Kevin Smith has always had a DIY spirit, going back to his self-made, debut film Clerks. In recent years, the multi-talented Smith began building a podcast empire. Based around his own “Smodcast,” Smith has expanded his podcast network into an Internet radio Talk station: Smodcast Internet Radio (S.I.R. for short). Smith recently chatted with FMQB at length about his love of radio, storytelling and much more.
Director/writer/actor Kevin Smith has always had a DIY spirit, going back to his self-made, debut film Clerks. Smith has directed 10 major motion pictures, written comic books, done countless speaking engagements and in recent years, began building a podcast empire. Based around his own “Smodcast” (featuring himself and longtime friend and production partner Scott Mosier), Smith has expanded his podcast network into an Internet radio Talk station: Smodcast Internet Radio (S.I.R. for short). The loquacious Smith chatted with FMQB recently for almost an hour about his love of radio, storytelling and much more.
Let’s start with how Smodcast and your series of podcasts began.
We had originally started doing a few podcasts: Highlands about the town I grew up in, and Tell ‘Em Steve Dave, and we started branching off. Smodcast was originally just me and [Scott] Mosier, sitting there and having a conversation. It didn’t begin as a stoner show by any stretch of the imagination. I wanted to hang out with my friends in a way that wasn’t work related. Someone told me about podcasts and described it as “a radio show on the computer,” and also told me “it’s like a [DVD] commentary track.” I can do that! We’d had practice with that, so I said to Mosier; “Let’s sit down. We record one of these podcasts once a week, and then we’ll put it public and that’ll force us to do it every week.”
I guess it was meant to be therapeutic for our relationship to some degree, or just a way to hang out with your friend and not have it be about budgets and films. Once we put it public, people seemed to enjoy it. For the first 60 episodes or so, we were just two dudes sitting there talking. And then at a certain point I started smoking weed, and then it takes this turn and in a weird way it goes even further and deeper at the same time.
I took Smodcast out on the road after we’d been doing the podcasts for about three years. I had gotten a tour bus for my Q&A’s around the country and I thought, wouldn’t it be great if we were on a bus? We could go place to place and play gigs, like an indie rock band. Mosier wasn’t into doing it live at first, but then we did it once or twice. I said, we can make some loot and put together some shows. Because we have to defend going out and doing a fun thing to our wives. That’s the key to life, kids: figuring out how to get paid for the shit you want to do so you can’t get in trouble for it. So your wife can’t bust your balls because, “we’re going to make money, dear. Not just make funny, make money.”
So we booked a tour of smaller theaters and little weird places…a movie theater, a community theater in Fargo and it was amazing. People would show up and see the show was literally two dudes talking to each other for an hour-and-a-half. We did a few more tours and it created a different kind of show. Smodcast in a room was me and Mosier trying to make each other laugh. But you throw it on stage; suddenly we’re trying to make the audience laugh, so it’s the same show but a completely different energy and vibe. Once we got that, it seemed stupid to record in a room by ourselves, when we could be sitting in front of people and getting like the laugh track. It reminded me of listening to Bill Cosby or George Carlin comedy albums as a kid when they recorded live at clubs.
How did you hook up with Jon Lovitz?
I started looking for a way to do Smodcast live every week. We’d done some comedy clubs, but I started looking for a black box theater. I had this idea: why not a Podcast theater? It’s no different than stand-up comedy; it’s just sit down comedy. We opened up the “Smodcastle” a year ago, and it was basically a place to do podcast shows. In the short span we were there, we built what would become Smodcast.com and served the Smodcast Internet Radio Network. We started doing many shows. However, it was a little too successful for its own good. Shows would sellout every show. Every time, instantly, before the day of the show. It was a good thing, but suddenly you’re holding people back from potential earnings because, clearly they can fill more seats.
Ralph Garman [host of Hollywood Babble-On] found the Jon Lovitz Comedy Club up at Universal City Walk, which had fallen on harder times. I had to explain the idea of giving away your comedy for free to Jon Lovitz. It took a while, because he asked, “Why do you give your act away? You gotta charge for it somehow.” I said, that’s the old model. The new model is this: you give everything away, and then you just hope like hell that when you’re in their neck of the woods, they’re going to come out and see you. And it works every time.
