Stay Free - Russel Brand - “They're the REAL FASCISTS" - EXCLUSIVE Adam Carolla Interview on Democrat CRAZY COVID Lockdown

00:00:00.000 so so

00:01:51.000 so brought to you by fighter

00:02:19.000 In this video, you're going to see the future.

00:02:31.000 Hello there, you Awakening Wonders!

00:02:32.000 Thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand for a conversation with that great innovator in this field.

00:02:39.000 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.

00:02:48.000 Before there was Rogan, before there was Ricky Gervais, before there was even old Russ... me, that's who I am.

00:02:54.000 There was Adam Carolla.

00:02:55.000 This is a fantastic conversation about how being an online presence has become a fraught and political endeavor in and of itself.

00:03:04.000 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.

00:03:15.000 And of course, if you are a member of Locals, do you know this?

00:03:17.000 You can come and see me live Anywhere, in the world, whenever you want, as long as I'm performing a show.

00:03:22.000 I don't mean like when I'm laying in bed sleeping, or when I'm at worship, or a prayer.

00:03:27.000 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.

00:03:39.000 Without further delay, ado, or hullabaloo, here's me and Adam Carolla.

00:03:44.000 Hope you enjoy it.

00:03:46.000 Adam, thanks for joining us tonight.

00:03:48.000 My pleasure.

00:03:49.000 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.

00:04:11.000 Is that right?

00:04:13.000 He is.

00:04:14.000 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?

00:04:31.000 Like, I've often joked that I think Gavin Newsom wakes up in the morning and thinks, what would annoy Adam the most?

00:04:39.000 And whatever it is, that's what I'm going to do today.

00:04:42.000 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.

00:05:03.000 So is that what the culture of war has become?

00:05:07.000 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 odd perspective that seems like it's designed to be antagonistic.

00:05:24.000 Do you mean things like kids?

00:05:27.000 Because 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.

00:05:36.000 I presumed that a good faith argument for that would be, oh what if a kid is being abused or mistreated at home?

00:05:44.000 But I suppose that can't be.

00:05:46.000 The starting point for legislation, like the worst case scenario in a family dynamic, cannot be the point from which a legislation is formed.

00:05:58.000 Can you see what the counter argument is?

00:06:01.000 Because it can't be just to annoy Adam Carolla.

00:06:05.000 That can't be their ideology.

00:06:08.000 Yeah, I mean, I think what they do is they take an outlier in a worst case scenario, and then they prop it up.

00:06:18.000 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.

00:06:26.000 The dad stayed around and they raised their children in an intact family unit that I think the black community would find.

00:06:32.000 And then someone always raised their hand and go, I know a black guy.

00:06:36.000 He went to Harvard.

00:06:37.000 He never met his biological dad.

00:06:39.000 And I'd go, okay.

00:06:41.000 Fine.

00:06:42.000 I'm not saying it can't happen.

00:06:43.000 I'm just saying, in general, this would be better, you know?

00:06:47.000 And then you go, I think they should reopen schools.

00:06:50.000 These kids are suffering.

00:06:52.000 Well, uh, what about COVID?

00:06:55.000 And then you go, well, the teachers are young and they're healthy and they're fine.

00:06:58.000 Uh-uh.

00:06:59.000 Yeah, but...

00:07:00.000 What if a kid goes to school, gets COVID, and brings it back to his nana and his grandpa who he's living with?

00:07:09.000 And they're elderly and compromised.

00:07:11.000 And I go, okay, now we're just going off into some direction.

00:07:15.000 That 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.

00:07:49.000 So he just went right down to the border with Mexico and said, what's Trump's policies?

00:07:54.000 Well, Trump's policies are remain in Mexico and many other policies.

00:07:58.000 And then he went, all right, undo it because that's his policies.

00:08:03.000 And my thing is, is your predecessor, Who you may loathe and despise may have been right on a couple of occasions.

00:08:14.000 And for those policies, you should leave alone and then enact your new policies.

00:08:19.000 Biden got into trouble.

00:08:20.000 He just said, we're going to undo whatever it is Trump did.

00:08:25.000 I sometimes feel that reflexive authoritarianism poses as rationalism when actually it's a kind of veiled hysteria.

00:08:33.000 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.

00:08:45.000 You know how you can volunteer to go on a school trip with your kids?

00:08:49.000 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.

00:09:11.000 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. 0.89

00:09:15.000 And I went, why?

00:09:16.000 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.

00:09:27.000 That's the scenario that you're regulated from.

00:09:30.000 We're already in a crash, there's kids dead on the floor, and I'm prioritizing my own kid.

00:09:36.000 And 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.

00:09:47.000 So 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.

00:10:00.000 And is that basically what you believe?

00:10:03.000 That they find ways to justify authority?

00:10:07.000 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.

00:10:35.000 And I think that would be my impulse too, which is I don't want to tell people what to do.

00:10:41.000 It feels like an uncomfortable position to be put in.

00:10:46.000 On the other hand, many are attracted to it.

00:10:50.000 And 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,

00:11:18.000 Newsome shut down outdoor dining.

00:11:20.000 There were no tests.

00:11:22.000 There was no history of any spread of COVID through outdoor dining.

00:11:26.000 He just did it, you know, and he just he just stormed forward in his authoritative Regulatory bouillabaisse that he'd cooked up.

00:11:41.000 And they did it with everything.

00:11:44.000 I mean, they literally arrested a guy paddleboarding in the ocean in Malibu alone.

00:11:49.000 They arrested that guy.

