All right. Hey, everybody. Welcome to my guest tonight. I'm Jeff Revilla, your host. We're
going way back, one of the original 50 podcasters started in
the 1900s. And in honor of the long
tenured 26 year podcasting career, we're honoring
Bob LeMent with our longest intro song yet.
Faster than a meme, stronger than a pun.
Bob LeMent been podcasting since day one.
With miles in the mix. They conquered the net.
Static radio's the funniest yet
with every villa The Laughter's Alive
2 podcast Heroes on a comedy die
saving the world one joke at a time on
my guest tonight. It's one can
prime
from dial tones ringing to streaming screens,
Bob's live the history. He knows what it means.
So grab your cape, folks. Hold on tight.
Bob and Jeff are taking flight tonight
with Jeff Revilla. The laughter's alive.
Two podcast heroes on a comed d
saving the world one joke at a time on
my guest tonight. It's.
Bob. Welcome to the show. Thanks. That's great. I
went with, like, a superhero vibe, like a theme. Superhero
theme. Time to take my aspirin. Somebody's at the door.
Yeah, that's my reminder to take my medication.
Oh, okay. I thought it was your ring. Your ring. Doorbell for a
minute there. Amazon delivery. They're late today.
Bob, welcome to the show. So glad to have you here. We've crossed paths a
few times in the past, and this time we're here to tell your story.
I believe you're still. Are you still in St. Louis? Yeah, I'm still in St.
Louis, yeah. Actually been here the whole time.
Go figure. The whole time we've been doing this, I've been
in St. Louis. Isn't that funny? All of this time
right now? Well, no, I mean for the. For the whole run of the pot,
the show, the podcast, and so forth. Yeah. Are you
originally from. Originally from Decatur, Illinois,
which nobody probably knows where that's at, but
is it near Gurney? No, no, that's way. That's by Chicago.
Decatur's in the middle of the state of Illinois, so Springfield is the
state capital of Illinois, and Decatur is its neighbor.
Not too close, about a half hour away, but yeah. Is that
where you. Did you go to college in that area? No, no, actually, I
went to college way down south. I wanted Southern Illinois. University of
Carbondale, which is way down in southern Illinois. So
I'm from the middle of Illinois. Actually, Miles is from Chicagoland.
He is in the suburbs of Chicago. We both went to college
down in southern Illinois. And Then because of fate, I
guess I ended up in the St. Louis metro
because of this, the way things worked out. But yeah, we've been doing the show
since I've lived in the Metro. So I've only lived in the Metro. How long
now? Probably?
Oh, it's probably about five or six years before we started doing the show. But
yeah, the whole time we've been doing the show, I've been not the same
house or anything, but in the same location, you know,
generally speaking. Did you two meet in
college? Yeah, Miles and I went to college together.
Funnily enough. We did a radio show called
Static at college and that's where all this started
from. So when Miles and I were in college, I was actually
the promotions director for the student radio station for
a couple of years and I wanted to do a show as
well. And so I wrote Miles was in
my. I met Miles at college in classes and
I said, hey, I think I'm gonna do a show. You want to help out
with that? He's like, you know, whatever. And so
then we did the show together for a couple
years in college. And then after college, you know, we kind of missed it.
And so I said, hey, we could. There's this thing called the
Internet. May have heard of it. He hadn't
really. He's a Luddite. So I said,
yeah, we could do our show on the Internet. And even though at that point
in time he went back up Chicago and then
I eventually landed here in St. Louis and I said, well, we can
still do this over the phone. The
landline. Can you believe it, Jeff? Anybody know what a landline is
anymore? Come on. The 10th caller could be the host. That's
right. And so we started doing
what was a variant of our old college show online.
So this was in the age of Napster, right? So we did. We used to
play music and then in between, you know, songs like
Old Time, at this point, an old timey radio show,
we would have little banter and do funny things and so forth. Well,
we kind of distilled all that down and just do the funny things. And
so that's what the. What the show became because they were suing
everybody. They were suing grandmas for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Back in
the late 90s, you know, whenever Napster was
kind of raging and, and Metallica was suing everyone
back then. Thank you, Metallica. People still love them, but they sued
everybody. For a while they just played the. Hamptons and people were pretty
upset about. It was like a private show. In the Hamptons. They're like, who are
these people? Yeah. Really? What happened? What happened?