I tell him we’re selling thousands of seats for people to watch two people talking to each other for an hour, and that’s because they’ve had it free online for years now, so it’s their way of saying thanks. It’s the same idea that’s been going on with music and the radio for years. We listen to the music for free, and then when the acts you love come to your town, man, you go see them in concert, and that’s not a new model. It’s a pretty simple model. We convinced Lovitz to change the name to the Jon Lovitz Podcast Theater, and now we had a home base where we could record shows.
How did Smodcast then grow into S.I.R.?
I’m a radio geek from way back. The notion of being able to sit there and be yourself and people tune in and listen always captured my imagination, and in a culture where everyone likes to put up spectacle, radio is very attractive. Online radio just made it affordable and doable for me. I wanted to get a job in radio. At one point, I was looking for a local DJ gig somewhere out here in Los Angeles. It was never a really practical dream, but I always dug it. Then when somebody told me you could literally do it on the computer, the notion of going local just seemed silly, because I was like, “Wait, why would I sit in a local radio station when I can just do it on my computer from my house and potentially reach more people than I’m ever going to hit in the local arena?” I was looking at all these podcasts, the ones we were doing at Smodcast.com and people like Mark Maron and Adam Carolla, the Nerdist, and I was like, “this is like radio.” Adam took his show from radio to a podcast…
We actually did an interview with Adam all about his move from radio to podcasting a year ago.
He was the dude who was a radio pro and went first. I tell people, “Podcasts are no different than morning radio. These dudes that do morning radio, that is podcasting. They just do it on a set schedule and you catch it in that window.”
So we’d been doing so many podcasts at this point, and at one point, Zune reached out to us and asked for an exclusive podcast. I said rather than a podcast, could you host a stream? They said they couldn’t, so I started looking into it myself.
We launched S.I.R. on May 9: Smodcast Internet Radio. To me, doing the show live was just recording the podcast live and letting everybody hear it, which simplifies my life a little bit because we’d record a podcast for hours, and then I’d spend a few hours editing it. So that’s eating up a lot of time. To do it all live, you have to be able to accept the fact that as it’s happening, that’s it, there’s your document. Once it happens, it happens, and that forces you to be even sharper. It also gave me something to do with [my wife] Jen. I started doing a podcast with her and the feedback was that out of all the shows you do (because at this point I was doing maybe seven podcasts), that’s the one where you sound the most like who you really are, because I can’t f**k around with Jen.
[Actor Jason] Mewes and I had a pretty successful podcast at that point, Jay & Silent Bob Get Old, so we took that daily and called it Jay & Silent Bob Get Jobs. And we decided we do a bunch of original content everyday. From 8:00 to 10:00 PST, Jen and I do Plus One Per Diem and then Mewes takes over with me again at 10:00 everyday. It’s just like morning radio for four hours, but it’s split up between a “boy” show and a “girl” show.
We started talking about finances, and I was told that two months in we could figure out how many people are listening and start looking at the advertising. I didn’t want to wait. We figured out our budget would be around $1,000 a day to turn it on and keep it on. I wanted to open in profit. The way to do that is the way radio and TV have done it forever. Give them what they want to hear, and now a word from our sponsor every once in a while, let somebody else pay the bills. Hosting podcasts and a radio stream are costly. You become a victim of your own success if more people listen, hit your stream, download from your server…that’s going to cost a lot.
We had found a sponsor for Smodcast already and realized: this is radio. There were some days you felt like this is abrand new model, but then you realize it’s the oldest model that exists. Everything needs to always be free to the audience. They have to buy their device. When you turn on your radio there’s always something entertaining happening and it doesn’t cost you anything except you’ve got to plug in the radio — when you turn on your TV, same thing. With satellite radio or cable TV, you pay a little bit more to support the cooler things. But still the idea is the same. I wanted people to go to Smodcast.com, once the page loads up they’re going to hear talking every time.
I reached out to the audience and said, “We’ll do your ads. We’ll make them rock bottom: $200 an ad as an introductory rate. Tell us what you want to sell: eBay, a blog, your Twitter accounts, poems and we’ll do the ads on there.” We did ads for other podcasts, for apps. Right then and there we were able to turn on the lights as an in-profit radio network. Once you’re doing that the corporate money starts sniffing around and we’ve lined up a bunch of deals with people who are sponsoring segments.
I’ve told radio people, “You have the best job in the world.” The Theater of the Mind is the best form of entertainment. You think about what I do for a living: films and visually oriented things. It requires you to take your attention and give it to me fully; it demands that you look at it. What I love about radio is that it lives with you in your car. You can do something else while you’re doing radio. The radio always lets you feel like you’re accomplishing multiple things at once. And you can’t do that when you’re sitting there watching TV or watching an image. I realized that early on, that we can live in people’s ears, just like Howard [Stern] lived in my ears for years. I used to work graveyard shifts, and early morning shifts, and I loved the radio.
