A dam Friedland is visibly concerned. I’ve just told him about reconnecting with an old romantic partner, and with the grave tenderness of a Jewish mother, he cautions me not to get too ahead of myself. It’s a sunny Friday evening, and we’re at the Chelsea Piers driving range with Thomas Eisenman and Zach Galsky, two members of the small crew behind Friedland’s weekly YouTube series, The Adam Friedland Show. Friedland, a comedian and former co-host of the podcast Cum Town, launched the show in 2022 as an absurdist riff on late-night television. What began as a joke about turning the once-awkward sidekick into a digital-age Dick Cavett has since become one of the internet’s more rarefied interview rooms, drawing comedians, rappers, and politicians into Friedland’s orbit.
Now entering its third season, the show’s roughly hourlong interviews keep producing clips that cut through the sludge oozing across our feeds, not because they feel more polished, but because they feel weirdly human. The usual carousel of famous people making the podcast rounds — Kamala Harris on Call Her Daddy, Tyrese on Joe Budden, the endless stream of tiny heads floating in front of screenshots of articles — is interrupted by something startlingly familiar.
In June, Spotify announced that The Adam Friedland Show would launch its third season through a partnership covering ad sales and distribution across podcast platforms. As part of the deal, Friedland also teamed with Spotify’s The Ringer on The Adam Friedland Show Presents: The Beautiful Pod, a limited World Cup series with Ringer personality Chris Ryan. For a show built on the joke of turning the least obvious person in the room into a talk-show host, the move gave the bit a strangely traditional media shape, almost as if Friedland had backed into the very kind of institution his show was designed to parody.
The way Adult Swim’s slate of low-fi, off-kilter programming managed to interrupt the monotony of 2000s cable TV, Friedland’s show follows a familiar format while subtly contorting it. Vaguely a video podcast centered around a long-form interview with a zeitgeist-y guest, it also has the uncanny quality of a student film. The set, a callback to 1960s talk shows, is disarmingly absurd. Friedland’s guests, doe-eyed and bewildered, lit just warmly enough to eviscerate any sense of celebrity glamour, are almost as surprised to be there as he is.
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“I literally go to the studio [and] the apartment,” Friedland says. “It’s the only way that I’ve found I can maintain productivity.” Golf is a recent pastime for Friedland, who told me he struggled to find a suitable activity for us to do. Having to set something up for this interview made him realize how little of his life currently happens outside of the set where they tape the show. “I literally go to the studio [and] the apartment,” he says. “It’s the only way that I’ve found I can maintain productivity.” Golf, then, is more like something to do so he doesn’t go completely insane.
I’ve never golfed before, so Friedland is also trying to coach me on my swing, which is funny mostly because he doesn’t seem fully convinced he should be explaining anything to anyone. His advice comes in the same register as his comedy: observant, sincere, and oddly endearing.
“Golf is all about touch,” he says, sounding philosophical and serious as he watches one of us try to hit a ball. A few minutes later, more technical advice: Keep your elbows locked, use your hips. “There we go,” he says after a decent hit. “Dude, that sounded so good.”
The advice keeps slipping from golf into life. Specifically, my love life. “So she said, ‘What’s up?’ And you didn’t play it like, ‘I’m great,’” he inquires, like a coach reviewing tape. When I explain that I may have come in too hot the first time, he repeats it back with alarm: “You came in hot!?” Then, with the wariness of someone who has seen enough romantic disasters to respect the danger, he says, “Nervous for you.”
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“I liked [interviewing], and I wanted to get better at it. It was the joke that became the real thing.”
This is Friedland’s gift as a person, but also as a host: He makes anxiety social. Around him, discomfort simply diffuses and becomes part of the mood. It’s particularly striking when his guests come from the world of politics. A few days prior, I sat in on a taping of the show featuring Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, who arrived with the boisterous energy of a politician in the heat of campaigning (he’s up for reelection in November). The pairing is at once baffling and organic. There’s an easy chemistry between the two, almost like when Barack Obama showed up on Zach Galifianakis’ web series Between Two Ferns. Moore knows it’s not a totally serious program in the vein of CNN, but also that Friedland, an ardent student of history, isn’t merely a comedian. Still, there’s a certain awkwardness in how badly it seems Moore wants Friedland, and by extension his audience, to see how in on the joke he is. As Democrats search for a so-called “Joe Rogan of the left,” shows like Friedland’s can become opportunistic vehicles to tap into a younger, perhaps more politically cynical audience.
