![]() It was an amazing and a completely bizarre experience. I shake my head and well up with emotion. I have moments when I’m just doing something during the day and a shudder runs through me in flash of excitement over the monumental fact that I hung out with the President and had a conversation with him in my garage. I still can’t really wrap my head around it or believe it happened. IT WAS INSANE! The conversation wasn’t insane. I sat with the President and talked to him for an hour. Something we all could use more of.As some of you may know, last Friday, June 19th, 2015, Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States of America, came to my house to talk to me in my garage for today’s episode of WTF. The Joe Budden Podcast is a respite: Thought-free entertainment available for no cost, in large doses. Look at the rise of biohacking podcasts, fitness and diet influencers on Instagram, and YouTube self-help gurus. Every second of our lives, we’re told, needs to be organized around being better: smarter, more informed, fitter, sharper, more creative, extra empathetic. ![]() Right now, the trend in podcasts-all media, really-is optimization. The following episode, they debated prostate exams. It was a fascinating look into a particular corner of the underground economy in the music business that I knew about in passing, but otherwise would likely not have heard explained by someone who knew about it firsthand. Joe talked about phoning in guest verses, and how the brown bag price doesn’t even include promoting the song. But the conversations run the gamut: Starlet’s (a strip club in Queens), coparenting, tons of terrible underground R&B music, discovering cold brew, Melyssa’s dating adventures, and if Gunna is indeed a narc.Ī recent back-and-forth centered on rappers doing verses for “brown bag money”-a sum negotiated between parties, often excluding lawyers and labels, and paid in cash. They often chat about Budden’s terrible fashion choices, which seem to always include a very expensive designer-logo baseball hat. He has a Maybach with a driver and personal chef and has a running bit about jeans being for poor people. Another frequent topic: Budden’s wealth, which appears to derive from his many podcast deals and vanity gig as “head of creator equity” at Patreon (plus “Pump It Up” royalties). The crew talks about New Jersey constantly (Joe grew up in Jersey City and now keeps a 6,100-square-foot McMansion in Edgewater). It’s probably the most honest depiction of friendship I have heard. They have real arguments that turn into full-blown fights, and they ruthlessly make fun of each other in a way that the talent on most shows just don’t. Twice a week, they sit together on two ugly white couches and talk for three hours. ![]() They don’t fall into the usual podcast tropes, and they rarely have guests. They are the opposite of people who worked in public radio and worship Ira Glass, and while I can’t believe that their whole thing works, it does. (It’s How Long Gone if my cohost Jason Stewart and I were rich, and I avoid it purely because it makes me jealous.) I listen to music when I exercise and try to stroll the streets of New York City AirPod-free, to take in the sights and sounds.īudden and two of his buddies, Rory and Mal, ushered the show to popularity, but they have since exited following contract disputes and been replaced with an oddly huge cast of characters drawn from a mix of Budden’s old friends: His engineer Parks Vallely (the only holdover from the original lineup), Lamar “Ice” Burney (rumored to be an electrician), Antwan “Ish” Marby (in construction), famous video vixen Melyssa Ford, and a guy named QueenzFlip, who does comedy skits on social media. I don’t bother with The Daily (I can read the news), any true-crime nonsense, or SmartLess, the podcast hosted by Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, and Sean Hayes that sold to Amazon for the jaw-dropping sum of $80 million. I spend about four hours a week cohosting How Long Gone, a show I love to make, but my interest in listening to podcasts has almost disappeared. I was happy to spend entire afternoons blissed out, enjoying some low-impact audio stimulation. Watching television during the day made me feel like a useless sloth, but this was different. The idea of being entertained in a fresh way took hold of me. I was extremely high on pills most of the time, but the medium was still newish at the time, and I was happily devouring WTF With Marc Maron, Reply All, and The Champs. At one point in my life, I spent hours a day listening to podcasts.
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