So, so yeah, so we just did. Started doing the show. It
started, we did experimental shows on
Thanksgiving night or the day after Thanksgiving in
1998. It went well. And then
we did a couple more experiments through Christmas. And so
then I usually say officially we started on January
1, 1999, because that's when we really, you know, at
that point we said, hey, this is fun. We're going to keep doing this
every week. And that's where it really took off. And so then, yeah, so we've
been doing shows every week. You can actually go listen to all the shows at
this point at our website, staticradio.com all the way
back to January 1999.
So, you know, that's a lot of shows.
Were you recording the phone calls or. There were some services back
then that. That's how they like got people
doing what they called Internet radio, I think at the time. Yeah, we call
was like a paid service. Tuxu was one of them back, way back then.
We know, we actually. You'll love this, Jeff, because I know you're a
technology kind of minded guy. So I got, I bought
a speakerphone and
I had an imac, you know, like one of the, the old Bondi
blue imacs back then. And I took. I had an
external microphone, I set it on the speakerphone and so then
I would talk at the speakerphone, he would talk from the speakerphone,
and I recorded it directly to the Macintosh. And. And
then I. This is before MP3. Yeah, exactly. This is before
MP3. So we actually did all of our first
shows in what was called real audio. And
if you're like, you know, an old person like me, you can remember way back
then, real audio was a. One of the first streaming
formats for audio. And so I
just happened to be lucky enough. I've mooched
off my work a lot over the years. I had
real audio at work and then I used it for this as well. So.
So then. So yeah, we had. We didn't actually live
stream or anything, but we recorded in real audio and then you could play it
back in real audio off the site. That was the first, I think
the first year. And then after that my work decided they
didn't want to pay for real audio because at that point in time it was
fairly expensive. I mean, several thousand dollars for the license.
And we switched over to QuickTime because that was
a free format. We just did audio that way, not
video, just audio. And then MP3 came along
shortly after that. I think it was like 2001 or something,
and we switched everything over to MP3. And then in
2004, guess what?
You don't want to guess. Well, I thought I
was going to guess blog talk radio, but that might be.
No, I'm going to go with podcasting.
Yeah, that's when podcasting came into the lexicon was
in 2004. I was listening to
Adam Curry. He did a thing called the Daily Source Code back then,
and he was talking about this thing that he was working on with a guy
named Dave Weiner called podcasting. It was an enclosure for the
RSS that allowed you to put an MP3 file
link inside there so that people could then just download your
MP3 and listen to it. Right. And so I'm like, that sounds
cool. And so then early on, and you
mentioned it in the little song, the first 50, right, whatever. Yeah.
So we were podcasting, like, right out of the gate.
I stole all of our RSS code, I'll say this proudly, from
Leo laporte. If you know who Leo laporte is, he
is one of the original people as well. He was on tech tv, wrote a
lot of tech books and things back in the day. He runs the Twit
network still to this day. And so,
yeah, I stole all of our rss, because at that time, you had to hand
code everything. There wasn't all this kind of fancy stuff. And so I stole his
RSS feed and adapted it for us.
And I know of at least one other person, his name is Frank Knorr, who
I've known from back at that point, stole it from
me and then did his podcast with it. So a lot
of people were stealing the RSS feeds just because it was new and
nobody knew how to work it yet. So the easiest thing to do was
to kind of grab somebody else's work and adapt it.
So that's what we did. Yeah, so we did that. And
Curry then started a thing on the Daily Source Code, which
was the podcast list. I don't even remember what he called it back then.
And I have never been able to find it, not even on the way back
or anything. I've looked several times over the years, and he just
listed out who was doing a podcast. So we
were somewhere around Soccer Girl
and Keith and the Girl, which are two really old podcasts. I don't even
think. I think one of them may still be going. And I
told Miles at the time, I said, I'm getting rid of you and getting a
girl. Because apparently that's what you need to do in order to be
successful in podcasting. You have to have you and
a. Girl, but cover all your bases. Yeah. So you're all set.
