Screengrab of Adam Carolla at the Houston Improv May 23, 2020
Last Saturday, May 23rd Adam Carolla made history with 1.1 million video streams of a live episode of his podcast The Adam Carolla Show that was a joint collaboration between LiveXLive, the video entertainment service, and PodcastOne, known for producing The Adam Carolla Show podcast as well as many others from known personalities like Dr. Drew and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin. Video podcasts have been made before, but never to this scale or with this many views.
The show was produced on the heels of the news that LiveXLive will be acquiring PodcastOne in June. LiveXLive, as of this weekend, has hosted over 1,000 artists on its streaming platform and this new union is big news because PodcastOne has generated over 2.1 billion downloads a year, and produced more than 350 episodes per week.
The streaming video version of the show was produced in less than 48 hours when LiveXLive and PodcastOne realized Carolla was doing an episode on a Saturday, which is not a normal day for him to podcast. Unfortunately, the streaming version was plagued with technical problems which I got to ask Rob Ellin, the CEO of LiveXLive, about. To give some reassurance and context he mentioned that six months ago they had 1.3 million live streams of a Selena Gomez show with a whole month to market it and that the audio-only version of the show went off without a hitch.
Ellin, says the power of laughter is so important during the pandemic and their shows bring digital audiences together with the ability to simulcast across platforms from YouTube to Facebook while reaching people from 179 countries.
Norman Pattiz, the founder and chairman of PodcastOne, saw the handwriting on the wall about the expansion of live programming in podcasting before the pandemic hit and knew that they needed to be able to provide service to their podcasters on a variety of platforms instead of merely adding radio to their list of services. “Historically,” he says, “radio has been a medium of formats. And podcasting, like television, is a medium of programs.”
Screengrab of Adam Carolla and Dan Crenshaw at the Houston Improv May 23, 2020
The show was live from the Houston Improv and began with Carolla interviewing U.S. Congressman Dan Crenshaw about what it was like being overseas serving the country as a Navy SEAL, followed by musical performances from John Hiatt and Graham Parker, before finishing with Carolla improvising an entire standup set from suggestions from the audience. This improvisational style was the focus of his most recent stand up comedy tour called Adam Carolla is Unprepared, where he performed a brand-new act nightly based on one-word audience suggestions.
Carolla says that this gives him an advantage over most comedians who are afraid of putting their act online, or “burning their material”, and then no one going to see their show because they’ve already seen all the material. “We can go on in perpetuity because there's no material to burn,” he says. “The material doesn't exist before the show.”
Carolla, who holds the Guinness Book of World Records for the most downloaded podcast of all time, says that he pioneered the live podcast genre about 11 years ago when he started taking his podcast live to stand up clubs and the recent pandemic has reminded him how important the audience experience is.
“Ask any comedian about doing jokes in front of no audience,” he says. “It's a death-knell. Every comedian I talk to about doing a set from their living room says it’s weird. When you're up on your feet telling jokes and you're not getting the feedback of the laughter of the audience, it's really tough.”
Saturday’s event was actually his fourth show in Houston and the socially distanced crowd was half-full, but eating up his unprepared act about pine tar in baseball and how millennials don’t want to work. My favorite joke of his set was about this topic. “I had my nephew try to work for me for four months,” he said. “I would yell at him for being late, but he was never here.”
A lot of the themes of Carolla’s humor come from his perspective on things that irritate him and Millennials are a frequent target as he feels their personal responsibility is lacking. I had the chance to ask him about this and his answer was so personal and introspective that it’s worth quoting the larger-than-life comedian in full.
Adam Carolla: I always look at my own life as a young person. I was uncomfortable. I didn't have air conditioning (in my truck). I wanted air conditioning, and I had to drive around a broken down pickup truck. I wanted a sports car. There are things that I wanted that I didn't have, and I was prepared to do things that made me uncomfortable and were sometimes even dangerous in order to try to get to a place where I could get out of this discomfort. And as I've talked to a lot of young people, they're pretty good with where they are, even if they're nowhere, which is scary. They have all the entertainment they want in the palm of their hand. They have all the pot they need to put in their lungs, and they have enough air conditioning and a roommate they're cool with and they just don't have that fire in their belly that I think a lot of us grew up with. There used to be a huge chasm between someone who had money and someone who didn't have money, namely you didn’t have a car with air conditioning. You didn't have a black-and-white TV that was 13 inches across. It was deeper than it was wide. The TV I watched growing up was 13 inches across and 40 inches deep. So I was uncomfortable, and I wanted something, and as I look at a lot of young guys, they're comfortable. And if you're comfortable, then how are you going to crawl under that apartment building and dig a footing?
Saturday was Memorial Day weekend and Carolla says it turned out to be good timing to have Crenshaw, the wounded veteran, on the program. “A guy like Dan Crenshaw I’m a fan of regardless of politics,” he said, “So we thought, let's make Memorial Day Dan Crenshaw day since he lost so many of his friends fighting for this country and was gravely injured himself.”
They raised $20,000 for the show and all the proceeds went to the Houston Food Bank. The money that came in for the other three shows he donated to the staff of the Houston Improv because, as he reminded me, they’ve been shut down for three months whereas restaurants were open for takeout.
“And there’s no take out comedy,” I interjected.
“That’s right,” he said with a laugh, “there’s no take out comedy.”
Which means that LiveXLive and PodcastOne have introduced the next best thing and in a world that still doesn’t have many sporting events or concerts during COVID-19, the future of video podcasting and the Adam Carolla Show looks very bright indeed.
