Spike Feresten, Jon Cryer + Investigative journalist Suzanne Rico; Race Cars, Classism, and Investigating a Nazi Past

Summary

Adam Carolla Show Episode Summary Title: Spike Feresten, Jon Cryer + Investigative Journalist Suzanne Rico; Race Cars, Classism, and Investigating a Nazi Past
Release Date: March 17, 2025
Guests: Jon Cryer, Spike Feresten, Suzanne Rico
Hosted by: Adam Carolla
Podcast Platform: PodcastOne / Carolla Digital

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1. Introduction and Guest Introductions

Adam Carolla kicks off the episode by welcoming his guests:

• Jon Cryer: Renowned actor known for his roles in Two and a Half Men and Pretty in Pink.
• Spike Feresten: Friend and co-host from Spike's Car Radio and YouTube ventures.
• Suzanne Rico: Investigative journalist with a profound personal story tied to Nazi history.

Notable Quote:

Adam Carolla [02:00]: "From Corolla 1 Studios in Glendale, California, this is the Adam Carolla Show..."

2. Seinfeld 917 Auction Business and Pop-Tarts Movie

The conversation begins with discussions about the mysterious "Seinfeld 917 auction" and a quirky Pop-Tarts movie project.

• Spike Farriston delves into the origins of the project, highlighting its evolution from a fun, annual brainstorming session to a professionally produced movie.

Notable Quote:

Suzanne Rico [04:40]: "That was just for fun in the beginning, which is the greatest kind of project there is..."

3. Porsche 917 Race Car: History and Auction

A significant portion of the discussion revolves around the legendary Porsche 917 race car, its historical significance, and the recent auction events.

• Suzanne Rico shares her personal encounter with the Porsche 917, emphasizing its rarity and the emotional impact of seeing such an iconic vehicle in person.
• Jon Cryer and Adam Carolla discuss the cyclical nature of vintage car valuations and the societal trends influencing these shifts.

Notable Quotes:

Suzanne Rico [07:40]: "And we got to go, this is what we want to shoot."

Adam Carolla [09:41]: "They were trying to downgrade their own reputation, that's what you want..."

4. Motorcycles and Personal Stories

The guests transition to sharing their passion for motorcycles, recounting personal anecdotes and the challenges associated with riding.

• Suzanne Rico reveals her 1966 Triumph Bonneville motorcycle auction, benefiting Palisades High School, detailing her long-term dedication to the bike's maintenance.
• Jon Cryer reflects on his own motorcycle experiences, emphasizing the balance between passion and responsibility.

Notable Quotes:

Suzanne Rico [20:41]: "And the money is going toward 100% of the money is going towards Palisades High School booster club to help rebuild."

Adam Carolla [23:00]: "Yeah, I get it. I had motorcycles. And at some point you have kids and you make money and you, you know..."

5. Classism and Race in Society

Adam introduces Jason Mayhem Miller to discuss contemporary issues surrounding race and classism in America.

• Adam Carolla critiques the manipulation of societal movements like COVID and Black Lives Matter, suggesting they were tools for shaming and control.
• Jason Mayhem Miller echoes these sentiments, highlighting the shift from race-based to class-based conflicts in media narratives.

Notable Quotes:

Adam Carolla [44:15]: "So I was like, listen, bitches, I pay a ton in taxes. Don't fucking try to pull this shit on me."

Jason Mayhem Miller [57:20]: "You do a lot of, you know, because you're a place of privilege. You do get that so many people are, like, struggling so hard and it's so easy to hate on you."

6. Suzanne Rico's Family Nazi Past Investigation

The episode delves deep into Suzanne Rico's personal investigation into her grandfather's involvement with the Nazis during World War II.

• Jon Cryer narrates the complex legacy of his grandfather, an innovative engineer responsible for groundbreaking aviation advancements and the creation of the V1 cruise missile.
• Suzanne Rico discusses uncovering family secrets, including her grandfather's forced involvement in war projects and the tragic loss of family members during targeted bombings.

Notable Quotes:

Jon Cryer [125:04]: "My grandfather proved that the chain is only as strong as a product of all its weakest link."

Suzanne Rico [129:05]: "Which is a World War II mystery that she actually solves, which is amazing."

7. News Segment: COVID, Black Lives Matter, and Classism

In the news segment, Jason Mayhem Miller provides his perspective on recent societal issues.

• Adam Carolla voices skepticism about the authenticity and motives behind movements like COVID regulations and Black Lives Matter, labeling them as manipulative.
• The discussion touches on governmental trust, economic disparities, and the impact of social narratives on public perception.

Notable Quotes:

Adam Carolla [45:30]: "And the whole point is that if you pay the government $2 million and they give you 300,000, then they're still up 1.7. But if you pay them 12 grand and they give you 300 grand, well, then they're down $288,000."

Jon Cryer [160:46]: "And what amazed me was I was at this dinner party, she offhandedly makes this comment, and suddenly I realized her whole family is hooked into history..."

8. Final Thoughts and Wrap-Up

The episode concludes with reflections on the discussed topics, upcoming live shows, and promotional segments.

• Adam Carolla encourages listeners to explore the "Man Who Calculated Death" podcast, praising its depth and emotional resonance.
• Guests express their appreciation and share final remarks before ending the episode.

Notable Quotes:

Jon Cryer [159:36]: "I would love that. I'm fascinated too. I'm like hooked."

Adam Carolla [161:13]: "Until next time, Adam Carolla for Spike and John and Suzanne and Mayhem saying mahalo."

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Key Takeaways:

• Historical Insights: An in-depth exploration of Suzanne Rico's family's Nazi past reveals the complexities of legacy and memory.
• Automotive Passion: Genuine enthusiasm for vintage race cars and motorcycles underscores the guests' dedication and personal connections.
• Societal Critique: A critical view of modern social movements and governmental policies invites listeners to reflect on underlying motives and societal impacts.
• Podcast Promotion: The featured podcast "The Man Who Calculated Death" offers a compelling narrative blending personal history with broader historical events.

Conclusion

This episode of The Adam Carolla Show provides a multifaceted discussion intertwining personal narratives with historical events and contemporary societal issues. Through engaging dialogues and insightful anecdotes, guests illuminate the intricate ties between past legacies and present-day dynamics.

Transcript

[Adam Carolla]

Well, in this episode, Jon Cryer joins us. Also, my old friend Spike Farriston comes in. He'll get to the bottom of this whole Seinfeld 917 auction business. And Suzanne Rico, who has a very interesting story as well, has to do with Nazis, but fascinating. Mayhem's doing the news and we'll do all that right after this. BetOnline is the world's most trusted betting platform and your number one source for betting online. All the madness, whether you're a seasoned fan or a first time better, betonline is your ultimate game day companion. With the largest selection of odds on everything from college basketball to $200,000 bracket contests, BetOnline continues to be your number one sports betting source. From every Cinderella story to every hat trick, Betonline has you covered with odds, stats and more for every game, every play and every win. And remember, if the NBA, NHL, UFC or golf is your thing, Betonline has them all. Betonline is your number one sports betting source. Bet online. The game starts here. Pluto TV is the place for movie fans like me and TV fans like me. They've got something for everyone and it's totally free.

[Jon Cryer]

You can binge laugh out loud sitcoms.

[Adam Carolla]

Like Frasier and rewatch cult classics like Higher Learning.

[Jon Cryer]

Whether you're in the mood to solve a little crime before bedtime with NCIS.

[Adam Carolla]

Or Tracker or curl up with a.

[Suzanne Rico]

Surefire hit like Forrest Gump.

[Adam Carolla]

Run Forrest.

[Jon Cryer]

Pluto TV has thousands of movies and.

[Adam Carolla]

Shows, all for free. Pluto TV stream now pay never.

[Spike Farriston]

From Corolla 1 Studios in Glendale, California, this is the Adam Carolla Show. Adam's guest today, actor Jon Cryer. And from the podcast, the man who Calculated Death, Suzanne Rico. Plus, we sit down with Spike Carr, radio host Spike Fariston. And we got the news and trending topics with Jason Mayhem Miller. And now just another writer trapped within his truth, Adam Carolla.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah, get it on. Got to get it on. The church. We'll get a mandate. You get it on. Thanks for tuning in. Thanks for telling a friend. We love that about you. Spike Farriston, old friend is in Studio. The YouTube show and it's a podcast as well. Spike's Car Radio featuring Seinfeld, which pops up on that show quite a bit and many other luminaries. And always good to see you again, Spike.

[Suzanne Rico]

Nice to be here. Good to see you. You've been on this show. You're one of the luminaries.

[Adam Carolla]

I'm one of the luminaries. Now, I heard you guys talking about the 917 and I spoke about it as well. But I'm interested in your candid opinion. Now, Spike goes back. Seinfeld wrote for Seinfeld, the Soup Nazi episode, a Pop Tarts movie recently.

[Jon Cryer]

Yeah.

[Suzanne Rico]

That was just out.

[Adam Carolla]

Right. I want to talk about that for a second. Like, how does it work? So does Seinfeld have the idea for Unfrosted and then calls you, or how does it physically work?

[Suzanne Rico]

Well, you know, we drive and get coffee a lot in Malibu. And one of the things that we spoke about since 2013 was this fake movie about Pop Tarts. And we would just riff on scenes, come up with funny ideas, cast it. And we did that every year, a couple times a year, just for fun. But it wasn't until, I think, the Pandemic, right around then, where we thought, you know, there's just a lot of depressing films out there. Why don't we do something silly? There's no silly movie out there that Jerry went, well, why don't we give this Pop Tart thing a try? And really all he was saying was, I'll give you two hours of time just to get on a Zoom with everybody. And at the very least, it'll be fun just to visit with everybody, because we're kind of locked down and not seeing each other. And we called Andy Robin, Barry Marder, and we got onto a Zoom. We had a great time. We looked at what we wrote, and he said, let's do it Thursday. And then suddenly we were doing it five days a week. Suddenly we had a script. Suddenly he said, I want to direct it. And he goes, you know what? I want to be in it. He goes, I'm taking it to Ted at Netflix. And suddenly we're making it.

[Adam Carolla]

Wow.

[Suzanne Rico]

That was the evolution.

[Adam Carolla]

It's nice to do things.

[Suzanne Rico]

Yeah. It was just for fun in the beginning, which is the greatest kind of project there is, because you didn't pitch it first. Therefore you don't have anybody noting you at all.

[Adam Carolla]

Right.

[Suzanne Rico]

We were able to write it, rewrite it, get it where we wanted it, and then take it in and go, this is what we want to shoot.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah. And it starts organically, which is you're just riffing and having fun of what if there was such a thing as a Pop Tart movie?

[Suzanne Rico]

Yeah. It was me asking Jerry, I think, in a lull in conversation once, if you could get in a time machine, where are you going? I never asked you this. Where would you go? And he goes, oh, it'd have to be Battle Creek, Michigan, 1963, Birth of the Pop Tart. It's at war.

[Adam Carolla]

Home of Kellogg's. Why?

[Suzanne Rico]

You don't want to see Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock. You don't want to go back and visit with the pilgrims. He goes, no, it's the Pop Tart. It was this obsession.

[Adam Carolla]

So the 917, which you were a part of him acquiring back in the day. For those who may be uninitiated, the 917 is really like the coolest, most sort of bespoke race car ever. Now, there's different kinds of race cars. There's Corvettes that get turned into race cars, and there's Porsche 911s that get turned into race cars. And then there's bespoke race cars. And, you know, F1 are bespoke race cars. Those are just race cars. So the 917 is just a race car. It's not homologated. There was no street version of it. It's just a race car. And, you know, there's eras. There's eras like heavyweight boxing and play Playboy bunnies. You know, there's just eras that are better than other eras. You know what I mean?

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

I don't know what the era is for playmates now, but I don't think it's as good as 1977. I just don't. There's eras, you know, heavyweights. I don't know what's going on in the heavyweight division, but it was not as good as Foreman and Muhammad Ali. It's just they're ebbs and their flows. And this is the best time for a race car. Cause it's kind of before the computer, not everything looked the same and was designed on a computer. It just was the best. And then there's liveries and the Golf livery.

[Suzanne Rico]

That's it.

[Adam Carolla]

69. I think the year of the car was Steve McQueen bought it, used it in the movie Le Mans. And that's about it. That's the top of the food chain for race cars. Porsche 917, Le Mans Golf livery.

[Suzanne Rico]

And not smashed and crashed, which was important.

[Adam Carolla]

Right. So this thing was used, and then McQueen's company sold it off. And then some privateers had it. And then at some point. Do you come across it, or you and Jerry come across it?

[Suzanne Rico]

No, I came across it driving down La Cienega. And it was at Symbolic Motors in the display window. And if you remember, I think this is like right around 2000, 2001. Nobody wanted old race cars then. They weren't valuable. It didn't matter. The racing history. They had been smashed and crash and whatever, just get rid of them. There's no real use for them. So here's this car. Yes, it was sitting there, I recognized it and I go, shit, is that the car from the movie Le Mans? Is that Steve McQueen's car? And sure enough it was. I told Jerry about it and he was back a few weeks later and we went in and checked it out and I still remember going through the loading, they moved it into the loading dock there and walking through and the gate opening and seeing this thing that you'd only seen models of, you'd only seen in the movie. And there it was. And we were awestricken. Oh yeah, awestricken by it. We stayed for over an hour just sitting and looking at it, going, my God, how can this be for sale? And no one has bought it yet.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah, we have. You know, as a society we have these weird ebbs and flows with old stuff and people too, like, you know, Freddie Mercury dies and no one really gives a shit for like 30 years. And then he becomes a deity and they're making movies about him. And then we like even Elvis was sort of a joke at the end. Oh, the fat, bloated, pill popping guy selling out Vegas, who cares? You know, then he's gone, you know, we want men without hats. Come on. We want real music, you know, and then, then there's. But then next, you know, I got my, you know, 14 year old daughter telling me all about Elvis, the movie and her friends and the famous, like that's five, four years ago. Like, when did you get at Ellis hill? He's gone 77. So there's a cycle.

[Suzanne Rico]

There is, you know, and this was at the beginning of the Steve McQueen cycle. Yes, this was, you know, and it was a friend of mine who really, my friend John who like a few months before said, you know, Steve McQueen's house is for sale in Santa Paula. We should really go and buy it. And I'm like, why? He goes, Steve McQueen, right? And I said, right, good point, good point. And it was at the beginning of this. Anything that Steve McQueen touched is now worth times 10 multiple idea. But this car was not priced that way. You know, it seems like it would be expensive, but it was kind of a reasonable, I think $1.5 million.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah.

[Suzanne Rico]

You know, and considering it just sold for quite a bit more than that, you know, it was, it was a deal.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah. Because it was old. And also vintage racing wasn't really what it is. Right, right, yeah. And so things are cyclical I'll tell.

[Suzanne Rico]

You what, we went out to the track shortly after Chad McQueen was there. They had a Ferrari 512 and they had this car up at Willow.

[Adam Carolla]

Oh, really?

[Suzanne Rico]

Yeah. And we, I remember we arrived just as it was coming out of the last turn at Willow and hitting the Straits. And we heard the sounds of these cars together and you know, again, awe stricken. Just. I had not been to a historic race, I had never heard this thing in motion. And just the sounds just transported me back to. I felt like I was in the movie LA Mall. That's what I felt like. And you know, Chad pulled over, said hi, and like there's Steve McQueen's son. You know, it was the first time I had met Chad. And he goes, I'm gonna take this thing, put it through its paces, you know, Jerry, to show you what it can do, he gets on it, gets back in the car, gets on it, goes through the, goes around the, I think the third turn, the front wheel comes off and the front of the car smashes down and a bunch of the fender came off. And Jerry turned and said, well, there goes that deal.

[Adam Carolla]

Well, I saw it at Joey Cavallari's shopping rebuilt several months ago, just down to the tube frame of it. Basically what the car looks like when it's completely stripped is it's like if somebody took a bunch of EMT tubing, which is solid conduit, not flex conduit, just solid tube conduit, right. And just made it into an outline of a car, like just welded it all together and you could stay in the middle of it and pick it up.

[Suzanne Rico]

That's exactly right.

[Adam Carolla]

Essentially what it looks like. Like if someone is doing an art installation and they were just giving 3 quarter inch steel tubing and they go, oh, make it into the shape of a 917 Middle School shop class project.

[Suzanne Rico]

Is what it looks like, you would never know it's the car.

[Adam Carolla]

And I remember looking at it and I was going, oh, looks like somebody did a pretty shitty repair here because that's some bad welding. And he was like, oh no, that's it. That was the welding.

[Suzanne Rico]

That's right.

[Adam Carolla]

Because they were trying to weld magnesium or something and they couldn't really figure it out in 1969.

[Suzanne Rico]

Well, that's what Jerry's guy Sam Cabilio is for. He goes around, he looks at those welds and says, that's the real weld right there. How he knows?

[Adam Carolla]

Well, because it's shitty.

[Suzanne Rico]

Yeah, maybe.

[Adam Carolla]

So then he gets it and he takes it to Mecham.

[Suzanne Rico]

Right. Well, now. Well, there's a lot of years in between.

[Adam Carolla]

A lot of years.

[Suzanne Rico]

We had it at the track a bunch. I've driven the car.

[Adam Carolla]

You have?

