The Joe Rogan of the left? Adam Friedland can barely put his pants on

Adam Friedland knows it’s ridiculous. After the manosphere got credit for Donald Trump’s US election win and podcasting somehow became the dominant platform of global politics, the 38-year-old comedian has suddenly found himself touted as a generation’s imminent saviour.

His YouTube talk show, The Adam Friedland Show – a ramshackle piss-take of the long-form intellectual discourse TV of yore (the show even cribs the exact set design and ’70s aesthetics of The Dick Cavett Show) – has, to many desperate progressives, become the thing that will deliver us from fascism.

Online, Friedland has been extolled as a potential “Joe Rogan of the left”. Earlier this year, GQ suggested he “could be the Millennial Jon Stewart”.

“I don’t know how any of this is happening. I barely know how to put my pants on!” says Friedland over Zoom, as he paces his home in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene. When he’s worked up, his voice wavers like a theremin. “Shame on society for anyone applying any of these labels to me.”

Videos across the show’s two seasons have accumulated over 70 million views, while Friedland – once best known for his part in a scandal that soft-cancelled Taylor Swift’s then paramour, The 1975 frontman Matty Healy – has earned writeups in esteemed spaces such as The New Yorker and The New York Times, a publication that once wouldn’t even print the title of the “cheeky” podcast that first made him a public figure. (That would be Cum Town, a linchpin of what was the Bernie Sanders-aligned “Dirtbag Left”, with fellow comedians Stavros Halkias and Nick Mullen, which ran between 2016 and 2022.)

Friedland, who attended George Washington University in Washington, DC, where he majored in Middle Eastern studies and had planned to pursue a legal career before he found standup comedy, is amused by the cultural capital being gifted to young men rambling on the internet, and the left’s desperation to claw back the space. “It is bizarre because I don’t think Kamala Harris lost the election because she didn’t have a good enough podcasting strategy. That’s a pretty moronic interpretation of what happened,” he says.

“But I owe so much to Trump. He really did legitimise a platform. Three years ago, trying to get someone to do the internet was impossible. But people are seeing the views things are getting and apparently anyone outside the right is desperate for anything, and they think I’m the one to help them.”

‘They think I’m Foucault or something but, literally, I’m just wearing glasses. I’m one of the dumbest guys ever.’

On his show, while rebuffing a conservative guest’s jibes that he was the “Rogan of the left”, Friedland joked he was actually the “Mahatma Gandhi of Generation Alpha”. “Anyone can say whatever they want, but I don’t want the show to be ‘of the’ anything and I don’t think the objective for me is to achieve any sort of political project,” he says. “I think that typically makes comedy not funny, and I just want to make a funny show.’”

The Adam Friedland Show is deeply funny. It began as a “half joke” soon after Cum Town ended, with Mullen as its instigator. “It’s a credit to him for being like, ‘We’re gonna make the least popular guy from a podcast for men with CTE [Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy] into a public intellectual,’” jokes Friedland.

The show functions in the finest traditions of Maniac TV. It is odd and unpredictable, thanks to Friedland’s wanton interview approach: he flatters and antagonises his often confused guests with vape in hand, hair greasy, literally wearing his dad’s suit (“we have matching bodies,” he says). He is heavily researched but mealymouthed and self-deprecating, a bizarre weapon that disarms even the most sceptical guest.

Friedland-mania reached a pitch after a recent episode with Ritchie Torres, a Democratic congressman for New York, known for his vocal support of Israel. Friedland, the son of South African Jews, had spent a year living in Israel after high school, where he worked for an ambulance service. He verged on tears as he chastised Torres over his campaigning. The video – the sort of raw exchange that mainstream news can’t produce – went viral, even earning praise from the Hulk himself, Hollywood actor and activist Mark Ruffalo.

While Torres saw it as an ambush, Friedland says what happened was not deliberate. He had wanted Torres on the show because he found his story – about escaping poverty, coming out as gay, overcoming a suicide attempt, and making it to the US Congress – inspirational.

“It wasn’t premeditated by any stretch of the imagination,” says Friedland. “It’s just a difficult thing to express because for me and a lot of Jewish people, this is a conversation we’ve had with our parents for 20 years, and now society is having this conversation. I think it’s important for Jewish people to speak up and express solidarity with Palestinians, and I think that needs to happen more. But what was difficult about that for me is I’m a freaking comedian! I’m not used to presenting myself in that way.

“Watching myself in an edit like that was terrible. But I do think it was a conversation about that subject in a way that people don’t talk about for some f—ing weird reason, which is, you know, human beings are dying! Is it about having more documents than the other guy? No, it’s about a tragedy. So I think talking to a politician who’s only equipped to talk about the issue in one way, like on Anderson Cooper or on CNN, is probably why it resonated with more people.”

It’s something Friedland returns to often when politicians appear on the show, a moment where he suggests to the guest, ‘Let’s cut the bullshit, can you just talk like a human for a minute?’

“I always want to be careful not to present myself as an expert in things because when I watch other comedians talk about politics in a nitty-gritty way, I’m like, ‘This f---ing guy does not know what the hell he’s talking about and he’s not qualified to talk in that way,’” says Friedland.

