Ed Elson On Why Gen Z Is So Miserable (And What No One Wants to Admit)

All right, in this episode, Ed Elson is back. You'll know who he is when he starts talking. Also, Rudy Povich is back, and he's got the news, and we'll do that right after this. This is Adam Karola from the Adam Karola Show. If you care about soccer, you care about moments. And the road to the 2026 World Cup starts here this week. As test matches get on their way, as we host some of the biggest names in the sport, BetOnline is where real soccer betting lives. Global markets, sharp odds, and player props, built for fans who follow more than just the headlines. BetOnline gives you live betting and in-game odds that shift with every goal, every card, every turning point. As teams fight for their place on the world stage, BetOnline keeps you locked into the action. From early qualification drama to final spots being claimed. It doesn't stop on the pitch. BetOnline Casino and VIP Rewards keeps the momentum going long after the final whistle. The road is long, and this is where the story starts. BetOnline, the game starts here. Thanks for tuning into the Adam Karola Show. You can watch the full show on YouTube. Just search Adam Karola Show and hit subscribe so you never miss an episode. You can also get the podcast wherever you like to listen. And for extra content, add free episodes and more, you can head over to our sub-stack and sign up today. ["The Adam Karola Show"] From Karola One Studios in Glendale, California, this is the Adam Karola Show. Adam's guest today, the host of Prof. G. Markets podcast, Ed Elson. And the news with Rudy Pommage, and now, Adam Karola. Yeah, get it on. Got to get on the charts, we're gonna mandate, get it on. Welcome back, Ed Elson. That's been a year and probably a year and a half. Professor G, he does the pod with Scott Galloway, who's been on the show a few times and so is a fan favorite. I guess, I don't know, give me your field of expertise, Ed. And I mean, go ahead and flatter yourself a little bit. Well, I'm a, yeah. Yeah. I'm a young buck, so I'm new to the investing game. I bring the perspective of I'm a young person learning about investing, trying to make it, trying to get rich. That's what we're trying to do on our show. We're trying to build economic security. So it's me and Scott Galloway, we talk about all things markets. We talk about all things finance. We try to make sense of the news as best we can. So I'm Scott Galloway's part of one. I'm not so much of an expert, but I talk about the markets, I give my opinion, and that's what we do on our show. So it's good to be here. Yeah, it's interesting, money and relationship with money. I think coming from a family that didn't have a relationship with money and was sort of turned off to it in a way that a fat person would be to a gym or pick up hockey game or something. Like there was a kind of a shame involved. What it was is we don't make money, we don't really know how to make money. And instead of investigate that, we're just gonna stay away from all things money because it's kind of shaming and it's a little bit depressing. And again, it's just fat guy doesn't wanna go to the gym. And by the way, it doesn't wanna hang out and watch other people or learn how to do it. Literally, I'm going across the street, I'm going to the pizza place, I'm gonna get a slice, I'm gonna sit down there. There was almost a taboo to it in a family. And then they build this scaffolding around money, which is this thing where it's like, money doesn't buy happiness. And it's like, well, it would buy some fucking air conditioning, could we get that? I would be happy with air conditioning. How about that? Or a car that ran, you know what I mean? Or being able to go somewhere for a vacation. So they build an entire apparatus with money doesn't buy happiness. And then they start taking anyone who has money and saying it's ill gotten gain, it's daddy's money. You know what I mean? Or they're probably raping the land or the indigenous people. And they build this entire world about around why they're righteous for not having any money. And then they sleep well at night. It always bothered me. My mom, when she was 85, was explaining to me that rich people don't pay any taxes. And I'm like, are you nuts? I'm rich. I live in California. All I do is pay taxes. She's like, well, they don't pay taxes. It's like they have to build this Trojan horse of bullshit around money. And I wish they'd just drop it and go, please tell us more. I'd like to learn. Exactly, yeah. Doing everything you can, everything in your power to convince yourself that, oh, this stuff doesn't matter. But to your point, well, it's kind of nice to have nice things. It's kind of nice to go on vacations. It's kind of nice to be able to afford a home. So that's what we want to do as well. We want to be real about things. We want to be real about, I mean, to your point, the rich are paying a lot of taxes, but there are some things that we could do in terms of the economy where the people at the very, very, very, very top are indeed paying a little bit less compared to the people in, say, the top 1%. And that's a whole other conversation we could have. But what we want to do is be real about things and recognize, yeah, money isn't going to buy you infinite happiness. It's not going to solve all of your problems, but it's actually going to solve quite a lot of your problems. And if you want to get real about it, then let's have the conversation, let's talk about it. Let's stop deluding ourselves, as you say, that none of this matters, because we all know that it does. Well, here's a subject I never thought about. I don't know if money solved all of your problems. Oh, here's an interesting challenge, I guess. Did money solve more of your problems 200 years ago than it does now? I do feel like everything sort of comes back to money now. Everything is about food, and it's about transportation, and it's about living, you know, in LA. I mean, average rents, $2,200 or something. Yes. You would have to live, you know, when I moved out, I got a one bedroom, I had three guys living in it, and we didn't have air conditioning, and it was not comfortable sleeping on a futon with another guy, I mean, a guy shared a futon. That wasn't comfortable? It didn't make me happy. It didn't make me happy. That's right. And that's, I would say, that I think is the key point there, because this is what a lot of people say, you know, we have come a long way in 200 years, and 200 years ago, what money would buy you is the basics. I mean, if you made the money, then you were able to feed yourself and you had shelter, and that was a big deal. Now we're at a different stage. Most people in America, at least most people's basic needs are just about met. There are people who still live in poverty in America, and it is a big problem. But when you think about people who are not happy with their lives, when you think about the basic things, it's like, well, you have a roof over your head, you have enough money to pay for food such that you can feed yourself and not go starving. Again, there are people in America where that's not the case. But what we find is that that's not key to happiness. Actually, there's something more. And this is the problem that we're experiencing with young people especially, because a lot of people will say, young people are very upset right now. Young people do not feel very good about the world, they don't feel good about America, they don't feel good about the economy. And a lot of people would say, well, what's the problem? You can door-dash your burrito, you didn't have that 50 years ago, what's the problem? And the problem is young people don't feel a sense of ownership over their own lives. And it turns out that that is very important. The idea of having the possibility of going out and buying a home and building a life, it turns out that that matters a lot. And it is very hard to do that for young people right now, especially when housing prices, as you point out, have just skyrocketed over the past 50 years. Well, I agree to a certain extent. And what it is, is you do want a sense of dominion over yourself and ownership, as you say. And that's for sure. But they're also competing against that. They're not wanting to own a car, they're wanting to Uber everywhere. There's a certain ownership of your life, it's not all about real estate. A lot of it is just about a discipline and a procedure and a sort of, I get up in the morning and I make my own breakfast, I don't have it delivered to my house and made by somebody else. I wash my own car or I do my own work and chores as sort of around the house. I take care of myself, I exercise, I work out, I eat right. There's sort of fighting against all of that stuff. I make my money, I'm responsible with it, I put it away so I can use it for things that I enjoy and that kind of stuff. And then there's a kind of community part where it's like I have a group and I help those people and I, we do things like, when I was young, you might help someone move. And that might be a whole weekend of you just carrying furniture up and down the stairs. I've moved people from LA to San Francisco, rented a cube truck and at the end, your payment is a six pack of Budweiser and then you sit out on the porch of the new house and you sip your beer and you feel a certain sense of satisfaction. I don't really see that or oh, we're gonna add, we're gonna build a barn like the Amish and the community is gonna come together. Or just I'm basic beer commercial stuff from the 70s where I, the dad showed up, helped the son put a new deck on his house and at the end they toasted the Budweiser. That stuff is super important. No young people I know are involved with it at all. Not happening, not happening. It's edibles and, you know. Fettables and door dash and corner. And glue and door dash, yes. But I have to defend my generation as a member of it because the question is, is it because we don't wanna do that anymore and so we've decided to do something else or is it because we've been conditioned in a certain way and the environment that we've grown up with has sort of taught us to be more attracted to things like swiping away on hinge versus going out and actually meeting someone in the real world. And I would argue that technology companies are the reason that we have become this way. And I agree with you. I'd rather we were more interested in community, we were more interested in working hard, figuring out how we can take ownership over our own lives versus just outsourcing everything to our phones. But you have to remember, we grew up on these screens. We grew up with technology with a first generation in history to have lived our entire lives on screens. And if you actually add up the amount of time that we are spending looking at our phones, this is Gen Z specifically, if you add it all up over the course of a year, it comes out to 109 days out of the year that we are looking at our phones. We spend 106 days of sleep. So that gives us about 150 days left over to do all the things that you're supposed to do, to figure out how to meet people, how to network, how to get a job, how to establish a relationship, how to get a girlfriend, how to get a boyfriend. We don't have enough practice with this stuff. And I would argue that it's largely because we're operating with almost like 40% less time than our parents did at our age because we're glued to these devices. So that's where I try to defend our generation. Yes, we certainly have our shortcomings. And there's a lot of ways in which we could be better and take more ownership. But I do think we were in a lot of ways dealt kind of a difficult hand where we were given these devices literally from the moment we grew up. Yeah, well Dawson, you can look it up. I don't know when, what year officially is the smartphone coming to wide use, you know, not the prototype because it's always, they always do this thing where they give you some German scientists in 1971, came up one, but it was a backpack smartphone, you know, and I had a war. Exactly. I just mean like when did it basically hit the zeitgeist, the smart phone? I would say maybe someone on the show can fact check me, but I would say the early to mid 2010s is when everyone has a smartphone. I mean, I'm 27 and I got my smartphone when I was 14. Right. But before then I was still on the screens and I was playing the video games and I was on the computer and, you know, I was still very much grew up looking at the screen. The smartphone was definitely the game changer and that's where it just expedited the entire process to the point where we are literally spending most of our time. Yeah. I'm looking at this. I have an answer and you're correct. 