Adam Carolla vs. Patent Trolls, the Government, NPR, Salon, and more!

“Adam Carolla vs. Patent Trolls, the Government, NPR,
Salon, and more!” Interview by Zach Weissmueller. Edited by Alexis
Garcia. Approximately 16 minutes. 

Original release date was June 17, 2014. The original text is
below. 

“There’s a lot of people out there whose job it is to be
offended for other people,” says Adam Carolla, comedian and host of
the Adam Carolla
Show podcast. “They’re like, ‘Hey, these are opinions
people disagree with!’ It’s like, ‘Hey, United States there, buddy.
It’s just one big pile of opinions that people disagree with.'”

Reason TV sat down with Carolla in his Glendale
warehouse/podcast studio to discuss a lawsuit he’s facing from a
so-called “patent troll” who claims
intellectual ownership over the idea of “a system for
disseminating media content representing episodes in a serialized
sequence.” In other words, the company claims to own the very idea
of podcasting, despite never having produced a podcast itself.

Carolla, whose show set a Guinness
Book World Record for most downloaded podcast of all time,
is a natural target for the patent troll, but Carolla believes that
if he goes down, the entire future of podcasting may be at stake.
So he’s started a “Save Our Podcasts”
campaign to fight back.

“We were just sort of number one on their shakedown list, and
I’m just assuming they’d just get to everyone who was in the top
1000 on iTunes eventually,” says Carolla (1:46). “We sort of felt
like, well, it’d be nice for our podcasting brothers not to give
them ‘X’ amount of dollars… When terrorists take hostages, if you
start negotiating with them, they just start taking more camera
crews. We just figured we’d save the next camera crew. We’ll take
the duct tape and the zip ties.”

Carolla even made a recent trip to Washington, D.C. to discuss
patent reform with a Congessional committee. But he left
underwhelmed by the experience.

“I got a call about an hour later that said, ‘[Sen. Patrick]
Leahy shot it down,'” says Carolla (4:23). “It gave me
renewed hope in the system and how one man could make a difference.
Oh wait… it was a total waste of time.” 

In addition to fighting off patent trolls, Carolla has also been
busy shooting an independent
film, working on his  Spike TV show To Catch a
Contractor, and recently released his third bestselling
book, President
Me: The America That’s in My Head. He sounded off on
several of the topics covered in that book, such as his disgust
with Los Angeles (“this town is trashy” - 7:08) and comedians being
pressured to issue fake apologies (10:25).

He also calls out online media outlets for constantly engaging
in ambush interview techniques, pointing to recent encounters
with NPR and Salon as
examples (11:45).

“There’s not a lot of people who disagree with them who are
willing to even talk to them anymore because of the ambush nature
of what they do now,” he says. “There’s sort of nothing in it for
the person who’s being interviewed by Salon.com anymore, because
all they’re going to do is try to make you look like a bigoted,
sexist, xenophobic whatever.”

The interview concludes with Carolla discussing the various
political labels that commentators have attached to him and why he
considers himself “mostly libertarian” (14:43).

“You bring up the topic, I’ll give you the answer” says Carolla.
“For me, if you go, ‘Would you like to lower taxes? Yes. Are you OK
with guys having a pot plant in their backyard? Yes. Would you like
government smaller? Yes.’ I think when you’re done with many of
these questions, you’ll probably end up with libertarian.”