GLENN: Comedian, radio personality, television host, actor, podcaster, author, director, do you ever sleep, Adam Carolla? Welcome to the program.
ADAM: Thanks for having me, Glenn.
GLENN: You bet. Hey, I want to start with something. We gonna get to No Safe Spaces, and a movie that you're trying to put together with Dennis Prager and some of the things that I think, really brilliant stuff that you're doing. But you're a guy who obviously No Safe Spaces. We have to have a conversation with each other. We have to not be afraid to say the unthinkable. And the only speech that needs protection is the speech that nobody likes. Is there a line in this for you -- and let me take you to what's his face...that just said this in --
ADAM: Johnny Depp?
GLENN: Yeah, Johnny Depp. If you didn't hear it, listen to it.
JOHNNY: Can we bring Trump here?
GLENN: He's in London. He says can we bring Trump here?
JOHNNY: No. No. No. You misunderstand.
GLENN: He says no. No. No. You misunderstand.
JOHNNY: I think he needs help.
GLENN: I think he needs help.
JOHNNY: This is going to be in the press. It's going to be horrible.
PAT: This is going to be in the press. It's going to be horrible.
JOHNNY: When was the last time an actor assassinated a president?
GLENN: When was the last time an actor assassinated the president? And then he says I'm not an actor. I'm a professional liar. But then, he closes this out with -- but maybe it's time that was repeated or something like that. Adam, where do you go with that?
ADAM: Well, I have a couple of thoughts. First off, you have to understand what it's like to live out here in Hollywood. It's like, remember when you're 12 or 13 years old, and you got together and maybe girls are a little more guilty of this than boys, but I can remember doing it when I was 12 or 13 years old. You get together, and there was that one kid you didn't like, and he wasn't at the party, and it was really just a competition to talk more smack about that person who wasn't there at the party. Who can say worse things about bad Ronald at the pool party? And you start getting drunk with this, and it almost becomes a competition, and there's no gravity. There's no push back. It's not like there's a 13-year-old Dennis Prager wearing an old-time, one-piece bathing suit with stripes on it.
GLENN: No, he's the one you're making fun of at the pool party.
ADAM: Yeah, bad Dennis. He doesn't come up and tap you on the shoulder. So it becomes this sort of crazy, insular competition with no gravity and no push back and sometimes someone you take it on the road and puts a microphone in front of you, and you don't realize that you're not in the friendly confines of your backyard swimming pool talking crap about bad Ronald.
So to these guys, Johnny Depp in Hollywood, this is just conversation that you would have on Tuesday, that's number one. Number two, if you really want my honest opinion about this kind of stuff. Johnny Depp, Kathy Griffin, what have you, it's outrageous, and I understand, but I am not outraged. Because these are comedians and actors being stupid, and that's what we do. I don't want to be a hypocrite. It's outrageous, but I'm not outraged. Here's what outrages me. What outrages me is the politicians and the civil rights leaders and the whomever, who talk about, you know, if you're black you have a target on your back, if you're gay, you have a target on your back, this guy's gunning for you. He hates women. He hates gays. He hates Jews. And if you're in this group, you better run serpentine to the mailbox.
Well, that kind of talk will get somebody shot because if you hear enough of that talk, you think -- you compare this guy to Hitler enough. Well, who amongst us wouldn't be a hero for taking out Hitler before he rose to his ultimate power?
GLENN: So is there a limit? I agree with you. I -- it's a really hard line because I agree with your analogy that these guys -- this is the way they talk. And they don't like it when somebody else says the same kind of junk with the same meaningless, mindless rhetoric about their guy, which is outrageous and wrong. But they become so outraged when somebody else says it. And then they say it so flippantly. And they do say it publicly because there is no push back. I don't want to be a push back police but as a society, when society pushes back, and I'm not talking special interest groups, I'm not talking about the law, I'm not talking anybody else when people going, "Ick, Johnny, what the hell is wrong with you?" When there isn't that societal push back, couldn't you spiral out of control and shouldn't there be societal push back?
ADAM: I think there should. I think there is. In a way, I kind of like it because they are with each proclamation and allegation, losing credibility.
GLENN: Yes.
ADAM: I've always used this analogy. There's never been a better time in America to be an actual racist because everybody's a racist now.
GLENN: Yeah.
ADAM: You're getting lumped in with Adam Carolla and Glenn Beck. So, like, what does it even mean anymore? I mean, could you remember what the word racist meant? Could you remember, you know, circa 1997 if you opened a newspaper, and it said this racist comment by this sportscaster, your mind went to the darkest, deepest part of, "Oh what did he shout?" If you opened the newspaper, and you heard a comedian made a racist remark or whomever, especially somebody on the right, would you even bother reading the article? Would you bat an eye?
GLENN: No.
ADAM: Okay. So they've taken one of the most powerful words and completely dumped a sack of flower in it and diminished it completely. I'm sorry I had to pick the whitest powder.
GLENN: It could have been wheat flower.
ADAM: It could have been wheat flower.
GLENN: It could have been blue tortilla flower. Anyway, go ahead
ADAM: Yeah, they took a word that used to mean something and took all the teeth out of it, right? Or most of them, essentially defanged it. And they're doing that with almost everything now. So we used to have to listen when actors spoke. Do we have to listen anymore? I don't mean we had to listen but, you know, this person pulled up to the microphone is going to endorse a candidate. This is going to be a big deal. You want to get his endorsement. Do you even care anymore? Do we need anybody's endorsement?
STU: It's nice to have the freedom to ignore, isn't it?
ADAM: Right so maybe this is a good thing. Maybe Hollywood is just sinking in the ocean.
