[Host]: Adam, great to meet you. Thanks for being here on the podcast.

Adam Carolla: Yeah, this is awesome for me. I'm a big fan. I grew up in LA. I listened to Loveline on K-Rock as a teenager pre-internet, like before the internet really took off. So, the content you and Dr. Drew put out on Loveline on drugs, sex, human psychology, this was stuff that didn't exist in our everyday lives and the discourse that you guys had. It was really kind of expansive for folks, at least in my cohort growing up in LA. We learned a lot. So, I want to thank you for that. I think you've pioneered an important corner of the world of content and media for a long time. So, thanks for that. You've lived in LA for a long time, right?

[Host]: Yeah. Whole life. And so, you know, we thought this would be a great conversation to have on the one-year anniversary of the Palisades fire because we know that you've been an outspoken voice on the actions and the reactions to the Palisades fire. And while we're talking, we can also talk broadly about LA, about California, about the US, and where things are headed.

[Host]: Let's just do a quick recap. So, you know, the Palisades fire a year ago destroyed 6,837 structures, including about 5,000 homes, and as of November 2025, only one home has been rebuilt. Can you just give us your view on what's gone on since the fire? Why has this been such a slow process, and why have all of the promises that were made in the days and weeks after the fire forgotten about?

Adam Carolla: Well, I'm uniquely qualified to address this subject because I live in Malibu and I was physically there on Sunset the morning the fire started. I literally walked out of the Equinox gym and I looked up Sunset Boulevard up into the mountains and I saw smoke. It was at 9:45 in the morning. I live there, was evacuated that night, but also have a background in construction, building, permitting the city, regulation, that kind of stuff. Um, and I think it leads into a bigger conversation about Los Angeles and California and how come there's no affordable housing and how come when they build homeless units that are 400 square ft, they're $900,000 a unit and so on and so forth. I've lived in California my whole life and I was in construction my whole life. Um, then when I got into show business later, all I did was use the show business money to fund more building projects. So, I never got away from being on a job site. It just happened to be my own home versus other people's homes. And of course, as an owner, builder was always having to deal with permits in the city and so forth. Um, I always knew it was super cumbersome and super expensive and actually did more harm than good. It dissuaded a lot of people from building. A lot of people went, I don't want to deal with the city. I was friends with Suzanne Summers and her husband Allan Hamill and they live in Palm Springs and I said well you love Malibu so much I don't get why you don't live in Malibu and they said oh we lived in Malibu, but a fire came in and took the house down. That was probably 20 years ago. And then when we wanted to rebuild, the Coastal Commission was so burdensome and there was so much regulation. Eventually, they just packed up and they went to Palm Springs and they built a house there. So, that's essentially what it does. It dissuades a lot of people from rebuilding.

Adam Carolla: In that broadcast the following morning after the fire, I said, "Do not expect any rebuilding. You guys have no idea what the permitting process is. You have no idea how much red tape there is in regulation. This is Los Angeles. Karen Bass is the mayor. There will be nothing rebuilt. I guarantee you that. And then, by the way, all you asses that vote Democrat every year, when you don't get your permit, maybe you should think about a different direction politically. And that's what I said 8 hours after the fire and it's been a year. And there's nothing rebuilt in Malibu.

[Host]: Can you just help diagnose the source of the problem? Is it cronyism, corruption by some sort of union or labor group or contractors? Is it an incompetency or is there a good motivation to save the planet and save the environment and slow things down? I mean, what is behind the overregulation and the red tape?

Adam Carolla: I don't think any of it is connected to unions or builders. This is what I'm starting to learn is basically what people are calling gynofascism, which is way too many women in positions of power with an eye on safety. And it's safety Uber Alles. And everything they do is under the umbrella of safety. shutting schools down for COVID may be the safest thing to do, but you damage kids. But what did you do? You said, "Shut the schools, shut the churches, shut the small businesses, mask up. You want full safety." They hide behind the shield of safety because it makes them sound noble, but it's essentially like saying, "Look, wouldn't your car be safer if it had a full NASCAR style roll cage in it?" Yeah, but the Prius is going to be $150,000 and no one can afford one now.

