This is a fantastic conversation about how being an online presence has become a fraught and political endeavor in and of itself. Adam Carolla is a comedian, podcaster, writer, and podcaster. He is also a resident of California and a fierce opponent of the current governor Gavin Newsom. We talk about what it's like to live in California, what it means to be a politician, and why he thinks the culture of war has become so polarized. And we discuss why it's important to have a black family unit in a family dynamic. And why it s better than an intact family unit, which is what most black families have. This episode was produced and edited by Annie-Rose Strasser and produced by Riley Bray. It was edited by Matthew Boll. Our theme music was made by Micah Vellian and our ad music was written and performed by Mark Phillips. Additional music was done by Ian Dorsch and Christian Bladt. Special thanks to our sponsor, Awakened Wonder, for producing the music for this episode. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE on Apple Podcasts and Subscribe on iTunes and leave us a review! Subscribe to our podcast wherever you get your favourite streaming platform, and don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to our other shows! Thank you so much for supporting this podcast, we really appreciate it! Love ya, bye! -Eugene and Rachael. -The Best Fiends. Timestamps: 0:00-10: 0:30- 5:00 - 6:30 - What's better than that? 7:15 - What would you like? 8: What do you think of the future? 9:40 - How do you'd like it? 11:00 12:15- What are you're going to be my favorite part? 13:00 + 15:00+ 16:00 Is it better? 17:00 Can I have a good day? 18:00 What's your worst case scenario? 19:00 Do you have a better one? 21:00 | Is it a good thing? 22:00 Would you like it better than a black kid in a black guy? 26:00 & 15:10 27:00 / 16:30 + 17:30 21?
00:02:32.000Thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand for a conversation with that great innovator in this field.
00:02:39.000If 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.
00:02:48.000Before there was Rogan, before there was Ricky Gervais, before there was even old Russ... me, that's who I am.
00:02:55.000This is a fantastic conversation about how being an online presence has become a fraught and political endeavor in and of itself.
00:03:04.000We'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.
00:03:15.000And of course, if you are a member of Locals, do you know this?
00:03:17.000You can come and see me live Anywhere, in the world, whenever you want, as long as I'm performing a show.
00:03:22.000I don't mean like when I'm laying in bed sleeping, or when I'm at worship, or a prayer.
00:03:27.000But 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.
00:03:39.000Without further delay, ado, or hullabaloo, here's me and Adam Carolla.
00:03:49.000I 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.
00:04:14.000I 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?
00:04:31.000Like, I've often joked that I think Gavin Newsom wakes up in the morning and thinks, what would annoy Adam the most?
00:04:39.000And whatever it is, that's what I'm going to do today.
00:04:42.000But 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.
00:05:03.000So is that what the culture of war has become?
00:05:07.000That 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 odd perspective that seems like it's designed to be antagonistic.
00:05:27.000Because I was trying to think of what the counter-argument is for Not for kids, for the school not having to tell parents information about their kids.
00:05:36.000I presumed that a good faith argument for that would be, oh what if a kid is being abused or mistreated at home?
00:05:46.000The starting point for legislation, like the worst case scenario in a family dynamic, cannot be the point from which a legislation is formed.
00:05:58.000Can you see what the counter argument is?
00:06:01.000Because it can't be just to annoy Adam Carolla.
00:07:11.000And I go, okay, now we're just going off into some direction.
00:07:15.000That is a worst case scenario and what I'm saying is is you're shutting down schools and or you know 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 policy needs to be made sort of for the masses and just being antagonistic in 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.
00:07:49.000So he just went right down to the border with Mexico and said, what's Trump's policies?
00:07:54.000Well, Trump's policies are remain in Mexico and many other policies.
00:07:58.000And then he went, all right, undo it because that's his policies.
00:08:03.000And my thing is, is your predecessor, Who you may loathe and despise may have been right on a couple of occasions.
00:08:14.000And for those policies, you should leave alone and then enact your new policies.
00:08:20.000He just said, we're going to undo whatever it is Trump did.