Right? But that's
early days. Yeah. Back then with the RSS feed,
did you know, we, we talk about how easy it is today. You go on
an app, you hit subscribe, and then you're notified when your episode's there. But
in 2004, somebody would have to know to find your
RSS feed, did they have to use something like, like feedburner or Google
Reader? How. How did they. None of that, you know, that's a good question.
They actually literally would go and just go to your
RSS feed. Eventually there came things
like that. But before that, you would post it on your
website, say, here's my rss. They would go in now. I think
Curry and Weiner made a fairly, you know,
kind of low tech kind of podcatcher back
then. I don't even remember. It might have been called ipod or one of them
like that. This is way back when. My memory doesn't serve
me well for these kind of things. But.
And so you could do that. But it changed so quickly. You know, the funny
thing is, and I talked to people even today, you know, X, which was
Twitter, was actually a podcast
network. Before it was Twitter, it was called
Odeo and that was a podcaster. It was Odeo. And
that was probably in 2006 or something like that.
2005, 2006 year long. And
the. They switched to Twitter because Odo wasn't
doing it at that time. And so they're like, okay, we're scrapping this Odio
thing and we're going to become Twitter
hashtags. Kind of created to, to. To do conversations around
episodes. Yeah, I think so. Well, now they're dead, apparently. I just
read a thing today. They're all dead. The hashtags are dead now.
Did you see that? No, I did not. Podcasting
outlived the hashtag. There were. Yeah, I
just, it was like, it had to be like a couple nights ago, maybe I
was just reading news and I'm like, oh, it says hashtags are dead. I know,
I didn't know that. But yeah, I think so. I think you're right.
And Odeo had, you know, started doing,
you know, top tens and things kind of like good pods does now
back then, really trying to get community going and so forth. And
it, it was going fairly well, but apparently not as good as
what the founders wanted, you know, and then they. They
pivoted to Twitter and then Twitter took off, you know, like
gangbusters. I was. I was early on Twitter too. I think that was around
2007. I got
my Twitter handle and yeah, I mean, so it's
just been a kind of one thing after another. All these things kind of spun
off of this idea of doing, you know,
radio on the Internet. And like we call it. Our original name was static
Internet radio. We shortened it to static radio after
a little while. We should have just called. I couldn't just call it static because
you cannot get the URL of static.com
I looked into a long time ago, but that is not going to happen.
That's too popular of thing for. I can't pay
enough money for something like that.
People trying to find podcasts. I pulled up my. From
2007. I have it in gray. The. The ipod.
When you wanted to listen to a podcast in 2007,
you had to log in to your itunes account,
subscribe to a podcast. When that podcast was
released, you'd have to refresh your itunes account and scrape all this
RSS feed. Right. Then you'd have to find your
ipod, plug the ipod into the computer,
sync the ipod with your computer. It would.
It would flush out episodes you listened to and download new episodes.
Then you had to unsync. Then you had. If you wanted to go listen to
something, you either had to put your earbuds in or, you know, connect it to
your car or. That's right. Yeah. It was. It was a
half an hour process to. To get pot. So when people found
you back then, they were much more invested. It wasn't just
a one click subscribe and then I can hear all your episodes. Exactly. Well,
I have a funny story for you about itunes. So we were in
itunes when it opened. Yeah. Oh, very nice.
Yeah. Because. And this is something that I only got
confirmation of within the last few years. So
back then, I actually got a note from a listener
and said, hey, did you know you're on itunes? And I'm like, I don't. What
are you talking. I don't even know what itunes. You know, I wasn't that keyed
into that. And I'm like, really? So I went and looked, sure enough,
there we are. And he's like, yeah, wild. Because
they didn't ask me. They just did it. Right. But what happened
is. And Adam Curry confirmed this on Joe Rogan a
few years back. They basically took Curry's list at that time,
which was probably about 100 and some shows,
and they just took it all into. Into
itunes. So those, all those shows
made, you know, were the first import into itunes, along with some
of the. The pbs, you know, public radio shows.
Those were the. That was the beginnings of itunes. Was. Was that,
you know, maybe a smattering of a few other things out on the Internet that
were more grouped together? But yeah, so
we just happened to be in that mix and got pulled into itunes,
like right off the bat. And to this day,
only one entity has ever
asked if we want to be in part of their organ, you know, part of
their listing. Do you want to guess who that might
be? Out of all the big names who run
podcasts and everything so weirdly reached out and
asked. So weird. For a tech company to get permission first
and not ask for forgiveness. I'll go with.
Could you have snuck into prime with permission?
We actually got asked by Amazon if we wanted to be part of the
Amazon music podcast catalog. Yes, that's only one.
So if you ever find the show in any listing or
whatever, that's the only one that ever reached out and said,
hey, can we put you on here? And, you know, of course they did
that partially because they had me fill out some paperwork.
So. But yeah, itunes, I mean,
Spotify, any of these other ones, they. All they did was just pull it
in. Not, I mean, I'm not mad about it or anything. I just find it
fascinating that, you know,
if, if the shoe were on the other foot and, you know,
Pidouty decides to make their own podcasting
platform and they're like, oh, we're just gonna pull in Joe Rogan and
all these. Oh, wait a minute, wait a minute, Jeff,
this Paduti. What. What are you going to give us? Paduti. You know what I
mean? So it's definitely a double standard for the kind
of independent, small, you know, folks compared to the larger ones.
So it's, you know, everything's free on the
Internet, right? So. But it's not really. But it's just
kind of an interesting kind of, you know, you know, being there for so
long, you basically everybody just scoops it up, right? So. Oh, it's still
there. We'll grab that. And it's almost like,
like the RSS feed is like the old rabbit ears tv. Like
you're broadcasting your signal out and people can pick it up, right?
Well, yeah, but the funny thing is, I mean, how many times have you seen,
you know, the Major league baseball have
fights with cable companies and they broadcast those things, right? So
there Is a. There is definitely a double standard. Although, not that I'm
necessarily totally complaining about making light of it a little bit,
but it just is kind of funny how that works,
how all your shows are fair game, but
some of ours are not. Yeah,
I can't play Game of Thrones on my theater
screen. Right. And have a little watch party.
I mean, people do it, but yeah, if you were to do it and advertise
it to where anybody of note could find out, you'd be getting a
letter or having somebody stopped by. How about a little bit of the
technical side? You know, back in the early 2000s, were you
self hosting your files or did you have a
hosting provider that, that you were using to manage
all that bandwidth that was coming? Well,
that's another. That's another funny story, Jeff. So the statute of
limitations has run out on this, but that comes to my work again. So
I,
I worked and I had access to a server
I had access to at the time was called a T1 line,
which now T1 line is almost kind of
quaint, but we had T1 line. So, yeah, so I had
kind of unlimited bandwidth from the beginning and did
that for, gosh, probably a good, I don't know, a good
10 years or more. And then finally
I had to move it off because, you know, policies changed and
people changed and it was better for me to move things
onto my own hosting and so forth. But I've always, We, we've always
hosted. Ever since then. Well, we've always hosted our own
stuff, be it, you know, on somebody
else's server or on a paid server.
So, yeah, we haven't been part of any of the, you know, podbean
or any of that kind of stuff so far.
I mean, we're on all these things, but we don't host things there.
So, yeah, I've always, I don't know, been independent,
kind of minded. And I'm like, yeah, I'll just keep it here. We have a
WordPress site and, and you know, everything's hosted
on server space that I pay for, so everything
just comes off of that. But the, the funny thing is,
other funny thing is all this Technology is technology. WordPress
WordPress is one of the early
pioneers for podcasters, right, that had plugins and so forth. We
were on WordPress before there was the plugins for WordPress
for podcasts, and we were actually on WordPress before it was
a CMS, it was just a blogging
site. And I thought, oh, this will work out really well because it's A blog
and I'll just put a link to the show and then we'll host the RSS
on the server and it'll all work. This is when everything
was kind of separate. And so, yeah, so I've been using
WordPress, gosh, since before it was as
popular and as big as it's gotten and integrated all this stuff into it
now. So yeah, that's been kind of a journey as well
over the years. And the reason I went to it was because
they had a feature for scheduling posts
and I wanted to go on vacation and not have to
try to connect and post up the show. And so
I'm like, hey, I can schedule a show to come on
with this system. So before that it was all
hand coded HTML, which
was not the most fun, but I did it.
The funny story on that one is that I
had, I didn't. I wasn't a coding type person
and a friend of mine gave me a book called how to code HTML in
7days. And you know, it's kind of like one of those dummies books or
whatever. And so yeah, I read that book and I put together a website,
HTML website, and I was off to the races. So that's where it
all kind of. That was the first incarnation came that in that way we
just had a website, hard coded HTML website that I updated
manually for our Internet radio days
and then eventually moved to WordPress and then now through
a bunch of different versions of WordPress at this point.
Yeah, people take it, they don't understand that, oh, I
published something and the website creates a taxonomy of
page one, page two, page three. When you're hard coding your own
pages and building them, that linking that structure up is
a nightmare. That's right. Yeah, exactly.
The funny. I still have our. Actually if you. I don't know if
I've got it linked out to the public anywhere. But you can go to our
first website, I still have all the IT coded and you can go and listen
to the first year shows as they were presented back in
1999. I don't know if anybody wants to do that, but I did,
I think convert them all to MP3. So it's fits the format,
but yeah, and it's, you know, it's kind of kooky,
it's a little rough. I don't have the mail
GIF or GIF depending on where you come from, where you, which part of the
country you're at, you know, where the mail comes flying out of the mailbox and
all that kind of Stuff was kind of hokey back in the day. I don't
have any of that, so I think I always thought that was good.
We didn't have the hokey mailbox. Your cursor would turn into rainbow
sparkles and. Right,
exactly. And
so you're coming up 26 years of static
radio. You know, what are some of the fun things that you've
done? Has it taken you anywhere? Have you made any appearances or,
you. Know, other than as I see you. On so many shows?
Well, the funny thing I. We did. The interesting thing is
we're kind of bookended. So I started. We started the show.
Both Miles and I started the show, I think both before
we had children, and then as we were doing the show, we had children.
And so in those early days, yeah, I was on other Internet
radio shows and I was a guest on,
like, panels for, you know, kind of Internet
radio as a thing, you know, back in the day
and so forth. And then my kids were born and
I got absorbed with that. We still did the show every week, but a lot
of those extracurriculars and so forth kind of fell by the wayside.
And then now my kids are all grown up and everything, and I'm finally
doing all that stuff again like I did back in the
beginning. So I kind of just did the show for, you know,
almost 20 years, I guess, maybe not quite 18, you
know, plus years. And then after
that time, come back out and I, oh, this guesting thing seems to be taking
off again. I'll be a guest on and do trivia on
Jeff's show. And that's why I've been doing stuff like that ever since, because
it's fun. I mean, it's. You know, there's a certain.
What do you want to say, A certain kind of
thrill for doing these kind of live things and so forth, and.
And I really enjoy him. And it's all fun to do. Right. I mean, that's
why we're doing this is, I hope, because, well, some people do it. I think
they make. Think they're going to make a bunch of money, but some of them
may do do that. Like Joe Rogan. He makes a bunch of money, but he
kind of made more money than me before, so that's not saying much.
Right? He's living off a fear factor. Yeah,
exactly. He's. He's living off of people eating
unedible things for, you know, what, 10 years or whatever.
That's what the media doesn't tell you is he's not making money. It's all Fear
Factor dividends. I love it. Right, exactly. But it's
just fun to do. And the guest thing just kind of exploded
during COVID and so I jumped back into
it during that time. And, you know,
there's a bunch of different ones. Pod match. And
I don't even remember all the different ones at this point, but I'm on a
lot of them, and I'll just try to connect with people and.
And do shows. And I have some people we've. I've done. We do
things now. So Miles and I still do what I call our core show, which
is the static show. And then I'll do little
shows here and there. I think you and I did a show where I talked
to you. Right. And posted it. And.