[Host]: Because their job is to increase safety. Their job is not to think about the second and third order effects on the economy, on the affordability. This is sort of like the autonomous vehicle stuff in California. For every million miles, autonomous vehicles reduce fatalities by like 95%. But if there's one autonomous vehicle that crashes once, everyone shuts that entire program down and says, "Wait a second, we've got robots killing people." versus looking at the second order and third order effects which is significant reduction in overall fatalities.

Adam Carolla: Well, it's like when you have these fools like Bill de Blasio saying, you know, if one person dies, that's one person too many. Whenever you hear that, you have to go, this person's a dope, and they shouldn't be in a leadership position. By the way, eight people died of fentanyl on the street in the time it took you to make that one pompous statement. So shut up and start being practical.

[Host]: Totally. I saw this in San Francisco when they gave away needles and then they created this sort of safe space for people to do fentanyl. It's just very thoughtless in the overall view. A leader's job is to see the whole field and to make a decision on how do we win the game or how do we win the war versus listen to the one person that's the safety commissioner.

Adam Carolla: Well, also the corruption of being in the pockets of the school board union and the teachers union. Gavin Newsom, who they funnel their money to and get elected every year, do our bidding. And he's a coward. And so he does that and then at some point Rochelle Walensky of the CDC announces they should open schools, but that gets shut down really quickly by the school unions.

[Host]: Before we get back to the unions, I just want to hit on this point on media. Why has media gone this way? Is this bias a reaction to technology? When the internet came along, suddenly all of the information, pure data, just reporting became ubiquitous. Did they evolve, do you think, in reaction to the internet?

Adam Carolla: I think there's some of that. I brought up gynofascism earlier. Men and women are different and we don't seem to want to acknowledge that. 15-20 years ago newsrooms would be 12% female. Now, it's all women in these positions. If you have now 57% women running the colleges or 57% of the women at the New York Times, well then they're going to sort of pick a side and they're going to say we like Joe Biden and we hate Donald Trump. It's much more of an emotional process.

[Host]: Is this part of the evolution of woke ideologies as they're called and that the permeation of those ideologies into media institutions seems to be a big part of the driver?

Adam Carolla: A lot of it. I live in Hollywood. I can't tell you the amount of times guys had projects and stuff and just went, "Well, it's not going anywhere cuz I'm middle-aged white guy." In this neverending quest to help people of color and women and the LGBT community, at a certain point you can't just help one group without at a certain point hurting white males. All the DEI hires will hurt because the product is going to suffer.

[Host]: Do you think that this is like what is now going to be the core driver of politics in this next cycle?

Adam Carolla: About 8 or 10 years ago, I said, "What's next is going to be safe spaces and octagons." All the people that are tired of living in a nanny state, they're going to self-segregate. They're going to move to Florida, Texas, Tennessee. And then all the safe space people are going to end up in Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles. Eventually the safe space places are going to fall apart and the octagons are going to thrive.

[Host]: California is projected to have an 18 billion budget deficit. The pension shortfall in California is 600 billion, maybe as high as a trillion dollars. The United States is 40 trillion in debt. They all share the federal balance sheet. How does this resolve?

Adam Carolla: The first part of this is going to be the physical relocation of businesses and of families. California could rein in some of its insane spending or they could just get more money. Taking more than 50% of your money, I would argue is the ultimate government overreach. Somebody's going to have to be the adult in the room at some point and stop worrying about their next election and start talking fiscal sanity.

Adam Carolla: Everybody I know who gets lumped into being a right-winger, all they say is I just want to be left alone. I have a property. I own it. I pay taxes on it. I would like to rebuild my property. And the government says no. I just want to be left alone. It's reached a breaking point because they now touch every part of our life, disrupt our ability to live our life, and we're constantly being prodded and poked in a way that feels really wrong.