People think of us like their friends by now. From four years of doing podcasts, I’m pretty candid. You know I’m never holdin’ back, and at that point, people form bonds with you. Again, you always hearken back to Stern. For years as a kid you felt you knew Stern. You think, “Oh my God. If I ever do hang out with him he would see that I’m such a cool dude because I think just like him.” That’s how you build an audience of loyal listeners, because they’re like-minded individuals that believe “I feel the same way.”
I said once we started, that by the end of year one we could be at 12 hours of fresh content a day, and then 12 hours of catalog. Right now we’re about between 5-6 hours. And now we’re getting other people into it. Jay Mohr was on Twitter talking about looking for somebody to do a podcast with and now we’ve got another show for the stream.
Speaking of Saturday Night Live alumni, I really liked the Jon Lovitz “ABCs of SNL” podcasts, especially because I’m a huge fan of Phil Hartman.
Aww, me too, and he hasn’t even gotten deep into the Phil Hartman stories. He gets so emotional, because Phil meant the world to Lovitz. I grew up watching the first cast all the way to the Sandler cast, when I started getting busy doing my thing, by ’94 or ’95. Funny people who helped shape your sense of humor are fascinating to talk to.
Are you still running shows on SiriusXM with Opie & Anthony’s Virus channel?
Yeah, I go on O&A a lot and they’re such good dudes. I was on there once to talk about Smodcast, and someone from SiriusXM asked if I wanted to run some of the shows on the Virus. But it’s not like we got rich off it, it was more like, this is one more place to play the podcasts, and they refer back to the site within the show. So I figured we’ll pick up some listeners off satellite radio and they’ll find us later on. It just felt like a way to put it out there deeper into the world. I don’t know if we’re gonna continue that, but it’s been awfully cool of them to play them. I know there are celebrities that made huge deals with SiriusXM. To prove that I’m not a celebrity, I was not one of them.
That’s kind of how they got in a financial hole, because they threw all that money at Oprah and Martha Stewart.
Those days are apparently over, which is weird, because I’m like, “Hey, I’m a real content generator!” But it doesn’t matter…things like that force you in another direction. At one point, SiriusXM was an option for me, I thought I could go to SiriusXM and probably have a line set up in the house for me and Jen to do a morning show.
Going back to revenue streams, tell me about Smodcost.
That’s the next revenue stream. Jason Mewes thankfully married a very smart, business savvy person. [His wife] Jordan suggested we could partner with Topspinand essentially do ad-free versions of our podcasts at CD quality. It’s all in a separate site with a paywall, where you charge a certain amount of money and have access to the CD quality versions of it and maybe some video clips. Sticher has also come in for a year or two to help us absorb the stream costs. They were cool enough to commit and say, “We’ll pay for your stream and in exchange we are your partners.”
The other thing I’m so proud of is that we’re publishing the podcasts. When I was a kid, you’d watch game shows or Donahue, and they’d say “for a written transcript…” So if somebody transcribes one of our two-hour shows; that’s a book! We’ve already published one book of transcribed episodes of Smodcast through Titan UK called Shootin’ The Shit with Kevin Smith. TweetBookz is a company that can publish all your tweets together. They did one for me, I have a zillion tweets and I asked for just the tweets where I mention Jen, they put it all under one cover and it was really cool.
I asked them, instead of publishing tweets, can you transcribe the podcasts? So we built this company called PodBookz, where if you’ve got a podcast and you want to publish a book off of it, you send it into us, it gets transcribed and it gets published.
After all we’ve done, you sit there and ask, what’s next? Let’s try this. This could be fun; this would be kinda neat. And it all comes from talk. That’s the lost art. In this culture and this day and age of CGI and 3-D, people think they’ve got to build a bigger spectacle to attract the crowd. But I go the other way. Sometimes it’s retro. Sometimes you just need to be that voice in their ear, the white noise in their life, the constant background. I didn’t listen to every word Howard Stern said, but I was dialed in most of the time when I was listening. And that’s all we hope for from our audience. If they listen to half the show while they’re doing work, that’s amazing. But as long as they’re doing something else, I know we’ll always be able to kind of worm our way into their lives.
[eQB Content by Joey Odorisio]