2010 to 2013, that was basically the stretch where they became mainstream. iPhone launch in 07. Yeah. So I missed that train and I was always kind of reluctant maybe from a weird impulse standpoint to get involved too heavily in that world. For instance, I never played a video game and they were available. I just didn't, it was weird. You know, in a weird way, I think I would file a video game under phone sex. There used to be a lot of phone sex and I would kind of go, I don't really get it. Like, it's not sex. You don't even meet the person and she's just saying shit. You're like, yeah, I know. And I was like, that's kind of a simulation of sex or a relationship and they're like, yeah, I like it. And I'm like, I don't like it because it feels weird because it feels unsatisfying. And I felt that way with video games. Like I just felt, and by the way, before that, I felt that way with comic books. I was like, what are we doing? Well, we're reading Spider-Man. And I'd be like, well, what's he doing? Well, he's up on a roof and he jumped off the roof onto a tree and I'd go, why don't we go do that? Let's just go do the thing we're looking at or let's go find someone and have sex with them. But let's make a phone call about it. It all felt weird and unsatisfying to me. 100%. But Adam, it's gotten even worse because now we're dealing with OnlyFans, which is that times a billion. And you look at how successful, I mean, one, we've got AI and OpenAI, which is the main technologist of our time. And they said that they wanted to basically get into AI porn. They've now rolled that back. But OnlyFans is one of the most interesting companies in the world right now because they're doing $7 billion in revenue per year. Americans are spending more on OnlyFans today each year than they spend on toothpaste. They have 300 million registered accounts, 70% of which are male. And so that's basically, I mean, you're getting close to the population of America across the entire globe, paying for OnlyFans. And what they're doing is that, as you say, it's not actually a sex, it's not actually a relationship. But what they do is they pay to have the chance to message privately with some woman that they've never met in their life. And this is becoming so popular, so huge that this company is now one of the most profitable companies we're seeing, it's one of the most revenue efficient companies in the world on a per employee basis. They're printing money right now because we are so lonely and because we're so out of touch without to have normal relationships with people, how to go out and meet people in any normal type of way. So, I mean, the video games, it started somewhere there. Now we've gotten way out of control to the point where young people don't even know how to talk to each other. So they just simulate the experience by going on OnlyFans and paying someone to just have the chance to speak with them. Well, you brought up something that caught my ear a couple of moments ago, we were talking about networking and young guys and I could remember at the beginning of my career, I did a lot of networking and I didn't even know it was called networking, I just met people who were doing what I wanted to do and I made myself useful, like really useful to them. And I hung out, I was, whatever they were doing, sort of count me in, you know, if you guys, we're playing cards, I'm like, oh, I love playing cards, you know, next thing you know, we're all playing cards. I even, when I started at the radio station, I wasn't getting paid and I was just trying to ingratiate myself, I noticed, and it's weird, I bring it up from time to time because I must have been in my head, I was trying to get something done, but I noticed that one of the morning show stars was Kevin and Bean on K-Rock and it was Bean, Bean's car was parked out on the street and from the radio station, I noticed there was a big scuff in the side of it, like someone took a hockey puck and made a big black scuff and I was handy enough and the next time I showed up or brought some rubbing compound and I just went a wet rag and I just buffed it out on the street and then I walked up and when I got up to the radio station, I said, hey, Bean, by the by, that scuff, he goes, yeah, things drive me nuts, I go, got rid of it, looks brand new and he goes, oh, man, thanks, thanks brother. It took me about three minutes to do, but I cemented myself and that guy's brain is one of the good ones, you know, and then after I'd been there for just literally about three months, the whole morning team was going to New York to cover the MTV Awards and blah, blah, blah, and I wasn't an employee, I wasn't getting paid, I was just kind of helping out and they were like, we should bring Adam to New York with us all, you know, and the radio station was like, I'm not gonna pay for another hotel room and another plane ticket and he's not even employee kind of thing and they battled to get me to go with them because I had made an impression on them, I'd networked with them and I have been at this podcast studio for 16 years and I've seen throngs of young guys coming in and out of this place who, as employees, who said they wanted to do this or do comedy or do writing or do some form of whatever it is I've been doing for 30 years, I've never had one of them ask me a question, I've never had one say, can we go out to lunch, can we talk a little about this process or how it works or tell me a story, how'd you get started? I've never had that conversation with anybody, any young man in this place, which is insane, but it proves something is going on because that's all we did when I was young and trying to work my way up as fine guys, ask them questions and gratiate yourself, work for free and buff out a scuff mark. So Adam, you need to start a career advice show for young people now because now we've got the problem of AI, where young people are thinking, what are we gonna do if AI is gonna come in and it can do all the things that humans are supposed to do? I mean, if I studied computer science, now AI can do the job, if I studied any of these other topics, AI can now do the job. And Adam's trying to think, okay, what is AI going to do? How is it going to replace me? And we are seeing some scary employment numbers for young people at the moment, but you do have to think, what can AI not do? And this is one of the things I tell people on our show and you basically just said it, AI cannot clean up a scuff mark on someone's call. That's not something that AI can do. AI cannot tell you a story about how you used to go to the same coffee shop that the person that you're networking with used to go to. It can't tell you about how, oh, I was in the same fraternity at my college and you were in the same fraternity and maybe let's bond over that. AI is very bad at getting coffees with people. It's very bad at establishing that level of connection. And so when you think about, okay, how are young people gonna figure out this whole employment thing? How are they gonna get a job? How are they not going to lose a job to AI? It's exactly what you just said. You have to establish relationships with people. You have to make people like you. You have to tell them about yourself. You have to show these people, I have a personality. I have interests. I have hobbies. Maybe we have something in common. Maybe there's some way that we have a connection here. Those are the things that AI is never going to get done because AI is just a sheep. You just prompt it and prompt it and prompt it and that's all it does. But it's never gonna do the things that you just said, which is why I think you need to start a career advice show at some point because that advice is what young people who are worried about AI need to hear. Thank you. And speaking of AI, I've always been a big fan of the trades because it's where I come from. Yeah. And now AI has really made me a fan of the trades. Also, you know, when I got started with the trades, pretty much you got seven or eight bucks an hour, that was that. And there wasn't a way to really make a good living off the trades because you got sort of paid whatever double minimum wage and that was about it. And nobody I knew was really flourishing in the trades. Things have evolved, things have changed. Guys are really making businesses out of it and they're also just making a good hourly wage as electrician or plumber, carpenters and things like that. And I know Scott pushes for that Galloway and has had some success at UCLA, I believe, with some of these things. And I spend time with the Mike Rose of the world. And I've always said it just long before AI. For me, I can remember a big push in the late 90s about exposing kids to music and how we needed the music programs and the schools were closing the music programs and hi, I'm Cheryl Crowe and this is super important. You should listen to me and I'd go, listen, music is fine, but they need shop class is what they need. They're not gonna make their living as musicians, but they would as carpenters. And you guys who are pushing for the music class don't give a shit about all the shop classes. You want those to go away so you can have more music classes. And- You just wanna party. Right, you just wanna have a good time. You wanna have a conga line straight to the poor house. So I was very out of vogue 30 years ago when I was complaining about shop class because shop class is where you send the dumb kids. The smart kids were going to college and the dumb kids were going to shop class. And I've always fought back against that. And now finally sort of slowly it's coming around, but it's still, there's a kind of snobbery involved. 