Monday, April 12, 2010

Interview with Adam Carolla

Originally run on 1 March 2010 at the Union Weekly.

Adam Carolla: Sorry, I’m eating pie.

Union Weekly: No, that’s fine. When did you figure out that you were going to be doing a podcast?

AC: Well, I didn’t really figure it out, that was Donny. He figured it out. “You should do a podcast.” When I figured out that I was going off the radio, I just told him, I didn’t ask him, what do you think I should do? He just said, “You should do a podcast.” And I was like, “How does that work?” “You just talk into this microphone, and record and throw it up the next day on the internet and see what happens.”

I’ve always looked at it as talking for free. It’s one of those things that you do. I guess it’s sort of like a porn star. You fuck for free, then you get paid to fuck, but this really was free to me. I really just always felt glad to get paid to talk, but what’s a nice evening? You go out with one of your buddies, who you really like, who’s smart and interesting and articulate and this guy’s got a good sense of humor and you go out and you sit at a restaurant, have a few beers, and you talk and it’s an enjoyable evening. Obviously, you’re not paying the guy, so to me, it’s just kind of an enjoyable evening. I just thought, let’s just do it and let’s see what happens. I don’t know if we’re going to do it every night or what’s going to happen. And we started [the podcast], but then you kind of get this weird little burden.

I was watching one of those biographies on, I think, Ben and Jerry. They started this little shop in Vermont making ice cream and the next thing you know people start lining up, and now what are you going to do? You can’t shut down. You can’t go, “Aw, no more ice cream for you,” ’cause there’s a line waiting outside the store. At a certain point for us, it was like, “Well, people want to hear it,” and you come out with a show on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and you can’t have a bunch of people on Thursday going—“What the fuck? I thought they were going to give us a show.” So, you get listeners and you get fans, and you start to get this somewhere between a burden and [being] indebted to. Somewhere between owing someone money and having them save your life.

UW: “Yeah, alright, I’ll take it.”

AC: Yeah, I guess we should not disappoint people. So, we started doing it and the next thing you know, we blinked our eyes and a year went by.

UW: It seems like so much longer and I mean that in a good way.

AC: [Eating pie] Yeah. I think it’s because the technology is so new. Like a year ago, everyone wasn’t podcasting and every TV show didn’t have a podcast. Now, it’s like, Lost: The Podcast. There wasn’t any of that stuff. There was a couple of shows on, like—

UW: NPR.

AC: Yeah, stuff like that. A couple of car shows and Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me and now there’s a million of them.

UW: By the way, last night I blew through two red left turn arrows.

AC: Mmm. Thank you.

UW: No, thank you. It’s great!

AC: It’s brilliant, isn’t it?

UW: It’s the best. It’s such a good feeling.

AC: It’s liberating.

Read the rest at the Union Weekly!

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