The Joe Budden Podcast Comes To An End; Akademiks Celebrates On Twitch

After weeks of friction, the Joe Budden Podcast has officially ended with Joe parting ways with Rory and Mal. This is something DJ Akademiks predicted ages ago, so he took to Twitch to celebrate after the news broke.

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After weeks of rumors and friction, the Joe Budden Podcast as we know it has come to an end. The podcast is, without a doubt, one of the biggest on the market and helped shape podcast deals and the space in general. Many are lost over how we got to this point when Joe Budden’s cohosts, Rory and Mal, came back after a short hiatus recently. With Joe’s new deal with Patreon, the show had to continue during their absence, showing that the possibility of a podcast with his cohosts was possible. In the most recent episode, ‘You Want It To Be One Way,’ Joe takes it back to square one.

Budden breaks down how he created the podcast and his former cohosts weren’t around for its conception. Joe does reveal how they came around and then continues to give the oral history of everything that lead to the termination of his employees. Mostly, Joe takes it easy on Mal, but he has all the smoke for Rory.

Rory was seemingly pushing the ownership angle years too late with Joe, wanting to see accounting and finances for the podcast. Joe’s stance was a straightforward answer in the form of ‘no,’ with his viewpoint being that his cohost’s record and get to go home–they’re employees, not executives. Joe has to pay for everything, secure the deals, pay everyone involved, and keep the ball rolling. Simply put, in Joe’s words: “If you want to audit me, you have to go.” 

A few months back, Akademiks came in the mix, talking about a situation where Rory visits his house and leaves a note–something that Joe believes Akademiks would not lie about.

Showing up to someone’s house is absolutely never the answer and puts everyone’s life and ability to secure the bag in jeopardy. The ongoing beef between AK and Joe’s cohost is a suspected cornerstone of the ownership beef.

AK has repeatedly gone on Twitch and called both Rory and Mal “bums” and “workers” and reminded them they do not own the Joe Budden Podcast, nor do they own anything. To be clear, nothing is wrong with being a worker, especially when the work is hard manual labor, doesn’t take up too much time, and the pay is great. AK’s point of view has always been that he didn’t start with him and to leave him alone or it will get ugly.

In recent weeks, Akademiks has devoted a good majority of his Twitch streams to bashing and exposing Rory, and once again, Mal wasn’t the main focus but caught strays by association.

After seeing how everything played out now, ugly might be an understatement–Plus, AK’s line about “bosses should only talk to bosses” is clearly instigating the situation between the podcasters. His all-out assault on Rory included exposing his side chick that visits his house and confirmed Rory left the note in his mailbox, allegedly ruining his engagement.

After news broke that Rory was fired, Akademiks celebrated with a 30-minute victory lap and rant on Twitch. The whole situation has more loops and turns than you could ever imagine. At the center of all the hostility seems to be Rory, whose name is at the start of every turn of conflict, while Mal is just caught in the middle for sticking up for Rory.

If you revisit episode #423 before the departure of Joe’s cohosts, you can see the friction and the tension according to reddit. Also, you can hear Rory offer Joe his hands which seems to be the tipping point for all of this.

Hopefully, all of these guys can come together to work things out, because it shouldn’t have gotten this far in the first place, especially in the public eye. For now, you can listen to Akademiks’ response to Joe’s Patreon-only episode explaining the situation below.

Rory has also responded to his firing and he’s promising to get into the “messy s***” later.