[Suzanne Rico]

Oh, yeah, yeah. Jerry would take go to the track every April. We'd get a lot of his cars on the track, my cars, and then some other friends at Willow. At Willow, Yep. We had that car, I think Las Vegas Speedway, too, if I'm not mistaken. Doing laps there in it. But, you know. And it's very easy to drive. It sounds amazing. But the big fear is always that you downshift. You skip a gear. Downshifting, you go from. I think it was like fourth somehow. You went fourth to first.

[Adam Carolla]

Right.

[Suzanne Rico]

Which apparently is easy. You would blow the engine. And if you blow that engine, that's big money.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah. Somebody stole some of those engines a while back. There's a whole controversy about stealing those engines. And they're hundreds of thousands of dollars.

[Suzanne Rico]

Bashak Polak had some, I think. Is it David Piper? There's a story about a journalist driving David Piper's car and blowing the engine and then David Piper charging him. Do I have that right?

[Adam Carolla]

I'll go for that. Piper's the guy who was a 917 driver back in the day, right? Yeah. Somebody stole. Literally, they were crated and there was a few of those engines. And it's something with the Pelican Parts. San Diego guy. But anyway, there's a whole big story about stolen 917 engines and there in crates and everything. But there were not millions. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. So lots of fun in between. Now it's time to sell. I don't really. I can't get inside of Seinfeld's head. But to me, I would just never sell that car because why?

[Suzanne Rico]

Right.

[Adam Carolla]

But he turns it over every once in a while, right?

[Suzanne Rico]

Well, he's got a very big collection.

[Unnamed Caller]

Yeah.

[Suzanne Rico]

He was on the show talking about his 983, which he loves more, you know. And, you know, I always talk about there are three stages in life. There is the dreaming of stuff, then there's the acquiring of stuff. And then as we get on in years, there's the getting rid of stuff.

[Adam Carolla]

Right?

[Suzanne Rico]

And I suspect, and this is just me, I suspect he's in that getting rid of stuff stage and curating this vast collection, because it is a vast collection.

[Adam Carolla]

So it goes to Mecham.

[Suzanne Rico]

Right.

[Adam Carolla]

People think Mecham's like an unlikely auction house for that car. But less and less these days. There used to be you know what it was with auctions? It was the same as it is with celebrities doing TV shows and commercials. People would go like, that guy's a movie star. He doesn't do commercials. He's not going to be on a TV show. He can do a commercial in Japan where no one will see it, but he's not going to tarnish his reputation. There were rules. Now there's no rules. You just do what celebrity would. Do a movie, do a TV show, do a commercial. It doesn't really matter. And there used to be rules for cars. Like, that car is not worthy of this auction. What they sell over there is Fieros, right. With a V6.

[Suzanne Rico]

We're going to Amelia. We're going to Gooding in August.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah, we got to go Gooding. And there was also rm, and there was like, a handful, but they wouldn't. You wouldn't take a car like that and bring it to Mecham.

[Suzanne Rico]

Yes.

[Adam Carolla]

Mecham's like a muscle car thing for meathead guys, in my opinion. Right. But things have changed. Things. The lines are blurred now. You can really take anything anywhere, right?

[Suzanne Rico]

I think so.

[Adam Carolla]

So the car goes to Mecham, and by the way, it's sort of the. You know, it's like a fat chick with the blowjob. Like, they're gonna try harder. You know what I mean?

[Suzanne Rico]

It's exactly like that.

[Adam Carolla]

It's exactly like, everyone wants a supermodel, but they're not putting the effort in. You want the effort. You want calories burnt.

[Suzanne Rico]

You know, I guess if that's how you want to think of Dana Mecham.

[Adam Carolla]

I'm not talking about getting a blow job from Dana Meek. What I'm saying is.

[Suzanne Rico]

It sounds like you are.

[Adam Carolla]

It was a metaphor, Spike. He's gonna work that much harder. He was get that car.

[Suzanne Rico]

As I understand it, he. He wanted the car the most.

[Adam Carolla]

That's what I'm saying. That's where the blowjob analogy comes in. That's what you want.

[Suzanne Rico]

So he blew Seinfeld, right?

[Adam Carolla]

Yes. He gets the car, and they put it up there, and it's. Now it stalls out at 25 million.

[Suzanne Rico]

Right.

[Adam Carolla]

And I tell people all the time, look, you don't just take a car like that with no reserve. It's got a reserve. The reserve's got to be. Look, we're not taking less than 25 for this or 22 or whatever it is. But the real question is, was the auction legit?

[Suzanne Rico]

In what sense?

[Adam Carolla]

Was it a car that rolled up and was going to be auctioned off that day.

[Suzanne Rico]

Yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

Or was it one of those people bidding it up inside of the room to get it to this number, but was probably never going to be sold?

[Suzanne Rico]

You really need to ask Dana Mecham.

[Adam Carolla]

Because you don't know.

[Suzanne Rico]

How would I know that? But, you know, I'm so distrustful of if that's even the right word. But I don't trust any auction house. Oh, yeah, I think most cars go off like that.

[Adam Carolla]

Oh, really?

[Suzanne Rico]

Most cars go off like that? Yeah. I've seen the shill bidding, you know, out in Monterey. Yeah, yeah, of course. But what I know is only what Jerry said in the show, which is the car was sold after the fact. I was as surprised as everyone else was when it was hammered up.

[Adam Carolla]

Sold. Or the day you think, no, no.

[Suzanne Rico]

That I'm not so sure about. That I'm not so sure about.

[Adam Carolla]

And where are we?

[Suzanne Rico]

I don't know.

[Adam Carolla]

It's gotta be above, because if it's.

[Suzanne Rico]

Below, I can tell you Jerry is very happy.

[Adam Carolla]

He's happy.

[Suzanne Rico]

He's very happy. And he's looking for cars.

[Adam Carolla]

Again, I was looking to buy more.

[Suzanne Rico]

He'S looking to buy more.

[Adam Carolla]

I tell him to look at my 935, but he won't do that.

[Suzanne Rico]

I think he sold his 935.

[Adam Carolla]

He sold his 935?

[Suzanne Rico]

Yeah. Again, I think he was curating his race car collection, knowing he's going to be at the racetrack a little less. But there's plenty of race cars left. Plenty of race cars left.

[Adam Carolla]

And he wants. Well, he does streetcars and race cars. Kind of interesting.

[Suzanne Rico]

Yeah. It's just. I would guess if you're at the track once a year and now it's starting to look like once every couple of years, why not put this out, back out to the world? He really feels like a caretaker for a lot of these models that are historically significant. And maybe he feels like it's time to release this stuff back into the world for someone to get out in the racetrack so people can see it.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah, I agree. At a certain point, you have enough money, you're shorter on time than you are on money. And then you start thinking about legacy, and then you think about your custodian and your stewardship, and you kind of want people just to see it out there.

[Suzanne Rico]

Or it's as simple as looking in your garage and going, I'm not using these two things. It's time to get them out of here. I mean, that's how I curate my collection. I'm Always, like, if I haven't driven this in a year, it's just gathering dust. It's. It's time to go. Let someone else enjoy it. Let's put something new in that spot that I'm excited about.

[Adam Carolla]

Speaking of that, you got a 66 Triumph Bonneville motorcycle.

[Suzanne Rico]

Yes.

[Adam Carolla]

That is at Bring a trailer as we speak.

[Suzanne Rico]

Right.

[Adam Carolla]

And the money is going toward what?

[Suzanne Rico]

100% of the money is going towards Palisades High School booster club to help rebuild.

[Adam Carolla]

Was that partially burned?

[Suzanne Rico]

Yeah, it was. 30% of it was burned. It's still closed, but they need money for the new space. They need. All of the equipment was burned. All the sports equipment was burned. They need a ton of money for all of it. So this wasn't something I was thinking about selling. This is my personal bike. But I believe in the same year Jerry got his 917 and I thought I would just donate it to the cause and throw it up. There it is. God, I love this bike. Sonny Nutter and I have been working on this bike forever. Every year I would give him notes right before summertime and we would try to perfect it. And about four years ago, we got it right. We put breathers on the carbs there. We changed the fuel cocks. And the thing has been starting in a couple of years for like three years. It's the greatest.

[Adam Carolla]

Sonny Nutter was my gay porn name. I don't know if you knew that. So I don't know if it's the same guy or.

[Suzanne Rico]

He's a flat track racer.

[Adam Carolla]

He's a flat sonny nutter.

[Suzanne Rico]

He's 80 now, but he raced flat track. And he's the guy who works on this bike. And a lot of great vintage bikes down at Santa Monica airport.

[Adam Carolla]

Flat track is great.

[Suzanne Rico]

See the little cool mirrors he did on the side there? I absolutely love this bike. And this ride down to the airport for this photo session really gave me pangs of regret. But if you're lucky enough to win this auction, you can take delivery. Right on my show, Spike's car radio.

[Adam Carolla]

I didn't know you were such a bike guy. Such a Porsche guy and the car guy, but not the bike guy. I was a bike guy.

[Suzanne Rico]

Yeah, I started on motorcycles. I got a Hodaka combat wombat when I was 12 years oldaka.

[Adam Carolla]

Wow.

[Suzanne Rico]

Two stroke. It wasn't my two stroke. Yeah, my uncle gave it to me to use and that kicked off a love affair with motorcycles, Hondas and Kawasakis and this guy. And now I'm driving a lot of electric motorcycles. Motorcycles. Yeah. But I try to stay. I mean, I have kids and I try not to ride a lot.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah, I get it. I had motorcycles. And at some point you have kids and you make money and you, you know, whatever and you just sort of.

[Suzanne Rico]

It's not the money, it's the key.

[Adam Carolla]

Start now. But I just. No, I mean, you have enough money. See, I was telling someone this today. I had to drive a pickup truck because that's what I did for a living. And they're always shitty Japanese mini trucks, which you don't look cool in. It sucks on a first date, it just sucks. But I didn't have the money to own a sports car and a truck. So at some point I realized you could get a Ninja 600 and look cool.

[Suzanne Rico]

Right.

[Adam Carolla]

Even though it didn't really cost that much because I bought one that was like four years old or whatever and it wasn't that much. But no one knew I was a poor person when I was pulling up on my Ninja 600.

[Suzanne Rico]

Did you have that bike?

[Adam Carolla]

I had two Ninja 600.

[Suzanne Rico]

That was my first cafe style bike.

[Adam Carolla]

Really?

[Suzanne Rico]

Yeah, yeah, but you're exactly right. I just thought, wow, with my waiter money, I think I was waiting tables and going to college. I could actually buy this new.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah. I'm trying to think, do you still have that bike? No. It's funny, couple things. I bought my first ninja 600 in what would have been. They must have started the first gen, maybe. No, second generation of Ninja must have been like, I don't know, 83, 84, something like that. It was good. It's like a cafe. It handled really well.

[Suzanne Rico]

Yep.

[Adam Carolla]

I always like bikes that handled well. Like I didn't like the laid back sort of choppery cruiser, you know, I want to be leaning forward, not tilted back. You know, I felt like tilted back was no way to ride a motorcycle. And so I had a Ninja 600 and I bought it used like through the recycler or whatever and some lady in Burbank and I was buying the bike and I said 85 is the first year. I must have bought it like 86. But I bought for this lady and she's like, yeah, I'm selling it for my son. He's going to kill himself on this thing. He is going to kill himself. I'm not going to let him ride this death trap. And I'm like, yeah, I'm buying it now though. She's like, for sure, yeah, it's a death trap and he's going to kill himself. And I'M like, stop saying that. Stop saying that. You're getting into my head. And that was my first one. And then I wrote it for a year or two and I sold it. And then I bought a second Ninja 600.

[Suzanne Rico]

They're so good.

[Adam Carolla]

Which they handle. They handle well. Put a Kirker pipe on it.

[Suzanne Rico]

Yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

Four to one. And that guy, what was a weird thing, that one was another recycler item. And me and the other dude showed up at the same time to a guy in an apartment building. And they looked. The guy looked at, like, both of us, and he was like, who got here first? And we're like, we got here at the same time. And he goes, okay, you got the cash? And I go, yeah, I got the cash. And he says, the other guy, you got the cash? He goes, yeah, I got the cash. I go, the guy just goes, I guess we'll flip a coin now. He should have won. I'll start the bidding at 1200, which is where we're at. Let's go up. And he flipped the coin, and I won. And the guy left. And the guy's like, all right. And I was like, listen, I don't have the cash. I said, I had the cash, but I don't have the cash. But I'll get you the cash. I got that bike. Sold it to a dude in the recycler. Showed up with his girlfriend, got on it. She followed him in the car. He crashed it down my street.

[Suzanne Rico]

Wow.

[Adam Carolla]

I watched him crash it. Wow. And then he pushed it back to my house.

[Suzanne Rico]

It's the red, white, and livery.

[Adam Carolla]

Red, white, red, white, and blue. The really cool blue.

[Suzanne Rico]

It's unreal. I still remember my first ride in my hometown in West Bridgewater. Going on, looking down at the Speedo, going, I'm going 90. What the hell? I had been driving, like, a Honda Nighthawk. 450.

[Adam Carolla]

Wow.

[Suzanne Rico]

So just a simple, inexpensive bike. And I got on this Kawasaki and I went, oh, my life just changed.

[Adam Carolla]

They handle, man.

[Suzanne Rico]

I rode that in the snow in Boston while I was going to snow. Yeah, Yeah. I took it to work where I was a bartender at Legal Seafoods. And I would ride in the snow slowly, but I'd ride it in the snow because I was saving money.

[Adam Carolla]

Jesus Christ.

[Suzanne Rico]

It was good. And then, you know, Boston to the Cape for the summer. Working and waiting tables down there, back and forth. It was fun.

[Adam Carolla]

Motorcycles, work. They'll get you around.

[Suzanne Rico]

Yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

And I could remember, like, I had a Honda 404, and I would put. I would put like, 60 cents of gas in, maybe not like, maybe a quarter.

[Suzanne Rico]

Right.

[Adam Carolla]

Like, I mean, gas was, you know, 92 cents a gallon or something. I'd just go and get half a gallon.

[Suzanne Rico]

Yeah, yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

Like, literally give the guy change.

[Suzanne Rico]

Exactly right.

[Adam Carolla]

And put half a gallon in that thing.

[Suzanne Rico]

I would always think too, like, can I survive this ride? So it would be Friday night at three in the morning, and I'd go, I wonder, after going out with my friends, I wonder if I could get down to the Cape for tomorrow morning. I wonder if I can survive that drive. Yeah, I had a weird death wish on that bike. But still, I don't know about you, I've never crashed. I've been riding since 12 and never had a crash.

[Adam Carolla]

I had a couple of. Couple of near misses, but I've always been. And I always rode, you know, aggressively. Like, I always split lanes and I was always, always go right up to the front of the signal, and I was always like, making time. Like, I drove with a kind of urgency. Like, here we go. Like, let's go. You know. And so I was always. I was always trying to make good time, but I was never. I had some close calls, but I never got clipped and I never anything. I've had maybe one of the few people who's had three motorcycles towed.

[Suzanne Rico]

Wow.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah.

[Suzanne Rico]

That's hard to do.

[Adam Carolla]

It's hard to do, but I did it. I had three motorcycles. Toad. Yeah.

[Suzanne Rico]

Well, it's also, you know, Leno. I, you know, I always ask motorcycle riders, how do you live on a motorcycle? And he's crashed a couple of times recently, but he said, you never get on a bike when you're late. Great tip. Super. That's a super tip. My friend Scuzz in high school, who lost brother in a motorcycle accident, his tip was also instrumental. He said, you're gonna die in intersections. He goes, you extra eyes every intersection you're in. I found that to be a great tip. And then I thought, I've beaten the odds. I can hear your listeners out there, viewers, going, yeah, now you're getting older. You're right. I've kind of beaten the odds. And I've slowed down to kind of eliminate most of the risk.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah, I think for me, I would. I've thought about it, like, I would go out with you and Leno on a Sunday and go to the rock store, like, with a group of dudes. I think that's kind of the way to do it, using it as your daily commuter, come hell or high water. I used to ride in the rain and stuff. Like, all the time. Like, because it's your only mode of transportation. Riding in the snow, riding in the rain. I would definitely do the go out for a group ride on a Sunday kind of thing, because that feels better.

[Suzanne Rico]

There's a guy in my neighborhood, I have a lot of lawyers, apparently, in my neighborhood, there's a guy who I thought was a drug dealer who's driving an old Suzuki enduro bike with, like, a bin on the back, a plastic bin, who finally came into my driveway and said, I bet you're wondering who I am. I know you've seen me all these years. I want to just say hello. He's 74 years old. He starts telling me about his bike. Over 300,000 miles on this bike, and he's got another one like it.

[Adam Carolla]

Wow.

[Suzanne Rico]

And he said he rides every single day here in California. So a combined 600,000 miles delivering documents from courthouses to lawyers.

[Adam Carolla]

Right, right. Those guys.

[Suzanne Rico]

And he's like, I'm not slowing down. I mean, he's never crashed either. Insane story, though. 74.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah. I had an Enduro, too. It was a Suzuki, too. I had an enduro. I had a Honda XR250. Red racer. An Elsinore. Had an Elsinore 250. Like, dirt bike.

[Suzanne Rico]

Oh, yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

There's a picture of me riding a wheelie in my backyard.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yes.

[Adam Carolla]

I'm fucking riding in my backyard of my North Hollywood house on my Elsinore 250.

[Suzanne Rico]

See, to me, that really. That. That's my son James. Right now, he's doing this on electric bikes. But that is living. That, to me, is living.

