Overregulation and Safety Culture Hinder Rebuilding and Economic Dynamism

Key Quotes

"I was friends with Suzanne Somers and her husband Alan Hamel, and they lived... I mean, I'm still friends with Alan, obviously Suzanne passed recently. And they were a great couple and they loved Malibu and they used to come out and stay at the Malibu Inn and go out to dinner with me. And they lived in Palm Springs and I said, "Well, you love Malibu so much, I don't get why you don't live in Malibu." And they said, "Oh, we lived in Malibu, but a fire came in and took the house down." That was probably 20 years ago. And then when we wanted to rebuild, the Coastal Commission was so burdensome and there was so much regulation. And you know, these are people in their early 70s, late 60s. They don't have 11 years to rebuild a house. They're in the twilight part, they're in the retirement years. At a certain point, Alan Hamel just said, "I couldn't deal with the Coastal Commission anymore." It's his property. He just wanted to rebuild a slightly different structure. You know, some talk about a carport and whether they needed closed parking or whatever. Eventually, they just packed up and they went to Palm Springs and they built the house there. So that's essentially what it does. It dissuades a lot of people from rebuilding."

Adam Carolla shares this anecdote to illustrate how burdensome regulations, specifically from the Coastal Commission, can prevent individuals from rebuilding their homes after a disaster. Carolla argues that the extensive red tape and time involved dissuade people, particularly older individuals, from undertaking the rebuilding process, even when it is their own property. This example serves as a microcosm of a larger issue he perceives with regulatory processes.

"I don't think any of it is connected to unions or builders or contractors or engineers or any of that. I don't think they want any of it. I've lived in that world. I talk to these people. They roll their eyes. They hate it. It makes their job much harder. So I don't think it's a sort of New York mafia, "we'll handle the garbage" kind of situation. This is what I'm starting to learn is basically what people are calling gynofascism, which is way too many women in positions of power with an eye on safety. And it's safety uber alles. And the second thing is environment uber alles. And everything they do is under the umbrella of safety. And they think and they get a lot of applause and accolades for making things safer. But what they don't realize is that grind things to a halt."

Adam Carolla posits that the root cause of overregulation and slow rebuilding processes is not corruption or union influence, but rather what he terms "gynofascism." Carolla defines this as an excess of women in power prioritizing safety and environmental concerns above all else. He contends that this singular focus on "safety uber alles" and "environment uber alles," while seemingly noble, ultimately paralyzes progress and grinds necessary activities to a halt.

"They hide behind the shield of safety because it makes them sound noble, but it's essentially like saying, "Look, wouldn't your car be safer if it had a full NASCAR style roll cage in it?" And you go, "I guess." And what about a fire suppression system? Okay. And then how about a fuel cell with a bladder in it, then a ballistic material in it versus a gas tank? Don't you think that'd be safe? And yeah, but the Prius is going to be $150,000 and no one can afford one now. Yeah, but it'd be safe. So they hide behind this safety BS. It's mostly women who buy into it, just like we scared the moms during COVID. And then they make all the rules. And the rules are always more and it's always safer. And also people sort of go along with it like they go, "Look, if a caisson is 10 feet deep into the ground with number four rebar, wouldn't it be safer to have it be 20 feet in the ground with number six rebar?" And it's like, it would be, but you just added 70% to the cost of the caisson. And they that's how they think because their job, the job of that individual sitting in that role, whether it's a local, state or federal government agency, is to increase safety. Their job is not to think about the second and third order effects on the economy, on the affordability, on the ability to move quickly, on all the other factors that the individual citizen and the businesses in the community then have to deal with. That's never what they're tasked with. They have a very kind of simple uniform statement, which is, "Hey, make things safe. You're the regulatory body that oversees safety and oversees that we're not going to have a fire."

Adam Carolla explains that the pursuit of absolute safety, often championed by those in regulatory roles, leads to impractical and unaffordable solutions. He uses the analogy of an overly safe car to demonstrate how an excessive focus on safety, without considering cost or practicality, can render a product unusable for the average person. Carolla argues that regulators are tasked with increasing safety but fail to consider the broader economic and societal consequences of their decisions.

"I think there's some of that. I think there's a... here's the way I've sussed it out and it'll be the next sort of subject that I think people will be talking about coming up. I brought up gynofascism earlier. So men and women are different and we don't seem to want to acknowledge that, but we are. And the newsrooms were, you know, a very short period of time ago, 15, 20 years ago, it would be 12% female or the news outlets or the news... the news, the news outlets or CBS, NBC, you know, New York Times, whatever, had a minority of women. College campuses, you know, when they bring all the presidents of these colleges up in front of Congress, they're all women. It's not like they went, "We need to talk to only women presidents of prestigious colleges." We just go, "Give me the presidents." And every time there's a presser, I think this just happened at Brown with the shooting that it... it what happened in Congress with Harvard and so on and so forth. It's all... it's all women in these positions now."

Adam Carolla connects the shift in media bias to an increase in women in leadership positions, referencing his concept of "gynofascism." Carolla asserts that men and women are fundamentally different and that the growing dominance of women in newsrooms and academic institutions influences their output. He suggests that this demographic shift leads to a more emotional and biased approach to reporting, where a preference for certain political figures