Not that Friedland is overtly positioning his show as a platform for politicians. “That’s why they think they lost,” he says incredulously. “And so I think it’s kind of by default, if anything.” For his part, Friedland doesn’t want to push the show too far in that direction. “I have my own opinions, but I’m not doing the show to achieve a political project,” he says. “I want to make a funny show. And I want to see people vibing and getting a chance to see people that are well-known for who they are naturally. And a lot of the time, it turns out that someone’s awesome, but you had no idea. And a lot of times, it’s the opposite and it’s interesting.”
I ask whether he worries that politicians and public figures are using his show to launder their images. “I don’t know. It’s not so deliberate,” he says. “I think, yeah, it’s laundering or … what’s that? I put it through a front business.” Then the ball flies, and the thought dissolves into applause. “Oh, that was our golf shot!” Friedland exclaims. “That was a great golf shot.”
Searching for New Heroes
It’s not as if Friedland usually gets into policy debates with his more political guests. In fact, the appeal of the show is in how mundane the interviews are. In conversation, Friedland is rapaciously curious, if slightly disorganized, prone to tangents that lead to a candidness that can verge on cringe or awkward. He has drawn Chet Hanks into a discussion about Kobe Bryant, niche porn, and Jamaican patois; asked Jadakiss about New York rap, Drake, and white boys talking like rappers; pressed former CNN anchor Chris Cuomo on AOC, mayoral politics, and family lore about the Mob; and sat across from Clavicular, a looksmaxxing figure whose episode moved through attraction, drug use, internet fame, and the self-improvement nihilism of young men online.
Even so, the show has pushed against the membrane of Friedland’s own comedic shield. His conversation with Rep. Ritchie Torres, the Bronx Democrat and staunch Israel supporter, became one of Friedland’s most widely discussed political clips. The interview, released in August, was supposed to follow the show’s usual strange logic, but instead the exchange hardened around Gaza, with Friedland growing visibly emotional as Torres remained largely unmoved.
When I ask Friedland about it, he still sounds uneasy. “That was the one time it felt like I fucked it up like a brick in the room,” he says. He had planned to start with Torres’ biography: His Puerto Rican heritage, being an openly gay politician, surviving a suicide attempt, and making it to Congress from one of the poorest districts in the country. “You could spin that into a heartwarming movie of the week,” Friedland says. “But then why has he become… the AIPAC guy?” He wanted to understand, he says, “How do you get to this place?”
What made the episode uncomfortable, for Friedland, was not only that Torres was difficult to move off-script. It was that the subject pulled Friedland into a kind of earnestness he usually tries to avoid. Watching the edit back, he says, was miserable. “I’m like, ‘Oh, God, I don’t want to put this out.’” But he decided the discomfort was part of the point. “It’s important that Jews express solidarity for Palestine,” he says. Friedland is careful not to recast himself as an expert. His usual rule, he says, is not to pretend that interview prep gives him authority over “some fucking specific omnibus pork barrel legend.” But Palestine was different. “I grew up a Zionist,” he says. “I studied Middle Eastern politics in college. I lived in Israel. It’s a topic that has mattered to me for 20 years.”
Another recent political guest was Rep. Ilhan Omar. The first thing he tells me about their meeting is how shaken he was by the number of people who want her dead. “There are multiple people incarcerated for plotting her assassination,” he says matter-of-factly. “The president of the United States is fixated on her, her community.” The way Friedland talks about Omar is noticeably different from the way he talks about the broader political circus.