“So if I have a politician on, I’m not going to talk about legislation. But I can speak about politics in a way where it’s like, ‘Hey, this is a time where people don’t trust our institutions, they don’t like the media, they don’t trust the government, so why do you want to be in the government?’ I feel comfortable saying it that way. And I think they don’t get that question very often, so you can get an answer that’s more useful for people to hear.”

Friedland’s talk-show success comes just as late-night TV is under attack. When Jimmy Kimmel was temporarily pulled off air in September following comments about the slain right-wing pundit Charlie Kirk, Friedland took to X to tell fellow late-night host Jimmy Fallon: “It’s just you and me now, brother”. It was a joke, but one with a sober subtext: while the traditional late-night formula – “tell me a funny anecdote, plug the product, throw to the clip”, as Friedland puts it – is dying on network TV, a looser version of the format is thriving on YouTube.

Has he been approached by networks or streamers to take the show to their platforms? “No, but I’ve been waiting,” says Friedland. “By this point, I was assuming nation states would be hitting me up. Gulf states or the Chinese, perhaps. I mean, I’m open for business.”

So no calls from Ted Sarandos or anyone? “I don’t even know who that is, but I would talk to anyone,” he says. “Who owns your newspapers, Emperor Palpatine or something? If you want to give him my phone number, I’d be happy to talk to him. I stand for nothing, I’ll say anything.”

If Friedland’s show has a recurring concern, it’s for the culturally maligned. Disgraced US politician Anthony Weiner; Amanda Knox, who was wrongfully accused of murder; and adult film star-turned-activist Mia Khalifa have all graced the show’s set for open-flowing interviews this season.

“Well, those are just the people that are available,” jokes Friedland. “I don’t want to do something exploitative. I just want to do something that can be both compassionate but also funny, which is hard to do. Being nice is kind of difficult to make funny. I remember when Ted Lasso came out and people were like, ‘Comedy doesn’t have to be mean’, and in my head, I was like, shut up!”

Navigating their controversies has helped hone his tools for interviewing, he says. “My objective every time is to make someone comfortable because that’s how you get more interesting things out of them. You go on Twitter and people are just arguing, and they’re arguing about nothing. They’re arguing about Charli XCX as if it’s the civil rights movement. It’s quite negative and unproductive and just indicative, probably, of very sad times. I don’t think you get as good of a conversation if you’re just trying to beat the other person. Plus, I’m not even equipped to do that. I’m not smart enough. I’m just a comedian.”

Peppered among his videos’ comments sections are criticisms that Friedland is giving controversial figures – his guests have included conservative commentator Michael Knowles who campaigns against immigration and the “LGBTQ agenda”, and Aaron “Steiny” Steinberg from boozy right-wing podcasters the Nelk Boys – a space to whitewash their images and platform their dangerous ideas.

“Steiny’s dangerous ideas?” Friedland deadpans. OK, maybe not. But is the goal to humiliate them or just let their arguments break down on their own?

“OK, so take Michael Knowles,” says Friedland. “His whole thing is that he’s anti-trans and anti-gay, and yet he spends his whole time arguing with trans and gay people. That’s funny to me. Or Steiny, he’s on this thing where guys sit around chugging alcohol but then the president’s been on it four times. The president of the United States! It’s crazy. So that’s funny to me, too. These guys have a big audience, which is why the richest man in the world and the President are going on their podcast, but they don’t really have any concept of why any of this is happening. So what, I’m supposed to make him look like he’s Adolf Hitler? That’s just the hyperbole of the internet.”

In Friedland’s eyes, the wide reach of these alt-stream figures means the case for deplatforming is moot. “If you disagree with something, if it’s absurd to you, as a comedian you joke about it,” he says. “When I was a kid, Howard Stern would have the KKK on his show; he didn’t treat it as ‘platforming’. He treated it as something to laugh at, and I think that takes the power away from it. It seems better to have someone like Michael Knowles on the show and then goof on him because these are laughable concepts and they should be treated as such, especially since they’re such a part of the political discourse right now.”

This season’s guest list has whiplashed between politics to pop culture, from Sarah Jessica Parker to Senator Chris Murphy to Amelia Dimoldenberg. On an episode with Amanda Knox, Friedland asked Knox to convince her friend Monica Lewinsky to appear as a guest on the show. Does he have any other dream interviews?

“I mean, Marc Maron got Obama again, and I got jealous of that,” he says. “Pandora’s box opened after Obama, so there’s just so many interesting questions to ask.” He catches himself. “Look at me, talking like I’m gonna get Obama! Well, apparently the newspapers are making me into Winston Churchill now.”

Hasn’t he heard? He’s the Millennial Jon Stewart. “How the hell did this happen? They really must have no one,” Friedland groans. “They think I’m Foucault or something but, literally, I’m just wearing glasses. I’m one of the dumbest guys ever. Genuinely, this is a house of cards that is going to come tumbling down.”

Until it falls, he’s going to keep playing. In the current context, Friedland feels he has something sincere to offer. “Everyone’s into politics now and they’re all watching the TV show that is Trump and the government. But what’s interesting is if you turn the camera back around onto everyone that’s watching, it’s the most demoralised and bummed out I’ve ever seen American people,” he says. “I’m 38 and born in this country and I can speak to that. I’m just trying to do it in a way where it doesn’t make people feel like crap watching it. I want them to be like, ‘Oh, that made me feel good, that’s funny.’”

The Adam Friedland Show streams on YouTube, with new episodes every Thursday.