00:11:51.000 So they cut down the volleyball nets at the beach.

00:11:56.000 They took pipes and welded them in basketball hoops so kids couldn't play outdoors basketball.

00:12:03.000 They shut down parks.

00:12:06.000 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.

00:12:20.000 So Newsome likes it.

00:12:23.000 He's attracted to it.

00:12:25.000 That's what I'm trying to explain to everybody.

00:12:27.000 And then everyone, I live in California, so everyone's going, oh, Trump.

00:12:31.000 You know, everyone in California hates Trump, right? 0.97

00:12:33.000 Trump's a dictator. 0.61

00:12:34.000 Trump's, and I would say, Trump's not the one who shut our beaches.

00:12:37.000 Trump's not the one who shut our schools.

00:12:39.000 Trump's not the one who shut the hiking trails.

00:12:42.000 That's not Trump.

00:12:43.000 That's your guy.

00:12:45.000 Who did this?

00:12:45.000 Why are you blaming?

00:12:47.000 Trump's the authority.

00:12:48.000 He's the, you know, Hitlerian authority figure, except for he's not shutting down anything. 0.66

00:12:52.000 Your guy's shutting down everything.

00:12:54.000 Just a weird mindset for them to be at, and it doesn't bother them.

00:13:01.000 They rationalize it and they justify it and then they vote him in again.

00:13:05.000 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 gotten to the point where we're presented with the specter of the terrifying strongman as a reboot of 2018. 0.89

00:13:22.000 If 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. 0.91

00:13:42.000 The actual use of authority to prohibit, inhibit, control. 0.98

00:13:46.000 Restrict, surveil, censor, shut down, close down free speech, shut down comedy, shut down communication, impose and justify technological dictatorships.

00:13:56.000 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, like obviously Orwell, but

00:14:12.000 also Huxley and even Kafka, the idea of sort of bureaucracies that are amorphous and difficult

00:14:20.000 to read and difficult to know.

00:14:22.000 They're actually quite friendly and benign, whether it's like what you've described,

00:14:28.000 that ridiculous paternalism, which is a type of authority that legitimizes itself through

00:14:32.000 protection like you've described, or whether it's like what it's like to deal with YouTube 0.57

00:14:38.000 or any bureaucracy, like 10 years ago we would have all talked about.

00:14:42.000 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.

00:14:49.000 Well, look at it now.

00:14:50.000 If you have a dispute with YouTube, there's just this sort of anodyne friendliness.

00:14:55.000 The team will get back to you on your complaint.

00:14:58.000 It's like Hal.

00:15:00.000 It's like sci-fi.

00:15:02.000 It's inaccessible.

00:15:03.000 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?

00:15:13.000 Vulgarity?

00:15:14.000 Clumsiness?

00:15:16.000 Wealth?

00:15:17.000 Conservatism?

00:15:18.000 Capitalism?

00:15:18.000 I'm not sure.

00:15:19.000 When the real march of power, particularly through the pandemic period, has been this rather banal, creeping insidious paternalism like we've described.

00:15:31.000 How's it happening?

00:15:32.000 Well, I agree.

00:15:33.000 So first off, everything is done under the guise of safety, right?

00:15:39.000 It's a safety issue.

00:15:40.000 So we have to regulate this and we have to control you.

00:15:45.000 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?

00:15:55.000 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.

00:16:07.000 First off, they come at it from safety.

00:16:11.000 Now they end up with authoritarian, but they're coming with safety, you know, so you're right.

00:16:17.000 It's a completely repackaged.

00:16:20.000 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

00:16:44.000 Dipped in estrogen kind of look.

00:16:47.000 We're worried about the kids.

00:16:49.000 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. 1.00

00:17:01.000 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.

00:17:08.000 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.

00:17:25.000 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. 0.73

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00:17:41.000 Stay with us.

00:17:43.000 Cybercrime is the third largest economy.

00:17:47.000 I wonder what the first one is?

00:17:48.000 Military industrial complex?

00:17:49.000 Big pharma?

00:17:50.000 Is it big tech?

00:17:50.000 I don't know.

00:17:51.000 But the third biggest one is cybercrime and it targets like email, social media passwords.

00:17:56.000 Even AT&T announced that hackers have compromised all of their customers text and call records.

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00:18:56.000 Thank you.

00:18:58.000 Interestingly, just behind safety, as it's, uh, the legitimization of safety requires fear.

00:19:05.000 Like, if you're frightened, if when I'm frightened, I'm more concerned about safety, obviously, and probably more open to safety measures.

00:19:12.000 You're malleable.

00:19:14.000 I'm more malleable.

00:19:15.000 Right.

00:19:16.000 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.

00:19:25.000 Because you're in flight, you know?

00:19:28.000 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 gonna let you do, because of the fear.

00:19:45.000 Because the legitimization of safety measures ought really come from, forgive the word, love.

00:19:51.000 That if it was like, because we love you, we want to protect you.

00:19:54.000 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.

00:20:06.000 If you take away the idea that life is sacred, who cares if people die?

00:20:11.000 Because life is sacred, everyone should take this medication.

00:20:14.000 Because life is sacred, all of us should go in home.

00:20:17.000 All of us should stay home.

00:20:18.000 All of us should wear masks.

00:20:19.000 You should certainly not paddleboard because life is sacred.

00:20:22.000 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, It's simultaneously being extracted.

00:20:31.000 We're simultaneously seeing the idea that human beings, rationalism and materialism are the apex of our systems of thought, philosophy and control.