GLENN: Well, of course. I think it is a good thing, and that's why I've always been a big free speech guy because I want to know -- don't cry racist, don't shut them up. I want to know what people actually believe. Then I can decide myself. I want -- oh, yeah, that guy down the street? He's an actual Nazi. Kids, don't play with his kids. You know what I mean? I want to know who they are. People start to shut up, and then it starts to fester in them, and then it gets really bad.
Let me take you here, though, moving from racism to a broader topic. No words have meaning anymore. Truth has no meaning anymore. Lies have no meaning. Anybody can say anything about anybody, and it doesn't matter. Joanna gains, by the way, is leaving her TV show to go into a facial cream. Now, that's an actual sponsored paid for ad that is being run on several websites, including mine up until this last week. And then we went to them and said you can't run that ad. It's completely false. Do you want our money or not? No. But there's no consequence nympho lies.
ADAM: Well, the, you know, we replace -- it's a very interesting thing -- we replaced I think with I feel. How many times if you had this conversation with somebody where, you know, I see it all the time, right? I say to people, look, this guy on the airplane, the airlines made a mistake. They overbooked it, or they did whatever. But somewhere around the 25th time, the security guard tells you to please stand up and exit the plane, you have to comply. I don't know what the other options are. If you're not going to do it, they have to physically remove you. And the answer when you say when you ask, what would you do if you were there, and they asked someone to be removed from your plane, and they refused? You have to lift them up and remove them from the plane. And the answer I would get from everyone is I just feel like there's a better way to handle this. And the word is feel. And my point is I'm wide open on better ways to handle this. Now you have to tell me how this should be handled. You're telling me I feel like we shouldn't have dropped a bomb in Hiroshima. I feel like the Japanese never should have bombed Pearl Harbor. I feel like the planes should have never hit the Twin Towers. That's what I feel, but I need you to tell me how to stop it.
GLENN: Adam Corolla is joining us. He's looking for some crowd funding and really close to his goal. He and Dennis Prager are putting a film together No Safe Spaces, and they're actually traveling to some of the most dangerous places in the world for ideas, and that is not over in Islamic countries, necessarily. That is in our -- in our own country on the campuses of universities.
[break]
GLENN: What Adam Carolla and Dennis Prager are trying to do is they're trying to go in and help people think and learn to think in college campuses, and they want to make a movie. Crowd funding at Indiegogo. They're making a money. 30 days to raise a million dollars. They're very, very close to their current goal. Adam, tell me about the project.
ADAM: Well, first off, I love Dennis Prager because he has so much wisdom.
GLENN: Yeah.
ADAM: And I wish more people would approach life this way, which is you can't get further apart from me and Dennis Prager as human beings. He's a very religious Jew. I'm an atheist from the San Fernando valley. He grew up on the east coast, he went to great schools, he traveled. I never left North Hollywood. I never went to college. I never learned a second language. I never had a religion. I got dumped off on a construction site and picked up garbage for a living, but I was always a fan of his because I thought the guy had wisdom, and I used to listen to Religion on the Line, his old radio show as an atheist construction worker because I wanted to know. Not just because I wanted to convert, but I wanted to gain some knowledge. I wish more people could approach life this way.
And, by the way, he's a deeply religious person, I've told him 2,000 times I'm an atheist, and he does not care at all. It does not hinder our relationship or the way he feels about me at all, which is a lesson in these times I would love to get across to the world.
I had the privilege of doing some speaking engagements with him. We fell in love with each other. Again, not because of the things we had in common but because of the things we sought after, which is just knowledge, understanding, and he came to me with this project, and I said, oh, my god. I have two 11-year-old twins. We're talking, you know, for the day that they were born, we set up a college fund for them. That was 11 years ago. I'm seriously considering not letting them go to college.
GLENN: I'm doing the same thing. I'm doing the same thing. I mean, I have a 13-year-old and a 11-year-old, and I'm, like, I don't think I want to send them to college. It's going to cripple them.
ADAM: Right and not only that. But, look, if college were free, I wouldn't want them to go.
GLENN: Yes.
ADAM: Not to mention the 50 grand a year or whatever the hell it is these days. Dennis came to me and said we have to do this project. I said Dennis, anywhere you go, I'll follow. And we're going to go to colleges, we're going to speak at colleges, and we're going to -- it's not going to be a straight documentary. There's going to be reenactments, there's going to be young Dennis, there's going to be young Adam. We're going to have fun with it. It's going to be a film, and there's going to be a lot of comedy in it. And if your listeners go to NoSafeSpaces.com, they can go look at -- we already hit Cal State Northridge, so we've been to one college. There's a whole bunch of little two-minute vignettes of us up on stage, and you can get a good idea for our dynamic, and I bring the humor. Dennis brings the thought-provoking conversation.
GLENN: Will you put Dennis Prager on a trampoline, scantily clad?
ADAM: I'll get him back into that one-piece swimsuit he wore in the '40s, and we'll get him on that trampoline.
GLENN: That was good. That was good. All right. So just go to NoSafeSpaces.com. When are you -- when do you think you'd have this done? You get the --
ADAM: I think we're -- yeah, I think we're looking for mid-early 2018. We shot at one college already. And once we secure the funding, we'll get started earnest and hit it.
GLENN: And what are you looking to show in the movie, quickly?
ADAM: You know, part of it is I would like to find -- part of it is I want to see what's going on. I've never been on a college campus before. I just see what I saw on the news, and it seems kind of disturbing. I think what we're going to try to explain is that hard work, values, no safe spaces, a little adversity, a little gravity is a good thing when you're growing.
GLENN: NoSafeSpaces.com. Join the fight right now. NoSafeSpaces.com.