Tom Green's Internet Talk Show Inspired the Podcast | Joe Rogan

Dude, we can give each other real knuckles. Don't be scared. Here we go. I'm not like crazy. I'm not like a paranoid person, but I'll tell you, Joe, you got me to leave my house for the first time in five weeks. I'm so happy you left and I'm so happy you got tested. Yeah, the first time in five weeks that I've left the house and yeah, I got tested and everything's great. So, but I'm not like, you know, paranoid or anything like that. So spray it down, baby. How bad is all this Lysol for us? This stuff is pretty good. This is a real question, right? How bad is all this Lysol? Yeah, it'll be fine. The aerosols are probably not bad. But no, great to be here. Thank you for having me. My pleasure. And man, I haven't left my house in five weeks. I've been isolating as a responsible citizen, right? Yes. Yeah. And I feel good. I feel, first of all, I'm excited to be here. I'm excited to have you here. I posted that. I've been going through my computers. I'm at home. I'm going through my computers. Just killing time. I live alone. Okay. I happen to be single at this point in my life. Ladies. There you go. Huh? Right before this happened. And I kind of think to myself sometimes I think, okay, imagine if I had been in a relationship that hadn't been going well and this happened and then you have to make the decision to isolate with somebody. I'm not in that situation. I'm home alone. And I've been talking a lot to my friends on FaceTime and I've been socializing and I've been living life in this world. But alone in my house, I'm going through my computers. I started going through old footage. I found that clip from when you came up to my house back in the day. And yeah, I just – I saw this moment where – I'll jump right into this if that's cool. Sure. And then in the clip where we started talking about my old web show and you'd come up to my house back in the day and it was so cool that you came up then. And I remember at the time, your website was like way advanced, right? Like it had all sorts of extra stuff on it that people weren't really doing on the web back then. And you came up – we just started talking about the web. And – That was because of my webmaster, Andrew Blevins. Shout out to Andrew. Uh-huh. He's a wizard at web creating. So I was always really into web stuff, you know? I had my website – I started my website early when I was up in Canada. And I was really – thought that was cool and we started talking about what I was doing, which was kind of crazy, right? And then you just started talking about – you said, what we got to do is figure out how we're going to make some money off this. And I'm like, yeah. And I'm like, yeah. I don't know. I mean, I'd been trying. I had been trying. I'd been going to advertisers and saying – they were like, what? What do you mean, internet? You know? But it's kind of funny. I saw that clip. I thought, that's hilarious because, you know, not to – not to, you know, blow too much smoke up your ass. But clearly you figured out how to make money off of it. And it was hilarious. I'm like, that's hilarious and prophetic moment. How can we make money off of it? Now we're here in this beautiful studio. That was incredible. Yeah, there were a few moments that really planted a seed in my head to do something like this online. This – yours was a big one. Yeah. Being at your house and seeing how you had servers. You had full cables. Like, folks, this room is not as sophisticated as Tom Green's home was in 2007. That's how crazy it was. There was some weird stuff in there, yeah. But you had it set up like an – you had a whole internet service provider set up at your house. Like, you could have run like a network in 2007. You had all those – you had that whole rack with all that equipment. I walked into that room and it's humming and I'm like, holy shit, dude. Uh-huh. Those were the G-ray drives. Yeah. I was like, this is crazy. This is your house. And folks, back then you had to have these cables that snaked through the house. So everything was taped down. I was like, fuck, dude. This is like you literally turned your house into a set. It was much more like a set than anything I'd ever seen before outside of a set. It was light screwed into the ceiling. I kind of trashed my place. You even figured out how to take video calls from people. That was exciting. That was crazy. I had this – Yeah, there it is. Tom Green. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then the TV on the wall. Yeah. And there's my dog, Steve. Oh, poor Steve. Oh, and look, I don't have gray in my beard. Oh, look at that. You had a young man back then. This was probably around 2007, I guess. Yeah. And that was the back corner of my living room there. It's a genius. And you could see all the wires going up. See that? That's going up into the ceiling, up through the ceiling, into the spare room, which I turned into the editing room. Look how crazy all this equipment is. Dude, you were so ahead of everybody. That's actually a little later, actually. I'm looking at this now. This is later. This is after, because I can tell, because that's an actual – that's not the TriCaster. That's an actual television switcher. I forget what model. It's a Sony switcher. So you started with a TriCaster and a computer? There was a thing called a video toaster system first. I had that for a year. Then we got the first version of the TriCaster. That's Victor, who was working on the show. He's stoked that I'm here today. I still talk to Victor quite a bit. Shout out to Victor. Victor, what's up? But – so, yeah. So that was a little later, but still kind of – we're talking three years later. So 2010-ish. Yeah, exactly. Look at all your lighting and everything. You had done it where you had basically – instead of putting cameras in your house, you'd turn your house into a studio. It was legit. I remember thinking, oh my God. Because Anthony Kumiya had a kind of pretty high-tech setup in his basement. That was another inspiration. Because he was doing that while he was doing Opie and Anthony. They actually – his employers at the time wanted him to stop doing it. They had decided somehow or another it's not – he shouldn't be allowed to do an extra show. He's like, but I'm just promoting the serious show. This is free. People can see it. It's fun. So Anthony would do karaoke with machine guns in front of green screen. She's still kicking ass on the internet. Well, no, he has his own network. Yeah, exactly. I love that guy. He's a unique dude. He was great on Opie and Anthony. He was always really funny. Just like a comic, but he never did stand-up. It's really interesting. The most comic-y comic guy that I've ever met that never did stand-up is Anthony Kumiya. 