100%, but I do think that that is coming to an end. I think it's starting to change. I think we're all seeing more of an interest and more investment in vocational training because we're realizing that this stuff is really, really important. I mean, we're on the subject of AI. I'm thinking about how are we going to build AI? This thing that's gonna create trillions of dollars worth of value is gonna transform the world. Well, if you wanna do that, then you need to build these things called data centers. And those things called data centers are gonna need electricians and technicians to lay down the groundwork, build those things up. And right now that's where all of the money is going. I mean, hundreds of billions of dollars from these big tech companies, they're investing it not in the software engineers who they're laying off by the minute. They're investing it in the people who are actually working with their hands and creating and building physical stuff that we will need to build out this economic revolution that everyone's so excited about. So I think that it is, I think we're beginning to see the change and people are starting to realize actually this vocational training thing is very, very important. We need to emphasize it a lot more culturally. And then we also need to invest in it a lot more. And I also think that young people are excited about that because they realize that the whole college thing was a little bit of a scam. I mean, it depends on who you are and where you went and the amount of debt that you took out to go to college. But for a generation where college costs were 42% of our annual income and you compare that to say, my grandparents, where when they were my age, it was 13%, when you consider the fact that a third of people who take on student debt say that college wasn't worth it. I mean, that's a generation of people who are like, we were sold a very specific vision. And that was you gotta go to liberal arts, you gotta do the college degree. And only if you do that will everything work out. And everyone bought in, we just sort of blindly put our faith into it. And then people graduate and we realize, actually that stuff doesn't matter as much anymore. Maybe I should have gone and learned how to work with my hands. Maybe I should have figured out some sort of vocational training program, which would have really guaranteed me a job for the long term. And that's the biggest struggle for young people right now. So vocational work is 100% coming back and you were early to that. Jesus, I'm trying to think. I was talking about that right around the time you were born. So you brought up a very good point, which is AI is gonna put a lot of, AI is gonna put a lot of programmers out, but it's gonna create a lot of jobs for electricians, plumbers, and guys who do big projects. And at the moment. That's what we're seeing at the moment. Right, and it is, but it's a very good sort of hard example. It's a part in the pun, a concrete example of like you saying to your 17 year old son, look, AI, you're worried about AI putting you out of work. It can if you go down this path, but if you go down that path, you'll have work for the next 40 years because they're gonna keep having to build these data centers. So it's a very good way to couch it. And like I said, back in the day, we weren't really getting paid. These guys are getting paid now. And it's a good living, but it's also satisfying. And I don't think we're understanding that males especially need to kind of be up on their feet and they need to break a sweat and they need to have a sense of accomplishment. And there's also a sort of camaraderie because the crew, the construction crew, you'll have your crew. It's a little battalion almost. And you make friendships and you have, you have a camaraderie. And it feels good. And it also, I can tell you the difference between finishing something at the end of the day and sort of standing back and looking at something that's physically built, that something that wasn't there the morning you got there and now it's the afternoon and you're gone. And by the way, it's gonna be there for 100 years. You'll be gone. It'll still remain versus like sitting in that cubicle and doing data entry. I don't think, I don't think it's good for anyone, but I think it's especially bad for young men. I- 100%, 100%. I mean, if you're sitting there just kind of, I mean, moving slides around on a PowerPoint and punching numbers into a spreadsheet. I mean, no one has ever thought that that was an interesting or fulfilling use of your time and way to spend your life. What is interesting, and I hopefully this isn't too marketcy and finance-y, but I do think it illustrates your point here. When you look at stock prices in the markets right now, we had a good 20 years where Wall Street investors were very, very excited to pay for companies that specialized in the stuff that exists in the world of bits, not atoms, where you'll pay for a company that is designing software programming and customer relationship software, all the stuff that you're describing. And Wall Street decided that that's the thing that matters most, that we really wanna have these very asset-like companies, and we're gonna pay extraordinary premiums for these companies, these software companies. That's what we're gonna pay for. But in the last year, or really the last six months, there's been a switch where suddenly the valuations of the companies that deal in the world of hard assets, that deal in the world of things, that are actually building physical stuff, suddenly their valuations have skyrocketed. I mean, one of the best performing stocks in the market this year has been Walmart, just as an example. And no one would have ever expected this, but Walmart is now trading at a higher valuation multiple than many of these software tech companies because investors are now repricing what they believe actually matters most. And they've decided, actually, the software doesn't matter, that doesn't matter. What matters is the stuff in the real world. That's the stuff that we wanna pay a premium for. And so the dynamic you're describing is interestingly kind of playing out in the financial markets right now. And so if you're someone who's invested in stocks where they very much deal in the world of hard assets, where they actually own physical things, that's actually something that you've been rewarded for and you've been paid very handsomely for over the past six months. And the companies that build software, that they build spreadsheets, they build PowerPoints and Slides and Decks, and then people sit in their offices and move things around, those companies have gotten very, very punished over the past six months. So it'll be interesting to see if this trend continues, where people decide actually we're not so excited about things on our screens. We're actually more excited about things in the real world. And I think the best thing would be if that happens for people, for workers as well. And I do think that we are starting to see that, but that is the trend that we're witnessing on Wall Street right now. It's very interesting to see. Morgan and Morgan, well, I've known people have gotten hurt in accidents that weren't, well, it wasn't their fault. And they tried to just tough it out. No lawyer, no help. Just hoping the bills and the pain would magically sort themselves out. Spoiler alert, they don't. And that's where Morgan and Morgan comes in. Morgan and Morgan is America's largest injury law firm. They've recovered more, more than $30 billion for over 500,000 clients. That's a serious track record. So if you're injured, because someone else was negligent, you deserve to be paid. Don't try and white-knuckle it alone. Reach out to Morgan and Morgan and let the pros fight for you. Right Dawson? If you're ever injured, you can check out Morgan and Morgan. Their fee is free unless they win. Yes, that's right. Their fee is free unless they win. To learn more, go to fortheppeople.com slash Adam or click the link in the description below. This is a paid advertisement. And for the clients and ghosts, Pluto TV is always free. Hazel. Pluto TV, stream now, pay never. Well, it's interesting, you know, the notion of the popularity of the walking desk, the desk where you just stand on the treadmill and walk is kind of an interesting metaphor for sort of the fact that we need one of those is an interesting thing. That was all the rage. I know, but it is, I always try to picture myself sort of explaining a treadmill to people from 500 years ago, you know what I mean? Where we just go, what is this? It's a simulation of walking. It's like, well, why don't you just walk? We don't have to walk, we don't wanna walk, but we kind of wanna walk, but we don't wanna get fat, but we don't wanna go outside. So we created a simulation of exercise. And I've often said that the treadmill makes sense because we went, well, what's happening? Well, people were sort of fit and sort of thin because they walked long distances to the well to get water and then they had to carry the gourd filled with water back to the hut, you know? And so no one was really fat, you know? You had to do that. And then someone said, well, why do you need the treadmill now? Well, we don't have that anymore. We have hot and cold filtered water, bottled water and grub hub, and we're not going out and walking around, we don't need to. So we've simulated that with this. And I go, okay, well, that makes sense because you wanna stay fit. I would argue that some version of the treadmill is necessary now mentally. That while we're on the treadmill, we're still staring at our phone on the treadmill. And so we used to have a workout for our brain and that, okay, you had to remember people's phone numbers. It wasn't all on your phone, you know? And you could just hit a button. Nobody remembers anyone's number anymore. When I was young, you memorized all your friends' numbers. And, you know, if you needed to work something out mathematically, you didn't have a calculator on your phone. You had to kind of get a piece of paper out and kind of work it out. But you were working out while you were working this out. And there was a kind of a mental, you didn't have 7,000 first run programs on TV. You had to kind of make your own fun and entertain yourself and kind of figure it out. And so that's all gone. And so now we do need a sort of a treadmill for our mind. And nobody's really thinking about it that way. They're just thinking about, they understand the physical part, you know? Everything is sort of simulate chopping wood and simulate, you know, I got a rowing machine. It doesn't go anywhere. I just sit in one place and I row. I'm not on a river. I'm not moving. I'm looking at a video of someone else who's actually on a river. While I'm sitting on my rowing machine and it's all a simulation, but we're gonna need some version of that mentally and emotionally. And we don't, and I just tell everyone, here's the version of it. You gotta start doing sort of mundane tasks and a little, what Dr. Drew calls, a little ordinary misery. Just a little, just stuff where people go, why do you cleaning your own toilet? Why don't you pay someone up? Because I should. And why are you out in the garage? Why are you trimming that tree in