[Adam Carolla]

And there's another. I don't. There's another picture of me with my truck and my Honda 404 wearing my bathrobe in my other apartment, but I didn't have any Ninja. But it's weird trying to ride wheelies in your backyard because it's very limited backyard. So you gotta shut it down pretty fast.

[Suzanne Rico]

Yeah, it's impressive. Wow. Oh, yeah, that bike. Those are great bikes.

[Adam Carolla]

404 is a great bike, man.

[Suzanne Rico]

Really great bike. See, there was a Honda dealership in my tiny town of 6,000 people, Betancourt Honda. So I only knew these Honda bikes. We would just ride our bikes there and just dream of being able to buy them.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah, I don't know what. I don't know what that is, but the mini bike, the go kart, the motorcycle, the dirt bike, Like, I would just stare at them and go. I would stare at it when I was 10. I would look at a YZ80, Yamaha YZ80 with knobbies and travel on the rear suspension stuff. And I'd just stare at them.

[Suzanne Rico]

That's for me.

[Adam Carolla]

Damn, I gotta get that. I gotta get my hands on one of those things.

[Suzanne Rico]

That's the obsession. That's the beginning of this whole thing. Mine actually started with lawnmowers. Cause I was mowing lawns. So I really wanted the better lawnmowers that were self driving or self pulling in.

[Adam Carolla]

But were you now? So let's explore this quickly, which is if you go to Utah and you go to Salt Lake City, you see a lot of people, like on the straight and narrow, and then you see people with super aggressive piercings and tattoos and stuff. And you're like, oh, that's someone who someone was trying to force to be a Mormon for too long. And now they escaped the reservation and they've gone apeshit crazy. Like, you'll never see more crew cuts and then crazy tattoos and piercings than Salt Lake City. Because those are people that pushed the other direction. They were trying to be pushed one direction, they ended up pushing the other direction. I grew up in a vacuum of tools. Cars, mini bikes, dirt bikes. There was nothing. I wanted it, but I never got hold of it. And then when I got older, I went nuts. Because I'm like, now, now I need the tools. Now I need this stuff. There's a kind of healthy relationship where you have access to stuff. So you don't. It works that way sexually. It works that way with food. You know what I mean? Just, you're sort of healthy. Like when I would go into people's houses and they had Ding Dongs and Ho Hos in their house, I'd go in their pantry. I go like, oh, my God. Oh, my God. Give me that, give me that. And they'd go, relax, relax, relax. It'll be there when we're done playing basketball. I'm like, what are you talking about? Get some now. Because I had an unhealthy relationship with him because I was deprived. And then that happened with building and tools.

[Suzanne Rico]

Exactly right.

[Adam Carolla]

Were you deprived? Like, did your dad know Spike wants a minibike and he should have one.

[Suzanne Rico]

The name was Michael back then, but my mom was an emergency room nurse. So when a kid came in, had their scalp ripped off by a Briggs and Straight, no more Go Karts, no more motorcycles, no guns, no anything. It was around me in West Bridgewater. My friends had guns. They would go hunting. They were canoes. I think we were allowed canoes. That was it. But that was it. No motorcycles. So that's why my uncle, when he dropped off that Hodaka combat wombat, he said, I'm just gonna put it here and tell your dad and mom that you're just there to start it. I just need you to start it every once in a while.

[Adam Carolla]

Wink.

[Suzanne Rico]

And they bought that lie.

[Adam Carolla]

Wow.

[Suzanne Rico]

You know, I would push the bike around when they weren't home, out into the woods and ride.

[Adam Carolla]

You know, there's just something I. It's either in you or it's not. And it's weird. Like, I. I could remember being in this shop and I had a 60s era kind of cool go kart, you know, with the slicks on it and the. And the chainsaw engine on the back. But, like, there's some really cool vintage go karts, twin engine ones, you know, two stroke, you know, blah, blah, blah. Not the Briggs and Stratton, but like the cool stuff, you know. And I had one back there, and I think Jimmy's son Kevin was over here million years ago. He was probably 7 or 8. And I saw him, like, walk to the back of the shop, and I physically saw him just step over the go kart and keep walking. And I was like, you don't want to stop at the go kart. And he's like, huh? I was like, the go kart. He's like, oh, yeah. Why? When I was 8, if there's someone had a go kart sitting in the back of their shop, I'd be like, what's going on with this go kart? What are we doing with this go kart? Can I have this go? Can I ride this go kart? What's going on with the go kart? Like, I would have gone nuts.

[Suzanne Rico]

Absolutely bonkers, right? I brought home a taco mini bike, and my boys went crazy. They loved it.

[Adam Carolla]

Oh, they loved it.

[Suzanne Rico]

They absolutely loved it. Go kart. They love anything on two wheels they ride now. They love it all.

[Adam Carolla]

Oh, really?

[Suzanne Rico]

So I think it's just, you know, it's just either it's in you or it's not in you.

[Adam Carolla]

It is in you or it's not in you. The people do a lot of like. Well, my dad owned a transmission shop, so my dad didn't know shit, and I'm into it. My son has been dragged around the country to vintage races and professional Trans Am races with me driving. He's fine with it, but he doesn't care. He literally is 18, doesn't own a car. And I've said to him, do you want a car? He's like, I'm good now. That's now he sprung from my loins. Yeah, my loins. Been exposed to all of it. Fine with it. Doesn't need a car.

[Suzanne Rico]

Excuse me. It sounds like he's happy.

[Adam Carolla]

He sounds like he's happy.

[Suzanne Rico]

He wants to be. My car represented me getting away from my parents.

[Adam Carolla]

Yes.

[Suzanne Rico]

Who I love. But still I needed to get away.

[Adam Carolla]

You needed something. No, it's true.

[Suzanne Rico]

I need to get to a city. Cause I knew I was gonna be happier in a bigger city. Boston, New York.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah. If I had a 75 inch TV with 7,000 channels on it, I might not need to get on my red race or take off.

[Suzanne Rico]

He loves you and he wants to stay close and that's nice.

[Adam Carolla]

It's a happy thought.

[Suzanne Rico]

Look at what you've done.

[Adam Carolla]

That's a happy thought. Spike. All right, let me give you a plug. Spike, the Triumph. All the years I've known you always just thought you were a car guy and kind of a port with an emphasis on Porsche. We've never really gotten whole motorcycle part of this.

[Suzanne Rico]

Here we are.

[Adam Carolla]

And here we are. All right. Oh, real quick. Just cause I was talking about it. My audience is going to be mad. When Jerry was making fun of me for not looking at my 9:35. I know you're being polite, but did.

[Suzanne Rico]

He do that in my show?

[Adam Carolla]

Yes.

[Suzanne Rico]

Oh, he did.

[Adam Carolla]

That's on him. Isn't that on him? That's gotta be on him. Spike. You can't just go up to registers and go, what am I going to do once I see the car? How's that going to change it? It's a car. It's a 9 35.

[Suzanne Rico]

You know Jerry and you know, everything he says is a bit. It's all.

[Adam Carolla]

Is everything a bit?

[Suzanne Rico]

Everything's a bit. I try to explain to my wife when she gets mad at me. I'm going, I'm just trying a bit. I'm just trying something. Don't take it personally. I think there might be comedy there in wife behavior, but maybe not.

[Adam Carolla]

No, I agree, people. My sister should get that too. Just a bit. Call your kids Nazis.

[Suzanne Rico]

Anything he's saying on my show is a bit.

[Adam Carolla]

It's a bit. Yeah, all right, all right. Well, good. De Bonneville Triumph six six on Bring a trailer. All the proceeds going to the Palisades high.

[Suzanne Rico]

That's right.

[Adam Carolla]

100%.

[Suzanne Rico]

100% even. Bring a trailer. Randy Nonenberg is donating his fees. Gianni Cabiglio who took all these great pictures in Sonny Nutter. Everybody's waived their fees to make this happen. So thank you, folks doing the Lord's work.

[Adam Carolla]

All right, we'll take a break. We'll bring in mayhem. We'll do some news right after this. Homes.com knows that when it comes to home shopping, it's never just about the house or condo. It's about the home. And what makes a home is more than just a house or property. It's the location, it's the neighborhood. If you have kids, it's also schools, nearby, parks, transportation options, all the above. That's why homes.com goes above and beyond to bring home shoppers the in depth information they need to find the right home. And when I say in depth, I'm talking about deep. That's right. Each listing features comprehensive information about the neighborhood, complete with a video guide. They also have details about local schools with test scores, state rankings and student to teacher ratio. They even have an agent directory with the sales history of each agent. So when it comes to finding a home, not just a house, this is everything you need to know all in one place. Homes.com. homes.com. We've done your homework. Oh, hydro. Love these guys. Listen, the rowing machine is great. I like, you know, they have pretty cool screen with lots of good stuff going on. But you can also just like watch TV and row. You don't have to leave your living room. And it only takes 20 minutes. And it's like a full body workout. So, you know, people want to hit the gym, but they don't always get around to hitting the gym. But you cannot get around your hydro. It's right there. It's waiting for you. And you just go at it. Like I said, as little as 20 minutes and you get a full body workout. I mean, you hit 86% of your muscles with this bad boy. That's right. So do it. Feel good about yourself. You're working the legs, you're working the back, you're working the glutes, you're working the shoulders and the delts and the traps and all the abbreviated muscle names. Get out there and get your hydro, would you, everyone? And look, whether you're training for a marathon or just trying to stay in shape, hydro meets you where you're at. It's hydro, right, Dawson?

[Spike Farriston]

Kick off the new year with a full body workout, all from the comfort of home with hydro. Head over to hydro.com and use code ADAM to save up to $475 off your hydro Pro Rower. That's Hydro W. Code Adam. To save up to $475. Hydro.com code Adam. It's time to check Adam's voicemail.

[Adam Carolla]

Hey, Adam. I had Dan Hill's album in the 70s. The next song after Sometimes Only Touch.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Is about him being biracial.

[Adam Carolla]

He's half black. See you later.

[Spike Farriston]

You can leave us a message at 888-634-1744.

[Adam Carolla]

What? Dan Hill, biracial. I didn't know that. Mayhem's in here. He's got the news. At first, I have to address something which is I like to study patterns and trends and like try to figure out which way we're going, you know, and it's always people trying to manipulate people to get them to do what they want them to do or to keep their money or whatever it is. And I'll give you an example. We just went through Covid and Black Lives Matter. Oh, yeah, they were both horseshit. They were both basically a lie. Now, Covid existed and black people exist, but the whole way they won, it was really just to prod you into doing what they wanted you to do and shaming you. Very shame based. Because the deal was you were racist if you weren't down with this and if you weren't down with COVID you were dangerous and also racist. They worked some race into Covid as well. And I realized it's all just a ruse to manipulate and get you to do what they want you to do. And I was saying to Dr. Drew the other day, I said, you know, it's funny, they kind of gave up. Covid's gone. And all the news is basically, oh, surprise, surprise. You fuckers lied about everything. Fine. Even the New York Times is like, oh, we were misled about the COVID origins. Yeah, you were misled, you fucking idiots. Also, I like the idea that the legacy media just reports shit that we all knew five years ago. Like, literally, if you listen to AM radio, you knew all the shit they're talking about four and a half, five years ago. Now they're coming around to, hey, is everyone sitting down? Yeah, we knew all this shit, you fucking idiots. It was you guys that bought into it. But okay, we're not going to take any victory lapse. But I was saying that Dr. Drew is. We're kind of done with the COVID stuff and we're done with the race baiting stuff. We're not done with it, but we put a pin in it. Like we go, hey, race hustlers. And CNN and Msnbc let's just put a pause on the race hustling for a second because Black Lives Matter didn't really work out for the hustlers.

[Unnamed Caller]

Just put it on the black burner.

[Adam Carolla]

Just put up. Put it on the black burner. We're now, now into the classism, the classism these billionaires, because Doge and Elon Musk brought it up. Now watch. Everybody who was crying racism 10 minutes ago is like, these billionaires come in here, they want to own everything and want to take money out of your pocket so they can enrich your fat cat friends. These billions. So now it's all. It's not millionaires, billionaires, it's billionaires. And it's all a class war now. So they've shifted from the race war to the class war. And that's why you're seeing it everywhere. You can't turn on CNN or MSNBC without them mentioning this billionaire. They'll do a little race. They'll go, this white billionaire, white. Pardon us for being white, bitch. But this white millionaire wants to come in here and tell you. All right, so it's all. So I sent out an innocuous tweet a couple of days ago after doing two shows. Now, let me explain to everyone, to all my detractors out there, guess who worked yet another weekend, bitches? This guy, the rich white guy. The rich white guy works every fucking weekend. So that's part of why I'm rich, because I work every fucking weekend. But I send out the most innocuous tweet in the world. I mean, I don't even know how more innocuous you can get with a tweet than what I wrote. And so I. Late night. Oh, yeah, well, the reason it was 1:22am is because I did two fucking shows at a club in Arizona and didn't get back to the hotel until 1am and the tweet reads, I have a thought. How about everyone take care of themselves and their families and not rely on the government? That's all been saying it my whole life. I don't think the government does a great job of taking care of people. I ate the government food when I was in junior high and grade school, part of the free lunch program. It was slop. It was prison food and saw my mom trying to get by on welfare and food stamps and not a great life, just the minimum. So I'm suggesting that people take care of their own shit and that would include their family. I woke up the following morning to see like tons of Action on my Twitter, People angry. People tweeting, clapping back at me. And I was like, first off, this was so innocuous and had a high ball after the show.

[Unnamed Caller]

Hey, oh, hey.

[Suzanne Rico]

Oh.

[Adam Carolla]

I was like, I don't know what is all of this? I don't know what created this. Did somebody hack into my account and write something wildly controversial? And I literally sat my hotel room in Arizona. I was like, what is. What's what? Everyone's upset, getting tons of action. The things at 6 million views. What I write, I got. I was. It was like. It was like. It was like I passed someone and said, oh, I passed. Someone said, have a nice day. And then later on someone, you know, that guy's really pissed. And I'm like, what? What I do? I didn't know. I just said, hi. I didn't do anything. I just said, take care of yourself, take care of your family. Don't rely on the government. And everyone went fucking batshit crazy. And my whole new world order is I don't have any reverse gear for shit. I'm right about you. People can all suck my medium sized cock. You want me to. You want me to what? Walk away from the a normal comment. It's basically like me saying, hey, hey, if you're fat, how about diet and exercise? And now I gotta walk it back because you fat asses are pissed off that I said it.

[Unnamed Caller]

Fuck you.

[Adam Carolla]

So people started writing in and they're like, you gotta. What about the government? So I was like, listen, bitches, I pay a ton in taxes. Don't fucking try to pull this shit on me. And then I had people going, give.

[Unnamed Caller]

Back the PPP loan and call us.

[Adam Carolla]

All right, okay, so here's the deal. During COVID they handed. They shut my business down. During COVID the government, your beloved government, shut my business down for no fucking reason. But they did it anyway. Okay? Then I had my business shut down and I still had many employees. Not just the podcast, but the movie making and others. I probably had 20 employees. I felt responsible for those employees. So I kept paying every employee. No employee missed a paycheck. During COVID we moved around, we did remote, we came back, we did some hybrid thing. We did everything we could do, but nobody missed a paycheck check. Then at some point, I don't know when, but after we were into Covid, my money manager, who does all the. Pays all the taxes and does all the stuff, told me, I think we're eligible for one of these PPE loans because you have a small business and they shut you down. And I said to him, fine, do whatever you can do. And then somebody tweeted that I took this money and I never paid it back, and it was $300,000, even though it wasn't $300,000. And then I wrote the guy back and I just said it was $300,000. I paid 300,000 quarterly in taxes, so fuck off. And then he was like, you don't think you should be. You're taking money from the government. And I just said, hey, bitch, how much you. And then everyone goes, it doesn't matter how much you spend, the tax. It doesn't matter. Why doesn't it matter if you pay the government? One guy said to me, I just kept saying to him, tell me what you pay in taxes or shut the fuck up, pussy. And he goes, I paid 12,000. I said, I paid that this weekend. So you got a long way to go, bro. You got a long way to go before you catch up to me. And then I said, don't you care about the kids? You should pay more. Here's the deal. If you pay the government $2 million and they give you 300,000, then they're still up 1.7. But if you pay them 12 grand and they give you 300 grand, well, then they're down $288,000. That's the way I look at. My whole thing is I pay a shitload in taxes. Fuck right off when you try to guilt me. By the way, you don't pay a shitload in taxes. So what are you coming after me for, bitch? And I'll tell you why you're ashamed because you're not successful, so fuck off. Calling me racist didn't work. Shaming me for Covid is not going to work. And this fucking shit where I work harder than you and make more money than you, it's not going to work either. I don't give a fuck. I work hard. I pay a shitload in taxes. And if everyone paid what I paid in taxes, you'd have a golden fucking monorail taking you to work every day. But where's the one. There was some good. Some good emails coming in. Because this is, by the way, this is where you get people. You just. You hit them financially a little, and they feel super ashamed. And then they fucking turns to rage immediately. By the way, first things first, the government sucks. I don't trust the government for anything. So why this notion of, like, well, why not just pay your fair share? I do pay my fair share, bitch. Nothing comes out the other end. That's. That's number one. Where was that email, Andrew? We found it. Oh, you have it? Yeah.

[Spike Farriston]

The subject is fuck you. Pretty fucking dumb Twitter comment. It's really something that a rich Hollywood piece of trash would try and tell others how to live without the same resources Adam's Hollywood bitch ass has.

[Adam Carolla]

All right, hold on a second. Wait, is you talking Dawson or something?