00:20:42.000 That you can change your identity, you can manipulate nature, we are progressing technologically and medically and that is our shared project.

00:20:54.000 As is so often the case, a hypocrisy at the heart of the ideology.

00:20:58.000 I 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.

00:21:24.000 It's just an omni-crisis that never ends, which provides the cover for this escalating authoritarianism.

00:21:32.000 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 of Biden's decline, which was obvious to any of us that

00:21:47.000 were operating in this space for some years, but we weren't allowed to talk about it.

00:21:50.000 And suddenly there was this repackaging and it's acceptable now and we've got to get rid

00:21:54.000 of him.

00:21:55.000 And I wonder how you, and then the assassination attempt and then the resignation of Biden.

00:22:01.000 I mean, is every election cycle in your country like this or are we in some sort of weird

00:22:06.000 hyper reality moment?

00:22:10.000 It's definitely moves toward more aggressive and more vulgar and less civility and it's

00:22:20.000 just more, but it's kind of a thing.

00:22:23.000 So I, you know, if you.

00:22:24.000 Bye.

00:22:26.000 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.

00:22:36.000 You know, if you took a look at skateboarding from the 70s, you wouldn't see guys doing 980s on vert ramps and stuff.

00:22:46.000 Now there's 13-year-olds doing it and 11-year-olds doing it.

00:22:49.000 You know, things Have a way of ratcheting.

00:22:53.000 They just ratchet up.

00:22:55.000 It's a societal thing, you know?

00:22:57.000 It's not, you know, pornography used to be two people, missionary position.

00:23:02.000 Now God knows what you can find on the internet.

00:23:05.000 I mean, It just keeps going.

00:23:09.000 It's like when I was a kid, Jack in the Box had a jumbo jack.

00:23:14.000 That was the biggest hamburger you could get.

00:23:16.000 It was one patty that was marginally medium-sized, but that was the jumbo.

00:23:22.000 Now it's triple patty, baconator, guacamole.

00:23:26.000 It just We just keep going.

00:23:30.000 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.

00:23:45.000 Now guys are doing double backflips with a full Superman grabbing onto the rear fender.

00:23:50.000 I mean, this, it's all miraculous.

00:23:53.000 It's kind of insane.

00:23:54.000 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

00:24:09.000 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, it's everything's just bigger and more.

00:24:30.000 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

00:25:11.000 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.

00:25:24.000 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.

00:25:36.000 That pipeline was blown up by Russia.

00:25:38.000 No, I don't think Russia would have blown up their own pipeline or the assassination attempt immediately.

00:25:46.000 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.

00:26:05.000 What do you think is the impact, and given what you've just said about pornography and skateboarding, how is this likely to crescendo?

00:26:15.000 Well, what I've experienced, because you brought up the fact that we can debunk things in high definition in real time.

00:26:25.000 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.

00:26:33.000 That's all we had.

00:26:35.000 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.

00:26:49.000 It doesn't mean it didn't happen, but it also doesn't mean we can confirm that any of this happened, you know?

00:26:56.000 It's storytelling, campfires, and lore, and that's all we ever had.

00:27:01.000 And there was no way to really fact check lore, per se.

00:27:06.000 Now, we have high def footage of everything.

00:27:10.000 And, but we still have lore.

00:27:13.000 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.

00:27:21.000 So we have, you know, we're in the United States, half the country thinks Donald Trump told everyone to inject bleach.

00:27:32.000 To get rid of COVID.

00:27:34.000 Now he didn't say inject bleach and there's footage of him not saying inject bleach.

00:27:40.000 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.

00:27:48.000 But they must double down on it.

00:27:50.000 So if you think about The things we have here, you know, January 6th, deadly insurrection.

00:27:57.000 It wasn't deadly, there was one person that was killed and that was one of the insurrectionists.

00:28:02.000 It was a woman who was shot by a black man who was a guard.

00:28:06.000 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.

00:28:15.000 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.

00:28:25.000 So the people that are working on the narratives, you know, Trump said he was going to be a dictator day one.

00:28:32.000 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.

00:28:39.000 It's him saying they're good people on both sides.

00:28:43.000 I mean, Biden to this day says good people.

00:28:46.000 It's been completely debunked.

00:28:47.000 There's footage of it.

00:28:49.000 So the people that are in charge of the narrative have to work harder.

00:28:54.000 at 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.

00:29:11.000 Pull out your phone.

00:29:12.000 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.

00:29:20.000 And they go, okay, there's something that exists out there that's going to debunk my lore.

00:29:25.000 I'm going harder with the lore now.

00:29:27.000 Everyone's got to get on the same page.

00:29:29.000 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.

00:29:37.000 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.

00:30:00.000 No, he said, that's not the reason we need to be able to censor.

00:30:03.000 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.

00:30:11.000 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 decay and decimation of that authority and Barack Obama has sort of politically did what you just described.

00:30:41.000 He doubled down on law live.

00:30:44.000 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.

00:30:55.000 I'll decide.

00:30:55.000 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.

00:31:08.000 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.

00:31:19.000 And 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.

00:31:31.000 Did you imagine that it would become, and could you have imagined, so politically charged?

00:31:36.000 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?

00:31:51.000 Well, a couple things, because there's a lot to unpack there.

00:31:54.000 One is...

00:31:56.000 Literally three weeks ago, we were calling footage cheap fakes.

00:32:01.000 Footage of Biden looking addled, looking confused.

00:32:05.000 At the end of the day, we're all human beings.