front of your house? Get the guy to do it. You know, just a little engagement and a little misery. Like a little bit of, I don't really feel like going out and doing it's hot outside. Yep, well, get your hat. Get out there. That's right. And what we're seeing, I mean, if you want a reason for why we should do the, you said ordinary misery, is that the term? That's what Drew calls it. And I kind of appreciate, I vibe with it. I don't know if there's a textbook. I don't know, you can look it up, Dawson. I don't know if there's a textbook version of it, but it's just all the shit you want someone else to do for you. That's right. Do it yourself. Exactly. And the reason that you might wanna do that, I mean, if we look at young people as an example again, what we're finding is that young people are actually getting stupider. I mean, literally we're looking at test scores, we're looking at math scores, and we're finding that the more we've become addicted to the screens, the more we've outsourced all of the ordinary miseries, all of the things that you should be doing as a functioning human being, the more you do that, and the more you let screens and technology companies take care of it, your IQ literally goes down. And that is what we're seeing at the moment. So I get, I mean, now we're on the frontier of AI, where you're gonna turbo charge that trend. I fear that one of the biggest problems, one of the biggest concerns for future generations is that we're actually gonna be one of the stupidest generations in history. I mean, what we've seen is that throughout humanity, most generations have gotten smarter than the previous one. They've figured out, looked at the mistakes, they've built on them, they've created new technologies, they've gotten sharper, they've understood how to deal with things, but we're one of those first generations where we haven't really been using our brains properly for most of our lives. And the more that this AI stuff is gonna be injected into our lives, or instead of actually learning how to do something and putting your mind to it and trying to use and manipulate resources to make it work for yourself, you just outsource it to chatGPT, you just give it to Google, you let Gemini deal with it, you let Claude or Anthropik or any of these other chatbots deal with it. That is a real, real problem. And I do think we need to start thinking about for young people, do we want to figure out ways to prevent us from using these technologies too much? I mean, a very simple thing that a lot of countries are doing at the moment is they're just saying, you're not allowed to use social media until you turn 18 or until you turn 16, they're just age-gating it flat out. Australia did this, Spain's doing it, France is working on it, Denmark, most of Europe is working on this, but I think that that could be potentially a remedy to the problem that you're describing because we are so dependent on these things to the point where like, how are we gonna deal with any hardship by the time we're grown adults? If we've never actually dealt with a problem ourselves and put our minds to it, if we've just constantly outsourced it, then we're gonna be in real, real trouble. So I think there's something to that. I think the treadmill is a good analogy. I think it's something that we need. We need more mind exercise because we are getting stupider. Well, I will go along on your point of getting stupider. Is there a definition that just nothing comes up, huh? Not really, I'm not even sure what to look for. I was looking through the Wikipedia on everyday life, but there doesn't seem to be like a sociological term for the ordinary. Ordinary misery, so you type that in and nothing even comes up. Well, maybe we've coined it then. You made it. So, yeah. So problem, okay, dumb. Okay, here's what's going on in my estimation and a lot of people think for me, kind of all roads lead to the construction site, but I realize that tangible problem solving sort of mechanical problem solving is a good workout for your brain. It's a sort of a Rubik's Cube, but in that, you know, back in the day, they'd say, look, we're gonna have a competition. Each class is given a pound of dried spaghetti and a jar of glue, and we're gonna see who can build a bridge out of it that can hold the most weight. And you really kind of went to town. You had to really think about it. And I've been very mechanical my whole life, but I realize when people kind of say to me, you know, you have a sort of pragmatic wisdom or some kind of everyday practical think, I go, oh, you know, thanks, but I think that's all mechanical. Cause the mechanical doesn't care if you're male or female or black or white or what's your sexual proclivities, it's just gravity. And this is just how it works. And by the way, it doesn't really care about your feelings. It's just sort of what works and what doesn't work. And I've lived my life in that world trying to problem solve and work things through and so on and so forth. And I realize, and I do it almost on a daily basis, I can sort of have a conversation about how to build something with someone else who knows how to build, and we can talk it over the phone, we can talk it through, and I can sort of see it, spatially in my brain, I will see what I'm laying out for this person. And nobody builds anymore today. So kids don't tinker, they don't tinker. I spent my entire youth trying to fix my bicycle or upgrade something. Everybody was trying to work on their go-kart or their mini bike. Like there was tinkering. There was nothing but putting things together. And nobody does that anymore. And so they have a sort of illogical thinking that goes along with that. And I hear it a lot. It's a little magical in thinking. Like we have a politician out here in LA who's I guess trying to run for mayor. And she's pretty high up there, her name is Nithya Raman. And she gave a whole speech about catalytic converter theft, which is a problem in Los Angeles. And it was the fault of Toyota for making it super easy for them to steal this thing that's welded into the bottom of your car. And it's an insane premise. It's an insane premise, but it's only a premise that someone who's never built anything could come up with. I couldn't come up with that because I know how an exhaust system works on a car. And I know what a catalytic converter is. And by the way, I know all the tools you need to steal a catalytic converter. You would need a Sawzall, but that's a brand name. It's a bayonet saw or reciprocating saw. And you'd have to get under the car with a floor jack and steal a thing, hopefully a can of WD-40, make it a little bit better and a by cutting metal blade on your Sawzall. Oh, I know all about that stuff, but she doesn't know anything about it. So she can give a speech saying it's so easy to steal and we should blame Toyota. Well, that's, now when that person makes policies, they're not gonna make logical policies because they're not mechanically logical. And that is what we're really experiencing now. A bunch of people who never physically put anything together and don't know how to and then problem solve as well having ideas about how we should run the city, which will never work, but they don't know it won't work because they don't live in a tangible world. They live in a world of ideas. That's right. Now, and this is, by the way, this is the trouble with being a politician is you must, I mean, ideally we can elect people who have had more real world experience and ideally those are the people who would succeed. But the politicians job is to be the quote unquote expert on everything and then find who the enemies are and then blame the enemies and then wag the finger and point the finger and that's the job of the politician. But I mean, to your point, something that I've been speaking with, speaking with Representative Seth Moulton, who's a veteran, he's a representative of Massachusetts running for senator. And one of his viewpoints, I don't know if he's said this publicly at this point, I think it's fine that I'm saying this, but we've been talking about the idea of national service, not just in terms of like you go and you go and less than in the military, but it would be perhaps good for young people and good for our generation if there was an expectation that when you graduate high school or when you graduate college for two years, you're gonna go out there and do something that is legitimately productive for America. You're gonna go work as a mechanic and figure out how to build things in certain areas. You're gonna go work as, I mean, maybe a teacher. You're gonna go in and provide some sort of public service and you're gonna get the skills of understanding this is actually how the real world works. This is how capitalism works. This is how value is created. This is how people get paid. And I mean, I don't love the idea of what we're gonna mandate it. It feels a little bit too stringent, but I do think that there's something to that. Where you wanna get everyone on the same page. We're all gonna realize that we have a stake in this thing. And if we wanna make something of this country, then we all need to be providing value in some way. And as you say, build some camaraderie. We can all be in the battalion together. Well, I think there's something to that. No, I completely agree. I don't know, you can look it up. God, let's see, something's bothering me. It was, we used to have like, if you were a youth who'd lost their way, you'd go into the forestry service or something and you'd have to clear brush for two years instead of going to juvenile, being a juvenile delinquent. You know what I mean? Like you'd learn something. Updating on ordinary misery, Freud seemed to call it ordinary unhappiness. And he said that that argument of putting yourself through that will help your mental strength. It will. And you know the other thing that's interesting? If you go to the Red Rocks Amphitheater in Colorado, which was built 100 years ago, it was mostly built by delinquent boys. Like boys who were fatherless, who would have lived in the poor house. So they took these 14, 15 year old guys and they went, look, we gotta put you to use and you gotta feel like something. Otherwise you're just gonna be running the streets causing trouble. We used to understand that. Now we look at it as don't be mean. And it's not really being mean. That kid's rudderless. He doesn't have a dad. You want him out on the streets? That's mean. On people will say, oh, you're restricting my ability to do what I want. It's like, well, let's just look at the alternative right now, which is that a third of young people are still living with our parents. More than half of us say that we don't wanna have children. We have the lowest national pride of any generation in the history of America. We're sitting around, we're vaping in the basement, playing the video games, doing the door dash, not making any meaning of our lives. It's like, that's your alternative. Right. So if we're gonna say you're restricting the freedoms, it's like, no, the alternative, the current situation that you are contending with is frankly a very shitty situation. You're living at home and you're not excited about your life. And that's what most young people are today. So I think it's a very reasonable proposal. I think the guy I'm talking about Dawson, who was in the, I'm calling it forestry service, but it's basically, you take the kid at 15, 16, 17, the male and you go, look, you wanna go to juvie? Or do you wanna pick up a shovel and head out to a camp in Clear Brush? That man's name was Coolio. Coolio. Coolio, who had gangsters' paradise was his big, you might recognize Coolio. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And who by the way, passed recently as I recall, but I do remember interviewing Coolio and he was a delinquent kid and he ended up in the forestry. And by the way, all those guys go, it saved my life. I was running around with gangs in the inner city. I probably would have got shot, you know, and then I ended up in Oregon clearing Brush and I learned how to use a chance. Yeah, I'm probably establishing some friendships as well. I mean, that's the other problem with young people right now is we don't have any friends. One in five Gen Zers, that's my generation, say they have zero close friends whatsoever. Wow. So that's, I mean, we're talking about what are the real problems for young people? The loneliness thing is crazy. By the way, if you look at the entire population of America, 12% of Americans say they have zero close friends today. It's up from 3% in 1980. So this is like a real problem around the nation and honestly around the globe, but for young people, it's especially a problem. So yeah, you wanna figure out ways to put young people in a room together where they're not DMing each other on their screens and actually interacting in the real world that would actually have some value. By the way, I have a question for you, Adam. You are, we've been talking about mechanics and you're saying how your brain, you have a more mechanical view of things. It's interesting that you are a comedian and you are in the arts in a way. I'd be interested to hear how that happened for you and you're working, it sounds like you have these kind of interesting diverging interests, but you are working in the world of ideas and that is where you landed. How did that happen for you, if you don't mind? I will tell you, first a Culeo update. That's the most important. Yes, we need to prioritize, ladies and gentlemen, if you learned anything from listening to this podcast, it's priority. Culeo worked as a firefighter for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Detection during the 80s. He was in the California Conservation Corps. That's what I was trying to think. They put him in a, served as a rehab effort to get over crack cocaine addiction. So they basically, and you can go deeper. He was a young man and crack cocaine, young black man, I'm sure he was in Compton or he was in Compton. So he's in the ghetto, he's dealing crack, he's got a choice between being a grip or blood and somebody gets hold of him and sends him out into nature. And teaches him how to do conservation. And that's what it was, we'd have core, we'd have the California Conservation Corps. Now, if somebody tried to mandate that today, the ACLU would sue them and then we'd never be able to do it. And our argument is you are suing me so this guy can have the right to get shot by gangbanger and never see his 17th birthday. Okay, fine. Listen, for me, they would, ACLU would definitely sue you if you tried to do some sort of mandate with this. Now- We should try it, we should try it and test out the theory. So look, for me, I was mechanical and had a great interest in that world and still do. And it doesn't, it's not just about building houses. I love cars, I love race cars, I love engines, I love anything mechanical. But I wasn't able to make, so ironically, if you wanted to participate and have race cars and work on race cars and have a shop and then go race those race cars, it was a very expensive endeavor. You need a truck, you need a trailer, you need a shop, you need the cars, everything about it is expensive. The tires are very expensive, the fuel is 117 octane and probably costs 40 bucks a gallon or something. Everything about the endeavor is expensive. So ironically, the guys who love all that stuff can't oftentimes afford to do that stuff. So I was like, I wanna afford to do this stuff mechanically. I would like to build myself a house, I would like to have a race car and a shop and tools and things like that. So I did an assessment of myself, which is I understood the mechanical part but that didn't seem to pay very well. And I liked it as a hobby, I didn't like to be forced to do it for 50 hours a week. And by the way, I was building someone else's house, it wasn't that as satisfying as building your own house. So I realized that my other aptitude was comedy. I had an ability to do comedy. So I just was very pragmatic about it. I said, here's the two things you're good at, building things and comedy. They're both innate and then they both involve a lot of training. But they're kind of a calling. And people don't realize that the building stuff is a calling, the mechanical stuff is a calling every bit as much as wanting to dance or sing or work with underprivileged children or whatever that thing that everyone calls a calling. There is a mechanical calling. All the guys I know that are real gear heads, it's a drug for them, they must do it. You know what I mean? And to deny them of it is torture for them, to put them inside a classroom and tell them to sit there and you're not picking up any tools but you'll pick up a textbook and you'll just sit there quietly. It's torture for those kinds of people. But I realized that I could make money during doing comedy and then I could, that would pay for my mechanical addiction. But I didn't have any clear path to that. But I just went about it magnetically. How did you know you were good at it? Because this is something we talk about on our podcast is like how do I identify what your strengths are? Because I mean, our belief, it sounds like we're in agreement is the follow your passion stuff isn't the right framework. You need to follow your talent. You need to figure out what are my strengths? What am I better at than other people? What differentiates me versus others in the marketplace? Train that talent and then go out there and monetize it and that's how you're gonna build the economic security. But you recognize I'm like, I'm good at this. I can do this. This is gonna work. I in a field where a lot of people wanna be a comedian, a lot of people wanna be good at it and a lot of people are not good at it. I'd just be interested like, how did that, at what point were you like, yeah, I can really do this. I know you're supposed to be interviewing me but I am just fascinated to hear the answer. Well, thank you. I always had the ability because of my upbringing to live outside of myself and sort of view myself realistically and I didn't have a mom that coddled me or a dad that coddled me or even paid attention to me. So I was always kind of autonomous and I was always very realistic about what I could do and very realistic about what I couldn't do. And maybe overly realistic about what I couldn't do. And I was never brash and I was never cocky but I was super realistic because I wasn't delusional. I never had but it's me. I never bought a lottery ticket because I knew I'd never win the lottery. I think people play the lottery. There's an element of it's me. People have way too much of themselves invested in themselves. You need to stand outside yourself and go how do other people view you? Not how what you think of yourself. That's insane. So I was raised in such a bizarre way that I had that when I was 10 and with some low self-esteem and plenty of doubt. So if I arrived at the conclusion that I was good at something, I was good at it. It wasn't, I wasn't blowing smoke up my own ass. I didn't have parents that laughed. It said, oh, you're the best. You're so funny. I had people sitting there with a scowl on their face not even listening to me. I never had anybody in a position of power tell me I had any ability at all. No school counselor, no teachers, no family members. It was exactly the opposite. They told me to shut up and sit down basically. So I was very realistic about what I could do. And I knew I had this ability like you would know if you had a great singing voice when you were 15 or 16. You know, if you had great, if you were a good singer or a good dancer or a good painter, you would know it. Now there's lots of people that thought they were great painters and great dancers and great singers. And that's fine and most of them aren't. But I could see that I had this ability. Now I was not confident that I'd ever get paid a penny for it. I was able to separate these two thoughts which is you have this ability and you cannot deny you have this ability but you're probably not gonna be successful because it's a very low percentage game you're trying to get into. And I'm not positive that everyone else will recognize this ability in you. Which up until I was, you know, in my late 20s I was right about, no one did recognize any of that ability. Basically until I met Jimmy Kimmel and then Jimmy Kimmel recognized it in a very substantial way. He was like, I don't know where you're from or what you do. I know you're a carpenter and a boxing coach but you have an ability comedically and it needs to be directed somewhere and we need to get it to work and I need to collaborate with you because you have this sort of gift. And he saw it. No other people might chuckle and then say shut up or whatever it is. Nobody really, he was the first guy who really was like you have a thing. And by the way, I knew it. I just didn't think anybody would ever pay me to do it because I come from a sort of downtrodden world where nobody gets rich and things never worked out. But I got here because I was realistic about what my abilities were. Exactly. And I think it's an example of how people say tough love, being realistic, being objective. The idea that that is mean is kind of a misnomer because actually you're doing yourself a favor by being as realistic and as objective about your skill set as early as possible such that you don't go down the wrong path such that you don't overestimate your abilities and think that this is the right thing and then become deluded by what's actually good and what isn't good, what society is gonna reward you for and what they won't reward you for. And this is part of the problem with the sort of the participation trophy culture where you can delude people and this probably affects young people. I think maybe the trend is starting to end and we're moving into more of an objective direction. But it is an example of how that can be a real problem because you have a whole generation of people who if they're told over and over again, like you're great, you're great, you're great, then it's impossible to distinguish which things you're bad at and which things you're good at and then you gotta make a choice. What am I gonna dedicate my time to? What am I gonna go out there and try to monetize about myself? And so if you don't have that level of discernment, I guess, and objectivity about, I mean, I love what you said earlier, like