[Spike Farriston]

No, let me say that sounds too real, huh?

[Adam Carolla]

The first ones I would get was like, oh, we're going to listen to a rich white guy tell us how to pick us up by our own bootstraps. And I was like, yeah, you should listen to me because I was fucking poor white guy. And then I got out of it, and, yeah, I'm a perfect guy to tell you how to do this because I grew up in poverty and now I'm not in poverty. So this sort of notion of, like, why should we listen to you? I don't know. I'm a carpenter. I've hung a lot of doors. You should listen to me when I'm telling you how to hang a door. And I grew up in poverty, and now I'm rich, and I just did it through hard work. So you. You could listen to me. I like when they start working in white guy. Like, I don't know what would. Neither. Okay, then listen to LeBron James if not. But, but, but I'm telling you how to get successful. That's all right. Sorry. Keep going.

[Spike Farriston]

The genius continues. Shut the fuck up and go live outside of the Hollywood bubble just for one minute. What a fucking idiot.

[Adam Carolla]

I just flew here southwest from Phoenix, by the way, so I'd say that's outside of it. Oh, yeah, but people. People get enraged.

[Spike Farriston]

I don't understand where the rage is coming from. How dare you tell people to just take care of their families themselves? What's wrong with that? What's wrong with that?

[Adam Carolla]

Some. Because they're. Because I shamed them, that's what. You can't shame these people. It's why they don't tell the black community, where are your dads? They just talk about white people. They've asked them where their fucking dads were. Then they would shame them, and then they would get angry and they would not vote for them. The shame came with this PPE loan that this guy brought up who's like a Kamala Harris campaign manager or whatever, and he wanted to know what about. He basically said, I'm relying on the government to prop up my podcast, which I'd like to I wish the government underwrote my podcast, but they do not. And I just told this guy, look, Douche, go back 30 years. In the last 30 years, you tell me the total you've paid in taxes, and then I'll tell you the total I've paid in taxes, and then you'll shut the fuck up, pussy. Stop fucking pointing fingers if you're not paying in. I mean, ultimately, we're talking about money. You're very concerned about this PPE money. How much have you paid in taxes? I'm not going to get lectured by fucking school teachers who paid eight grand in taxes last year when I pay eight grand a day. So shut the fuck up. And by the way, this is all we can do now. There is no backpedaling or apologizing. It's nothing. Just kiss my ass. But that got everyone fired up. I sent a tweet out about nothing. Take care of your shit and take care of your family. A zero thought of a tweet and started a class riot.

[Unnamed Caller]

Well, you do a lot of, you know, because you're place of privilege. You do get that so many people are, like, struggling so hard and it's so easy to hate on you.

[Adam Carolla]

Okay, but here's what I want to tell everybody. You can try as hard as you want to shame me. You can try as hard as you want. You can call me rich and white and Hollywood and elitist and out of touch. You can say whatever the fuck you want. It will never work. It'll never work because I know what I did. And I never went to college. And I dug ditches for a living. And I drove every piece of shit pickup truck there was. And I work every fucking weekend. There's no possible way you can shame me. That's the problem.

[Unnamed Caller]

You're a strange target. You're not a product of nepotism or nobody really handed you anything. You went out and got it, so.

[Adam Carolla]

It kind of discriminated against for being white.

[Unnamed Caller]

That's true.

[Adam Carolla]

When I was trying to be a fireman. So there is nothing you can get to certain guys, like Dr. Drew's dad was a doctor. You can probably hit him a little. Well, you went to college, you know, and your dad was a winner. And Mark Garagos, his dad was a lawyer.

[Unnamed Caller]

Yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

Now they're still successful and they still bust their ass, but you can get them a little bit. Right. But you can't get me. Yeah, there's nothing.

[Unnamed Caller]

I know there's nothing.

[Adam Carolla]

No one was poorer than me. Nobody was poor. Me. And nobody dug More fucking ditches than me, so it's impossible. But try keep trying to shame me, bitch. All right, Sorry. News. Where the fuck were we?

[Unnamed Caller]

All right, well, on that great note, let's get into the news. A Colombian Columbia professor marched for Hamas and received millions in public funding. In a concerning development at Columbia University, neuropsychologist Jennifer J. Manley, a faculty member, has come under scrutiny for her involvement in pro Hamas demonstrations on campus. Many participated in a human blockade aiming to prevent administrators from dismantling unauthorized encampments supporting Gaza. Over the past two decades, she'd been associated with over 100 million in federal research grants, much of which focuses on controversy.

[Adam Carolla]

But everyone is trying to tear me a new asshole is not interested in her hundreds of millions of dollars in federal gr. Worried about my pittance as a business owner and employer. Yeah, trying to stay open during COVID which was imposed upon me from the government. And then the government offered up this ppe.

[Unnamed Caller]

That's the best.

[Adam Carolla]

And I didn't even go after it. My. My accountant, who did his job went and said, look, if we're owed money or we can get money, then that's his job to go get it. Yes, yes, but by the way, I just survived a fire in Malibu. The same guy is talking to the insurance company, and he's going, hey, man, Adam's been displaced. How does the homeowner insurance work? Could you pay for a hotel room? That's not him ripping off the insurance company. That's him getting money that's owed to me or that was offered buy something I didn't create. Thank you.

[Unnamed Caller]

Yeah. Manley's work is lavishly funded by taxpayers. Most recently, the National Institute of Health gave her and her team $700,000 to produce work linking racism to brain disease.

[Adam Carolla]

Oh, yes.

[Unnamed Caller]

As a part of the grant, they published an article implying that blacks living in states of high lynching proportions experienced higher levels of C reactive protein crp, a factor associated with greater risk of dementia.

[Adam Carolla]

We have a clip. I think.

[Unnamed Caller]

Believe so.

[Adam Carolla]

We have clip.

[Suzanne Rico]

We shouldn't blame people for their lifestyle choices in terms of their brain health, but instead think about policies and how we can improve brain health from the public health perspective. Repairing intergenerational impact of racism and discrimination. That any biological differences are driven by racism and structural and social disparities that are not just in the lifetime of.

[Jon Cryer]

The person, but also prior to us.

[Suzanne Rico]

Being on this earth. Racism is essentially the pathway through which race is biologized.

[Jon Cryer]

I can't say that word today, but yeah, that's how it's done.

[Adam Carolla]

I kind of feel sorry for these people because they're sort of sad and brainwashed and weird and we fucking made a society that just makes them feel like every road. It's like racism is the hub and every spoke just goes to it. And they have to see everything through this prism. It's gotta be a shitty life.

[Unnamed Caller]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I looked into this and what she's describing in these things. Yeah, it affects the black community, but she's describing the fact that when you live in the hood, your grocery store is 7:11. Like you're, you know, you're. You're not eating the best food. You're not, you know, you don't have the means to do that. So as somebody who grew up poor, I just know that the cheapest food was the food that you got at some point.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah, I mean, I. I was talking to Cali Means about this in Phoenix, and we'll run that tape a little later. But this thing of, like, it takes a lot of money to eat right. You can eat. Right. It's just. You're eating hard boiled eggs and oranges and apples and shit. And kids just don't want to do that. I know they don't want to do it, but it's not like they don't have access to whatever I've told people. Best thing you can eat is eggs or just whip up a bunch of beans and rice and, you know, put up some. Put some bullion cubes in there, whatever. There's a way to do it. It's just. Nobody wants to do it, but. All right.

[Unnamed Caller]

Yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah.

[Unnamed Caller]

Well, going right into another story. The American Heart association opposes Texas snap, sugary food and drink regulations. In Texas, a heated debate is unfolding over a proposed bill that seeks to restrict the use of SNAP benefits, or food stamps, commonly known as food stamps, for purchasing sugary drinks and processed snacks.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah. So the problem is these corporations are corrupt. So the heart association, even the naacp, they've all been bought by Pepsi and Coca Cola and whatever. And you're going, why would this corporation be a champion of kids drinking soda? And the answer is they're bought and paid for so we can no longer listen to these institutions anymore. So. So there's a thing. It's interesting. They start these institutions, right? And then you have to. Then you listen to them. You go, oh, where did the virus from, COVID come from? And you go, I don't know. Did it come from that lab? No, the NIH says it came from a wet market. And you go, oh, the NIH said that. Oh, okay. And, yeah, so the cdc. And you're like, oh, they both think it came from a wet market, not from a lab. No, they said that, like, okay, they're corrupt. They're corrupt. It's like you start a group like the Southern Poverty Law Center. The Southern Poverty Law Center. And they go. They've declared Prageru a hate organization. Prageru's a hate organization. No, no, you're corrupt. You started a group and you're being purchased, and now you're doing the bidding of people. And dumb people listen to you. What happened to the 51 intelligence experts that all signed the document that said Hunter Biden's left? Those are all 51 guys, former FBI, former CIA. Those guys with security clearances. They all fought this or they're corrupt. So there's no more of this. Oh. But the National Heart Institute says.

[Unnamed Caller]

Well, the American Heart association is concerned about potential impacts of this bill on participation and population health. Imposing nutritional restrictions will interfere with the primary function of snap. Reducing hunger without reducing the root cause of chronic diseases.

[Adam Carolla]

Okay, first things first. I've said this a million times. Nobody needs to drink soda. No, I haven't drank a Coke in 34 years.

[Unnamed Caller]

Diet Coke's awesome, but, yeah, it's all bad. Yeah, it is bad.

[Adam Carolla]

I'm not a weirdo. I'm just like, Cokes, a bunch of sugar. Every person I know who lost a bunch of weight, and I go. And you run into them a year later, they go, how do you lose so much weight? They go, stop drinking soda. Started walking, and that's it. That's it. It's not good for you. It's certainly not good for poor people. Many poor people are obese. Many of these kids drink all this shit. And by the way, you don't need it, and we don't need to fund it. When I was on food stamps, my mom was on food stamps. We went in the store once, and she tried to buy cat food where they're food stamps. And the guy's like, yeah, you can't do that because that's for your cat. Yeah. Yeah. This shit's for you.

[Unnamed Caller]

Yes.

[Adam Carolla]

And we don't want you buying fucking cat food with your free fucking money we're giving you. So here's the whole deal. If we are paying for it, I know this shames a lot of people. We're allowed to make rules, and your kid's fat, and we don't want to pay for a soda. Yeah.

[Suzanne Rico]

Yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

So good don't do it.

[Unnamed Caller]

Well, the argument against it is personal choice. Government assistance shouldn't come with excessive restrictions.

[Adam Carolla]

Yes, it's all, listen, we've lost our way. When you put your hand out to get anything from somebody, then they get to dictate portions of what you're doing. That's it. Just like if you wanted to borrow my truck to move this weekend, then I could go fill it up before you bring it back. And then you go, why do I have to? You don't have to. You can go rent a fucking truck. Yeah, but if you want to borrow my truck, then you can fill it up on the way back. And I'm allowed to say that. You know what you're allowed to say? I'm not doing that. Yeah. And then I'm gonna go, good, then you don't drive my truck. That's how the world works, everybody.

[Unnamed Caller]

Yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah.

[Unnamed Caller]

They also say enforcement challenge might slow down checkout lines. Nutritional acts that some people don't access to healthier options.

[Adam Carolla]

Everyone has access to healthier options. It's called your sink. You can just drink water. Yeah, you can.

[Unnamed Caller]

I know.

[Adam Carolla]

You can eat a hard boiled egg. You can do all this stuff if you want. I don't want to do it. But you can.

[Unnamed Caller]

Yeah. And caloric necessity. They say if you're homeless or hungry, access to food, even crappy junk food is better than no food at all.

[Adam Carolla]

Soda is never better. No food at all. Yeah, it's never good. Kids are fat. Poor kids are fat. Someone's gonna have to start stepping up and telling the truth and shaming these fucking people. But by the way. Because they care about the kids. Yeah, that's the whole thing. Like I send my tweet out, it's like, oh, what about the kids in wheelchairs? You want them to go hungry? It's like, no, just stop relying on the fucking government. Yeah, just stop it.

[Unnamed Caller]

Well, we'll keep an eye on this Texas law. Let's see if it passes.

[Adam Carolla]

Oh, God, I don't know who these fucking people are.

[Unnamed Caller]

Well, I mean, look, it's a bunch of poor people that want to eat junk food, that are used to eating junk food or, you know, conditioned to eat junk food. And then now SNAP is going to come and change their whole paradigm.

[Adam Carolla]

Yes.

[Unnamed Caller]

Where they have to eat.

[Adam Carolla]

That's how it works. Yeah, that's how it works. You have to eat actual food.

[Unnamed Caller]

Yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

Or you cannot take free food from the government.

[Unnamed Caller]

Yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

You have a choice. You don't need to. If you're offended, buy it or you want free will. Then you could go in and you could use your EBT card to buy food and then use your own fucking money to buy your Dr. Pepper. How about that? That's an odd.

[Unnamed Caller]

I can't believe that that hasn't been a thing already.

[Adam Carolla]

Nobody says you can't have soda. They're just saying we don't want to pay for it.

[Unnamed Caller]

It occurred to me, though, that 711 takes EBT. It occurred to me that pretty much the same companies, Jack in a Box, these, like, junk food conglomerates, they make sure that Snap is accepted.

[Adam Carolla]

Oh, yeah. Listen. Okay, first off, nobody's your friend. All they want is money. Money. I don't care how you know. Who. Who was the spokesman for Coke for all those years? Bill Cosby. Have a Coke and a smile. Such a good dude. Isn't he a good dude? He's a good dude. What happened to Bill Cosby? He's such a good dude. I could see those commercials. He was laughing. I mean, that's the kind of guy you want babysitting your daughter, right? Because he's a good dude. He's got the Coke, he's got the smile. He's good. Dude, they're all good. Pharmaceuticals are good. The government's good. Everyone's good. Everyone just wants what's best for you.

[Unnamed Caller]

Yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah. Okay. Everybody, wake up. They want money.

[Unnamed Caller]

Yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

And whatever it is they're arguing about, it's not you. It's money.

[Unnamed Caller]

Yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

Okay. Oh, we got the Cosby Coke commercial. No, you need to watch.

[Unnamed Caller]

I've never seen this one.

[Adam Carolla]

Watch him dance, man. By the way, I'm adding a third dancer to my mix. Dawson, you got.

[Spike Farriston]

We got Ellen and Cosby.

[Adam Carolla]

Ellen dancing the beginning of her show. Cosby danced at the beginning of his show when Michelle Obama was dropping her podcast. A lot of dancing. All the bad people dance. It's a psychological thing, which is they know what they're thinking. They don't want you to know what they're thinking. And the best way to do that is to dance. Because when you dance, everyone thinks you're happy and nice.

[Unnamed Caller]

Yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

All right, here he is. Sorry. Attention, Pepsi drinkers. Introducing the new taste of Coca Cola. The best Coca Cola ever. That's all I'm going to say.

[Suzanne Rico]

In fact, that's all I have to say.

[Adam Carolla]

No more words. New Coke. This stuff is great. I'm sorry. Really, I'm sorry. So affable. Wish he was my dad. He's America's dad. He's a good dad. I bet there wasn't really coke in the can.

[Unnamed Caller]

Oh, man, that is creepy.

[Adam Carolla]

He's a good dude. So Michelle Obama dances and Ellen dances and Cosby dances because they're good, you know, they're happy good people who just like to dance. I love them some dancing.

[Unnamed Caller]

In other news, circling back to this one, the family of a New York City subway burning victim says Democrats need to answer for how the migrant suspect was allowed back into the U.S. oh.

[Adam Carolla]

You know what's crazy about this story?

[Unnamed Caller]

Yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

I don't know if this is crazy, but I feel like this is crazy. I was sitting around here and I was talking about removing debris. Debris. And then I was like, debris. I can't believe no one named their black kid Debris. It's a good name. Bree's a name. And they like to put the duh in front of everything, right? DeShawn and stuff like that. There's no girl. There should be a girl named Debris. It'd be a great black person name. And then I was saying that out. I was saying I was laughing with someone like, yeah, there's gotta be some black person has to name their next daughter Debri. And then I looked at this story and her name.

[Unnamed Caller]

Debrina Kawara, 57.

[Adam Carolla]

Debrina.

[Unnamed Caller]

She was sitting by herself, believed to be asleep on stop theft train, Brooklyn, December, when Sebastian Zappata allegedly walked up during nighted her clothes with the lighter.

[Adam Carolla]

It was an illegal alien.

[Unnamed Caller]

Yeah. Formally deported from Guatemala back to Guatemala.

[Adam Carolla]

Let somebody. By the way, how much do you. Do you really care about being in this country if you're gonna light, like, what if I said, like, I'm gonna go to Canada? Yeah, we'll keep a low profile so I can stay in Canada. My boss is gonna light some commuters on fire. Like someone to go. You know what? Not a good plan for the low profile part of the whole thing. Oh, we have. We have Michelle dancing. She's such. She's happy. She's good. She's gotta be a good person. Look at her. She's having a good time. She's doing a podcast. Oh, she's happy. She's happy.

[Unnamed Caller]

That's like a $4,000 outfit. Talk about class warfare.

[Adam Carolla]

I'm telling everyone. Yeah. Be very leery of those who dance. You know, she's a kuss as soon as they stop the filming. And also, by the way, I wouldn't do it if somebody said, we're gonna line a hall with sycophants and they're gonna sing a song to you, Adam, and you're gonna Walk toward the camera and dance. I'd go, let's just do a fucking podcast. Can we just do the podcast? I don't want to do the whole fucking dance thing. Whether it was, like, cheering me on as I walk down a hall lined with sycophant.