00:32:07.000 And when you see somebody who's off, you know it on an animalistic level.

00:32:13.000 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.

00:32:22.000 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.

00:32:33.000 We see looks in eyes.

00:32:34.000 We see vacant stares, you know, and we're pretty tuned up as human beings, just instinctively, no, honey, we're going to cross the street.

00:32:42.000 This guy's moving in a weird way over here.

00:32:46.000 And so we all saw Biden moving in a weird way, walking in a weird way.

00:32:52.000 We all saw it, not as physicians and not as Democrats and not as Republicans.

00:32:57.000 We saw them as a human being.

00:32:59.000 I was like, that person is struggling.

00:33:01.000 That person is off.

00:33:03.000 And then there was footage of it.

00:33:04.000 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.

00:33:13.000 That was about three weeks ago.

00:33:15.000 The media labeled it a cheap fake.

00:33:19.000 Said it was edited.

00:33:21.000 And it is edited in the sense that P. Diddy punching that chick in the hallway of the hotel is edited video.

00:33:30.000 We're not watching 219 hours of an empty hallway.

00:33:34.000 Or just folks getting on and off the elevator for 26,000 hours.

00:33:41.000 Yeah, it's edited.

00:33:42.000 We took a piece of a video.

00:33:44.000 That doesn't mean it's edited.

00:33:45.000 It doesn't mean P. Diddy Didn't smack that woman in a hallway, but it's still, it is edited video.

00:33:52.000 It's a piece of a longer video.

00:33:54.000 The Joe Biden videos weren't edited.

00:33:56.000 It was, we weren't going to watch the entire Juneteenth celebration.

00:34:01.000 I like Patti LaBelle, but not that much.

00:34:04.000 I wasn't going to watch three hours of Patti LaBelle singing hymns from a stage.

00:34:08.000 We saw one minute of Biden looking very off and very affected.

00:34:15.000 That was three weeks ago they were trying to pitch that as a cheap fake.

00:34:19.000 When I say they, I don't mean some sort of deep, dark, you know, lefty operative.

00:34:25.000 I'm talking mainstream, CBS, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, all of them.

00:34:33.000 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.

00:34:46.000 So they're up to it.

00:34:48.000 I mean, they're they're trying now.

00:34:51.000 Again, back to you didn't think they're going to do this in the day of video.

00:34:55.000 We're sitting there staring at a video and they're telling us what we're staring at isn't happening.

00:35:01.000 By the way, it takes a lot of hubris to do that.

00:35:04.000 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. 0.98

00:35:14.000 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. 0.90

00:35:22.000 That's the end of my career. 0.99

00:35:23.000 It would be the end of your career.

00:35:25.000 That's the end of anyone's career.

00:35:26.000 Like, I have no idea whether Adam believes what he's saying.

00:35:29.000 Maybe he's just lying again.

00:35:31.000 He's been wrong about everything.

00:35:34.000 But they will play fast and loose with their reputation, and they will try.

00:35:40.000 And I don't think they can unring the bell now.

00:35:43.000 Now, what they What they say is we want you to have the truth because you're getting misinformation and that could be dangerous.

00:35:54.000 But if you really think about it, it's only dangerous to them and their, you know, way of living and their control.

00:36:05.000 It never goes the other way.

00:36:07.000 You know what I mean?

00:36:07.000 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 Ivermectin is horse-paced, and okay, that's all our fact-checking.

00:36:21.000 They never go, we're going to do some fact-checking.

00:36:24.000 Trump never said good people on both sides.

00:36:26.000 He wasn't talking about Klansmen, and he was talking about a separate group.

00:36:31.000 We fact-checked.

00:36:32.000 They never fact-checked that way.

00:36:34.000 So what they are, And it's what social media is and big tech was before Elon Musk.

00:36:41.000 What they do, it's like you go to a store and you pay for your milk and they shortchange you.

00:36:47.000 And then every time they shortchange you, you go, oh, you shortchanged me.

00:36:51.000 And they go, oh, I'm sorry, the cash register is broken.

00:36:53.000 Sorry, sorry.

00:36:55.000 And I would say, if the cash register's broken, then wouldn't I get more change sometimes?

00:37:02.000 If it's just broken, then I should get more every other time I come in, but it's always short.

00:37:08.000 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.

00:37:14.000 Yeah, Obama wants to be in charge of his truth because our truth is not good for his business.

00:37:22.000 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.

00:37:34.000 You have facts and data.

00:37:37.000 And they don't have facts and data.

00:37:38.000 They never had it with COVID and that's why they needed so much monitoring.

00:37:42.000 You know, why weren't they ever agnostic?

00:37:45.000 That's my whole thing.

00:37:46.000 I didn't hear one person from CNN go, Ivermectin?

00:37:49.000 Hydroxychloroquine?

00:37:51.000 I'm not a doctor!

00:37:52.000 I don't know what that stuff does.

00:37:55.000 I just heard, I learned how to pronounce it 10 minutes ago.

00:37:57.000 So I'm not weighing in on what this does or doesn't do.

00:38:01.000 Maybe it's effective, maybe it's not.

00:38:03.000 You should talk to your doctor and draw your own conclusions.

00:38:07.000 No, they all became experts.

00:38:09.000 And expertise only went one direction.

00:38:12.000 Ivermectin, bad.

00:38:13.000 Hydroxychloroquine, bad.

00:38:15.000 Social distancing, good.

00:38:16.000 Shutting down schools, good.

00:38:18.000 Masking up, good.