make a list. You made a list of the things that you're good at and you've weighed it up and made the logical decision. I think that's something that a lot of young people should really be thinking about right now, especially as we are entering into this very uncertain job market. And I mean, this is the big problem that a lot of young people are so worried about. So one of the first things that you should really be thinking about is like, what am I actually good at? Like, can I identify my strengths? Can I write them down on a piece of paper? And in addition, can I identify the things that I'm bad at? Because once you can make those distinctions, that makes it so much easier to figure out, actually, okay, this is the path ahead. This is how I'm gonna build the best life for myself. So it's not, it really isn't mean. It's actually kind. It's actually kinder to yourself. Well, yeah. I mean, it's, you know, it's your doctor telling you you have to lose a few pounds. It's unhealthy. Well, don't you make me feel bad, doctor? Well, it's not him being mean. Exactly. Exactly. And let me give you a plug. Prof G Markets is the pod with our friend Scott Galloway. Ed Elson, always good catching up. Always great to be here. Thank you so much, Adam. I appreciate it. I appreciate you. We'll bring in Rudy. We'll do the news right after this. Oh, Riley Auto Parts. Yeah, love that jingle. Oh, oh, oh. So they're in the business of keeping your car on the road. We know that. They're also, you know, I don't have too many car issues. Usually I can figure them out, but if I can't, I go to O'Reilly. And they got all the stuff there. Mostly stuff for me. Cause the new stuff's like a computer, but my vintage cars, man, I can get a lot of parts from O'Reilly. They got thousands of parts in stock, either in store or online. So you never have to worry if you're getting a jam. Also, they'll test your battery for free. And if it needs to be replaced, they'll help you find the right one. So whether you're a car aficionado or an autonavis, you'll see the employees at O'Reilly Auto Parts are helpful and friendly. O'Reilly is your one stop shop for all things auto do it yourself. It's O'Reilly Auto Parts, right Dawson? Stop by O'Reilly Auto Parts today or visit us at oreillyauto.com slash adam. And that's oreillyauto.com slash adam. Rosetta Stone. Well, getting ready for spring, maybe a little summer travel. Imagine showing up to another part of the world and being able to order food and connect with locals, like a local. Rosetta Stone. Well, they've been the trusted leader in language learning for over 30 years. Their immersive, intuitive method helps you naturally absorb your new language. I'm a busy guy and it's nice and it's easy. And you can fit it into your schedule. I can get my lessons into my schedule. And if I'm touring around, I take them with me. And the true accent feature helps you make sure your pronunciation is correct. So you don't sound like a doofus. It's Rosetta Stone, right Dawson? Ready to start learning a new language this spring? Visit rosettastone.com slash adam today to explore Rosetta Stone and choose the language that's right for you. Go to rosettastone.com slash adam now and begin your language learning journey. It's time to check Adam's voicemail. Hey everybody, get an apartment before the ink is dry on your high school diploma. There's a car analogy for pretty much every situation in life. We would smoke about four dupes a day. I'm Adam Corolla, renowned expert on just about everything. You can leave us a message at 888-634-1744. I don't know, I've not heard a good version of me and all the years with all the people that do impersonations, I've never heard a good version. Ever. There's two things that always fuck them up as they wanna do some sort of building thing but nobody does impersonations or who's in comedy knows anything about building. So they always go, mwah, mwah, mwah, plywood, mwah, mwah, mwah, nails. Left turn arrows, mwah. They don't know the lingo so they can't do it but they've never gotten it. I'll say this, one of my best friends and touring friend is Jonathan Kite, world-renowned impressionist. I have many a times on many occasions been on the road. Jonathan and I have sat in coffee shops, we've been in Ubers, we've sat at airports and I have sat with him for hours to try to nail your voice. Jonathan doing it obviously. And finally at some point, I think it was about four months ago, he just went, you know, I just hell with it, I'm done. Can't get it. He's tried so many times. That guy can do, spot on everybody but he can't get yours. I wonder what that is. So what's so different? I mean, you got Christopher Walker and Fine. He has a whole sort of cadence. Everyone's got to walk in, yeah. Yeah, but I'm saying he has a cadence that people can replicate. But then there's like De Niro or Trump's from Fine. Why certain people you can do and then certain people you can't do? Cause they can do 40 people. So what is that? And sometimes it's also not even dialing in exactly how they sound, but it's more of the essence of them. Like we used to do an impression of a guy that we worked with. And every time we started it, it would go, well, he didn't sound like that. But there was like an essence to it. And I don't know man, there's just some people you can't figure out. Anyway, if this caller wants to know why I know everything, it's cause I'm super pragmatic. And if you're super pragmatic, then you win. And I'm super pragmatic cause I'm super mechanical. So everything is pragmatic and I've never read a book. So everything goes under the umbrella of what makes the most sense. And then your batting average is gonna be super high, super high. We were, I think it's out there. It's in, I think our new vlogs out there for Home Depot. I ran to a guy at Home Depot, 65 year old guy, ran into him and- Chest first. You ran to the bat? Yeah. He started talking to me at Home Depot. And remember, I said, what do you do? He said, I'm retired. And what I say, Andrew. You predicted, or excuse me, you, and I'm trying to think of the right term. You said what he did with his life. He said you were a firefighter and he goes, yes, I was. Right. So what am I smart? Or did I read a book on people's professions? Nope, just sized up a whole bunch of stuff. He was fit for like a 64 year old guy. He was white and he was tall. And he had, and he came up said hi to me. So he probably didn't work knitting the AIDS quilt. And he was retired. Sure. And that's a young retired job. But he didn't look like he crushed it on Wall Street and then retired. And he was milling about a Home Depot on a Friday at noon. So that didn't mean started his own dot-com company and then sold it off to Nike or something. So I did all the calculations in a matter less than a second and then I spit out firefighter, which could have been wrong, but it's a high percentage choice. Yeah, well walking with the devil. He was playing, he was eating chili. He was the only guy eating chili out of a bowl with a Dalmatian. Yeah, some smoldering ashes on the top of his head. No, no, he was in full gear. Full gear. The oxygen tank on. The tank. I had to pull the mask off just to talk to him. But he couldn't speak through the mask. We gave me a thumbs up. LAFD, yeah. You must have been a firefighter in a previous life. I saw the truck parked up front. Yes, yeah. That's right. I saw him loading plywood onto the truck. All right, how dare you diminish my accomplishments? It's impressive. Everybody thinks it's luck or something. It's not, it's profiling. It's all the profiles. Yeah, you're like a human version of Google where the internet knows more about you than people know about themselves. Yeah, you can win a look at it. All right, so I know you got news. Now I don't know if one of them is a new Jennifer Newsome clip, but I got a clip. She's the gift that keeps giving. Oh, my God. She never stops. It's also, do you guys find it strange that every speech she gives is about the patriarchy and males and dominating males and is 100% where she is because she's blonde and not fat and wears mini skirts and has cosmetic procedures and dies her hair? Does that feel weird, like in a weird way? Like I feel the same way when Oprah is talking about what it's like to be black and to be a woman and to be oppressed and all that kind of stuff from her sprawling estate in Santa Barbara. Like, doesn't that feel bizarre? And also, wouldn't you have thoughts about it? Like, as I would go, like, heterosexual males of Italian descent can't get a leg up in this society because they will not be accepted. So says Adam from his home in Malibu. That's, I would feel self-conscious about it. She's literally as close as you can get to a human Barbie doll and she's never stops talking about the patriarchy, but that's exactly who she ingratiated herself to in order to be rich now. All right, let's hear what she has to say. Like every problem that we have in society right now will be fixed when women come together and partner with our male allies and other allies, but when more women are in the rooms. All right, pause it. This horseshit is what got us in this place, in the first place. LA is all women. It's basically run by women and it's a fucking shit show. Because it's run exclusively by women who have a lot of thoughts, but don't really have any actions. And their heart goes out to everybody who wants to stab you on a light rail. So the notion that we're gonna solve all these problems, I mean, I don't know. I guess you could go, here's what I would say. If you took most cities that were run by women and had a sort of majority female city council and tried to measure them and their success by, you know, potholes and test scores at schools, crime and whatever, I do not think you'd have any better results and I think it would be worse. But go ahead, go ahead, Jennifer. James, changing the status quo and transforming not just our culture, but our society and our economy. I'll give you one example. Look at Silicon Valley. Had more women been early on in those companies or at the tables of power making decisions, I don't think we would have so much or have a love for- We wouldn't have any of it because it wouldn't exist because you bitches didn't think of it. So no, we'd have nothing is what we'd have. But I'm sure there are plenty of chicks floating around back then and no, you guys aren't inherently better. I'm now starting to think you're more violent than men, judging from what I've seen on the internet. Yeah, wait till we get to the news. And your decision making is for shit because you're emotional. All right, keep playing it. I don't think we would have so much or have allowed for so much sort of bigotry, racism, misogyny and hate online. I don't think that we would have the anonymity of it. I think that there would have been a, ooh, that's unkind, that's not okay. You can't make money off of that about dividing people, misinforming people, belittling people, bullying people. I mean, again, think about who's the victims online more often than not. It's women, LGBTQ plus marginalized communities, women of color. She was created in some sort of factory. A lab. And I really do think weirdly that her and Gavin Newsom don't even