Friedland making friends at a local Men’s Wearhouse. What struck him about her story was the language people use when referring to refugees. On the right, the rhetoric is obvious in its ugliness. “It’s the xenophobia,” he says. “The Trump thing.” But he found something strange in the liberal framing, too, a kind of condescension disguised as compassion. “‘Refugees are welcome here,’” he says, trying out the phrase with suspicion. “Almost like they’re lesser than.” Omar’s story, as he understood it, scrambled that framework entirely. “The reason she is unafraid is because she’s right,” he says. “She’s like, ‘I walked to Kenya from Mogadishu to save my life with my family when I was eight.’”
Friedland sounds almost embarrassed by the size of the thought forming in his head. His instinct is usually to puncture grand language before anyone else can. But Omar seems to defeat the reflex. “It’s kind of corny to say it,” he says, “but the concept of a civil rights hero that we’re like, ‘That’s from the olden days.’ But this is — it’s like Mandela. It’s like a hero.” He says that while researching her, something kept dawning on him: “No one discusses her in that light.” Instead, her interns pick up the phone to people threatening to kill her. Politicians talk about executing or expelling her. The most remarkable thing about her, to Friedland, is not that she has endured all of this, but that she appears to have metabolized it into certainty. “She’s like, ‘Fuck you,’ ” he says, with admiration. “It felt good to me to get her on the show,” he says.
Accidental Podcast Star
For all of the apparent looseness in the show, Friedland insists it’s not the same as randomness. The interview works because it feels like nobody is steering too hard, but in practice, he has already figured it out. “There’s a plan,” he says. “I’ve worked for weeks on researching, and I have a flow of conversation.”
Friedland’s show trades in a kind of intimacy, but he is deeply suspicious of exposure. I ask whether they would ever do more behind-the-scenes material, and Friedland recoils. “I hate behind-the-scenes,” he says. “I would kill myself.” The current podcasting landscape, to him, already mistakes access for art. “Everyone’s just showing the world their butthole,” he says.
Friedland was born in Santa Monica, California, and raised mostly in Las Vegas, with a brief childhood stretch in Cape Town, South Africa, where his parents were from. He went to college in D.C. with plans to become a lawyer, but instead met Nick Mullen and Stavros Halkias, his future podcast co-hosts, and started doing stand-up. Friedland eventually had to tell his parents he was choosing comedy over law — what he calls having to “come out of the closet as a clown.”
On some level, he thought, his parents might understand taking the path of a creative. His father was an architect, his mother studied theater, and his grandmother, a divorced woman in Cape Town’s Jewish community at a time when that was grounds for ostracism, was a self-made art dealer, going on to open one of the city’s more prestigious galleries. Still, his parents were less romantic about comedy as a career. A little while after college, Friedland moved to New York with Mullen and Halkias. The idea was basically “maybe you have to have a podcast now.” Mullen bought a recorder, Halkias was on the first episode, Friedland joined on the second, and “that was the crew.”
“We were making really cheeky, immature jokes,” Friedland says of his former podcast, Cum Town. “It was like 11-year-olds at a sleepover.” Cum Town, which started in 2016, initially took off as something of an anti-podcast. The cast were pioneers of the shooting-the-shit format that eventually became dominant in the medium. “I know people loved it, but for us, it was just arguing about lunch pretty much after the episode was over. Stav was like, ‘We always record in Brooklyn. Can we go to Queens once, where I live?’ It was just that.”
Because they were Bernie Sanders supporters, the crew was thrust into the so-called Dirtbag Left, a diffuse network of comedians and podcasters whose politics leaned progressive. Despite this reputation, “the show wasn’t political,” Friedland says. “We were making really cheeky, immature jokes,” he says. “It was like 11-year-olds at a sleepover.”
The show’s vulgarity was part of its armor. Even its name seemed designed to resist professionalization. “We had the worst name,” Friedland says. “You couldn’t write it in articles.” When I mention that publications often had to describe it obliquely, he laughs and reaches for the obvious comparison: “Like Voldemort. He who shall not be named.”
For the people listening, Cum Town could feel like a transmission from a more lawless internet, where the jokes moved faster than the self-consciousness around them. For Friedland, though, the memory is less romantic. “We didn’t think it was good,” he says. “We thought it sucked.” Only in recent years, out of nostalgia, did he go back and appreciate the show’s irreverent humor. “I’m like, ‘It’s amazing. It’s so funny. I had no idea.’”
At the time, the work barely felt like work. It was “organized in terms of, we set the time to be in Nick’s living room,” he says. He calls it “the best business model, the $5 Planet Fitness Patreon model,” referencing how, like a cheap gym membership, it wasn’t hard to sell fans on a subscription. “What costs $5?” he says. “You can’t get water for that anymore.”
“I was earning a handsome salary for two hours of work, and I grew quite lazy,” Friedland says. “I could bang out three movies a day.” When his girlfriend came home from work, he would feel the need to prove he had done something with his day. “I started taking notes on movies to act like I was thinking.”
When Halkias’ stand-up career began to take off in 2022, he left the show. Friedland assumed he and Mullen would keep the old format, but Mullen had other plans. “Honestly, it’s credit to Nick,” Friedland says of the creation of his new show. “He was like, ‘I have a vision. You got to do The Adam Friedland Show.’” Friedland was skeptical. “I was like, ‘Well, we have this brand that we built, Nicholas.’ And he’s like, ‘No, you got to trust me.’”
“I’m going to still be annoying and myself. I’m going to do it my way.”
The joke, at first, was how ill-suited for the gig Friedland was on paper. He had been “the kind of nebbish” of Cum Town: slight, nervous, self-effacing, with round glasses and the wardrobe of a background nerd in an Eighties rom-com. Turning him into what he calls a “Gore Vidal-style” host was funny because it seemed like the wrong move. Then he started doing interviews, first with comics already in his orbit, like Shane Gillis and Dan Soder, then with a widening cast of actors, rappers, athletes, media figures, and politicians. By the time Mullen left the show in 2025, leaving Friedland alone to helm it, the premise had become less absurd. “I found that I really liked it, and I wanted to get better at it,” he says. “And it was a joke that became a real thing.”
The show gave Friedland something of a renewed lease on life as well. The lax structure of Cum Town was beginning to take its toll. Now, he had something he was in charge of. “Coming out of that experience, I found that I’m not bad at things,” he says, looking back on how his attitude toward work has changed since starting the new show. “I found that, actually, if I work really hard at something, I can do an OK job. And also, when you think back to it, you’re like, ‘Oh, God, I was just fast-forwarding to being dead.’”
The team is small, with several guys named Zach, he says, and everyone is working hard. “Zach the intern, Zach the part-time, Zach the contractor, Zach the salaried full-time,” he jokes. But the affection behind it is obvious. “I love the lads,” he says. “We’re very driven about … We want to make a good thing.” Once the infrastructure expands, he says, they can try different formats. “We’ll do different things.” Adding live music is the first experiment. Friedland doesn’t describe it as a content pivot so much as a nod to the talk-show format — a place where the guest list could zigzag, where a young underground rapper and an old singer-songwriter might make sense in the same universe because the host’s curiosity was the format. “We’re doing music,” he says. “We’re starting that. That’s happening right now.” Xaviersobased recently came through. “Such a nice guy,” Friedland says. “Such a sweetheart.” He says he showed him Bob Dylan. “He’d never seen him, and he was like, ‘This is hard.’”
Friedland is far more interested in talking about this version of the show, a sort of callback to the talk shows that would break new bands via live performances. “I liked late-night shows that have bands,” he says. Bruce Hornsby was the next slated musical guest. Friedland wants the show to keep audiences on their toes as opposed to being a predictable parade of cool 19-year-olds, or worse, politicians trying to prove they get the joke. That same instinct, to let the guest list zigzag until unexpected connections appear, is also how Friedland talks off-camera. A conversation about music on the show drifts, almost inevitably, into the pop-cultural trial of Drake and Kendrick Lamar, and the strange identity politics that gathered around “Not Like Us.” Friedland, a tried-and-true Drake fan, was struck less by the beef itself than by how eagerly some white listeners joined the song’s moral chorus. “It’s also weird that white people, ‘They not like us, they not like us,’” he says, pantomiming the track. “But the song’s about how he’s not properly Black. Does no one realize that?”
“I was earning a handsome salary for two hours of work, and I grew quite lazy,” Friedland says of his podcasting days. “I could bang out three movies a day.” What bothered him was the chorus of self-assured commentary that formed around it. “The way that fat white guys with beards got into it was the worst,” he says. “That was the thing that was really disgusting. It’s like guys that worked at Vice and now they’re 42.” I was experiencing firsthand what Friedland’s guests get when they visit his show: Instead of them being caught in a lie, he was catching himself in a moment of earnestness.
‘I Was Like Rip Van Winkle’
There are moments, though, when Friedland’s ironic distance breaks down faster than he seems prepared for. Later at the range, the conversation turns to Kanye West, then to the way prejudices now circulate as memes and content. He doesn’t talk about it with the grand posture of someone trying to claim moral high ground. The contemporary internet, he says, has made certain kinds of racism feel weirdly available again. “I do think it’s peculiar that in general, racism is on the menu,” he says. “I think it’s insane, in fact.” The new race science, the casual antisemitism: To him, it all feels both archaic and newly stupid. “It’s all going old-fashioned,” he says. “Phrenology is like the 1910s.”
West, in Friedland’s telling, becomes the perfect example of how the internet turns a person’s visible unraveling into everyone’s entertainment. “People took the antisemitism,” he says, and what Friedland saw was “this guy I liked a lot” who was “having a tough time.” It bothered him that it became “fodder for Reels or content.” Not that he excuses West’s politics. He notes some of the tweets were “unreal,” and hanging around certain far-right figures is “not cool.” But beyond the politics, he says, it was also “just really tragic.”
Friedland and his crew had just watched Jeen-Yuhs, the 2022 West documentary, and what stayed with him was not only the spectacle of West’s rise, but the figure of Donda West, his mother. He talks about the scenes of West and Donda as if he were remembering a family member of his own. She is, in Friedland’s reading, the person who makes West human. “You can tell that that woman is the one person on the planet that can calm him down,” he says.
Friedland’s mother died in early 2020, which made him miss a lot of the social upheaval that summer. “I was more dealing with being with my family during that than lockdown.” The conversation has the casually pointed nature of many of Friedland’s interviews. In telling me how much he was moved by the maternal moments in the West documentary, he connects it to his own life. “I lost my mom.” The practical absence of a parent, he says, is something a person can adjust to. But the pain is different. “It never leaves.”
Friedland’s mother died in May 2020, around the moment the George Floyd video began to spread. “The day before she passed away, I saw everyone was posting on Instagram the video of this guy,” he says. “I’m like, ‘What the fuck? On Instagram?’” Then his mother died, and he went home to Las Vegas to sit Shiva. Friedland describes the ritual with the mixture of reverence and annoyance that marks many of his best observations. “Everyone comes over to the house with food and you’re so annoyed by people spilling and not doing the dishes,” he says. But the point of it, he says, is practical: “You go home and you’re not alone after your loved one dies.”
By the time he returned to New York, the country had entered a different fever. He had missed the social media scorekeeping and the transformation of grief and outrage into performance, as well as the subsequent backlash. “I was like Rip Van Winkle,” he says. “I missed everything.”
In some ways, he says, he was lucky. Not because his grief was easy, but because it gave him a real problem to deal with while other people were stuck online going insane. “I was more dealing with being with my family during that than lockdown,” he says. “People were going crazy at the crib, and they were just looking at their phones.”
A couple of years later, he remembers talking to his dad after his episode with former Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan, trying to figure out what the next few years of the show should be like. His worry was that he needed to be selective with politics because, as he puts it, “I’m a comedian. I want to be funny.” His dad’s advice was simply “Just be yourself.”
Friedland says that might be “the second compliment” he’s ever gotten from him. “I’m going to still be annoying and myself,” he says. “I’m going to do it my way.”
After a few hours at the range, the sun is still out, and Friedland is beaming with joy. He looks around the range, at his crew, at the balls arcing into the evening. “I’m so happy right now,” he says. “Guys, we got to do more fun [stuff].”