00:38:19.000 Why wasn't there debate?

00:38:21.000 Why wasn't someone going?

00:38:22.000 I don't think shutting down schools is a good idea.

00:38:24.000 It could have some long lasting effects.

00:38:26.000 It could be very negative effects on kids.

00:38:30.000 Where was the, I don't know, I'm not an expert, consult your doctor.

00:38:36.000 Nope, they are all 100% on the same page going 100% the same direction.

00:38:42.000 How did that happen?

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00:39:05.000 Ivermectin, Hydroxy... Ah, it was a fluke.

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00:39:10.000 Don't know why.

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00:39:45.000 Okay, back to the content.

00:39:48.000 There was an extraordinary degree of certainty and I saw an amazing clip with Morning Joe having Fauci on.

00:39:54.000 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.

00:40:04.000 Andy Fauci was saying, this is the fog of war!

00:40:07.000 And like, in the morning, Joe guy was like, you know, you did a good job, and you know,

00:40:11.000 I have to ask you this.

00:40:12.000 And like, it was just so, such a sort of cosy reappraisal of the time.

00:40:17.000 When we were talking just then, you sort of talked about authenticity and how on a personal

00:40:20.000 level that you would be held to account if you kept lying, made mistakes, you know, and

00:40:25.000 of course everybody does make mistakes, certainly.

00:40:28.000 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.

00:40:49.000 So I wonder how you noticed how it all are and what the pivotal moments were.

00:40:55.000 I'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.

00:41:11.000 How that has impacted you personally from your position as an early voice in this space?

00:41:18.000 You know, ostensibly I would like to entertain people and sort of make them think, you know, simultaneously.

00:41:26.000 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.

00:41:35.000 But 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.

00:41:47.000 So that's, you know, the basic mission statement for me.

00:41:52.000 As I went on, I felt like there was more going on than what was going on 15 years ago when I started.

00:42:02.000 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.

00:42:20.000 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.

00:42:31.000 I mean, they sort of treated it like citizens gone rogue.

00:42:36.000 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.

00:42:50.000 They started going after.

00:42:52.000 People 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.

00:43:03.000 Now, they essentially label it as dangerous, but they never can prove the dangerous part of it.

00:43:11.000 You know, like they would say Trump Trump voters are fanatics and they'll do whatever this guy says.

00:43:21.000 He's like a, you know, Hitlerian, you know, Stalinist dictator. 0.68

00:43:25.000 And Trump voters and Trump followers will do whatever that guy says.

00:43:31.000 And that guy said inject bleach.

00:43:34.000 Except for nobody injected bleach.

00:43:36.000 So which is it?

00:43:39.000 Did he say inject bleach and his followers who will do his or sycophants will do anything he tells them to do.

00:43:45.000 But that's how dangerous he is.

00:43:47.000 But then none of them injected bleach.

00:43:49.000 So either he didn't say inject bleach, or they're not listening to him like you say they are.

00:43:55.000 So there's a lot of with a lot of that going on.

00:44:01.000 And what I was doing is just kind of Breaking down our society and thinking about it.

00:44:08.000 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.

00:44:20.000 And it was disappointing.

00:44:22.000 Like, it scared me.

00:44:24.000 The COVID didn't scare me.

00:44:26.000 People and people's reaction scared me.

00:44:30.000 And it made me worry that, wow, this is what lurks inside so many human beings.

00:44:36.000 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 there's a tons of kids are sick and they're on ventilators and that's why we need vaccine passports.

00:44:54.000 Anyone who has a company with more than 99 people needs to get their employees vaccinated.

00:44:59.000 The military and firemen and policemen and all children going back to school.

00:45:04.000 I went, oh wow, this is scary.

00:45:09.000 But for me, Podcasting, when I started 15 plus years ago, was not really a job.

00:45:18.000 It wasn't a viable job.

00:45:20.000 It was just something I did because I want to communicate with people and I'll do it for free.

00:45:30.000 It didn't need to be a job.

00:45:32.000 It's something that I do.

00:45:34.000 You know, when I first started in radio, In the mid-90s I got a job and the program director said to me

00:45:48.000 I was hosting Love Line with Dr. Drew.

00:45:52.000 It's a popular radio show that became syndicated and was on K-Rock in Los Angeles and was a popular station and so forth.

00:46:00.000 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.

00:46:07.000 And he said, it was a popular radio show, and I'd just become the host.

00:46:11.000 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.

00:46:21.000 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.

00:46:29.000 I said, listen, Trip, I didn't get into this to make money.

00:46:34.000 And if you tell me there's no money, then I will do it for free.

00:46:39.000 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.

00:46:49.000 But 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.

00:46:58.000 And when I started podcasting, Bandwidth cost me, because my show is popular, about $10,000 a month to pay for bandwidth.

00:47:09.000 That's how much it costs back in the day if you had a popular show.

00:47:13.000 So not only was I not getting paid to podcast, I was paying $9,000 or $10,000 every month to podcast for free.

00:47:24.000 So that was always my approach to it.

00:47:28.000 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.

00:47:35.000 I used to talk to comedians who would come on the show, you know, years ago, and I'd say, you should podcast!

00:47:42.000 And they'd go, I don't want to. 0.99

00:47:43.000 I don't got time for that shit. 0.99

00:47:44.000 You know, like, they're all doing a podcast now. 0.99

00:47:47.000 But I would tell them, yeah, you should do this.

00:47:49.000 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.

00:47:57.000 You know, I'm not getting paid to talk to you.