exist. They were just put here to try to get me to kill myself. Like somebody went, hey, Adam, what state you living in, this state? All right, let's hear what the two people that are running your state have to say. And I just go, are you fucking high? Literally, there's nothing she says that I would agree with. I bet she wants ketchup on her hot dog. If she said to me, I like a Chicagoan style, I'd go, oh yeah, that's weird, because I like it that way. She was built in a factory, and also it's so, it is perfect because I'm telling everyone this styrofoam packing peanuts world, like we're eating it right out of the box. There's nothing, these are empty calories. First off, you're wrong. Secondly, what's your plan, bitch? Thirdly, none of it's ever gonna work. I bet she eats hot dogs the same way that Jacob Fry, mayor of Minneapolis, eats Indian food. With that disdain look on his face, like, oh, get me the hell out of here. I wonder if I have to hang out with these people. I know I get votes from them, but I'll sit and eat this and try to at least somewhat kind of muster up a smile. I guess we'd have to go to Harvey Weinstein to figure out how she eats those hot dogs. Jesus Christ. Ugh, sad. And also, by the way, listen, you can say all you want about the pee-whipped guy who's running the state into the ground, which is Gavin Newsom. I don't know a guy who does not weigh in to different extents the wishes of the woman they're married to or living with. You take, like, sort of COVID. You know my stance on COVID. I didn't give a fuck about COVID, but I had a daughter and a wife that did. And so when I would come home at night, I'd just fucking kick my shoes off downstairs because I didn't wanna deal with their shit. Now, they're 100% wrong, but you're factored in. You know what I mean? If your significant other hates cigarette smoke, you don't sit in the living room and smoke. You smoke, you go out to the fucking patio and you crouch down behind the fucking barbecue like an animal and you smoke like a raccoon smokes out in the fucking yard and then you drink a little LeVors and you come back into the house, right? That's what guys do. Meaning there's no way Newsom can be married to this fucking crackpot and not have some of her retardism bleed into his world. And if he ever tried to make a proclamation that was somewhere near practical or had to do with discipline or like going, I'm sorry, you're 17 year old and you stab someone, we're gonna prosecute you as an adult. He couldn't do all that shit and go home and get his dick sucked at the end of the night. So she is polluting his fucking world which is already fucked up. Every dude just wants peace. That's all we want. That's all we want is some sort of, doesn't matter how we get it, doesn't matter if it could be at a Metallica concert, it could be at work, it could be at home with kids, whatever it is, whatever it is I need to tell you so that you can just stop and be normal and I can enjoy the rest of my day. That is what we go for. So yeah, every now and again, you gotta kind of tell the line with these people and then yes, whatever it is that they have, their agenda is, it bleeds onto you. That's the part that is always hurtful. Yeah, there's no way her and her sort of radical feminism is not infecting Newsome to some degree. All right, let's do some news. Let's do it. Well, a 29 year old man has been arrested on two felony arson charges for torching the warehouse operated by Consumer Goods Company, Kimberly Clark in Ontario, California. He actually filmed himself after he lit this fire. Did you see any of this? No. Oh, this is wild, yeah. It's just a huge warehouse? Huge warehouse that this dude lit on fire. And basically he was screaming about, one of the things that he yells is, all you had to do was pay us enough to live. He works at the warehouse. Uh-huh, and he started the roll of toilet paper? He starts a couple of these pallets that are filled with paper goods on fire. It's pretty insane that one guy with a $2 lighter and a little wherewithal could take out an entire 100,000 square foot facility. You know, we may not get paid enough to fucking live, but these bitches dirt sheep. All you had to do was pay us enough to live. All you had to do was pay us enough to fucking live. All you had to do was quit and go get a different job somewhere that paid you better. How about you get a fucking skill, bro? Yeah. All you had to do was pay us enough to live. Listen, anybody, any male, especially without a bad back and under the age of 40, is about a year and a half away from an actual skill. You guys wanna fucking be barbacks and watch fucking ESPN all night and try to get chicks phone numbers or have sort of stupid shit, retard jobs, but you wanna fucking go out and apprentice and you wanna learn something, you can learn something. Absolutely. You don't wanna work, but if you wanna work, you're about two years away from getting paid a lot as an electrician or a plumber, but you never do it. You never avail yourself of it. You just fucking rot in a warehouse. So this, now this warehouse had to have fire sprinklers because it's a modern-esque warehouse, but I guess if you light enough pallets of toilet paper on fire. Yeah, I imagine so. It didn't say anything about the actual, like, inside of the, but you could tell from the photos, the blaze that, I mean, that led the whole damn thing on fire. Is it like a hundred thousand square feet? I mean, that thing's a huge facility. You know, it didn't say in the news report, I didn't see it. Oh, you know what, never mind, actually, this was, it's buried here, intentionally setting fire that engulfed the nearly 1.2 million square foot building. Wow. That's a lot of fire. Yeah, about 20 employees were inside the warehouse when the fire broke out, including he himself who was arrested for felony arson. Man. Now, what's the best thing? I'm trying to think. Paper towels, pretty good kindling. Yep. Toilet paper, good. Ooh, paper-ass gaskets, those go up pretty fast. Those are nice. I will say, I put third, Maxi pad. You got a cardboard box, you got a lot of cotton in there, adhesive strip. So it gets to fire started. Yeah. Yeah. They have any sort of those wipes, like those butt wipes, but it's too moist. Too moist. But you have ones that are alcohol-based for cleaning. Do they have some sort of? Well, they do, because I know, because once Jimmy wiped his ass with the Clorox ones, he thought it was the ass wipe for the ones that his wife left out, the sink wipe ones, and he burned his ass with the Clorox. Crazy. So I can't imagine that. By the way, here's how guys are. If a woman had burned her vagina with the Clorox, why other women would be sympathetic when she told him that story? When Jimmy told me that, all I did was laugh my ass off. I went, oh my god, how's your asshole? That's the greatest thing I've ever heard. That's the difference between men and women. Yeah, funny. Simply safe. Wow, traditional home security has expensive monthly fees. Multi-year contracts and confusing hardware, and that's why I use Simply Safe instead. You can customize a system on their website and have it at your home in just days. Easy to install. It's not just cameras, by the way. It's an entire ecosystem of sensors. And no lock-ins or hidden cancellation fees. Simply Safe earns your business by keeping you safe, not trapping you in a contract as two eyes in Simply Safe, by the way. And they were named America's best customer service by Newsweek. It is Simply Safe. Right Dawson? We want you to experience the same peace of mind we do, which is why we partnered with Simply Safe to offer an exclusive discount for our listeners. Right now, you can get 50% off your new system by visiting simplysafe.com slash adam. That's half off at simplysafe.com slash adam. There's no safe like Simply Safe. Pluto TV has thousands of free movies and TV shows. We're coming at you with everything we got. This is the mindset. Free. This is the mantra. Free. This is the mindset. With movies like Pineapple Express, the entire Star Trek film franchise and Gladiator, and TV shows like Survivor, SpongeBob SquarePants, the Fairly Odd Parents and Ghosts, Pluto TV is always free. Ha-zah! Pluto TV, stream now, pay never. All eligible men will now automatically be registered into the military draft pool by December as part of an effort to streamline the previous process of self-registration and to save money. Most men between the ages of 18 and 25 are already required to register with selective service, but automatic registration was mandated in December of 2025 as part of the Fiscal 2026 National Defense Authorization Act. All right, I'm all for more people doing more shit. There's too many fucking lazy dudes in this country. And that's part of the problem. I was a little bit past, I was already 21 when 9-11 happened. And since I'm the last male in my family, there was conversations about like, hey, there's a couple of us that are just sitting around doing nothing in Wisconsin. Maybe it's time we jump into the service. We talked to a lot of the recruiters who said, well, because of your situation with your family, you're never gonna see active duty. But there is, if you wanna do behind the scenes stuff, you're more than one. You come from family of pussies? Pussies, yeah, a lot of pussies. That's why they were like, they were like five foot six, all 152 pounds of you. Come on, buddy. They wouldn't let you because what with their family? Because I'm the last male in my family. I have no brothers, I have no cousins. I was the only male in my family. So they said, you can still join though. You can still go in. Interesting, it's interesting that they factor that in. Yeah, well, it started because of, I think you and I listen- Saving private booty. Yes, well, it started because the Sullivan brothers from Waterloo, five of them, there was five of them. From Waterloo, Iowa, who went to the service. All five boys were killed during the service and that's where it came from. So yeah, this is great, absolutely. I think it's, man, I always say if I could go, I'm reading Rob Riggle's book about spit, grit, and never quit, Marines Guide to Comedy. And he talks about being a pilot and that's my biggest lament is not becoming an Air Force pilot. Because I'm the size, I'm small, I wish that would have been the thing I could have done. And never panned out. Yeah, that's what is a dream of mine as well. I mean, it's so cool, but I couldn't have the education to be able to pull it off. But yeah, there's a joke I've never been able to work out because it upsets the audience, but I swear I'm gonna try it. Is every one of those shows on 9-11, it always shows the guy sitting home like you seeing the thing and the guy like said, I stood up when that second tower went down and I walked right to the recruiter's office and two weeks later I was in Afghanistan and everyone's like, God, you're a hero. And I'm like, yeah, but also didn't have a lot going on. Sure, I watch a TV at 9 a.m. Yeah, and then what about your family? You have a young girl, you just fucking laughed. Like you literally just got up, left your house and went, I mean, if you think about it, if I just left right now and just went, I'm going to recruiting