[Unnamed Caller]

Well, as somebody who danced to the ring all the time, I'm feeling very uncomfortable with your.

[Adam Carolla]

Oh, you did the dance all the time?

[Unnamed Caller]

All the time. I danced on. I danced with a bunch of Japanese schoolgirls. Like, that was my thing, bro.

[Adam Carolla]

Oh, shit. I did Dancing with the Stars. Shit. I gotta rethink this whole dance thing. Cause now we're in dining.

[Unnamed Caller]

We're in here.

[Adam Carolla]

Shit, you're right.

[Unnamed Caller]

Quaaludes.

[Adam Carolla]

God damn it. All right. It only occurs to people. It only happens when I don't like the person.

[Unnamed Caller]

Yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

So we got Ellen, we got Michelle, we got Cosby. I'm telling you, there's something to that. I know Cosby. You gotta watch him, knowing what you know.

[Unnamed Caller]

Yeah, I know. He's just Quaaluding chicks all the time.

[Adam Carolla]

Oh, it is awesome.

[Unnamed Caller]

What a nightmare. Yeah, but this story with the family came out after the guy had a court date, a short court appearance.

[Adam Carolla]

I didn't get what was going on with her. She got lit on fire.

[Unnamed Caller]

Yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

And she was just kind of standing there.

[Unnamed Caller]

I think shock, you know, she was asleep on the. On the train. He lit her on fire. She popped up. He had already left the train.

[Adam Carolla]

But there's like footage of.

[Unnamed Caller]

Yeah, she was just standing.

[Adam Carolla]

There's footage of, like a cop walking back and forth. Like, it's literally like someone going. I came out and I saw my kid, my 3 year old, at the bottom of my swimming pool. So I hurried into the house to call 911 to get paramedics out. And I'm like, no, no, get your fucking kid out of the house. Like, hey, cop, you're doing something. But this citizen is on fire. Literally on fire. So you can call for backup or the HAZMAT team or the fire department, but she's physically on fire. I would say take your jacket off and try smothering.

[Unnamed Caller]

And look, I hate to make make fun of them at all, but I feel like you might because Civil rights leader Kevin McCall spoke outside of Kings County Supreme Court in Brooklyn, where he read a statement from the family who described Kawam as a beautiful, bright soul who brought light to everyone around her.

[Adam Carolla]

That's a lie.

[Unnamed Caller]

A woman that was on fire. You're going to say she brought light to everyone around.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah. Especially at night when we were looking through those caves. Yeah, it's true. Don't say it that way.

[Unnamed Caller]

Don't say what the hell? They put this down on paper for him to read.

[Adam Carolla]

Now, look, I don't want to speak ill of the debt, but she had to do a lot of drugs, right.

[Unnamed Caller]

Or something to pass out on F.

[Adam Carolla]

Train lit on fire and didn't really react to it.

[Unnamed Caller]

Not all.

[Adam Carolla]

We have the clip. I hope he doesn't say that. Light. I want to take this moment to express my deepest gratitude to everyone who has supported our family during this incredible difficult time following the tragic loss of my sister Debrina, whom we all affectionately call Debbie. My daughter, our sister didn't deserve to be taken away from us in such a traffic and horrific manner. She was a beautiful, bright soul who brought light to everyone around her. And her loss has left a hole in our hearts that can never be felt. All right, we can pause it and listen. I've seen enough comedians do this, you know, open micrs. I've seen enough people give toasts at weddings. No more reading off your phone.

[Unnamed Caller]

Yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

You cannot just load up your fucking phone and walk up for a toast at a wedding, on stage at a presser, and just stare at your phone. You got to get off book. You can have a beat sheet, you make some notes, you can have some thoughts. You can't just read your phone. It's a crowd killer. All right, let's see. Jon Cryer's coming in here. Yeah, that guy is going to dish the dirt on Two and a Half Men and Charlie and the rest. Suzanne Rico as well. It's an interesting story she has about Nazis and her grandfather and everything else. And we'll take a quick break and we'll talk to those two right after this.

[Spike Farriston]

Adam Caroll is on the road. San Diego, April 11th and 12th at the American Comedy Club, Port Charlotte, Florida, May 2nd and 3rd at Basani's Italian Steakhouse and Comedy Theater. And Melbourne, Florida, on May 4th at the Melbourne Auditorium. Get tickets for these shows and a whole lot [e-mail].

[Adam Carolla]

Morgan and Morgan. Well, there's a reason why my opinions hit like a heavyweight punch. No fluff, no Phil. Just the truth. And that's why there's Morgan and Morgan, America's largest injury law firm. For over 35 years, Morgan and Morgan has been fighting for the people, just like you and I. They have over 100 offices with more than a thousand lawyers nationwide. If you're injured by the negligence of another, you deserve to be paid. That's where Morgan and Morgan comes in. When you hire the wrong law firm, well, you may be beat before you even start the fight. All law firms are not the same, and that's why I love Morgan and Morgan. Am I right, Dawson?

[Spike Farriston]

If you're ever injured, you can check out Morgan and Morgan. Their fee is free unless they win. For more information, go to forthepeople.com Adam or dial pound law pound 529 from your cell phone. That's f o r the people.com Adam or pound law pound 529 from your cell. This is a paid advertisement.

[Adam Carolla]

O'REILLY oh, oh, oh. O'REILLY Auto Parts. Wow. Yeah. You know the jingle. Yeah. They're in the business of keeping your car on the road. O'Reilly Auto Parts offers friendly, helpful service and the parts and knowledge you need for maintenance and for repairs as well. I've always been a fan of O'Reilly. You know, I like to ranch. Used to use the one over in North Hollywood, then it was the one up in La Canada or La Crescenta when I used to live out there. I was working on my stuff and always using O'Reilly. Whether you're a car aficionado or an auto novice, you're going to find the employees at O'Reilly Auto Parts to be knowledgeable, helpful, and best of all, they are friendly. So stop by O'Reilly Auto Parts, do it today. Or you can Visit us online. O'reillyauto.com Adam o'reillyauto.com Adam.

[Spike Farriston]

It'S time for Nicaraguan Name that movie with Adam's buddy Oswaldo. See if you can guess which movie this famous line is from.

[Adam Carolla]

No one put baby in the corner.

[Spike Farriston]

If you said Dirty Dancing, nobody puts.

[Adam Carolla]

Baby in a corner.

[Spike Farriston]

You're correct.

[Adam Carolla]

Now back to the show. All right, JON Cryer in studio. Good to see you, my friend.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Dude, how are you?

[Adam Carolla]

I'm good. I mean, John and I go way, way back. Way back. Way back.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

We go back to kroc. We go back to.

[Adam Carolla]

We were in Hollywood.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yeah. We were neighbors. And I still, I needed to apologize, actually, for something. I think we should start with an apology. My apology is when my son was first born, I used to, I was very discombobulated for a good long time because we were not sleeping and it was a nightmare. And so, and I, and we. You remember that little Boston terrier I used to have?

[Adam Carolla]

Yes.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yes. Betty was her name. And I used to throw on my robe to walk Betty some mornings with my, my infant on the Crook of my hip. And so you unfortunately had to witness me in a threadbare bathrobe, walking down the street with my little Boston bug eyed Boston terrier, my infant. And, you know, the robe may have slid open a couple of times. I just want to apologize for anything.

[Adam Carolla]

It's burning my psyche. As a matter of fact, I gotta cut this short for therapy session, so if we could just bring this home.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yes.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah. So I lived up. The first house I ever bought was up in that hill under the Hollywood sign. And then John lived under. Just right beneath me, but right on the same road. Mine was up on this precipice. And then Kathy Bates lived there. But I'm trying to recall, did you buy her house? Her house?

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

From her.

[Adam Carolla]

Okay, so Kathy Bates lived there for some period of time. And then you also remember who else lived in that neighborhood. Speaking of dogs.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Speaking of dogs.

[Adam Carolla]

Whoa, whoa. What are you saying about Patrick Dempsey?

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Oh, he did. Okay.

[Adam Carolla]

Because Patrick Dempsey always had a Rhodesian Ridgeback, which is the world's biggest, scariest dog. And he would walk the dog. He lived down Beechwood a little bit. He would walk up the hill with this Rhodesian Ridgeback. And I was picturing your terrier being a nice little palate cleanser before dinner for that Rhodesian Ridgeback.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

I never ran into Patrick Dempsey. Patrick Dempsey and I started together, actually. We were both in a show on Broadway called Torch Song Trilogy. He was an understudy coming in right when I had started doing the role. And he was a juggler from Maine. Seriously, that was like his, like what he did. He was a kid from Maine who juggled.

[Adam Carolla]

It's so. Yeah, and it's. I mean, it's unlikely that he became McDreamy because he was kind of like a scrawny, funny looking guy who grew into McDreamy. And when I knew him, he was kind of in between, like, he was kind of out of work. It would have been. You moved in in 97, 90, 98 or something? Somewhere.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yeah, 2000, I think.

[Adam Carolla]

Oh. So I was there for a couple years where you moved in. Patrick moved in and was there around that time. And Patrick Dempsey, circa 2000 wasn't. You know, his phone wasn't blowing up with all, you know, movie roles and TV shows and things. It was like a little. And I don't know if you. Because you had some ebbs and some flows, I imagine. Like, I remember I was famously friends with Molly Ringwald and Bob Ringwald and the dad and Beth the sister and Kelly the brother. They all Lived down the street from me. So I was at Pretty in Pink.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Oh, my gosh. You were like, wow.

[Adam Carolla]

I was there.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Wow. I saw a video from that recently, and Fee Waybill from the Tubes interviewed me for a while. No, it was amazing. It was amazing.

[Adam Carolla]

He's a weird dude.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

He's an odd duck. Absolutely. But he was lovely to me.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah. And you were there for the premiere in Hollywood on that rainy night.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yes, yes, I remember that. That was right after the shuttle exploded, the challenge exploded, and. Oh, my God. And I remember I saw Cher there, and I saw the Psychedelic Furs. Obviously, were there. A bunch of great bands. New Order was there. And then I saw George Michael come out of the bathroom with a guy. I was like, huh, that's odd. Anyway, yada, yada, yada. Totally wrote it off.

[Adam Carolla]

That man was Patrick Dempsey. Yeah. So, you know, now, that's a. Well, first off, go try to figure Life. So it's 1985. I don't know, six.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

That was 86.

[Adam Carolla]

86. Okay, so it's 1986. You're Ducky Boy. I'm going to the premiere because the Ringwalds grew up down the street from us in North Hollywood. Very humble home off an alley. Was that a Hartsuk? Yeah. The street I lived on was Hartsook, and the street they lived on was Hartsuk. And I just lived 15 houses down. And I just hung out. Cause I had a crush on her older sister, Beth.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Oh, my God.

[Adam Carolla]

So you could join the club.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Who.

[Adam Carolla]

Who had a cameo in the movie.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yes.

[Adam Carolla]

She was in the locker room getting taken away by one of the jocks or something.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Or something like that. And she was. Yeah, she was dating the lead singer of the Rave Ups, I think, at the band. The band was a popular band.

[Adam Carolla]

Right. And so also their mom, Adele.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Sure.

[Adam Carolla]

All she did was want to bake pieces all day. All she wanted to do was, like, bake pie. Literally. They lived in a house. I knew they were in trouble because their house was smaller than our house, and we had a shitty house. I was like, who builds a house? They grew up in a house that was like 700 square feet, but, like three bedrooms, you know? And the kitchen was as big as a mop closet. And Dell would just be in there baking, and I would show up, and I was like. She was like, I make these pies. No one appreciates it. I was like, I appreciate it. I will eat your pies. I would just sit there and eat pies and talk about her daughter.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

I only went to the House a couple of times back in the day.

[Adam Carolla]

You did go there?

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

I did go there because she had her 18th birthday party there.

[Adam Carolla]

Oh, really?

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Which I did get invited to. She and I were not actually wildly close.

[Adam Carolla]

You didn't have a crush on her, like on set thing?

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Not so much. Not because it's not that I didn't like her, it's that we just didn't. She's kind of quiet and a little bit. She was a little bit remote at the time and she was like the biggest thing on earth. I mean, she was like hugely famous at that point. Right.

[Adam Carolla]

And you were coming off of Broadway and doing other things, but not a name that people knew back then.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

And she wasn't like rude to me or anything like that. She just is remote. She just doesn't feel the need to fill the air with words like I do. So I was like, this lady is frosty.

[Adam Carolla]

Listen, I will say that it's an interest. First off, you would be surprised that this was her chosen profession.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yes.

[Adam Carolla]

Because she doesn't seem loquacious or an extrovert. She seems like sort of quiet. And when people are quiet, all it does is summon all everyone else's insecurities. Because you think they're quiet because they don't like you or they think you're stupid or they're above you or whatever the reality is, they're just quiet.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Exactly. That was the entirety of our relationship. She just does not like me.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah, but she's always. She's had a kind of a. Well, first off, I mean, she was probably a 40 year old trapped in a 12 year old's body. Like there was an element of that.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

She's very smart. Very wildly already.

[Adam Carolla]

Just beyond what. It's not even an intellect. It's like this person who's living in this little house in North Hollywood is not long for this place. She needs to go somewhere else and do something more interesting than eat Adele's pies. I didn't have anything on my chest.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

You just went to Glendale. Basically. Side maneuver.

[Adam Carolla]

So did you go to her house party when she got her house up on Mulholland?

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

I did not.

[Adam Carolla]

So you guys worked together?

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yes.

[Adam Carolla]

It was like professional. But there was never really that on set crush or vibe or social thing going.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

No, there was not. There was not.

[Adam Carolla]

And you were young at the time too. Maybe not as young as her.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

I think I turned 20. I believe so. No, it had been 86. So 21. I turned 21.

[Adam Carolla]

21, yeah. And did you know what you were getting Into. I mean, John Hughes and all that.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yes. Yeah. Because when I first read the script, he had had 16 candles. But when. But right after I got cast, Breakfast Club came out, and it was just like an atom bomb of teenageness. And so I was like, oh, oh, this is gonna be a big deal. And I really enjoyed Breakfast Club. And I thought, wow, okay. I guess we're sort of of a piece with that. But interestingly, John didn't direct Priam Pick. It was actually directed by Howie Deutch.

[Adam Carolla]

Oh, I didn't know that.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yeah. Yeah. So he obviously wrote it and produced it, but he did not direct it. So it was. So that's why it's got a little more gritty feel than Breakfast Club, I.

[Adam Carolla]

Think I would say. John Hughes died young, and he doesn't really get his due in the pantheon of, like, great creators. You know, weird signs, super funny planes, trains. I mean, just classic plain signings.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Oh, my God.

[Adam Carolla]

I mean, oh, my God. Right?

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Not to mention Home Alone Funny and pathos and everything.

[Adam Carolla]

Like, just deserves more in the collective memory of society.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yeah, I don't. You know, his teen movies, he really sort of had to work something out. He was really coming from, like, I think, not feeling taken serious. Taken seriously as a teenager. I think that's why some of those teen movies got so serious. But then, you know, he's doing movies about kids and, you know, and, you know, his movies are getting sillier and sillier as he gets older. And it's like, almost like he got freed of that teen angst thing. He was like, you know what? Okay, I did that. I got out. What. You know how I felt about being a teenager. And now I'm just gonna do people getting hit by shit.

[Adam Carolla]

Died of a heart attack at 59.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

So I'm 59, by the way.

[Adam Carolla]

It's sad when you look back and.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Just hopefully I will make it through today.

[Adam Carolla]

All right. Would you like to feel old?

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Sure. Why not?

[Adam Carolla]

One of the good ways to feel old, like, there's that kind of. Of stuff where you watch Love Boat, you go, Captain Stubing was 43. And those are all 40. Captain Stubing. There's no way he was old. He was old.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

He was ancient.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah. And Archie Bunker was. But here's another. In case you don't feel old enough. Great brain tease. I was listening on the way into, like, the 80s channel on Sirius XM, and John Fogarty Center Field Song came on, you know, the Put Me In Coach song. And I was, like, from 85. And I was like, oh, that was a new hit. It's not a Credence song. Credence was all through the 60s. And then 20 years later, Fogarty comes back and he does another album and has a bunch of hits on it. And in my mind, that's new Fogarty. That's 40 years ago. New.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

New.

[Adam Carolla]

New Fogarty is 40 years ago. And Old Creens is half as close. It was 20 years. So, like, from 65 to 85 is 20 years. From 85 to 20, 25 is 40 years. Credence was much closer to Put me.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

In Coach than we are now to.

[Adam Carolla]

All right.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Feeling well, yeah, now you're old. I remember one thing that made me feel old already in the 80s was living through the 80s ification of bands like Heart.

[Adam Carolla]

Right.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

And, you know, remember there was. They had those amazing 70s guitar rock songs that were just, you know, Barracuda. And then they're these dreams go, you know, like, what happened to Hart?

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah. No, There wasn't an 80sfication of everybody.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yes, Yes.

[Adam Carolla]

I mean, if you. I think the biggest 80fication you might use, you would study. If you're teaching a class of. This might be like Hauling Oates. Cause they had like, Rich Girl and Sarah smile in the 70s. And then it's man eater and adult education and stuff. You're like, what the fuck happened over here? Oh, it got hit by the 80s, 80s. Even the rolling Stones were doing weird stuff in the 80s.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Everybody undercover of the night.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Although I like Undercover of the night.