00:08:25.000I sometimes feel that reflexive authoritarianism poses as rationalism when actually it's a kind of veiled hysteria.
00:08:33.000And 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.
00:08:45.000You know how you can volunteer to go on a school trip with your kids?
00:08:49.000When 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.
00:09:11.000When I went to get on the same minibus as my kid, they went, oh no, you can't get on the minibus with her.
00:09:16.000And 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.
00:09:27.000That's the scenario that you're regulated from.
00:09:30.000We're already in a crash, there's kids dead on the floor, and I'm prioritizing my own kid.
00:09:36.000And 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.
00:09:47.000So when you see it happening in states and nations, it's difficult to, I suppose, not inquire as to whether what's really behind it is legitimizing more and more authority.
00:10:00.000And is that basically what you believe?
00:10:03.000That they find ways to justify authority?
00:10:07.000Well, 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.
00:10:35.000And I think that would be my impulse too, which is I don't want to tell people what to do.
00:10:41.000It feels like an uncomfortable position to be put in.
00:10:46.000On the other hand, many are attracted to it.
00:10:50.000And COVID to me was just a test To see who was most attracted to authority and being the authority, you know, and it was sort of, so COVID came and many Democratic governors and mayors jumped into action and their action, you know, in California,
00:12:54.000Just a weird mindset for them to be at, and it doesn't bother them.
00:13:01.000They rationalize it and they justify it and then they vote him in again.
00:13:05.000I 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 gotten to the point where we're presented with the specter of the terrifying strongman as a reboot of 2018.
00:13:22.000If 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.
00:13:42.000The actual use of authority to prohibit, inhibit, control.
00:13:46.000Restrict, surveil, censor, shut down, close down free speech, shut down comedy, shut down communication, impose and justify technological dictatorships.
00:13:56.000And 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, like obviously Orwell, but
00:14:12.000also Huxley and even Kafka, the idea of sort of bureaucracies that are amorphous and difficult
00:14:22.000They're actually quite friendly and benign, whether it's like what you've described,
00:14:28.000that ridiculous paternalism, which is a type of authority that legitimizes itself through
00:14:32.000protection like you've described, or whether it's like what it's like to deal with YouTube
00:14:38.000or any bureaucracy, like 10 years ago we would have all talked about.
00:14:42.000Oh 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.
00:15:03.000And 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?
00:15:19.000When the real march of power, particularly through the pandemic period, has been this rather banal, creeping insidious paternalism like we've described.
00:15:40.000So we have to regulate this and we have to control you.
00:15:45.000I 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?
00:15:55.000But 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.
00:16:07.000First off, they come at it from safety.
00:16:11.000Now they end up with authoritarian, but they're coming with safety, you know, so you're right.
00:16:20.000It'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
00:16:49.000So 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.
00:17:01.000With 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.
00:17:08.000Because 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.
00:17:25.000So 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.
00:17:38.000We can't make this content without our partners.
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00:19:16.000Yeah, 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.
00:19:28.000And 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 gonna let you do, because of the fear.
00:19:45.000Because the legitimization of safety measures ought really come from, forgive the word, love.
00:19:51.000That if it was like, because we love you, we want to protect you.
00:19:54.000And 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.
00:20:06.000If you take away the idea that life is sacred, who cares if people die?
00:20:11.000Because life is sacred, everyone should take this medication.
00:20:14.000Because life is sacred, all of us should go in home.
00:20:19.000You should certainly not paddleboard because life is sacred.
00:20:22.000But what's curious is that simultaneously the idea that life is sacred, or that there is a God, or that there are universal principles, It's simultaneously being extracted.
00:20:31.000We're simultaneously seeing the idea that human beings, rationalism and materialism are the apex of our systems of thought, philosophy and control.
00:20:42.000That you can change your identity, you can manipulate nature, we are progressing technologically and medically and that is our shared project.
00:20:54.000As is so often the case, a hypocrisy at the heart of the ideology.
00:20:58.000I wonder how you think that sort of tracks onto 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.
