How Adam Carolla Became a Podcast Superstar

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Carolla, midrant, at his warehouse/studio, in Glendale, California | Photographs by Jeff Minton

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Cast of Millions

Adam Carolla has done the math. The comedian, actor, and multimedia ranter is studying what appears to be a trap door in the ceiling of the garage he personally helped build for his West Hollywood home. He's scowling.

Somewhere above the opening is his office, a glass box he added to the 1929 Spanish-style mansion he assiduously restored from near-wreck conditions. The office, a modernistic anomaly when compared with the rest of the house, was designed to do one thing: showcase one of Carolla's many expensive vintage cars, such as his 1969 yellow Lamborghini Miura. "My fantasy is that you walk in the house's front door and look down the hall and see the city lights, but the car is the center of attraction," he says while pointing up through the ceiling. "You won't know how it got there." Carolla, once a $15-an-hour carpenter, shares every detail -- about the adjustable lights he installed, the platform he custom-fabricated, the way he measured the hole so that the floorboards above would all be precisely the same width, and the monumental effort to install the hoist that would ultimately lift the car through the ceiling.

There's only one problem. Eyeballing the hoist, he notes that there will be about a 3-foot gap between where it stops and the floor above. The mental image of a $600,000 car dangling in space brings a barely perceptible smirk to his face. "Yeah," he says, slowly describing a hazy strategy involving experimental safety harnesses, removable I-beams, nylon straps, and netting that he's devised to get the car the rest of the way. "For the most part, there wasn't a clear-cut plan," something he seems to say often. "Obviously, no one wants to see their priceless car get destroyed, and nobody wants to see their buddy get crushed. But I'm kind of in the business of working things out."

In just over a year, Carolla, 45, has used this same improvisational approach to lift podcasting from the realm of amateur audio and video blogging to an increasingly professional medium with real revenue potential. His daily talk show was an
immediate hit -- more than 50 million downloads in its first year -- and was named iTunes's best audio podcast of 2009.

By aggregating a devoted audience and then experimenting with new ways of interacting with it, Carolla is both taking advantage of an opportunity and creating one. Analysts at eMarketer predict that U.S. podcast listenership will approach 38 million by 2013, more than double 2008's audience. Meanwhile, traditional media has mostly used podcasting to repurpose preexisting TV and radio content -- the same mistake newspapers and magazines made with the Web, opening the door to outsiders.

Watch Carolla struggle to do something as basic as finding the exclamation point on a keyboard to include in an email response to a publicist ("Oh fuck it, she knows I'm happy," he says, tapping send), and he wouldn't be your first pick to advance the cause of new media. But of course, Carolla has built his career on doing the unexpected. "I said to anyone who would listen, all arrows point to the computer -- all music, all entertainment," Carolla says. "Why aren't we trying to get in front of that?" That's why Carolla is now building on his early success to launch an ambitious podcasting network.

As a comedian, Carolla is funny, crude, and distinctive. His voice has been immeasurably shaped by his improbable path to a career in the entertainment industry. He was a wrong-side-of-the-tracks North Hollywood high-school graduate who could barely read and who worked a series of menial jobs before breaking into radio and then TV. Carolla's radio career -- 11 years as sidekick to Dr. Drew Pinsky on Loveline and 3 hosting his own
morning show -- was peaking when he was abruptly fired. Podcasting was never his game plan, but thanks to its free form and lack of rules, it just may be the perfect medium for his skills. Listen to one of his podcasts and you know exactly what it's like to hang with him in his living room. It is this authenticity -- along with his work ethic forged out of his drywall days and his torrent of ideas (including a sitcom he's developing for NBC this spring) -- that has made Carolla and his nascent podcasting network the Internet's great talking hope. After all, his vintage sports car somehow made it through the garage ceiling and into his office. Why shouldn't Carolla's Ace Broadcasting Network ascend against all odds?

Carolla's first podcast, in February 2009, was a doozy. Just two days after CBS Radio unceremoniously ousted him from his popular morning-radio program -- it decided to switch to a cheaper music format -- Carolla recorded an hour's worth of material on a Sunday night so his fans could at least have the methadone of a Monday-morning podcast after the heroin of his four-hour show. It was Carolla's high-school buddy Donny Misraje, a veteran of past Carolla projects, who persuaded him to give podcasting a try. "It was a timing thing," says Misraje, who looks a bit like a long lost Bee Gee. "It didn't matter if we were ready or not."