00:48:00.000 I'm enjoying talking to you.

00:48:03.000 How did comedy become reformed, and is comedy going through a kind of renaissance now?

00:48:11.000 I was just thinking, like, in my country, when I was growing up, there was the emergence of what was called alternative comedy.

00:48:17.000 where like comedy had been sort of I guess conservative by default and alternative comedians

00:48:22.000 came out like the Thatcher, Margaret Thatcher eras of Reagan I guess in your country that

00:48:26.000 were political and left-wing and then that became kind of surreal and then sort of like

00:48:32.000 more than I got into comedy and it was sort of very so I don't know biographical and had

00:48:37.000 all sorts of different components to it I guess but I what I'm witnessing what we sort

00:48:42.000 of recently witnessed was a kind of heavily censored prohibitive movement through comedy,

00:48:50.000 comedy becoming virtue signaling, comedy that just weren't funny no more and now there seems

00:48:53.000 to be a reaction to that and a response and the emergence of new comedians and I think

00:48:58.000 the person that sort of is easiest to sort of tag it on to and understand it through

00:49:02.000 someone like Shane Gillis who as an SNL comic was of course cancelled but due to sort of

00:49:07.000 technology and his great ability has sort of re-emerged and I think that there's something

00:49:12.000 very there's loads of interesting things about Shane Gillis of course but one of them is

00:49:17.000 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.

00:49:36.000 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.

00:49:53.000 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?

00:50:04.000 And I wonder where you stand on that and what kind of movements you've noticed.

00:50:09.000 Yeah, I think that's a real astute point you just made.

00:50:13.000 When Alec Baldwin would do Trump, we all knew he hated Trump.

00:50:18.000 And so what we got is a cartoon caricature version of bad Trump.

00:50:24.000 And when Shane does it, there's more affection there.

00:50:28.000 Also, Shane, there's a lot of guys who do impersonations, and they do great impersonations, but they're not particularly funny.

00:50:36.000 Outside of the personation.

00:50:39.000 Shane is funny and does the personation.

00:50:41.000 And that's why the impersonation springs to life.

00:50:45.000 Because there's a comedy brain driving the tone that is dead nuts on.

00:50:52.000 But you got the 200 horsepower comedy brain behind it.

00:50:56.000 Other impersonators are just acts who do the tonal sound and read, you know, read the teleprompter.

00:51:04.000 So I think that's what you're getting with Shane.

00:51:07.000 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.

00:51:15.000 This is where I really think you see Shane Gillis' affection, but also his comedic ability.

00:51:20.000 Have a look.

00:51:22.000 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.

00:51:35.000 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.

00:51:42.000 You had Crosby, Stills, and Nash.

00:51:45.000 You had all, you know, Creedence, Clearwater Revival.

00:51:48.000 You 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?

00:52:05.000 Okay.

00:52:07.000 By the mid-70s, we got into disco.

00:52:11.000 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.

00:52:23.000 Right.

00:52:23.000 I 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.

00:52:41.000 Okay, so, okay.

00:52:43.000 So we did that, and we had like five years of disco, and then what followed disco immediately?

00:52:50.000 Punk.

00:52:51.000 But what's the opposite of disco?

00:52:52.000 Well, the opposite of disco is the Sex Pistols.

00:52:55.000 It's a bunch of guys spitting, who don't care, with clothespins through their nostrils, who can't play their instruments.

00:53:02.000 But it was not disco.

00:53:04.000 Certainly not disco, you know?

00:53:06.000 And then, we had sort of punk and new wave.

00:53:10.000 Don't worry, one of my favorite guys is Graham Parker.

00:53:13.000 I know he's a countryman, so.

00:53:16.000 And then we had New Wave and punk, right?

00:53:18.000 And then what happened?

00:53:19.000 Well, now we get to the mid-80s, we get hair bands.

00:53:23.000 We get Cinderella, and we get Warren.

00:53:26.000 We get guys who are dressed like women with hair out to here, wearing the spandex, which would be the opposite of punk.

00:53:35.000 And then hair bands go on for about five years, and then we get grunge.

00:53:40.000 So we get Nirvana and Soundgarden, which are the opposite of hair bands.

00:53:45.000 So what we do is we go salty, sweet, salty, sweet.

00:53:50.000 We go hard and then we go the exact opposite direction.

00:53:55.000 We don't sort of drift into a middle ground.

00:53:57.000 We just go back hard, you know? 0.90

00:54:00.000 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 0.59

00:54:25.000 Yeah, that's a lovely bit of cultural analysis. 0.59

00:54:27.000 That's lovely.

00:54:28.000 That really makes sense and shows sort of what the cultural rhythms actually might be.

00:54:34.000 It feels interesting too that in a fractured culture, the generation of Stars is sort of, in itself, in decline.

00:54:44.000 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 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.

00:55:00.000 It feels like the culture can't anymore generate Authentic movement, certainly not in the top line way.

00:55:09.000 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.

00:55:17.000 There'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.

00:55:29.000 to generate consensus through strong messaging, through

00:55:32.000 censorship.

00:55:32.000 There, there seems to be a central culture, but it's a very fraught one.

00:55:36.000 But when it comes to entertainment, it feels like it doesn't...

00:55:39.000 there is no unified culture anymore. Would you agree with that?

00:55:43.000 Like, say when you watch something like the Oscars now, I don't know if it's like a personal thing,

00:55:46.000 because I've been cast out of that world, but it seems sort of like...