00:21:24.000It's just an omni-crisis that never ends, which provides the cover for this escalating authoritarianism.
00:21:32.000And 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 of Biden's decline, which was obvious to any of us that
00:21:47.000were operating in this space for some years, but we weren't allowed to talk about it.
00:21:50.000And suddenly there was this repackaging and it's acceptable now and we've got to get rid
00:23:30.000And 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.
00:23:45.000Now guys are doing double backflips with a full Superman grabbing onto the rear fender.
00:23:54.000But 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
00:24:09.000With 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, it's everything's just bigger and more.
00:24:30.000Yeah, 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
00:25:11.000Unless 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.
00:25:24.000And 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.
00:25:38.000No, I don't think Russia would have blown up their own pipeline or the assassination attempt immediately.
00:25:46.000If 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.
00:26:05.000What do you think is the impact, and given what you've just said about pornography and skateboarding, how is this likely to crescendo?
00:26:15.000Well, what I've experienced, because you brought up the fact that we can debunk things in high definition in real time.
00:26:25.000So, 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.
00:26:35.000We 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.
00:26:49.000It doesn't mean it didn't happen, but it also doesn't mean we can confirm that any of this happened, you know?
00:26:56.000It's storytelling, campfires, and lore, and that's all we ever had.
00:27:01.000And there was no way to really fact check lore, per se.
00:27:06.000Now, we have high def footage of everything.
00:27:50.000So if you think about The things we have here, you know, January 6th, deadly insurrection.
00:27:57.000It wasn't deadly, there was one person that was killed and that was one of the insurrectionists.
00:28:02.000It was a woman who was shot by a black man who was a guard.
00:28:06.000That's not part of their narrative, so they just call it a deadly insurrection except for nobody died and it wasn't an insurrection.
00:28:15.000So 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.
00:28:25.000So the people that are working on the narratives, you know, Trump said he was going to be a dictator day one.
00:28:32.000There'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.
00:28:39.000It's him saying they're good people on both sides.
00:28:43.000I mean, Biden to this day says good people.
00:28:49.000So the people that are in charge of the narrative have to work harder.
00:28:54.000at the 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.
00:29:27.000Everyone's got to get on the same page.
00:29:29.000And that's the era we're living in, which is pretty incredible for those of us who think in a rational and linear way.
00:29:37.000I 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.
00:30:00.000No, he said, that's not the reason we need to be able to censor.
00:30:03.000We 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.
00:30:11.000It 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 decay and decimation of that authority and Barack Obama has sort of politically did what you just described.
00:30:44.000He 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.
00:30:55.000Let 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.
00:31:08.000And 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.
00:31:19.000And I wonder if you thought, as perhaps the earliest ...doing what we all do now, podcasting, responding through conversations and punditry and chat and joking around.
00:31:31.000Did you imagine that it would become, and could you have imagined, so politically charged?
00:31:36.000And 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?
00:31:51.000Well, a couple things, because there's a lot to unpack there.
00:31:56.000Literally three weeks ago, we were calling footage cheap fakes.
00:32:01.000Footage of Biden looking addled, looking confused.
00:32:05.000At the end of the day, we're all human beings.
00:32:07.000And when you see somebody who's off, you know it on an animalistic level.
00:32:13.000You 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.
00:32:22.000You know, whatever, maybe drunk, maybe high, maybe schizophrenic, but you can see as an animal, as one animal to the next, we see movement.
00:33:04.000Footage 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.
00:34:51.000Again, back to you didn't think they're going to do this in the day of video.
00:34:55.000We're sitting there staring at a video and they're telling us what we're staring at isn't happening.
00:35:01.000By the way, it takes a lot of hubris to do that.
00:35:04.000I 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.
00:35:14.000If somebody said, you know, Adam is wrong so much and talks so much shit, I just don't believe him anymore when he talks.
00:36:07.000So 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 Ivermectin is horse-paced, and okay, that's all our fact-checking.
00:36:21.000They never go, we're going to do some fact-checking.
00:36:24.000Trump never said good people on both sides.
