Seth Rogen is famously a pothead. Kevin Smith used to be famously a pothead. What some may not know, is that it was Seth Rogen who introduced Kevin Smith to weed after shooting Zack and Miri Make a Porno back in 2008. The two shared a joint in the editing room, and it re-energized Smith so much that he ultimately became a stoner, in part because of how impressed he was with Rogen that he could continue to be prolific and productive while baked.

Fifteen years later, Kevin Smith has given up pot. He’s been off the stuff for a couple of months, and so it made sense for Justin Long — who has a cameo in Zack and Miri — to get a reaction on the news from Rogen during his podcast, Life Is Short.

“I just heard that Kevin Smith stopped smoking weed?” Justin Long said.

“Did he?! Wow! He went the other way with it,” Rogen said.

“I think if you come into weed late in your life, it’s easier to give up. You’re an interloper. You’re a tourist. It’s just a phase for you. You think you’re adopting a whole thing and years later, you’re like, ‘What am I doing? This is not me.’”

“But for me, it is me,” Rogen concluded.

I’m not sure that I’d call heavy pot use over 15 years of Smith’s life “a phase” but I get what Rogen is saying. He did make another mention of Zack and Miri later in the podcast, noting that it was one of his first box-office disappointments, blaming that one largely on Harvey Weinstein.

“Zack and Miri, that was a Weinstein thing. I remember all the other studio heads coming up to me and saying, like, ‘Just so you know. He doesn’t know how to release a f**king movie. He is not behind you. They are not putting as much money in this as he’s saying they are. This is not like your other movies. Those movies have real studios behind them. This one has a line item behind it.”

“It’s so nice when you hate someone,” