Joe Rogan & Kevin Smith on the Early Days of Podcasting

Now, facetious, if you walked into the facility that I just walked into and had the grand tour that you were given, a gentle listener and watcher at home, I was saying to Joe before we went, like, he's got this new, new to me. I don't know how long you've been here since October, you said. Yeah. But it's, it's a paradise. It's a, you know, fuck the term man cave. This is like man empire. You walk in and it's just, it's like walking into Joe's head. It's everything he loves under one fucking roof. And I said it to him before, like, you did this with your mouth. Like, you talked yourself into this. Very strange. Isn't that awesome? Yeah. I mean, I know you've got, and you've got a zillion things that you do, but like, even in a world of like the MMA stuff, that's still your mouth. It's always your fucking mouth that is taking you from where you started till now. You walk into this building, it's not like he had a family fortune and this is willed to him. Your mouth put you in a building this nice. Painted the walls, the color it is. You walk in, it's like a museum. It's like you see pieces of him, hence me, all over the fucking place. That's all out of your mouth. If anybody's watching or listening at home teetering on the verge of like, I wonder if I should do a podcast, send them a snapshot of that fucking room where you can launch bow and arrows for 45 yards. They'll start talking. Well, I think if you're interesting at all, you should do a podcast. Fuck yeah. It can be a, it can be a way to make a living. There's enough people like this. I'm not a one of those famine thinkers. I think the opposite. I'm like, you could do it. Anybody could do it. I'm never like, man, it might not be enough for everybody. I agree. I'm always the guy who encourages you to like, Hey, try it because oh my God, it's fucking fun for me. And you know, we've been, we're rare birds and as much as we've been around since the fucking art form started, like you've been doing podcasts since a minute after podcast. Carolla started first. He was the guy who- Well, I pre-date Carolla. Yeah. Well, yeah, for sure. But, but you're in the first five years. You were, well, what year did you start? I started, we just celebrated last year was our 10th anniversary of Smocca. So we're now a year 11. So count back from now is 2007. Yeah. That's a couple of years. When did you begin? Think 2009. I think it was in two years of the Big Bang. When I, when I jumped in, it was Leo LaPorte doing This Week in Tech and I think he still does that and the Happy Tree Friends. And that was like the Apple podcast top five. And then me and Scott started with Smocca and then later on we added a bunch of stuff, but getting in within the first two years, like we happened and then right on the heels of us, Adam was on the radio and then the radio job went away. And Adam- What year was that where Adam went to podcasting? I gotta be 2000. If we started Smocca 2007, I got, it's either in, we start February 2007, either he loses the radio gig in 2007 and moves to podcast or it happens in 2008, but it was- It was in that neighborhood. Yes. And he's, he was the, the model for a lot of folks now, like Ralph Garman, the guy that I do Hollywood Babel. I love Ralph. Ralph's amazing. He was let go by K-Rock earlier this year or later. Yeah. Like at the end of last year, right before Christmas. And so he too moved into a kind of online world. It can sustain a motherfucker. If you've got enough people to care about you. Ralph's a very smart- The Ralph Report is his show. I like him a lot. He's a good dude. He's a very good dude. But I always like talking to him at K-Rock. When you, when you go to K-Rock, that's how our friendship began. You sit there doing the show and then afterwards, like I was a cigarette smoker in those days and we'd sit there out in the parking lot and smoke. And slowly, like I remember I came in once K-Rock just announced like, hey, I've rented a theater on Santa Monica Boulevard and we're calling it Smodcast. And we're going to, we're the world's first live podcasting theater and we're going to do podcasts there and stuff. And so Ralph was listening. He's right there. And then like months prior, he had approached me. He's like, Hey man, would you ever want to do like the show Biz Beat? That's what he used to do on K-Rock. On Kevin and Bean. Like as a Saturday show and I was like, fuck yeah, hear myself on the radio. That'd be fantastic. So we recorded a demo for the show, gave it to his bosses and his bosses were like, nobody wants to listen to people talk on the radio anymore. And so it died there. Just like how years ago, things died when you couldn't get past a gatekeeper who was like, we don't want your shit. Was this after the talk radio station in LA went under? Yes. Okay. So they probably were like, they got burned on that. And they were just like, you know, K-Rock was reading the tea leaves, which was like, people don't want to hear people chat. This one play music. We're competing with satellite radio. Now we're competing with streaming music where it's like they don't have to wait 15 minutes to hear a song. They had some good shows though. Like Conway and Stekler. That was a really good show. Yeah. They were great. There's a bunch of really good shows. But the, uh, so he, we had tried that. Um, it was called show Biz Beat. And then months later when I was in there going like, yeah, I'm opening this podcast theater. Afterwards in the parking lot, grabbing the post show smoke, Ralph was just like, Hey, would you ever want to try that radio show at that theater? And I was like, fuck yeah. You want to do it as a podcast? And he was like, yeah, like, yeah, let's try it out. And so I was driving home and I texted him at a light. I said, we could call it Hollywood Babylon. There's an old book called Hollywood Babylon that was about like gosby stories about Hollywood people and stuff. But we spelled it of course, differently and stuff. And that was my, that's what I brought to Babylon. Uh, other than that, Ralph built that entire thing. And then my job became to sit next to him and react to the news, which is, that's why I love that podcast so much. Cause as you can tell, I fucking love the sound of my voice and I wind up talking, talking, talking on smodcast. I would lead on Jane Sondbob get old, which is really about Jason Muse. I wound up wind up talking a bunch, but with Babylon, I get to sit there while he's the main act and I'm, you know, the second banana. It's, it's nice to be able to top and bottom in the world of podcasting. Like, you know, it, it's, it gives you a place to go. If I'm topping all the time, right? Then I'm talking about my thoughts and what I believe in. And these are the experiences I've had and people are interested in that. But then sometimes you just want to check out and talk about somebody else's shit. Now on a podcast we do call fat man on Batman. That's what we do. I just sit around and go like, Oh my God, you watch the Avengers and shit like that. So you get to concentrate on that kind of stuff. So yeah, the Babylon thing grew insanely organically. We started at that little theater, sat 48 people. And since he was on the radio every morning, he could just fucking sell it out. He'd be like, Hey, go to Kevin Smith's website. You get tickets for Babylon to be sold. Is that your place on what was it? And it was somewhere in West Hollywood, right? That little theater. It was on Melrose. Yeah. It was on a Santa Monica Boulevard in an area where they put up a few black box theaters. This, this section is called the complex. And we had one theater in the complex and repainted it and hung up like all the artwork, like you got artwork based on the podcast out in the hallway. Same thing. We were like, I essentially built a shrine to Scott Moser. My co-host of his podcast, which I'm sure on some level creeped him the fuck out. First time he walked in was just like, he wants to wear my skin, you know? And so the idea was we're going to do nothing but podcast here. But since Scott didn't suddenly go into like, yeah, let's do five podcasts a week. You know, it stayed pretty much the same. We had a theater with nothing going on in it and stuff. So I started trying other things. Babylon became one of them. Jane Sombab, get old also came out of that experience as well. You still have that theater? No, we let go of that. Me and Maddie Cohen, who's a co-host on this very fun podcast, he does it with Macaulay Culkin. Have you spoken to fucking Macaulay Culkin yet? No. I'm just putting a bug in your ear. Yeah. Oh, fuck dude. Fuck. He gives good talk. Really? Good oral. I mean, that sounds filthier than I meant to, but you know what I'm saying. Like as a guest, fucking fascinating and funny and gifted. Anyway, Matt and Macaulay do a podcast called bunny ears. And so Matt Cohen was the guy that I'd opened smod castle with. Like I was guy going, I wish I had a black box theater and Matt went out and found it and stuff. So we kept it open for like one year and then let it go because what had happened was like the Babel show sold so well, so quickly all the time that it became clear. Like we can move this to a bigger theater. This is a thing. He was on the radio all the time. So it was easy to move seats. So we went up to the love it's remember John Lovett's comedy club. Um, Ralph had went to the improv and love it's and love it's. We're like, you could have 95 or a hundred percent of the doors, something ridiculous. And, uh, and that was the only reason we went up there. We were there for a while. Things fell out with love it's and stuff. And then we moved to the improv instead. So we've been there ever since. Um, and now we do it on the road, you know, quite a bit and stuff.