00:36:26.000He wasn't talking about Klansmen, and he was talking about a separate group.
00:36:55.000And I would say, if the cash register's broken, then wouldn't I get more change sometimes?
00:37:02.000If it's just broken, then I should get more every other time I come in, but it's always short.
00:37:08.000But 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.
00:37:14.000Yeah, Obama wants to be in charge of his truth because our truth is not good for his business.
00:37:22.000And 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.
00:39:17.000This is, of course, backed by research and endorsed by experts, specifically Dr. Pia McCulloch and Dr. Harvey Rich, both friends of the show.
00:39:25.000Avoid the chaos, wait times and price of the hospital.
00:39:28.000Get the entire kit for the cost of a single doctor's visit.
00:39:48.000There was an extraordinary degree of certainty and I saw an amazing clip with Morning Joe having Fauci on.
00:39:54.000It 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.
00:40:04.000Andy Fauci was saying, this is the fog of war!
00:40:07.000And like, in the morning, Joe guy was like, you know, you did a good job, and you know,
00:40:12.000And like, it was just so, such a sort of cosy reappraisal of the time.
00:40:17.000When we were talking just then, you sort of talked about authenticity and how on a personal
00:40:20.000level that you would be held to account if you kept lying, made mistakes, you know, and
00:40:25.000of course everybody does make mistakes, certainly.
00:40:28.000Part 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.
00:40:49.000So I wonder how you noticed how it all are and what the pivotal moments were.
00:40:55.000I'm assuming Covid was one of them and now that I'm sort of reframing this question, I wonder if you've sort of noticed other cultural changes around As we all have done, of course, around which party is free speech, which party is anti-war.
00:41:11.000How that has impacted you personally from your position as an early voice in this space?
00:41:18.000You know, ostensibly I would like to entertain people and sort of make them think, you know, simultaneously.
00:41:26.000That'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.
00:41:35.000But I'll write a book or making 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.
00:41:47.000So that's, you know, the basic mission statement for me.
00:41:52.000As I went on, I felt like there was more going on than what was going on 15 years ago when I started.
00:42:02.000And 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.
00:42:20.000And 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.
00:42:31.000I mean, they sort of treated it like citizens gone rogue.
00:42:36.000Conveying 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.
00:42:52.000People that were sharing ideas that they label dangerous, but it's always just an idea that they're not having, and all it is is different.
00:43:03.000Now, they essentially label it as dangerous, but they never can prove the dangerous part of it.
00:43:11.000You know, like they would say Trump Trump voters are fanatics and they'll do whatever this guy says.
00:43:21.000He's like a, you know, Hitlerian, you know, Stalinist dictator.
00:43:25.000And Trump voters and Trump followers will do whatever that guy says.
00:44:26.000People and people's reaction scared me.
00:44:30.000And it made me worry that, wow, this is what lurks inside so many human beings.
00:44:36.000From 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 there's a tons of kids are sick and they're on ventilators and that's why we need vaccine passports.
00:44:54.000Anyone who has a company with more than 99 people needs to get their employees vaccinated.
00:44:59.000The military and firemen and policemen and all children going back to school.
00:45:34.000You know, when I first started in radio, In the mid-90s I got a job and the program director said to me
00:45:48.000I was hosting Love Line with Dr. Drew.
00:45:52.000It's a popular radio show that became syndicated and was on K-Rock in Los Angeles and was a popular station and so forth.
00:46:00.000And the program director was cheap, or the general manager was cheap, and he came in and it's a two-hour nightly radio show.
00:46:07.000And he said, it was a popular radio show, and I'd just become the host.
00:46:11.000And 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.
00:46:21.000And 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.
00:46:29.000I said, listen, Trip, I didn't get into this to make money.
00:46:34.000And if you tell me there's no money, then I will do it for free.
00:46:39.000But 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.
00:46:49.000But if there is no money generated from this show, then I will show up every night and I will do it for free because I want to communicate with people.
00:46:58.000And when I started podcasting, Bandwidth cost me, because my show is popular, about $10,000 a month to pay for bandwidth.