[Adam Carolla]

Everybody got hit by the 80s. I think it was cocaine. I blame cocaine. I think it was fuel. I think everyone who made a bad decision in the 80s musically was super high.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

You know, it would explain a lot.

[Adam Carolla]

It would explain a lot.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

I never did Coke in the 80s. And that was. And it's weird. I never even got offered Coke in the 80s.

[Adam Carolla]

What's that?

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

I know I wrote a memoir a few years ago, and at one point the title was no Coke for Ducky. Because nobody. Because I would go to the parties. And I guess everybody just knew I was a square, which I was. In their defense. I was always a square. I was always, like a musical theater nerd.

[Adam Carolla]

I've never been hit on by a gay guy, and I take a certain amount of offense to it. And I feel that way with coke. Come on, offer me a bump at least. Let me at least turn it down. You never got hit on by a gay guy?

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Nope.

[Adam Carolla]

Nope. I don't like it.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Oh, you know what? Actually, I did get. I got groped. By a celebrity who will remain unnamed.

[Adam Carolla]

Really?

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yes, yes. So. Yes. I take it back.

[Suzanne Rico]

I take it back.

[Adam Carolla]

Now, is this in the Ducky era?

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

This was post Ducky.

[Adam Carolla]

Post Ducky.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Post Ducky.

[Adam Carolla]

This is pd.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

So how long? And then you have Two and a Half Men, which just turn into a phenomenon, which is weird. I mean, not weird, but I just mean. Cause it was a terrible show. No, no, it was a fine show. But I'm saying it is interesting why certain things just sort of capture the zeitgeist and turn into something in a sea of sitcoms and everyone's trying to. To catch lightning in a bottle. And going into that, did you have any inkling the John Hughes stuff you had some thought about? Because he was coming off of a lot of success, but Two and a Half Men?

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

No. Two and a Half Men, you never know with sitcoms. It's alchemy. You never know what's gonna work. Stuff that on paper reads great and everybody's howling, having a great time. You go up and it just goes, pew. You know? Right. But by the same token, stuff you read at the table and somebody's. And everybody's groaning, and then you get the right group of people and suddenly it sings. You just never know. And with that one, I had actually worked with Charlie Sheen before on Hot Shots.

[Adam Carolla]

Oh, right.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

And he and I got along great. And I had already worked with Chuck on a pilot that didn't go again. One of those things that everybody thought was gonna be a. You know. And then. No, of course, Chuck Lorre didn't work. Yes, Chuck Lorre. The.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

And he's. And so this was me and Charlie, and it's never a given. That one had a lot of good auspices going in. Once I found out we were going on after Everybody Loves Raymond, there was a time when time slots meant everything. And hopefully we are raising a generation of people who. That does not matter to anymore Americans.

[Adam Carolla]

And time slots, it always used to be because.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Because the person either before the show, either before or after your show, if it got big ratings, then it could help your show. Right. But nowadays people don't care about that very much. But back in the day when I, you know, Everybody Loves Raymond was a juggernaut, which is, when you watch it, it's kind of a. It's a lovely minor key family show. That's very, very funny. But, you know, assuming that, you know, going 2003, I guess this was in 2003, it was a juggernaut and we were behind it.

[Adam Carolla]

What were you doing? I mean you've always worked, but were you working a lot?

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

No, actually when I was your neighbor was the worst. The most fallow period. I don't think it had anything to do with it, but no, that was. I spent three years. I did a Becker. I did a couple other. I did the Practice. Remember that legal show? I did an episode the Practice. But I. But I had a three year period where I only worked three weeks in three years, which is really hard.

[Adam Carolla]

I feel like maybe I cursed you and Dempsey because you both were. I know. Soon as you moved out. Yeah. Yes. You got away from my radon gas or whatever it is. I was poisoning you guys.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

I like that house. I liked your house there.

[Adam Carolla]

I love that house.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

You showed me that like in your bedroom you'd built a TV into the. The ceiling.

[Adam Carolla]

Oh, TVs, yeah, I. I love TVs. I. They used to weigh a lot, so it was an issue.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

It was a real engineering feat. It was like the Panama Canal and the. And the TV in your ceiling.

[Adam Carolla]

14 laborers died getting that television into my bedroom. Do you know that Joe, I didn't share it with you at the time because I.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

They're buried on the property.

[Adam Carolla]

I want to send Joy Sports center together on my bed and I didn't want to ruin the mood. Never hit on by a gay guy. So you then you start off on Broadway young then, right? So you must musical theater.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yeah, I got my first gig when I was 18.

[Adam Carolla]

Were your parents. What do they do?

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Both actors. Oh, both actors. My mom is also a playwright. She's actually more known as a playwright than an actor.

[Adam Carolla]

East Coast.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yes.

[Adam Carolla]

Feels East Coasty and parents supportive then because that's what they did.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

No, they were hoping I'd get a real job, you know, but no, they supported me. My mom sent me to theater camp, which was as ridiculous as it sounds. And it was amazing. Amazing place that changed my life. Full of, as I said, insane people. But yeah, I did that. But I was a goner from after like 12 years old. I knew I was going to do it.

[Adam Carolla]

Did your dad have any credits like Joseph Cryer and Mannix this week? Like one of those bad 70s shows?

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

His name was David Crier. And yeah, he had a few. He was on Wonder Woman, which was like. That was like the height of fame to me was being on Wonder Woman. He was also an escape from Alcatraz. He's the cop who hoses him down Clint Eastwood, man. He hoses down Clint Eastwood and says, welcome to Alcatraz.

[Adam Carolla]

Now Your parents New York thespians?

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yes.

[Adam Carolla]

You know Ducky, Boy and Two and a Half Men?

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

There was no boy on it, by the way. It was just Ducky.

[Adam Carolla]

Oh, sorry, Ducky. Sorry. Would they get a little snobby about that kind of stuff? Did they want you on stage on Broadway, plying your craft?

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Not at all, no. My dad. Dad was. Both my mom and dad were incredibly. They were worried. I'm sure just foot in the door and actually making a living are. Foot in the door is one thing. Then you're struggling for who knows how long to make a living. Then, yeah, you can make a living. But can you get a sustainable level of recognition that you can keep making a living at that? So there's sort of three humps, and I. I got all of those in the course of a year. So all of a sudden they were like, okay, this is gonna be fine. And so they were nothing but supportive. I remember my dad coming to see me in Brighton Beach Memoirs, which is a great Neil Simon play on Broadway. And I was terrified when he came to see the show. And he just. I was like, so, what did you think? And he was like, oh. Oh, it was great. Like, it didn't occur to him to, like, criticize. Oh, it didn't. You know, he was just, you know, it was. It's just like relief, like when, you know. You know, like when you send your toddler out on the playground, when they make a friend, right. You feel a certain amount of relief.

[Adam Carolla]

I get it. When guard number four from Escape from Alcatraz is in the audience. I think most of the cast would be nervous at that point. You know what I mean?

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yes, they might be.

[Adam Carolla]

So you go from New York, you go Broadway, come to la, married for a shortish period of time to a attractive blonde woman whose name escapes me.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

That was the woman living with me across the street from you. It was her dog. The Boston terrier was hers.

[Adam Carolla]

You know, I didn't like that.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Boston terriers are an acquired taste. They are really fun little animals. But you gotta get used to the snorting and the party.

[Adam Carolla]

Dempsey riding his Rhodesian Ridgeback up the street. You never saw that?

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

No, that's true, I didn't.

[Adam Carolla]

It was weird. Cause he would walk it up and go right past your house. Maybe it was before you went. Cause I remember standing on my lawn, like outside and going, hey, Patrick. And he's like walking his dog.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

I'm really surprised I did not run into him. I mean, Grey's Anatomy and Two and a Half Men started The same year we both started. We were on the same.

[Adam Carolla]

Oh, it's part of my curse. I bet that's the year. You guys. When did you move out of that neighborhood?

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

I actually moved out. I got it in 2003, and I moved out in 2004. I would just beat feet the F out of there.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah, I think that was me. I think that was my juju I cast upon you. You talked to. Is Charlie Sheen sober and normal and good now?

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

My understanding is he is. He and I have not spoken in years, although we have a couple of mutual friends, and he's been much healthier lately. That's my understanding. I wish him. I really wish him well. You know, every now and then people say, hey, you know, let's get something. You know, and it's like, God bless him. Like, he did Bookie. Did you watch Bookie at all? Yeah, it was really fun.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah. Yeah, it was great.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Angus T. Jones was on it as well. And they had a lot of Two and a Half Men Easter eggs in that first couple episodes.

[Adam Carolla]

Sebastian. Yeah, he was a gambler. I think he was playing. I think he was playing himself. Wasn't he in rehab?

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yes. And he was great. And he was great. And he and Chuck, who had that famous falling out that, you know, created one of the biggest Internet shitstorms ever experienced. I mean, it was one of the first Internet shitstorms that I can recall.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

And it was so weird to be in the middle of that. Cause it was like, this is a new thing that's happening.

[Adam Carolla]

Internet shitstorm. I know Internet didn't exist back in the Pretty and Pink days. Yeah.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

And so at any rate, he and Chuck famously were incredibly combative. Mostly it was Charlie lashing out at Chuck. Chuck was kind of like, huh, I.

[Adam Carolla]

Don'T know Chuck at all. Is he tough? Is he fair? Is he nice?

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yeah. I had a great experience working with him. It was great. He's wonderful with actors. He is in the writers room. He's very demanding. And that's part of the reason he's so successful. And he has incredible comedic instincts. And he and I just got each other. I got what he was trying to do. So that's why I think we got along so great. But, no, the reason he and Charlie fell out was because Charlie was clearly using again, and Chuck didn't want to start the show back up with Charlie still using. He was saying, you gotta get clean so that we can start the show back up.

[Adam Carolla]

Because he was too erratic when he was using it.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yeah, he was Just too erratic.

[Adam Carolla]

And what people don't really get is, like, when I used to work construction, if a guy got really high and didn't come in, it was just your short one. Drywaller.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Ye.

[Adam Carolla]

The entire crew didn't stand there waiting for the one guy to come in. And there's a lot of guys and a lot of gals and a whole ecosystem that's waiting for one person to come in. And if that person doesn't come in, that's unacceptable.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yeah, we couldn't function with the way that he was.

[Adam Carolla]

Was he just super erratic, like, just not coming in and stuff?

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Well, interestingly, he was still great to work with. Charlie was never a. A jerk or anything. On the set, even. He was. If anything, you could sort of tell something was up because he was trying to be super nice to everybody. But it was getting hard to write for him. The writers were having to write less and less for him because he wasn't.

[Adam Carolla]

Capable of delivering all.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Remember, he was getting arrested, and we'd have to shut down for him getting arrested. So it was plus. Plus. Chuck and Charlie had become incredibly successful doing this together. And they really liked each other and were good friends. And Chuck was worried that Charlie was gonna die.

[Adam Carolla]

Right.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

That was the biggest thing. So Charlie lashing out at him was really, really painful for him. But they have. But the point I was making was that he was just in Chuck's show, and they've obviously reconciled, which is great. In bookie.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Listen. I don't know. I found this a lot with guys. I found guys that get older and they just mellow out. Yeah, some of it is sobriety, but a lot of it's just prostate growth. You know, all the dudes who are, like, the bullies and stuff are now bald and mellow, you know, and they. They got their dad bods, and no one's proven anything anymore. I notice women get crazier as the years wear on, though. So we pass you guys, I think, at 47 and a half, we pass women and we start mellowing out. Cause all the douchebag dudes I remember are all kind of mellowed out. You know what they're like. They're like old fighters, you know, Like Mike Tyson, the scariest man on the planet. You run into some old fighter. They're like old mafia guys. And old fighter guys are, like, the most mellow, because I think they got it all out of their system in their 20s and 30s. But it's a good time. Like, if you can hang around long enough, you'll see wild men start to just become dads and mellow out.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Well, yeah, Charlie had kids, and he's. He is. You know, he realized, I think, at one point, how important his kids were to him. You know, and I think that that has probably.

[Adam Carolla]

And people. And everyone's always trying to recapture Lightning in a Bottle. And I think I just saw an article that, like, Tim Allen is. They're trying to get him together with this old. Richard.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Richard. Oh, oh, Karn.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah, I was at Karn, the guy from the hose commercial at Fox.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

A fine actor who also happened to do a hose.

[Adam Carolla]

Whenever that commercial star someone was like, I don't need an. Maybe I do need a second hose. That woman's enjoying herself. I don't enjoy myself hosing down my car, but this woman seems to just have a blast. Yeah. Like, so they're trying to get them back together.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

And so I'd imagine there's a. Let's get the cast back together and see if we can recapture this Lightning in a Bottle.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

There's always, you know, attempts at that. And, you know, every now and then you can have fun with that. And I wish the people who do that. Well, it's like, you know, when you got the Star Trek cast back together from the. You know, they did the show in the 60s, then they made a movie, and the movie was like, ugh. But then they made a second movie, and it was great. So I don't want to write off any idea. You know, I'll always listen to things, but, you know, I just don't. I don't see Charlie and I working together in a way where we. Where I have to depend on him for an extended length of time. I will happily meet him for lunch, and we'll have a great time, and we'd work together for a day. That would be wonderful. But an extended period of time.

[Adam Carolla]

No, no. Even if he's put together five years of sobriety, maybe.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

I don't know. I mean, he had put together two years of sobriety when we started Two and a Half Men.

[Adam Carolla]

First season.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

First season. And then I think. And I think he lasted another two more years before he started sobriety, wasn't he?

[Adam Carolla]

You're like the parole board, and you need to see several decades of good behavior. And so for you now, we have this podcast. We're going to bring a partner in here in a minute and talk about it as well. And it's a very interesting, compelling subject for a podcast. And I'll reveal that when Suzanne Comes in and we'll talk about that. And so for you, how much writing and how much longer? Like, okay, I was thinking about it earlier. Everyone heard Rosie'd move to Ireland. And first off, I think, good for her. She made a proclamation, she backed it up, she left. A lot of people say they're gonna do it, but they don't do it. But she did it. But then I try to figure out the finances of Rosie O'Donnell, I go, okay, she had the money. Syndicated TV, daytime, tons of dough there. I don't feel like she's looking for work. Is she set for life? Is she choosing not to work? And I would say the same for you. Can you just pick and choose your roles and your moments? You good? I'm not saying brag about how much money you have in the bank, but, I mean, it's fine to go. I worked real hard for a lot of years, and I'm good now, so I can be selective about projects.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yes. I don't know her particular situation, you know, but hopefully she saved her money, because that's the secret in this business is save your money. Because it's not always gonna be coming in. In my case, I hit the lottery. I absolutely hit the lottery. And now I just do the stuff that I love.

[Adam Carolla]

In a way, I've always said the best money is not F you money, it's F me money, meaning I can do whatever I want or not do whatever I want. And in a strange way, I think you should find. So when Cage, when Nicolas Cage gets into tax problems, he starts doing a whole bunch of movies. And then as a consumer, you can go, is he doing this movie because he's really attracted to the script, or does he just owe the IRS money? And it turns out he owes the IRS money? But I would say, take actors that are set and then when they do a project, you go, we know you're doing it for the right reasons. You're doing it because you are attracted to the material. I know. Doesn't mean it's going to be great. It just means you're doing it not because you got divorced or you owe the IRS or whatever that thing is.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

No. In fact, it's even less of a guarantee that it's going to be great. Because a lot of time you'll do stuff that's fun and interesting. That isn't normally what people would expect from a commercial actor. So a lot of time you'll use the opportunity for that.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah. To do stuff you want to do. That may not be what Society wants you to do.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yes. And so, yeah, so I'm incredibly grateful that I got that. The two and a half gig a was incredibly fun. Was a great, great job. I loved working with Charlie. We had eight great years. Loved working with Ashton after that. I have zero regrets about that. And again, as I said, I feel like I won the lottery. So now the great thing is I get to just find really, really interesting stories and take part in them. However, I wish. And that was actually how this podcast thing happened. It was just an absolute. Just one of those crazy sort of, I guess, coincidences. You'd even say, well, let's set the.

[Adam Carolla]

Table for it before we bring Suzanne Rico in. Okay. The podcast is called the man who Calculated Death.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yes.

[Adam Carolla]

The epic true story of Suzanne Rico investigating her own family's Nazi past.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yes. Yes. It is a World War II mystery that she actually solves, which is amazing.

[Adam Carolla]

And it's refreshing because everyone in the day and age where everyone's running away from whatever their family. We only had a handful of slaves. Come on now, let's not judge. You know, everyone's running away from the past. She's leaning in.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yeah. Well, the story sort of came about and she'll be in in a second. But she throws these lovely dinner parties and she knew. She's an old friend of my wife's. My wife is. Is Lisa Joyner, who is also on cbs. Suzanne Rico was the anchorwoman of the CBS Morning News here in Los Angeles. And my wife was also on the show, and they were great friends. And we're having at a dinner party one night, I was talking about the fact that I was just a space nerd and I love the history of the space race. The Cold War is fascinating to me, and World War II is fascinating to me. Me and I had recently done a deep dive where I had gone to Moscow for cosmonaut training, and it was bonkers. And she said, oh, wow. Suzanne said to me, that sounds amazing. My grandfather was involved in the space program. And I was like, really? Wow, that's so cool. She was like, yeah, and before that, he worked for Hitler. But anyway. And we were like, wait.

[Adam Carolla]

Ho.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Time out, Suzanne. We've got to go back and you're going to have to tell the story of how grandpa ended up working for Hitler and it turned out to be this insane story.