And so, yeah, I'll do little things here and there. Miles is not quite
as technologically savvy, and so
he doesn't do too much on his own. I've. I've told him time again, I
said, I'll help you do it, and I'll just be quiet in the. You know,
just do the controls in the background. But he's also got, you know,
other stuff going on, and he's like, I don't know if I want to. So
I. You're lucky I got him to come on your thing a couple of times.
He liked to do that for some reason. But I. It's a lot of times
it's just me on other shows because he's not
available. He's always unavailable.
For. Perpetually unavailable. Yeah, he's very unavailable.
Exactly. That's good. You want to be. Have
limited resources. Sometimes maybe that increases the value.
Well, that's what he'd tell you.
I'm more like, yeah, you want me to be on the show? Sure, I'll do
that. If I can. If I got some time here,
I'll do it. And so then, yeah, so I'm the one that's probably overexposed
and he's underexposed, I guess, at this point.
And where do you see this going? You get to continue guesting and
producing shows. Is there anything that you want to achieve
in these coming years? That's a good question, because I'm
constantly like, this character here is one of my. What
I'll call my achievements, because back in. Well, a long time ago,
had somebody write and they said it would be really funny if you guys were
cartoon characters, you know, and talking. And so back in.
I think it was around 2017 or 2018, I finally kind of
cracked that, you know, idea
and so I came up with this character for me, and I came up with
a character for Miles. The problem is I can do mine in real time and
he can't. And so we did record the show
for the good portion of a year where we both were cartoon
characters talking about. But I went on vacation. When I came back,
I'm like, this is way too tough, so I'm not gonna do
that part anymore. It was fun, you know, and we
did it. But then I started guesting, and I'm like, well, I still have
this cartoon character I can do. And so I decided
to use him for this purpose with one of my guests. And I use him
now on the weekly show, but for a while, I just did him as guesting,
and I never did him on the weekly show with the cartoon, but now
I do it in both places now. So the little character has
my Persona, which is great because he's kind of like Chewbacca. He never gets old.
He never, you know, he's always the same
good old guy. I mean. And you'd say in 2018,
you created the cartoon character. People have to understand that's before
Snapchat filters and. Yeah, and phones that could
automatically process in real time was. What was that process like
trying to figure out how to map a cartoon to
your face? What? I just. Again, it just happens
as I go through. And you kind of, you know, I'm always stuffing
ideas in the back of my head. And this was an idea that
came about, and I'm like, you know, this would be really fun to
do if I could do it, but I, you know, I can't.
I have some experience doing cell
animation, believe it or not. Old school cell animation. I'm like, I can't
do that. That's way too much work. I don't know if you have any about
cell animation, but it's way too much work. So just as time has
gone forward, I happened to encounter. I'm using Adobe
Character Animate is what this is. And so I
happened to get a hold of it, and I'm like,
oh, I think I can do this. And so then, you know, you go through
your research phase and experimental phase, and then finally
I got it all together where it is now. I still.
I can. I can move my arms, but not, like, smoothly
yet. And so I still have to. I can. The funny thing is, I can.
I have it set up so I can do that. I can do it either
via, like, keyboard strokes
or I can use my camera. But if I use my camera, I Have to
back up so far that I need to figure out how to get my microphone
close to my mouth. And so I don't like to do that because I kind
of like to be up close, sit. Normally put it that
way. And then the keystrokes, when I start getting talking and so
forth, I'm like, I can't remember to hit the keystrokes or anything. So, you know,
I just say, all right, he's just gonna be stiff armed and, you know,
expressive in the face. But yeah, I'm gonna work
on that. Then maybe the next level is I'll finally, you know, maybe
I'll invest in a wide angle camera so I can stay up close and then
it can watch my hand movements and map those.
Right now it's just watching my face movements and mapping those like my
eyebrow, my mouth and my eyes. So.
But yeah, but these are the kind of things. So I don't know what's going
to happen next. But typically what happens is
I think about something and I'm like, oh, I would really like to, you
know, do xyz. And then I get
on a path and I'm like, how do I accomplish this? And then I work
toward it. This, this whole podcasting thing to
me has been a total experiment, you know, for 26 years
where I do, you know, different things just to
kind of fuel my own curiosity. And
each time, you know, things come up, I'm like, oh, well, maybe I
like to try this, I like to try that. So who knows where it's going
to go? I. I'm doing, I mean,
I have incorporating some, I haven't got it all set up
tonight, but it's sound effects into things now and I'm playing around with some of
that, which is another layer of complexity to all this.
