LOS ANGELES—Adult podcast host Matt Slayer is usually the one doing the profiling, but this time the tables have turned on the broadcast personality and industry insider. His show, “And Now We Drink,” has racked up more than 400 adult industry interviews, 1,100 video clips and 8.5K followers on its YouTube channel, since debuting in 2019.
But Slayer has been industry-adjacent for years, since when he first started hanging out at a weekly event hosted at Chicago’s longest-running punk rock bar Exit, where he made the acquaintance of some alt stars from Joanna Angel’s Burning Angel studio roster.
“In those days, Tuesday nights, they started doing TNA Tuesdays. It was put on by Damon James, and eventually Damon and Veruca James,” Slayer told AVN, “and ended up—I was friends with Damon, so, I would roll through on Tuesdays to support. Then, I ended up meeting—there was like seven performers that worked for B.A. at the time.
“I ended up partying with a bunch of them. Met Joanna. I ended up meeting Teagan Presley and her husband just through mutuals and stuff like that, so fast forward to early 2011—I started roadie-Ing for people, started going on the road, working the conventions. I was roadie-Ing for dancers. I was working the Exxxotica circuit. And I was well over being in Chicago. I wanted to come out West. Teagan Presley’s husband was like, ‘Hey, I'm starting a production in Vegas—come West.’
“And I went, ‘fuck it, let's do it.’ That production never really got off the ground,” Slayer recalled.
After years of working on adult sets, plus working at fan shows on weekends and being on the road, Slayer realized his unique perspective on the industry might be interesting to an audience, especially if he could feature candid conversations on wide-ranging topics, like he had behind-the-scenes with his industry friends. With podcasts beginning to proliferate prior to the pandemic, “And Now We Drink” was born.
“I feel my show differs from most of the other industry shows,” Slayer said. “I'm more than willing to get a new performer on. I'm also more than happy to get people from the LGBTQ-plus community on, where a lot of, you know, my peers don't.
“But at the end of the day, I'm here to have conversations with people, like real conversations with people. When people come to do my show, they go, ‘What are you going to ask me about?’ I'm like, ‘I can't tell you that, but I can tell you what I'm not going to ask you.’
“I'm not going to ask you about how you got into the industry, how you came up with your stage name, what your position is, who you want to work with. I'm not going to really ask you about your scenes. The only thing I'm going to ask you about on the set, maybe, is if you've got a real wild story. Because as someone who works on set, it's boring to me—and if it's boring to me, I can't feign interest from my audience,” he explained.
Hundreds of industry newcomers, starlets, personalities and established stars have guested on the show, but only occasionally will an episode focus on his own personal experience, like in 2011’s “The Vasectomy Chronicles, 1 & 2,” featuring Slayer’s own vasectomy performed by a Las Vegas urologist.
“So, the way this came together was [adult performer] Xander Corvus and I actually doing an episode. We were doing a bit, talking about that we needed to normalize ‘brosectomies’—the two of us go get a vasectomy and, like, have a spa day beforehand,” he described.
After that, Corvus was willing to take action—at first. “Roe v. Wade gets overturned, Xander calls me, and says, ‘So, I booked it.’ I'm like, ‘Oh, shit. Well, I guess this is a thing then. I never wanted kids. It probably is the responsible thing to do. Yeah, I don't like pulling out either, so...’”
Taking the gag even further, Slayer said, “I'm like, well, it'll be hilarious to crowdsource this. So, I started a GoFundMe campaign called, “Save the World—Stop Matt Slayer From Breeding,” and there's a picture of me holding a baby doll upside down by his foot.” Then, Corvus backed out.
”For the first appointment, he's just like, ‘Oh, man, like—I think he'd gotten COVID or something. This is still in during the pandemic. So, you can't get a vasectomy during COVID, you're having COVID? So, I'm like, I'll reschedule mine for a month later—and he backed out for whatever. I forgot what the second reason was. I'm like, because you want to have kids, Xander. Just admit it.”
“But the way I looked at it was like, I've already crowdfunded this. I can't back out again. All right. What are you going to do? Send back the fucking money? Or make people think I'm scamming them? Like, yeah—so I went through with it. I filmed it for fucking YouTube,” Slayer laughed. His audience would expect nothing less. What they want is pretty simple; listeners are interested in authenticity, like having a vasectomy on YouTube.
Of course, booze often helps anyone be a little more honest, so it works well with the show’s format. As long as everyone on is having a good time, he’s not going to take advantage. “I definitely feel, especially because we're drinking, that it would be unfair to be like, ‘Hey, this thing you said while you're drunk, I'm going to ruin your career with it,’” Slayer said.
What does he like to drink? “I drink bourbon on the rocks if I can get my hands on a W.L. Welch Special Reserve. Unfortunately, everyone discovered it a couple of years ago and it is really expensive and hard to find now. It's Buffalo Trace [Distillery].”
Photography by @kogafoto
