a lifeguard tower in Malibu on PCH Highway saying end hate at the beach.
There is no hate at the beach, but if you're an American, you can't walk 10 feet without seeing a sign saying stop hate and stop racism.
We don't really have a problem with racism in this country at all, but it's still scrawled everywhere, and the reason I think it's insidious, and a lot of people will go, well then so what?
They end racism.
It's a good thing, you know.
What if it said, love thy neighbor?
It's a good thing, you know.
If I was looking at a culture And I was looking at Brazil, and everywhere I saw scrawled in their soccer stadiums and on the signs everywhere it said, end malaria, then I would think Brazil had a big problem with malaria.
If I came home from my one-week vacation in Brazil, they'd go, how's Brazil?
And I'd go, Brazil's fine, but evidently there's a malaria issue over there because everywhere I went there was a sign in front of somebody's house that talked about stopping hate and stopping racism and stopping xenophobia.
And I was like, They're evidently a very hateful group of people who need to be reminded on a daily basis, you know, when the black guy is in the end zone spiking the football with his other 10 black teammates after the touchdown, they're standing on letters that say end racism.
So I don't like it, and I've never liked it.
Every year for Martin Luther King Day, all the race hustlers get up and they make a speech, and this is white and black, and they say, We have come a long way, but there's still a long way to go.
And I'm always like, give me the examples of what you're talking about.
You talk about institutional racism, give me the examples of institutional racism and we should work on those.
But you never give the example, you just keep agitating And by the way, I couldn't imagine being a young black man growing up in this country thinking that this country hated him and didn't want him here.
But that's what we do.
Yeah, that's a good analysis there.
I feel like people in a contrary position would point to, I guess, economic, prison populations, those kind of demographics.
And I know you've got arguments for them because I've seen you make them.
But I feel like the same interests that were likely behind the execution, assassination, murder of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X are not The people are the people that are ensuring that these campaigns are proliferated, you know?
I don't feel like, you know, that that's the same institutional power.
That's what it does now.
Then it killed black leaders.
Now it generates tension because I suppose earlier we were talking about the necessary generation of fear and here we're talking about the generation of guilt, shame, like all of these things I suppose necessarily because you're dealing with human beings have to have some sort of Emotional or psychic field that they provoke in order to guide and manage behavior.
The intention either to create further conflict, to create division, to create confusion, to create uncertainty, to create doubt.
These are what these messaging systems do.
And I suppose in this new media space what you have is the immediate ability to contradict, set up parallel narratives, take down that narrative.
The problem is not This untruthful information, the problem is truthful information, isn't it?
That is the stuff they want to shut down.
Because if you have the ability to truly communicate, then you can talk about, well, these are the real issues that pertain to race, or sex, or gender, or individual freedom.
Or how tradition is oppressive towards new emergent identities and how these institutions could improve.
And what I feel like, yeah, we have are exploitative forces that are claiming that their role is beneficial and helpful that are actually the opposite of that.
Yeah, well, they're hustlers.
I mean, that's how they get paid.
You know, if somebody said to me, I've heard in this country from the hustlers 10,000 times that black folk didn't have access to IDs, so there shouldn't be an ID presented when voting because it's unfair to certain populace of this country who don't have access to IDs.
I've heard them say that for 20 years.
I've never heard one say, I have a plan To mobilize this.
I want to get an ID mobile and I want to drive it into the black community and it'll be certified by the DMV just like they have blood drive mobiles.
When they need blood, they'll drive the blood mobile.
It's a modified Winnebago camper.
They'll drive it into the community and they'll get blood from people And there's the bookmobile.
They'll drive that into the community and hand out books to people who need books.
Okay, let's go along on this journey.
There are people who are in the inner city who don't have access to IDs or folks who can't get IDs.
Good!
Where's the plan to get them an ID?
You keep saying they don't have access to it.
Let's give them access to it.
Let's get an ID mobile.
We'll drive it into the inner city.
We'll have employees of the DMV working it and we'll sign people up to get IDs.
But I've never heard that plan.
Yeah, that's an interesting continuum because when it comes to, for example, Ukraine, Russia, there is no plan for what would constitute a victory and an end point.
These are kind of, it seems like ideas are just sort of thrown into the culture in order to create, you know, delirium.
Right, but so the question is, do they want black people to get IDs or do they want to use this To further an agenda that they're not speaking of.
Yeah.
Do they want to end the war between Ukraine and Russia or perpetuate a war between Ukraine and Russia?
Right.
Yes.
Yeah, man.
Adam, thank you so much, man.
It's really brilliant to have the opportunity to talk to you.
Thank you for making time for me, mate.
And I'm going to come on your show soon, I understand.
I'm glad we had this chance to speak.
I look forward to talking to you on my show as well.
I've always felt like we were simpatico because I've heard you speak on many subjects and I was like, He and I are going to get along.
Yeah, thank you.
I look forward to our next conversation.
Cheers, Adam.
Thanks so much, man.
I appreciate that.
Many switching, switching, switching. Many switching, switching, switching. Many switching, switching, switching.