And yeah, so I don't know. I mean, eventually,
I've always thought, I really enjoy
guesting because even way back when we first
started, I got asked a couple times to be this was audio
only back then on panels to talk about various things.
And I really enjoyed that. And so I still like to do that. So. And
I have my areas of expertise and interest that I always
kind of gravitate towards in
those categories, unfortunately. I wish they were
business, I Wish they were B2B and marketing and
real estate, because then I could be on any number of shows now
or personal growth. But unfortunately they're mostly
a little less businessy and a little more fun.
You know, just comedy and movies and trivia like
your show and things like that. So
it's interesting to me. Over the last. I would just say over
the last year or maybe year and a half, the arc of. As I'm
looking at things, how it's changed. It used to be a lot of
people, you know, talking on topic, right.
Pick a nerdy topic, right? D and D or what have
you. And now it's skewing now towards, you know, I'm
a life coach and I'm giving you tips, or I'm a business guy and I'm
giving you tips, or I'm a real estate guy and I'm giving you tips. And.
And I'm like, really? People listen to that. That's what I always think in my
head. Because I would never in a million years listen to any of those things.
I'd be like, I would much rather listen to the DND person than
any of that other stuff. You know, you could show up and crash.
Real Housewives of St. Louis would be a good. A good appearance.
Do they have that? I don't know. Yeah, they probably should.
It also be great, like, if you animated your. Because if your arms are too
much trouble to use. If you move them one time, they just fall off,
and then you have to worry about it. It's a. Yeah. Then I don't
have to think about it, right. Like, oh, my.
I could be Bucky Barnes. I could have my little robot arm and just pop
right off. Yeah. And then. Because every movie he's in, he
loses the arm at some point, right? In that part of the gig, he's always
losing his arm. But, yeah, we'll, you know,
we'll see where it goes. I mean, you're doing all kinds of great stuff.
I think I. You know, as soon as I saw you and
all the different things that you were doing, I'm like, oh, my gosh. I have
to. I have to get on there. I mean, the trivia thing is so much
fun. I've been on there a few times playing trivia. I think it's
fantastic. You know, you're doing, like a talk show here.
This is great. I mean, you're doing so much fun stuff. You have the live
theater there as well, and so it's kind of, you know,
a hybrid kind of situation. Those are all very. To me, they're
all very incredibly fun projects to do,
and I'm so glad you're doing them because people need to test
these things out. I mean, you know, the. The hard part is,
as, you know, because you're. You're more of a business person than I Am. So,
as you know, it's hard to get these things going and to
maintain them and so forth, but just trying
them is just fantastic. Kudos to you for
jumping out there. Because the terrible thing is,
when I started doing this, I told you, we were like,
I don't know exactly where we are in the first 50. I know we're not
the first ones, but I know by the time there was 50 in the
list, we had been on the list for a while. And so. And then
now look at it. There's like, million, 2 million sometimes they say 5
million podcasts in the world. Golly, that's
crazy. That is a lot. They say
It's. It's about 10% of the number is about
active. So. Right. You have 5 million podcasts, but maybe
500,000 are active. So, yeah, there's a lot.
There's still a lot, though. I mean, and you have the whole, you know, I'm
going to do this, and then they, you know, you do like three shows and
you're done. They count the total. Yeah,
they count, but that's. I mean, that's the way it goes, though. I mean, that
even happened back in the day, you know, I mean, there are people who would
say, I'm going to do this. They do it for a month or something, and
then that was the end of it. And so, yeah, that's why the list was
so hard to maintain. I think that's why Curry gave up. Once it got to
be past 100 and some, he's like, I'm not keeping track of that.
He does have a new one. What is it called? He.
He is part of one, or at least was part of the origination of one.
And I can't think of the name of it now, but that's still going.
So it's just a bigger list is all. It's a little bit more,
you know.