office, I'll be in Afghanistan for the next four years. I'd kind of fuck up a lot of people around me. The only way you could do it is if you had zero going on in your life. Well, after the second day of no Montel Williams on at 9 a.m., he was like, wow, what else do I got? Time to roll. All right, what else you got? A beloved coffee chain founded in San Francisco is removing pride flags and other flag decor from its stores the company's CEO announced on Wednesday. Fills the longstanding supporter of LGBTQIA plus community. What does it really mean to support that community? Like, let's really just break it down. I support, you give them money and then they what? Buy lube or flags. Yeah, dead love. Cock rings, like what does that mean? Like I support, like I don't know, without your support, would they be okay? Would gay men be around? Would they be allowed to get married? That's a good question. I don't think it means anything. I don't think Jesse Jackson has done anything. I don't think Al Sharpton's done anything. I don't think Black Lives Matter. You know, I know Jennifer Newsom's very close to the LGBT community. What the fuck does she do? And then how does that work? It works by saying we support you. So can you please come to our coffee shop and spend money so we can make money? All right, and here's a flag with your colors on it. But other than that, I'm not sure. That's as far as it goes. And they will also throw a sign that says what they will tolerate and what they will stand for. Right, I do like that. There was a Phil's coffee in San Diego. You did 20 minutes on this because you walked by it early and it was one of those signs where we accept everybody. It was on the way to San Diego. It was like halfway to San Diego. Yeah, and that was a Phil's coffee. And it's here we believe no one is in. We believe in and we believe in. And you just want some fucking coffee. I took a picture of it and made fun of it for 20 minutes on stage. There's a picture of it somewhere. I don't know, Phil's coffee creed or whatever. It's the same bullshit the neighbor with the sign on the lawn believes in. But here's what I'm saying. Mark Garagos' attorney is an armo and he fucking loves the Armenian community. And he does like pro bono work. If some Armenian, and this isn't even hypothetical, some like 19 year old Armenian kid, is doing 90 miles an hour in a freeway and hits somebody and kills them in their car and they're trying to give him vehicular manslaughter. He fucking defends that guy for free because he's into Armenians. You guys are into the LGBT. What the fuck do you ever do? You put a stupid flag up and do nothing. And by the way, what then what? And what do they need from you? You know what I mean? What does the gay community need from you? Like how does it even work? Yeah, besides a hug? I don't know what else it's possibly be. Well, anyway, there Phil's creed. It's fucking retard. Well, what's funny is the workers of this particular franchise came back and they're starting to revolt a little bit. And basically all he said was, listen, we're taking down the flags because we can still stand by you and we just don't have to put your, you know, put your sort of decor and put your stuff in the window. And also there's other people who might not be into it that, hey man, we're not here to like make a statement. We're here to sell coffee. So we'll support you, but we also want other people who don't believe this things that you believe to be able to come in and enjoy our product as well. And he's taking a lot of heat for it. I should talk to Dave Rubin because he's gay and he could tell me what Phil's coffee is doing for him or what the gay community or what Jennifer Newsom is doing. All those who stand by this, what the fuck are they doing? We're living in such a fucked up world now. Sorry, what else you got? All right, so speaking of, I mentioned this earlier, but there is a wild video captured when two women brawling across the top of a coffin after realizing they had both been dating the dead man laying inside. This can't be in this country. This is an out of country. Man, you hit the nail on the head, my friend. I always know an out of country. I know an out of country clip and I don't know why. And by the way, it looks to be sort of Hispanic women, but also semi-white women. I don't know, you could go well-course, but I live in LA. I can go out and see Mexican chicks fighting all day long who are from here and I could film them and that'd be from here. This feels out of country, but anyway, here we go. They're literally pushing the lid back and forth. Yeah, well, it's like somebody's got to buy the hair. That one woman that somebody grabs her by the hair. Women be fighting. Yeah. They're not, they have trouble with impulse control. I've found. Man, you know, you talk about bucket list stuff. I got one postpartum, no wait, what do you call it? Postumous bucket list item. And that is two chicks fighting over my coffin. How amazing would that be? Just a lover of all and these two ladies just fighting. Cause what's the matter now? The guy's already dead. Why do you care? But they weren't gonna give it up. And you are right. Veracruz and Mejio is where this happened. Yeah, I don't, you know, let me tell you guys something. Pause it for a second. You can do a lot of out of country math by tile work and color palettes and pictures hanging on the wall. Not by what's in the pictures, just pictures. There is a calculus that is very tile centric for me, where you can kind of tell where the place is based on the tile, which people go, well, you fucking live in LA. There's fucking tile, all kinds of tile all over the place. And I don't know why, but there's a little bit of a tile tell. Yeah. Are you mean like year wise? So that tile that I was looking at was from like 1987. I don't know. Yeah, but I can go to a thousand shops in Glendale and have outdated tile. Okay. I am just saying, much like the fireman retired calculation, when you look at something, you can go, what's the behavior? Yeah. We're fighting in a funeral home. You go, okay, that feels a little non-white and it feels a little non like United States. But then you go, but there are plenty of people from plenty of places in the United States. And then you go, okay. And then it's a combination of tile, palette, decor, the palette, I mean the color, like the wall behind it is weird green. It's maybe even brighter than avocado. Mexico's all fucked up with their color palettes. Purple. They like colors like nine year olds like their colors. You know, they'll paint the fascia orange on the side of their house and shit, because they're fucked their culture's juvenile. Their music is really loud and juvenile. It's basically a culture where no one can study because it's too much fucking shit flying at you all the time. It's a sort of pinata loud. All you have to do is you could skim through a hundred TV stations, you land on one Mexican one, you go, I know exactly what this is. Because it's all made to distract and it's all made for nine year olds, essentially. That's why they have no space program. That's why they don't make a car. It's a completely different thing than Germany. Germany has a completely different color palette, completely different tile, different grout situation. They lean toward an unsanded grout. Unsanded grout. The Mexicans do. Also, they'll put it down with a sponge trowel. Whereas the other ones will put it down with a notch trowel. Obviously. So there's a lot of grout based, tile based. I can just, you can show me a picture and tell me the activity and I will sort of, I will tell you if it's abroad or not. And this thing felt foreign. I just saw a picture of it. I didn't hear any sound or anything. I didn't read anything about it. It just felt foreign. Well, the stand that the coffin is on also looks like it is just some barbed wire, not barbed wire, but it almost looks like rebar that has just been literally just kind of like made into a stand. Oh, I put the coffin on. Well, let me tell you this. You tapped into something. I didn't really notice that part of it. It looked a little more official to me than the rebar stand. Yeah, I don't know. I can tell you, let me tell you guys this. The number one tell for this is not in America is the prison with the rebar for the bars. Ah, yeah, like Columbia. When you go to any, we see any of those things that show all the gang bangers with the face tattoos and their underpants sitting by it, it's all rebar. It's all rebar. It's 100% rebar. All third world nations build their prisons. They build the bars a rebar. Our bars probably cost $20,000 a lineal foot to install their own machined and stainless steel and everything. In Guatemala, they build the prison out of concrete and rebar and then at some point someone goes, well, what are we gonna build the cage part out of? For the gang bangers, they go, we got extra rebar. And they go, well, that's not a prison cell. They go, weld the fucking rebar together. You think they're gonna chew through it? They're not going anywhere. Yeah, what's their grout situation looking like to you? They're definitely unsanded, right? You, they wanna make it as uncomfortable as possible. They're not a silicone grout based society. I'll leave it at that. I'll leave it at that. I don't wanna attack the good people of Guatemala. Whenever you see rebar, by the way, saddest, rebar at the zoo. Oh yeah. When you see rebar holding that line in, that is some third world shit right there. We got official bars for everything and our rebar only goes in concrete. Yeah, gang bangers and polar bears, man, behind that rebar. So sad. You do not want to be in a prison that has a rebar fucking bars in front of you. You are fucked if that's it. And if you're a polar bear, you don't wanna be in a zoo with rebar. All right, so everyone coached up. We got it now. I'll be in Phoenix this week. Are you gonna be out there, Rudy? Desert Ridge? I'll be there with you, man. Improv, five shows. Rudy's a really strong comic. Friday, Saturday and Sunday. You can go to the merch store. We got our new racist shirt available for you guys. Check that out at amcrawler.com. And the Home Depot vlog is out, everybody. So check that at amcrawler.com. So let's see, Rudy, give a plug. Yeah, I got a bunch of dates right now. I'll be in Chicago, I'll be in Arlington, Texas and then I'm with you in Phoenix. So check out rudipovitchcomedy.com. And Ed Elson and Rudy and Adam Sand, Mahalo. Pick up your phone and leave us a voicemail at 888-634-1744 and get tickets to see Adam Carolla and adamcarolla.com. ["Mind Set Free"] Pineapple Express, the entire Star Trek film franchise and Gladiator. And TV shows like Survivor, SpongeBob SquarePants, The Fairly Odd Parents and Ghosts. Pluto TV is always free. Huzzah! Pluto TV, stream now, pay never. Pluto TV has thousands of free movies and TV shows. We're coming at you with everything we got. This is the Mind Set Free. This is the Montreux. Free. This is the... Mind Set, Mind Set. With movies like Pineapple Express, the entire Star Trek film franchise and Gladiator. And TV shows like Survivor, SpongeBob SquarePants, The Fairly Odd Parents and Ghosts. Pluto TV is always free. Huzzah! Pluto TV, stream now, pay never.