Hate him if you want, Joe Budden clearly played this well, was shown to be right, and is the only one moving legitimately out here.Agreed. The thing that excited me was that it felt truly inspired by the Combat Jack show. There were guest episodes but for the most part, Combat Jack was just the hosts shooting the shyt and talking about topics. Combat, Premium Pete, Dallas Penn, DJ Benhamin, Matt Raz, Just Blaze...it was beautiful. Yea it got too chaotic or unfocused at times but the fukkery was amazing, as was the chemistry. Once you move to strict guest-based episodes you essentially put a muzzle on your hosts. You can tell in these Math interviews the guys are waiting their turn to ask generic ass questions, or you get Champ fukking up the flow with some off topic random question.
Some of the earlier guest eps felt like an actual barbershop convo. You walk in and within 30 minutes you're gonna hear brehs talking about the local NFL/NBA/college football squads, LeBron will come up, discussion of the big game of the week, Deion Sanders, Bill Gates conspiracies, relationship problems, movies, laughing at Trump, etc. That's missed when each episode is focused on an autobiographical account of a guest's life or career.
I think it would make sense to start out episodes with 20-30min of shooting the shyt before the guest even arrives. Maybe the guest walks in the shop on some Mr Rogers shyt, and that's when an interview begins.
If you can't host a podcast WITHOUT guests, you're not legitimate in my opinion.