Was he part of rss? No. Well, he may have been, but no,
it's not the one I'm trying to think of. I can't think of the name
of it now, but it's fairly recent. Like within the last. Well,
he was part of. It was called Pod
show, if you remember. Pod show way back when, that was his company
and it changed into Mevio at some
point. And we were part of Mevio for a while, believe it or
not. With permission or without. Yeah, no, we actually
were. We were a hosted show on Mevio,
so we hosted it ourselves, but then we also. I uploaded it
to the Meevio.com servers and we were
one of the plethora of shows on Meebo at that time.
And that was kind of my. Our
foray into sponsorship because we did do sponsorship
with. What do they call it?
We just read the ad, right. So it's just. Hey,
the funny thing was we did pets.com, which is funny in
hindsight now, but that was the one we chose out of the
list of ones that were available.
When you got on, you got with a person, like a
salesperson or whatever, they listened to your show, you got asked to be
on, we were on. Then they hook you up with a sponsor, they're like, okay,
I think you would work good with one of these three
sponsors or whatever that they had relationships
with. And so, Yeah, I chose pets.com
because to me, that was, you know, seemed like the best one out
of the list. I can't remember what the other ones were at this point, but
they didn't. Fare too well when the Internet bust. Yeah, I know. Then they were
gone. But I think by that time, Mibio was gone too. So
it was gone at some point
during that same time period? I think so, yeah. Turbulent times.
Yeah, it was wild, but that was fine. But we never really stopped. We never
missed a beat, never missed a week during all of
that. We just kept going. It's just at some point, me vio said, okay, don't
post it anymore. We're not going to have you post
anymore. I'm like, okay, we're not paying the server bills anymore.
Exactly. That was basically it. They just kind of fade away a little
bit. But that was our only
foray into the profit for profit kind
of aspect. And. And honestly, you know, it was.
It was made things a little bit different.
Right. So the. The kooky thing is you. We'd done this thing
already at that point. By the time that came along for
like eight years every week, I think it was around
2007 was pod show. And.
And then, oh, we get asked to do this. You want to do this?
And then we start. And then like, oh, we got to do this every week.
And your mindset changes. It's like, now it's a job, you know,
And. And so then during those times, at a couple of
points, it was like, oh, we got to do a show. Whereas before we were
like, yeah, let's do the show. We got to do the show. You know. And
so it really has a weird change in your head
whenever it's. You're expected, you know what I mean? Well, you're expected
to do this and So I always found that
fascinating. So then after that, I'm like, eh, we'll just do it for fun. And
then maybe sometime in the future we'll look into this
again. And we just never have. I mean,
it's all been rolling along here and everybody's happy, and so
we'll just keep it that way. That's one of the things I tell people. The
hardest part about podcasting is the process to repeat it next
week. Right. Everybody can do the first show. That's
easy. Right? You got a great idea. Yeah. You got to keep it, keep
momentum. Yeah. It's tough.
Yeah. Bob, this has been so much fun, always. You're so generous with
your time, and you've helped me out with events in the past, and I always
appreciate getting to spend time with you, having you on the shows.
Staticradio.com Bob LeMent. Check it
out. Original 50 podcast. Somewhere higher than 50.
Unofficially on the list. Yeah, probably.
I hate to say probably within the first 30, because I
don't know, all I can remember is like, oh, yeah, we were then. And I
can't find the. I can't find the list anymore. Curry took it down and
it's, you know, the. The. The digital
junkyard. You can't go back to it. It's just gone.
Awesome. Let's go back to that theme song.
Faster than a meme, stronger than a pun.
Bob LeMent has been podcasting since day one
with miles in the mix. They killed Conquer the Net,
Static radio. The funniest yet,
with every vill of the laughter's alive,
Two podcast heroes on a comedy time
saving the world one joke at a time on
my guest tonight. It's
poor.
From dial tones ringing to streaming screens,
Bob's live the history. He knows what it means.
So grab your cake, folks. Hold on tight.
Bob and Jeff are taking flight tonight
with Jeff Revilla. The laughter's alive.
Two podcast heroes on a comedy
die saving the world one joke at
a time on my guest tonight. It's
Pie Pride.
Now, I'm not gonna spoil anything, but I can see you backstage. Those arms were
flapping. I know. Since I wasn't talking, I started
hitting button.