00:47:09.000That's how much it costs back in the day if you had a popular show.
00:47:13.000So not only was I not getting paid to podcast, I was paying $9,000 or $10,000 every month to podcast for free.
00:48:03.000How did comedy become reformed, and is comedy going through a kind of renaissance now?
00:48:11.000I was just thinking, like, in my country, when I was growing up, there was the emergence of what was called alternative comedy.
00:48:17.000where like comedy had been sort of I guess conservative by default and alternative comedians
00:48:22.000came out like the Thatcher, Margaret Thatcher eras of Reagan I guess in your country that
00:48:26.000were political and left-wing and then that became kind of surreal and then sort of like
00:48:32.000more than I got into comedy and it was sort of very so I don't know biographical and had
00:48:37.000all sorts of different components to it I guess but I what I'm witnessing what we sort
00:48:42.000of recently witnessed was a kind of heavily censored prohibitive movement through comedy,
00:48:50.000comedy becoming virtue signaling, comedy that just weren't funny no more and now there seems
00:48:53.000to be a reaction to that and a response and the emergence of new comedians and I think
00:48:58.000the person that sort of is easiest to sort of tag it on to and understand it through
00:49:02.000someone like Shane Gillis who as an SNL comic was of course cancelled but due to sort of
00:49:07.000technology and his great ability has sort of re-emerged and I think that there's something
00:49:12.000very there's loads of interesting things about Shane Gillis of course but one of them is
00:49:17.000Is 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.
00:49:36.000And 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.
00:49:53.000Do 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?
00:50:04.000And I wonder where you stand on that and what kind of movements you've noticed.
00:50:09.000Yeah, I think that's a real astute point you just made.
00:50:13.000When Alec Baldwin would do Trump, we all knew he hated Trump.
00:50:18.000And so what we got is a cartoon caricature version of bad Trump.
00:50:24.000And when Shane does it, there's more affection there.
00:50:28.000Also, Shane, there's a lot of guys who do impersonations, and they do great impersonations, but they're not particularly funny.
00:51:45.000You had all, you know, Creedence, Clearwater Revival.
00:51:48.000You had a lot of anti-war, sort of very Joni Byas, Joni Mitchell, very folksy, Grassrootsy, people getting upstage in tattered jeans and belting out their anthems that were anti-war and anti-government, right?
00:52:11.000There 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.
00:52:23.000I mean, just, you couldn't... 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.
00:54:00.000So 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
00:54:25.000Yeah, that's a lovely bit of cultural analysis.
00:54:28.000That really makes sense and shows sort of what the cultural rhythms actually might be.
00:54:34.000It feels interesting too that in a fractured culture, the generation of Stars is sort of, in itself, in decline.
00:54:44.000It 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 I 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.
00:55:00.000It feels like the culture can't anymore generate Authentic movement, certainly not in the top line way.
00:55:09.000Perhaps 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.
00:55:17.000There's no need for a centralized 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.
00:55:29.000to generate consensus through strong messaging, through
00:56:11.000A, 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.
00:56:24.000And 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.
00:56:39.000That's an era that will never happen again.
00:56:43.000We'll never revisit really bad art being very popular.
00:56:51.000I also think that a lot of these franchises like the Oscars hurt their brand by doing a sort of DEI version of of their product and and shoehorning a lot of films that nobody saw that nobody really appreciated into into some sort of stratospheric level because they met the requirements the cultural requirements of that group you know and
00:57:25.000Ultimately the brand will be hurt just like Bud Light took a beating with Dylan Mulvaney.
00:57:33.000And 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.
00:57:57.000And so you're sitting there and it's going to be hosted by the three black chicks, you know?
00:58:03.000And then you think, are they the funniest or are they just doing it because they're women of color?
00:58:09.000And 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?
00:58:17.000So, while they struggle to hang on to market share, the Super Bowl gets more popular every year.
00:58:26.000Because the Super Bowl in professional sports and professional football is the last meritocracy.
00:58:35.000You 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 she just there because?
00:58:47.000Well, as soon as you start going, she's just there because you've hurt your franchise.
00:58:53.000You know, when, if you're walking through the A 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.
00:59:14.000By the way, which is unfair to the person because that person may have earned their way there.
00:59:20.000But the second you start doing that, the franchise falls apart.
00:59:24.000And Oscars did that to themselves and 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.
01:00:12.000But when you think about the Super Bowl, the Super Bowl gets bigger and more popular every year because people crave meritocracy.
01:00:22.000Because I suppose meritocracy is adjacent to authenticity.
01:00:26.000I can see how that would become dismantled.
01:00:29.000I'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.
01:00:39.000That I know from just cross-referencing a variety of other things, the pandemic included, that this is not about protecting people and saving lives.
01:00:50.000Even if it isn't a conscious conspiracy, the convergence of interests are creating power, opportunity, legitimization of authority.
01:00:59.000And I'm curious about what was once political correctness, which is now DEI, but 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 it confuses me Adam.
01:01:55.000So for example, like when athletes started to take the knee, there were obvious questions
01:02:01.000because, well, you know, you're taking the knee, but the royal family are present.
01:02:05.000And how can we be talking about, you know, 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.
01:02:21.000Seems like we're only interested in gestures, rather than addressing the actual power structures that possibly generate inequality.
01:02:28.000Furthermore, 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 wintertime to accommodate having it in Qatar.
01:02:40.000Have weird moments where, you know, people are going to wear rainbow laces in support of, you know, gender fluidity.
01:02:48.000Various sexual identity groups, and then sort of not do it because they're scared of doing it in Qatar.
01:02:53.000The whole thing is very, very fragile, it seems, and difficult to hold together.
01:02:58.000Well, some of the questions I have, because I am sympathetic to anti-establishment thinking, even if that establishment is tradition itself.
01:03:05.000Like, 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.
01:03:14.000And 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.
01:03:23.000But there is definitely the sense that our culture is being used to create something that I don't think is wholesome.
01:03:30.000I don't buy that it's about supporting people or creating love or creating opportunity.
01:03:37.000I don't fully understand its motives, but I certainly don't trust it.
01:03:42.000It's a business to a very small group of people.
01:03:47.000And the rest of us are just scared to be called racist or homophobic or misogynistic, so we go along with it.
01:03:56.000So 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.
01:05:24.000You 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.
01:05:41.000Then I would think Brazil had a big problem with malaria.
01:05:45.000If I came home from my one week vacation in Brazil, they'd go, how's Brazil?
01:05:49.000And 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.
01:05:59.000And stopping racism and stopping xenophobia.
01:06:03.000And I was like, they're evidently a very hateful group of people who need to be reminded on a daily basis.
01:06:10.000You 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.
01:06:56.000And 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.
01:07:10.000I feel like people in a contrary position would point to, I guess, economic, prison populations, those kind of demographics.
01:07:18.000And I know you've got arguments for them because I've seen you make them.
01:07:21.000But 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?
01:07:40.000I don't feel like, you know, that that's the same institutional power.
01:08:11.000The intention either to create further conflict, to create division, to create confusion, to
01:08:17.000create uncertainty, to create doubt, like these are what these messaging systems do.
01:08:22.000And I suppose in this new media space, what you have is the immediate ability to contradict,
01:08:26.000set up parallel narratives, take down that narrative.
01:08:28.000The problem is not this untruthful information.
01:08:33.000The problem is truthful information, isn't it?
01:08:35.000That is the stuff they want to shut down.
01:08:36.000Because 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.
01:08:46.000Or how tradition is oppressive towards new emergent identities and how these institutions could improve.
01:08:51.000And 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.
01:09:29.000I'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
01:10:31.000Yeah, 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.
01:10:43.000These are kind of, it seems like ideas are just sort of thrown into the culture in order to create, you know, delirium.
01:10:50.000Right, but so the question is, do they want black people to get IDs or do they want to use this?
01:10:58.000To further an agenda that they're not speaking of.