100% could have been a great comic. 100%. I think sometimes people that – I mean, I'm just making this up right now, but I think sometimes people that have never done stand-up who do radio are afraid of it. Because it's like the odd – because they can – it's a scary thing to get on stage in front of an audience if you've never done it before, but you get comfortable behind that mic. But anyways, yeah, man, it was so cool when you came up because I remember like – I think there was like Entertainment Tonight was there that day or something like that. Remember that? Yes, that's right. And you talked to them after and you left this – made this quote to them and that went out and it was defining what's happened in our world. You were just saying, you know, like, well, we don't need the advertisers. We don't need the networks anymore. We don't – you know, we can get over – that's right. – straight to the advertiser. I always – Is that video available anywhere? I think I saw it on the internet somewhere. That video of me saying that is kind of hilarious if you stop and think about how this internet stuff has played out since then. It's like – there was this pre-YouTube, right? Like nobody was uploading to YouTube. You had to have your own tomgreen.com set up. So I remember I got a call. This is one of those like, you know, when you think back and you sort of kick yourself. You know, I was – so I mean, how far into the weeds do we want to get technically? I was – it's like people are like, who gave a fuck – Oh, there it is right there. But here I was. I had the – that's the clip. That was my backwards basketball hat days. Jamie's still in those days. We were hosting this stuff on this site called BitGravity.com. So we would upload our shit to that. Were those the guys from Denver? No. BitGravity is San Francisco. San Francisco and Barrett Lyon is – Did you do some stuff with some guys from Denver? That was sort of around the same time. They were – that was Mania TV. Yeah. Right, right, right. And so they kind of – but what I did was Mania TV was the only people that were really doing live streaming. And I said, hey, you know, like I want to build this TV studio. And they helped me build the studio. But I wanted it – I wanted to be autonomous of them as well. So I got my own servers through this company BitGravity where they basically invented the technology to upload video and then serve it out. So I would link that to my website, TomGreen.com, completely autonomous of the other website, Mania TV. So it was funny shit that happened there because I remember – like I think back ago, I really made a few mistakes. I go, I want all the stuff to be on my website, right? And then YouTube started. You know, what's this? Oh, YouTube. Oh, that's cool. They're doing a thing out of an apartment in San Francisco. And I remember at one point somebody called me from YouTube and said, hey, man, we really like what you're doing. What do you think? I'm like, oh, that's cool. Cool, man. Yeah, yeah. I'm kind of doing my own thing over here. Yeah, that's cool. I like what you're doing too and never really kind of connected with them because I thought – I was thinking at the time, it's got to all be on your server, right? So you have those views, not thinking, okay, we could have it out, spread it, send it out, just get the eyeballs on it. But it was exciting. It was an exciting time. Everybody thought that though. I mean, no one could have ever saw what YouTube had been or has become. What's crazy about YouTube is that there's not another one. It's just YouTube. It's like there's Vimeo and a few other fairly popular video sites. But it's like the XFL compared to the NFL or something like that. Not even. The XFL is done, right? Do they just go under? Yeah, done. I don't know what it's like comparing the two of them because all those other video things it's like, yeah, you'll get some views, but it's just YouTube for whatever reason captured – they have the market. It never became MySpace. But imagine – Remember YouTube? Yeah. Something as simple as uploading video. I mean, obviously it's complex, right? Like just being able to get it onto the website and make sure it streams and all the technical stuff super complex. But just the concept is pretty simple. You with your phone or video camera, you film it, you can upload it. Like real simple. Anybody can do it. And then anybody all of a sudden can get views. Like that is amazing that one company has that locked up. It's kind of crazy because you would think that like, boy, that would be something that everybody would want to get involved in. Look how much money YouTube is making. Yeah, I haven't thought about that, but I guess – Kind of nuts. The amount of advancement that happens every six months in technology and they've got the funding to be able to stay right on top of it and just make it the strongest platform possibly. I don't know. Even Twitter. Like how do they do that? There's like one Twitter. Yeah. I mean, there's Facebook and I guess people hold discussions on Instagram. But if I read – one of the things that drives me crazy about Instagram is like if I go to your page and I'm reading one of your captions, someone will say something in response to someone. They're like, hey, fuck you, dick boy or whatever. And then I try to click and find out what they were talking about and I get to the beginning of the comments. And then I go through all the comments to try to figure this out. Like why can't I just click?