00:55:50.000 seems sort of like ridiculous now. I don't know. Is that a more...

00:55:53.000 is that a general view, do you think?

00:55:55.000 I think what we're going through is you... well, to bring up the Oscars, for example,

00:56:02.000 which I've written on for a few years because Jimmy Kimmel is a friend, hosted the Oscars.

00:56:09.000 I think there's a couple things.

00:56:11.000 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.

00:56:24.000 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.

00:56:39.000 That's an era that will never happen again.

00:56:43.000 We'll never revisit really bad art being very popular.

00:56:49.000 I don't think we're going to do that.

00:56:51.000 I 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

00:57:25.000 Ultimately the brand will be hurt just like Bud Light took a beating with Dylan Mulvaney.

00:57:33.000 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. 0.92

00:57:57.000 And so you're sitting there and it's going to be hosted by the three black chicks, you know? 1.00

00:58:03.000 And then you think, are they the funniest or are they just doing it because they're women of color? 1.00

00:58:09.000 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? 0.99

00:58:17.000 So, while they struggle to hang on to market share, the Super Bowl gets more popular every year.

00:58:26.000 Because the Super Bowl in professional sports and professional football is the last meritocracy.

00:58:33.000 It is not corrupted.

00:58:35.000 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 she just there because? 0.98

00:58:47.000 Well, as soon as you start going, she's just there because you've hurt your franchise. 0.61

00:58:51.000 You've hurt your business.

00:58:53.000 You 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. 0.94

00:59:14.000 By the way, which is unfair to the person because that person may have earned their way there.

00:59:20.000 But the second you start doing that, the franchise falls apart.

00:59:24.000 And 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.

00:59:39.000 You know what I mean?

00:59:39.000 And you go, oh, come on.

00:59:41.000 Give me a fucking break. 0.99

00:59:42.000 And by the way, how come none of these women ever cracked your top 50 of the last 75 years? 0.99

00:59:48.000 Why are they all up there now?

00:59:49.000 You know what I mean?

00:59:51.000 Rolling Stone has, I don't know, the greatest artist of all time.

00:59:56.000 The greatest album of all time is a Lauryn Hill album.

00:59:59.000 Oh, it's a black woman. 0.99

01:00:01.000 It's okay.

01:00:02.000 I don't believe Rolling Stone anymore.

01:00:04.000 And then Rolling Stone is going to weigh in on Ivermectin, and I don't believe them again.

01:00:09.000 And they've hurt and destroyed their own franchise.

01:00:12.000 Oscars have done that.

01:00:12.000 But when you think about the Super Bowl, the Super Bowl gets bigger and more popular every year because people crave meritocracy.

01:00:22.000 Because I suppose meritocracy is adjacent to authenticity.

01:00:26.000 I can see how that would become dismantled.

01:00:29.000 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.

01:00:37.000 It is not that.

01:00:39.000 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.

01:00:47.000 There is some other motivation.

01:00:50.000 Even if it isn't a conscious conspiracy, the convergence of interests are creating power, opportunity, legitimization of authority.

01:00:59.000 And 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.

01:01:19.000 I find it.

01:01:20.000 I find it confusing.

01:01:21.000 And to your point about sport and meritocracy, the same thing is happening in this country.

01:01:27.000 You know, like football or soccer, as you would call it, continues to be incredibly popular,

01:01:32.000 but it's full of contradiction.

01:01:33.000 It was a game that once belonged to a certain cultural group.

01:01:37.000 You would have to say working class males.

01:01:41.000 As they attempt to sort of repackage and repurpose the commodity, there are sort of odd compromises

01:01:47.000 that happen.

01:01:47.000 There are sort of like instances of politicization and genuflection.

01:01:52.000 But there are conversations to be had there.

01:01:54.000 Even there, I would say.

01:01:55.000 So for example, like when athletes started to take the knee, there were obvious questions

01:02:01.000 because, well, you know, you're taking the knee, but the royal family are present.

01:02:05.000 And 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.

01:02:21.000 Seems like we're only interested in gestures, rather than addressing the actual power structures that possibly generate inequality.

01:02:28.000 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 wintertime to accommodate having it in Qatar.

01:02:40.000 Have weird moments where, you know, people are going to wear rainbow laces in support of, you know, gender fluidity.

01:02:48.000 Various sexual identity groups, and then sort of not do it because they're scared of doing it in Qatar.

01:02:53.000 The whole thing is very, very fragile, it seems, and difficult to hold together.

01:02:58.000 Well, some of the questions I have, because I am sympathetic to anti-establishment thinking, even if that establishment is tradition itself.

01:03:05.000 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.

01:03:14.000 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.

01:03:23.000 But there is definitely the sense that our culture is being used to create something that I don't think is wholesome.

01:03:30.000 I don't buy that it's about supporting people or creating love or creating opportunity.

01:03:37.000 I don't fully understand its motives, but I certainly don't trust it.

01:03:42.000 It's a business to a very small group of people.

01:03:47.000 And the rest of us are just scared to be called racist or homophobic or misogynistic, so we go along with it.

01:03:56.000 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.

01:04:10.000 So that's essentially what We have.

01:04:13.000 That's how COVID worked.

01:04:15.000 That's how Black Lives Matter works.

01:04:17.000 That's how many of what goes on works.

01:04:22.000 There's a part of it that I find insidious, which is all the messaging suggests there's a problem.

01:04:31.000 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.

01:04:44.000 I drove here today there's a there's a sign on a lifeguard tower in Malibu on PCH highway saying end hate at the beach.