[Adam Carolla]

Well, first off, you know, you can't beat reality.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

No.

[Adam Carolla]

Especially when you're talking about World War II. That's like the stuff they did.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yeah, it's an amazing and.

[Adam Carolla]

And it was weird because everything was analog. And so imagine you're trying to get into jet engines and rockets and things, incendiary bombs, where the Japanese were going to float them over the woods and the north here and try to set fires with these weird balloons and stuff. And it's like everything was like a mechanical timer and stuff like that. And imagine being in a jet aircraft and everything is analog.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

There's no computers of any kind, no fly by wire. Everything's a cable. But you have a jet engine or going into space later.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Suzanne's grandpa was instrumental in all of that. He invented the V1, the first cruise missile. He invented the B.F. 109, one of the most successful warplanes ever built.

[Adam Carolla]

Oh, is that Messerschmitt?

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yes, yes. And he built. He worked on one of the first jet engines as well. So revolutionary scientist this guy was Absolutely.

[Adam Carolla]

So what are we talking to you for?

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yes, I.

[Adam Carolla]

Why didn't you tell me this earlier? Stupid Ducky Hawk. Charlie Sheen. Who cares? All right, let's take a break.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

World War II step.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah, let's get into World War II with Suzanne Rico, John Cry right after this. Well, you want to start a business, your own business, a small business, and grow it this year. Let's do this. And now's the best time to start. Shopify is going to help you. I started a business and I use Shopify, and I'm glad I did. Shopify makes it simple to create your brand, open for business and get your first sale, get your store up and running. It's easy. And they've got thousands of customizable templates that can help you with all the details like shipping, taxes, payments from one single dashboard, allowing you to focus on the important stuff like growing your business. Because. Because you want to be freed up to grow your business, not burdened with the nickel and dime stuff. Let Shopify help you with that. With Shopify, your first sale is closer than you think. It's Shopify, right? Dawson?

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[Adam Carolla]

Business, your own business, a small business, and grow it this year. Let's do this. And now's the best time to start. Shopify is going to help you. I started a business and I use Shopify, and I'm glad I did Shopify makes it simple to create your brand, open for business and get your first sale, get your store up and run. It's easy and they've got thousands of customizable templates that can help you with all the details like shipping taxes, payments from one single dashboard, allowing you to focus on the important stuff like growing your business. Because you want to be freed up to grow your business, not burdened with the nickel and dime stuff. Let Shopify help you with that. That with Shopify, your first sale is closer than you think. It's Shopify, right?

[Spike Farriston]

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[Adam Carolla]

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[Jon Cryer]

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[Suzanne Rico]

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[Adam Carolla]

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[Jon Cryer]

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[Adam Carolla]

Shows, all for free. Pluto TV Stream now pay Never. All right, so Suzanne Rico has joined us. It's her grandfather. We spoke about the podcast. It's episodic.

[Jon Cryer]

Yep. Nine episodes.

[Adam Carolla]

Nine episodes. And it's on Wondery. And it's the man who Calculated Death. So let's first get into the title, the man who Calculated Death.

[Jon Cryer]

It's an interesting question because the man who Calculated Death has to do with something that my grandfather did after World War II, during the Space race, when he came up with an engineering formula called Lesser's Law that basically changed the way engineering was looked at, at which. You know the old saying, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

[Adam Carolla]

Yes.

[Jon Cryer]

My grandfather proved that that is not true, that the chain is only as strong as a product of all its weakest link.

[Adam Carolla]

All.

[Jon Cryer]

All of its links.

[Adam Carolla]

Right.

[Jon Cryer]

So if you got on an airplane that, say, had a hundred parts and each one of those was 99% reliable, would you think you were getting on an airplane that was 99% reliable? The math doesn't work out that way. That plane is only 37% reliable.

[Adam Carolla]

Really?

[Jon Cryer]

So my grandfather was called the man who Calculated Death because he could calculate how safe any complex system was. A plane, a car, a Space shuttle, a rocket, anything like that.

[Adam Carolla]

Does he do marriages?

[Jon Cryer]

I think he would have actually a lot to say about that for a.

[Adam Carolla]

Consultation at least, before rushing into. So. And it is insane. I was just at the Intrepid in New York, and I was walking through there, and I was looking at the space shuttle, and you see the cosmonaut thing, and you see all this stuff, and when you walk up on it, it's like seeing the Batmobile in real life. You go, jesus, this is it. I wouldn't get this. It was all just so tin canny.

[Jon Cryer]

And those things look like they came out of Hollywood.

[Adam Carolla]

Right.

[Jon Cryer]

And you realize that didn't come out of Hollywood. That came out of somebody like my grandfather's imagination and was real.

[Adam Carolla]

So the Germans always had a kind of mechanical advantage over those around them, their tanks, their equipment. I mean, I guess you would say if they had a car race and one car were built in Germany and the other was built. Built in Jamaica, you'd go, who'd win? And you'd go, well, I'm going with Porsche. That's just me.

[Jon Cryer]

My grandfather actually worked with Ferdinand Porsche. He worked in the very, very beginning, before the war.

[Adam Carolla]

So they're mechanically. You know, they're mechanically oriented. And the Tiger tanks are. First itself's kind of aesthetically pleasing, which is weird. Like, when you see Russian stuff, it looks weird. The planes look clunky. And you see the German stuff, even the uniforms, you know, Hugo Boss and.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

All that stuff, he can throw together nicely.

[Adam Carolla]

Everything looks sort of aesthetically even better. And so they were always ahead of everyone and probably gave them the confidence to declare world war, essentially being the size they were.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Well, Hitler, when he started, was considered this huge success. Right. You know, and that's one of the reasons everybody fell in line so quick, was because he was talking tough and he had rebuilt a lot of German industry, but he was blitzkrieging.

[Adam Carolla]

Like, the Machineau line was. No, it wasn't gonna deter them because they had speed and size and skill and stuff like that.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yeah. And it was an entirely new kind of warfare.

[Adam Carolla]

Right. And so your grandfather starts off as an engineer, I'm guessing an aeronautical engineer.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

No, actually, he started as a race pilot. See, this is the crazy thing.

[Jon Cryer]

Well, that's the 20. Yeah. We gotta go all the way back to the.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

I've got to do a little setup. Because what happened was Suzanne had always known, like, her grandfather's name. There was a picture up on the wall, but she didn't really know the story.

[Adam Carolla]

When did he pass 1969.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

But when her mother was diagnosed with cancer, her mother started working on a memoir, but she died before she was able to finish it. And she asked Suzanne to finish her memoir.

[Adam Carolla]

Wow.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Which is a crazy thing to ask somebody. I mean, it's like, if I wrote a memoir, I'm like, it's kind of a thing. Exactly.

[Jon Cryer]

No problem.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

But that sort of forced Suzanne and her sister to go back to Germany and find. You know, and find out what was the real story. And there had always been this mystery that hung over the family because this. Because Robert Lesser's wife had been killed in a mysterious bombing at the end of the war, the family had been sent out to this farmhouse in the middle of Bavaria, hundreds of miles from any combat line, and a plane hit it with. In a targeted bombing run. Hit just that house.

[Adam Carolla]

Wow.

[Suzanne Rico]

Yeah.

[Jon Cryer]

Well, there was no other houses around it. It was like a farmhouse on the. On the edge of the woods.

[Adam Carolla]

Allied plane or German plane?

[Jon Cryer]

Good question.

[Adam Carolla]

My mom, E51.

[Jon Cryer]

My mom was 7 years old when this happened, and she remembered seeing a bunch of planes come over, One of them kind of pulling off from the. From the group, coming down low over the farmhouse and dropping these bombs. And then her mother was killed. My mother was in. In the bottom of the farmhouse, and she had glass embedded up and down her legs. And then my. My aunt and uncle were both buried in the farmhouse rubble, and they survived. But the legend in our family, the truth in our family, because legend often becomes truth when it's told so many times, was that those bombs were meant to get. As retribution against my grandfather. Right. So.

[Adam Carolla]

Well, that would have been from the German side.

[Jon Cryer]

No, from the Allied side, because my grandfather built the vengeance weapon. So the Allies were trying to get a little vengeance of their own.

[Adam Carolla]

Oh, I'm sorry. I thought he was trying to get away, but okay. So did it have an elliptical wing? That's a total inside joke.

[Jon Cryer]

You're gonna have to listen to the podcast, because I do figure it out.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yeah, we do get into it.

[Adam Carolla]

We do figure it out.

[Jon Cryer]

It took me a year.

[Adam Carolla]

All right. That joke was for any aficionados who know would be a Spitfire if I say an elliptical wing.

[Jon Cryer]

But most of the time, the BF109 that my grandfather built and the Spitfire were always, you know, fighting for air superiority. One was faster, and then the other. They would do a redesign, and the next one was faster, and one could go higher. And one had a better div.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yes.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah. So that's the 109. The VF 109 was the Messerschmitt. Right. And the Spitfire, of course, is legendary. The English one, and then there came the Mustang. And really it's when they got away from the radial engines and into the Inline or the Merlin or the Rolls Royce V, whatever configuration, which Leno has it as shop, by the way.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

He does?

[Suzanne Rico]

Seriously?

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Oh, wow.

[Adam Carolla]

Okay. He's got everything over there interested in this. But it's crazy. It's also crazy when you see those planes in real life. They're bigger than you think. The newer jets aren't as big as what you'd think they are, or they're smaller than you think. And these are bigger. Especially the radial ones going off of aircraft carriers. And God knows it was a crazy innovation. I mean, we must have won. You know, we went from by wings and canvas and guys dropping grenades out of planes on top of guys heads to full mechanization rockets and even jets at the end.

[Jon Cryer]

Well, it's. I mean, I like to brag about my grandfather, but I'm careful of doing.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

That because he was working for Hitler.

[Jon Cryer]

He was working for Hitler kind of in the 20s.

[Adam Carolla]

I was on Celebrity Apprentice.

[Jon Cryer]

I brought you a picture, Adam. This is my grandfather in the 20s, and he was a pretty famous race pilot. And he used to go out racing over the Swiss Alps in the plane that he built. And my grandmother would get mad at him. What sorry year this has been in the 1920s.

[Adam Carolla]

Uh huh. After World War II.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

So he would build after World War I a plane.

[Adam Carolla]

I'm sorry, after World War I, he.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Would build a plane by hand that he would fly. And then there's nothing I could build with my hands that I would ride in.

[Jon Cryer]

So my grandmother would get mad at him for throwing his laundry out over the Alps. And so what did he do? He built a luggage compartment. And so the first luggage compartment was born.

[Adam Carolla]

Wow.

[Jon Cryer]

And then he built on later on. He was one of the first designers to have tricycle landing gear and an ejection seat. So you realize like, those are, those are just like everyday things now. Like, of course you're gonna have tricycle landing gear and an ejection seat if you're flying a fighter jet.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah. Let me, let me just coach up the people listening who aren't World War II. Happy Boyington Doolittle. The old planes were called tail draggers because the wheel that steered the plane was in the back. And then at some point they put the wheel in the front and that was called the trike. And it's actually nice because you can see, you know what I mean? And the modern era, I mean, the trike sort of began when the Jewish jet began right in there. Right.

[Jon Cryer]

It was the HE 280, which. Okay, I'm going to brag again. That was my grandfather's plane. The first jet to leave the drawing board. It did not get picked up by the Luftwaffe, so they didn't get the contract. And then it never was produced. But that was the first one.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah. And later on, there was a jet that. Toward the end of World War II, but we don't think that much of it now. But if you're an Allied pilot and you're flying a Mustang or whatever equipment, you're flying P40 or whatever it is, and you see a plane go by you with no propeller, that you first off, like, when you went back to base, did you even want to say anything?

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Like Bigfoot?

[Adam Carolla]

It's like the farmer seeing the alien. You see anything? I didn't see anything. Yeah.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Like.

[Adam Carolla]

Because obviously, from the very, you know, the Wright brothers to this point to the Flying Fortress and the bombers and whatever it is, it's all propeller all the time. And then you see a plane just go past you with no propeller. That had to be like alchemy. Like, those people had to be like, what am I seeing here?

[Jon Cryer]

Well, if you think about this, the people in London when the V1 started in 1940, in June of 1944, when the Nazis started launching the V1s, that my grandfather was in charge of that product project at London, these people were now seeing pilotless planes, black pilotless planes coming down over London making this like, woo, woo, woo, woo noise. Because it was the jet engine, the first pulse jet engine pulse yet. And not knowing what the hell that was. And they describe how scary it was because it was so new. It was like nothing else they'd ever seen up in the sky.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah. And then obviously that, you know, we go right at the end of World War II into the jet age, and then we almost, you know, pretty quickly get into the rocket age there, and it's again, Germans and scientists and being gobbled up and. I know the whole alloy thing with the Russian and the gummy shoe. I don't know if, you know, I don't. You know, I figured you're just free.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Associating at this point. I have no idea what you're talking about.

[Jon Cryer]

The microphysis in the strudel.

[Adam Carolla]

You can look this one up, Dawson. But. So the story is the Russians didn't have the alloys to make the rockets or the jets. You know, obviously it takes a lot of metallurgy to do these things, but they somehow got invited to wherever the place was in England or whatever, where they were doing the metallurgy, but they couldn't get samples or anything. So the guy wore a shoe that had a gummy sole on it, like a wallaby or something. And he went over by the lathe to like, oh, what have you here? Well, you can't take anything home. And he just put his foot in all the shavings and press the shavings into the sole of the shoe. And then when he got back to headquarters, they had some examples to examine.

[Jon Cryer]

Oh, they did.

[Adam Carolla]

That's a weird story. We'll see if we can find. But anyway, so your grandfather, so he's a genius and he's a designer genius, but he's also living the, you know, he's the Carroll Shelby of Germany. He's building the car and he's racing the car.

[Jon Cryer]

Yeah, yeah, that's a good analogy.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

He was absolutely a celebrity. And this was a time when pilots were kind of the tech giants of their day. They were kind of not the elans, because they weren't. They were more like cowboys.

[Jon Cryer]

They were testing everything. So my grandfather was an avid skier and he wanted to mix aeronautics with skiing. So he welded these skis that he designed onto the bottom of his plane and landed it on a glacier in the Swiss Alps. And I mean, just to think about doing that. And then he took off again and, you know, came back and gave somebody a ride and, you know, it's like, what the hell?

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

By the way, this was like front page news over in Europe.

[Jon Cryer]

Well, it had never been done before.

[Adam Carolla]

Flying was a big thing and pilots were celebrities. And also like, I think it was de Havilland who made airplanes. But like, the son died trying to set the speed record in an airplane. And, and there's lots of obsessions with records and travel and speed records and stuff like that back then that we don't seem to, oh, maybe we're just over it or past it or whatever.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

But it was the Wild West. It was absolutely the wild West. There was no rules, there was no, There was no regulation.

[Adam Carolla]

Oh, he died because his plan for setting the speed record is just get a bunch of altitude and just go to a full blown dive and gun it, you know, and the plane just fell apart and he died. But they were nuts. Water speed, they'd all die. Air speed. So World War II begins and your grandfather gets recruited for lack of a Term. But he's already probably working for a company that is now, you know, Ford made cars, and then they made airplanes because a war broke out.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yep. You're exactly. This is exactly his trajectory. So now he's got a lot of awful choices to make, you know, because he was a celebrity.

[Adam Carolla]

He's a.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

You know, and the great thing about this podcast is it's the story of this. How this family survives through, you know, because obviously Germany lost. And.

[Jon Cryer]

Spoiler alert.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Spoiler alert. Yeah. And it was incredibly. An incredibly brutal war. And so it's how this family survives and eventually comes to the United States. States.

[Adam Carolla]

So he's working for what company when war breaks out?

[Jon Cryer]

So by 1939, he was working for the. He was working for Messerschmitt from 34 up until 39. And then he went to the north and he worked for. Not the Hans Klemm, the.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Not Heinkel.

[Jon Cryer]

Heinkel. He was working for the Heinkel, which was the Heinkel 280 and the Heinkel 218. And these were the plans that he was working on. These very.

[Adam Carolla]

Messerschmitt. Heinkel were like the two.

[Jon Cryer]

Two big companies, Heinkel and Clem, to some extent. He worked for all three of them. And then he actually worked for Messerschmitt twice and for Clem twice. But, you know, my grandfather was super, super outspoken. You know, he was a product of his time. He thought he was a genius. He thought he was this shit. And so he was very outspoken. And one of the things that I uncover in the podcast, which I had no idea about, nor did anyone in my family, is that my grandfather, at one point, was brought up on war crimes charges by the Nazis for sabotaging his own planes, and he was put under house arrest for a year. And what I uncovered was that he actually got himself caught in this power struggle between two of the biggest Nazis of the day, and he aligned himself with the guy that lost. And so they tried to get rid of him, and he was fighting for his life for a while. But. But these were the times that you were living and working in, right? I mean, can you imagine? And, you know, Adam, that's one of the things that I've been really trying very hard not to do, is to go into this family excavation trying to either condemn or redeem my grandfather. Right. I think that it's not fair to armchair quarterback from 80 years in the future because we weren't in Nazi Germany.

[Adam Carolla]

Right. Well, first off, people set the bar really High when it comes to, like, revisionist history, you know, like, I would have stood up and sat with whoever. Harriet Tubman in the back of the tank. Like, you would not. You're a fucking coward. You don't do anything that's courageous. Like this whole thing. You'd lose your life if you did all the stuff you say. You think everyone else.