01:04:56.000 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.

01:05:07.000 We don't really have a problem with racism in this country at all, but it's still scrawled everywhere.

01:05:15.000 And the reason I think it's insidious and a lot of people will go, well, then so what?

01:05:20.000 They end racism.

01:05:21.000 It's a good thing.

01:05:22.000 You know, what if it said, love thy neighbor?

01:05:23.000 It's a good thing.

01:05:24.000 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.

01:05:41.000 Then I would think Brazil had a big problem with malaria.

01:05:45.000 If I came home from my one week vacation in Brazil, they'd go, how's Brazil?

01:05:49.000 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.

01:05:59.000 And stopping racism and stopping xenophobia.

01:06:03.000 And I was like, they're evidently a very hateful group of people who need to be reminded on a daily basis.

01:06:10.000 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. 0.92

01:06:21.000 So I don't like it.

01:06:22.000 And I've never liked it.

01:06:24.000 Every year for Martin Luther King Day, all the race hustlers get up and they make a speech. 0.83

01:06:30.000 And this is white and black. 0.57

01:06:31.000 And they say, we have come a long way.

01:06:38.000 There's still a long way to go.

01:06:40.000 And I'm always like, give me the examples of what you're talking about.

01:06:43.000 You talk about institutional racism.

01:06:46.000 Give me the examples of institutional racism and we should work on those.

01:06:51.000 But you never give the example.

01:06:52.000 You just keep agitating.

01:06:56.000 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.

01:07:05.000 But that's what we do.

01:07:07.000 Yeah, that's a good analysis there.

01:07:10.000 I feel like people in a contrary position would point to, I guess, economic, prison populations, those kind of demographics.

01:07:18.000 And I know you've got arguments for them because I've seen you make them.

01:07:21.000 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?

01:07:40.000 I don't feel like, you know, that that's the same institutional power.

01:07:44.000 That's what it does now. 0.98

01:07:45.000 Then it killed black leaders. 0.98

01:07:47.000 Now it generates tension, because I suppose earlier we were talking about the necessary 0.98

01:07:51.000 generation of fear, and here we're talking about the generation of guilt, shame.

01:07:59.000 Like all of these things, I suppose, necessarily because you're dealing with human beings,

01:08:03.000 have to have some sort of emotional or psychic field that they provoke in order to guide

01:08:09.000 and manage behavior.

01:08:11.000 The intention either to create further conflict, to create division, to create confusion, to

01:08:17.000 create uncertainty, to create doubt, like these are what these messaging systems do.

01:08:22.000 And I suppose in this new media space, what you have is the immediate ability to contradict,

01:08:26.000 set up parallel narratives, take down that narrative.

01:08:28.000 The problem is not this untruthful information.

01:08:33.000 The problem is truthful information, isn't it?

01:08:35.000 That is the stuff they want to shut down.

01:08:36.000 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.

01:08:46.000 Or how tradition is oppressive towards new emergent identities and how these institutions could improve.

01:08:51.000 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.

01:09:02.000 Yeah, well, they're hustlers. 0.85

01:09:04.000 I mean, that's how they get paid. 0.98

01:09:05.000 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.

01:09:16.000 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.

01:09:26.000 I've heard him say that for 20 years.

01:09:29.000 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 1.00

01:09:55.000 And there's the bookmobile.

01:09:56.000 They'll drive that into the community and hand out books to people who need books.

01:10:00.000 Okay, let's go along on this journey.

01:10:03.000 There are people who are in the inner city who don't have access to IDs or folks who can't get IDs.

01:10:11.000 Good.

01:10:12.000 Where's the plan to get them an ID?

01:10:15.000 You keep saying they don't have access to it.

01:10:17.000 Let's give them access to it.

01:10:19.000 Let's get an ID mobile.

01:10:21.000 We'll drive it into the inner city.

01:10:23.000 We'll have employees of the DMV working it and we'll sign people up to get IDs.

01:10:29.000 But I've never heard that plan.

01:10:31.000 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.

01:10:43.000 These are kind of, it seems like ideas are just sort of thrown into the culture in order to create, you know, delirium.

01:10:50.000 Right, but so the question is, do they want black people to get IDs or do they want to use this?

01:10:58.000 To further an agenda that they're not speaking of.

01:11:03.000 Yeah.

01:11:03.000 Do they want to end the war between Ukraine and Russia or perpetuate a war between Ukraine and Russia?

01:11:09.000 Right.

01:11:09.000 Yes.

01:11:09.000 Yeah, man.

01:11:11.000 Adam, thank you so much, man.

01:11:12.000 It's really brilliant to have the opportunity to talk to you.

01:11:16.000 Thank you for making time for me, mate.

01:11:18.000 And I'm going to come on your show soon, I understand.

01:11:21.000 I'm glad we had this chance to speak.

01:11:23.000 I look forward to talking to you on my show as well.

01:11:25.000 I've always felt like we were simpatico.

01:11:29.000 Because I've heard you speak on many subjects and I was like, he and I are going to get along.

01:11:34.000 Yeah, thank you.

01:11:35.000 I look forward to our next conversation.

01:11:38.000 Cheers, Adam.

01:11:39.000 Thanks so much, man.

01:11:40.000 man I appreciate that.

01:12:04.000 Switch on.

Stay Free - Russel Brand - August 05, 2024

“They're the REAL FASCISTS" - EXCLUSIVE Adam Carolla Interview on Democrat CRAZY COVID Lockdown

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