[Jon Cryer]

Look, you gotta be careful.

[Adam Carolla]

Everyone wanted to get along. Everyone loved their family. Everyone wanted to live their life with this bar. Like, I would have found Adolf Hitler and spit in his face. Like you would have.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yeah. I mean, Hitler based some of his laws on American laws. He admired how we segregated Native Americans, and he admired how we, you know, he. I mean, we were under segregation still. You know, we were in Jim Crow, you know, so he admired. He admired a lot of that. And so, you know, we want to say, well, Americans would have, you know, as you said, them in the eye.

[Adam Carolla]

Everyone does this revisionist thing about what they would have done. And the reality is, most people. I just learned from COVID they just wanted to get along. You know what I mean? Like, forget about standing up and causing trouble. So I don't do the. Also, there's a. A. There's a biblical passage, and I'm not into. I'm not into the Bible.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

I did not know we were going to get into the Bible on this one. I'm not.

[Adam Carolla]

I'm not into it. But it. But it had a lot. Can I just share some good news with you?

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Now is the time. Now is the time to share.

[Adam Carolla]

Charlie wouldn't listen, but I think. I think you're more receptive to what I'm going to have. We'll talk after the show about that.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

It'll be.

[Adam Carolla]

It. It says he was. Was a. Like a righteous man for his time. Because people go, he was a righteous man. They owned slaves. Or he was a righteous man. He had five wives. You know, Moses did this. Or the founding father. What do you mean, righteous man? He was a Nazi, you know, and you go, yeah, for his time, like, where he was in his day, in his situation, he was a good man in that situation.

[Jon Cryer]

Well, one of the things that. That I wanted to do when I tried to walk in his shoes is actually walk in them and not say, like, oh, from 2024, 2025, I can look back. I was like, if I had five children, which he did, and he was the sole support of them, and I was an aeronautical engineer, and somebody asked me to design a warplane, chances are I probably would have designed the Damn warplane.

[Adam Carolla]

It's not the same, but I used to make fun of Mountain Dew all the time on the radio. Hear me out.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

I'm not saying I knew a Mountain Dew segue. I knew it. We went to the Bible. We gotta hit the mountain.

[Adam Carolla]

I'm coming clean with you.

[Suzanne Rico]

Thank you.

[Adam Carolla]

I would call it nectar of the tards. All the time. All the time. And then they offered me $50,000 to do a commercial and I jumped on it and Kimmel made fun of me and I said, I'm weak. I get it. I get it. So I sympathize.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

The siren song of the dude is very powerful.

[Adam Carolla]

I'm saying it's not exactly the same, but I understand what it's like.

[Jon Cryer]

He knew what side his bread was buttered on. He knew where he was going to make his money. He would have had to leave the country. And by 39, when the war started, that was just downright dangerous. They weren't gonna let him go at that point.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah. And I mean, he was a high profile guy. He couldn't just sneak off on a steamer.

[Jon Cryer]

There was no scene in Canada.

[Adam Carolla]

So he did what he had to do, which is designed and some of the. Well, he designed the rocket. The V1. Wait, sorry, the V1.

[Jon Cryer]

The V1. The world's first cruise missile.

[Adam Carolla]

Right. That's the world. So there's the V1 and then there's the belch bomb or whatever it is, not the V2. Oh, I'm trying to think. Show me a V1 picture on our screen. Because one looked like a traditional rocket and the other was a cruise missile.

[Jon Cryer]

Yeah. So you're at. The V1 is the cruise missile. And then the traditional rocket was the V2. Werner von Brown's V2, which looks like our rockets of today.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah, right. Oh, the V2 is what I'm thinking.

[Jon Cryer]

You're thinking of the V2, which. It was a belch rocket. I mean, that thing.

[Adam Carolla]

It was.

[Jon Cryer]

Yeah, that thing belched.

[Adam Carolla]

It was so I mean, when also the technology. I mean, the stuff they were trying to do. You know what I mean? Like if that war had gone on another two years, the stuff they were. And along with.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Could have had some great knocks on it.

[Adam Carolla]

Could have some great Nazi stuff, though. Japan was trying to do crazy stuff too.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

I'm glad we didn't get some great Nazi stuff.

[Suzanne Rico]

Yeah.

[Jon Cryer]

Had they gone. There's a V1.

[Adam Carolla]

There's a V1.

[Jon Cryer]

Isn't that badass looking?

[Adam Carolla]

I know.

[Jon Cryer]

God, that would scare the crap out of me. Yeah, you Know if these weapons. So the V1 went into. Into service in June of 1944. The V2 was September of 1944. If they had gotten those into production and been able to make them work earlier.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yeah, well, but I don't know, there's a lot of argument about that because they weren't targeted enough to really, militarily, they could terrorize. They were good terror weapons. Terror weapons. But militarily, I don't think they would.

[Jon Cryer]

Have had to make them work better. But they were working as fast as they could just to get them launched.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah. And then at some point, Americans figured out what was going on on allies and started targeting the launch sites.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

The actual launch site.

[Adam Carolla]

Yes, yes, stuff like that.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

But another thing I love about the podcast is this guy who starts as a celebrity and wonder boy designer. You see how he starts with hope that his country could possibly win this war, but things just keep getting worse and Hitler just keeps getting worse and he keeps having to compromise and his family gets threatened and, you know, it's the story of how a really clever person still can get ground down when the forces of the world are coming at you.

[Adam Carolla]

It's got a little Breaking Bad in it. Think about it. I mean, the guy was a smart guy. He got sucked into something.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

After family.

[Jon Cryer]

After the war was the hardest time. Right. I mean, during the war he had a job, all of that kind of stuff. But after the war, his kids went into an orphanage because my grandmother was dead. He. He was the handyman for the orphanage.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yeah. He had to hide from both the Russians and the Americans because they were looking for every scientist they could find.

[Jon Cryer]

And so he was slopping the pigs and, you know, weed in the garden. And then that fell through. And then the next thing, he went back to the airport where he had learned to fly and lived in like a half bombed out airplane hangar with like a tarp over the. What year are we in 1947. By the time he was at the airplane hangar, and it was the Germany's coldest winter, and the rats were coming in, the big sewer rats and trying to eat the kids, you know, grab the kids in the night and they were all sleeping on the floor. Like, those were the war. Those were the years that all of Germany was just trying to restart. And the Marshall Plan didn't start till 48. So they were.

[Adam Carolla]

Where did he die?

[Jon Cryer]

He died back in Germany alone and broke.

[Adam Carolla]

Oh, he never made it.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Oh, no. He got taken to the States and worked on the space program.

[Jon Cryer]

He made it, but that's season two, right?

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

That's season two. That's how Suzanne sits in your Glendale. But then that happened.

[Adam Carolla]

Back to Germany.

[Jon Cryer]

Yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

Wow.

[Jon Cryer]

Yeah, Back to Germany. That's another thing that has to do with the man who calculated death. And it will be a big plot point in the second season is. I don't know if you know what the Starfighter. The Starfighter controversy.

[Adam Carolla]

No.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

If anybody would know, it would be you.

[Adam Carolla]

It would be you. I got to know. When you tell me I may know.

[Jon Cryer]

I'm actually shocked at how much you do know about the kind of the minutia of World War II, because I've been studying it for a long time and I still don't have a grip on everything. This was called the deal of the century. And it's when Europe. Europe got together to rearm, especially Germany, in the face of the Cold War. Right, the burgeoning Cold War. So they buy X number of Lockheed Starfighters.

[Adam Carolla]

Oh, you talking about the plane?

[Jon Cryer]

The plane, yes, the Starfighter.

[Adam Carolla]

I don't know. Starfighter could be a. You know, it could be a Star Trek spinoff or something on Netflix or something. You're out the plane.

[Jon Cryer]

Yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

Lucky.

[Jon Cryer]

So they brought the Starfighters over to Germany and they hired my grandfather back away from the space program to run the program.

[Adam Carolla]

Are those the ones with the really stubby wing that are really fast?

[Jon Cryer]

Yes. And they. And they were trying to make a night fighter out of them.

[Adam Carolla]

They don't look like they can fly.

[Jon Cryer]

You know, they were. Look really weird.

[Adam Carolla]

They look like rockets.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yeah.

[Jon Cryer]

I don't know if we can get a Starfighter up, but they're weird.

[Adam Carolla]

If it's the one I'm thinking of, it's like it doesn't have a big much. Well, it's got a little more wing than I. Than I thought. I am thinking of another plane, but. Yes.

[Jon Cryer]

Look how deadly that thing looks.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah. No, listen, let me tell you something about airplanes. Cars all look like bars of soap now, you know, and everyone kind of goes, we're sorry. The angles and the curves and the cool stuff from the muscle car era or the ferraris from the 50s or whatever. And I go, the computer's gotten rid of all that. This is the shape it needs to be to be the most efficient or the fastest or less drag coefficiency. Right. But back before all that, guys would try things, you know what I mean? And so a Lamborghini from the 60s looked a lot different than a Ferrari, which looked a lot different from a Mustang, you know, like Everything was just different. But once everything got pushed through a computer, one shape comes out. An airplane. Military aircraft are sort of that way. Now. They're not sexy because they just kind of all look. But an F4 Phantom, that's a cool looking plane. Right. But everyone was trying something different. Now everything's going to be the same, just the same as American cars and Italian cars and German cars are all going to start taking the same shape because it's the best shot shape or the most efficient one.

[Jon Cryer]

That works the best.

[Adam Carolla]

The one that works the best. Yes. But this is back when people said sheets of paper and were like trying stuff, you know, like I saw the SR71 the other day. I mean, that's crazy, right?

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yeah.

[Jon Cryer]

You mentioned a sheet of paper. My grandfather doodled his idea for the V1. Doodled it in the margins of a magazine on a train.

[Adam Carolla]

Wow.

[Jon Cryer]

So, yeah, there was no, like computer.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

They had been trying for years to get a sort of remote bomb to work. But he was the one who finally figured out how.

[Adam Carolla]

I'm sorry. The Starfighter.

[Jon Cryer]

Lockheed playing the Starfighter. So the Starfighter, they were doing a redesign of it and he was in charge of that. And politically they were pushing to get it done very fast. There were some politicians that were involved. I gotta be careful when I say that that had some skin in the game. They wanted him to do it faster, to get him out. And he said, they're going to crash, they're going to crash. We're trying to do too much. You're pushing too hard. And he died in 1969. And in the next, over the 20 years before he died and after 300 of those planes crashed, killing 115 pilots.

[Adam Carolla]

Wow.

[Jon Cryer]

And he was fired because he was basically the whistleblower on that. And they fired him because he was saying people are going to die. Which he was the man who calculated death. And his calculation was that that plane was being made too complicated to be able to fly safely. And he was proved correct.

[Adam Carolla]

It's so fascinating. And even when you hear about stories about Lindbergh going over to work with Ford and do test, test, test. Charles Lindbergh, sorry, Going over to Ford and like being test piloting for Ford when he was at Willow Run, I think it was, and stuff like that. Just, just. And, and by the way, I always think about it because Ford and Lindbergh were both anti Semites, so I don't know what they were doing, but they.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Were, they, you know, they liberated a lot of Jews.

[Adam Carolla]

I tell everybody one all the time. Listen, I always use that example. I go, look, they're anti Semitic. Yes. Okay. But they built a product that bombed Germany. And they go, yeah. And I go, okay, but that's still better. Like, like you still. Ultimately, ultimately it'd be good if they weren't anti Semitic.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

That would be best.

[Adam Carolla]

And build the planes that brought Germany to its knees. But if you had to have one and you had. You'll take. It's a package.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

It's a package of Z.

[Jon Cryer]

The end result you're looking for.

[Adam Carolla]

The end result is what you're. What you're looking for. Well, I guess I would say people are complicated.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yes, people are complicated.

[Jon Cryer]

People are complicated. And that's. I mean, I never expected what I would find.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

You know, there is a real historical reckoning that, that she has to.

[Jon Cryer]

You have to be careful when you start scratching at the past, because somewhere down there you're going to find something that you don't like and that you're going to have to look in the face. Face, and there's a quote that, that says something like, you know, pain travels through families until someone's ready to feel it. And. And somehow that person was me. So this has been, you know, this has been a six year real labor of trying to understand where I come from, who the. You know, to get in the mind of a dead man is not an easy thing to do. And I think you have to do it very, very carefully, very respectfully. And, you know, I hope the podcast is representative of that.

[Adam Carolla]

It sounds incredibly compelling and I mean, it's great.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Suzanne. I was a producer on it, but it's really. Suzanne did all of it. Oh, we know. But it's an incredibly moving and. And just. It's a remarkable story of an American family.

[Adam Carolla]

On Wondery, the Man who Calculates It.

[Jon Cryer]

It's actually on.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. No, it's coming out on podcast one, as a matter of fact.

[Jon Cryer]

Yeah, Podcast one.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

It was exclusive, but now you can. Now anybody can.

[Adam Carolla]

Wherever you find finer podcast the finest.

[Jon Cryer]

Podcasts, that's where you'll find the man who calculated Death.

[Adam Carolla]

Did you say eight or nine part?

[Jon Cryer]

It's nine. Nine episodes. And then there's. There's a couple of best. There's a couple of bonus episodes that you'll appreciate where I dive deep into how the V1 worked, which is insane. It had a guillotine on board.

[Adam Carolla]

Not as a weapon.

[Jon Cryer]

It had a little. It had a little. You were mentioning earlier, like these little doodads that people just invented. It had my grandfather Invented this little whirligig thing that they would set to unwind so many thousand tens of thousands of time. And when it unwound all the way, it would start a domino effect that would kill the bomb's engine, flip the bomb down like this and cut the engine out. And that's when the people on the ground knew it was falling because they couldn't hear it anymore.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah, the mount that we did in the analog world.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

And these remarks. Sometimes you can go back to Egypt and stuff like that, because you sit around and go, what the hell do people do before phones? It sucks. My phone's out. I'm helpless. You know, they were able to figure things out in a mechanical way, which is. It seems really antithetical to how we think, but I guess it's a kind of elitism, like, how did those guys figure stuff out without us?

[Spike Farriston]

You know?

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

But, yeah, no, the feats of engineering alone, yes, of. Yeah, it's.

[Jon Cryer]

And the Germans were. I mean, somehow, some way, the Germans were on the forefront of all of it. And when. When Operation Paperclip started and they started bringing the Germans over after the war, they called it the Klugs de Koopfe, which meant the smartest heads, you know, the most brilliant minds. Those are the ones that both the Americans and the Soviets wanted. They wanted the smartest Klugster, Kopfer, from Germany, and they had a big fight to get them.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah, yeah, they. Now, Obviously, World War II is over and we're allied, but sort of begrudgingly with the Soviets. And now it's time to race for space and Soviets and Korea and everything. Everything else.

[Jon Cryer]

That's a fascinating era.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

Yeah, it's a really amazing era. And again. And what amazed me was I was at this dinner party, she offhandedly makes this comment, and suddenly I realized her whole family is hooked into history into, like, the darkest period of history, Nazi Germany, but also the space race, which was arguably the man's greatest achievement.

[Adam Carolla]

Listen, it's almost. In a weird way, it's almost overwhelming because there's just so much. And it's almost unbelievable how these things played out. And the technology and every facet of it is. It's all interesting, it's scary, it's poetic, it's sad. There's just so many layers to that onion. It's incredible.

[Jon Cryer]

I look at, like, this picture, and this is my grandfather with Wernher von Braun and two of the other German scientists, and the American who brought the. Really NASA. He was the genesis of NASA. Those Are all the Saturn, the Jupiter rockets. Those weren't like they invented those, you know what I mean? They weren't around and they made them better. Those just came out of, out of imagination. And when I look at that, I think to myself, wow, you know, no wonder Warner von Brown did a Disney special. Because it seemed like Disney almost.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

It seemed like magic.

[Jon Cryer]

Seemed like magic that they were doing this kind of stuff. And like, you know, my grandfather was on that team.

[Adam Carolla]

It's probably good that he's not here anymore because he'd be like, ah, Bezos, give me a fuck. Fuck it. You don't know anything about rocketry.

[Jon Cryer]

SpaceX, whatever.

[Adam Carolla]

Sold a bunch of widgets. You bought your way onto a rocket ship. All right, the man who calculated death. Nine episodes. Podcast 1 Wherever you find finder podcast. That's right. I don't know. Come back and we should talk more about this because I'm fascinated.

[Jon Cryer]

I would love that. I'm fascinated too. I'm like hooked.

[Adam Carolla]

Completely hooked. John, come back anytime you like and talk about any project you like or just catch up and say hi.

[Jason Mayhem Miller]

It's always nice. It's always nice. As long as my bathrobe is closed, it's nice.

[Jon Cryer]

And your little buggy eyed dog.

[Adam Carolla]

Get Dempsey and his rich back here. We'll settle that dog's hash. All right, thanks, guys. Thank you.

[Jon Cryer]

Thanks.

[Adam Carolla]

Well, there you go, another action packed episode. I'm gonna be in San Diego at the American Comedy Club doing standup. That'll be April 11th and April 12th as well. Two shows both nights and then heading off to Florida and then Florida and then Bellflower, California, Tacoma, Washington. Just go to AdamCroll.com for all the live shows. And until next time, Adam Kroll for Spike and John and Suzanne and Mayhem saying mahalo.

[Spike Farriston]

Pick up your phone and leave us a voicemail at 888-634-1744 and then get tickets to see Adam Corolla live@adamcola.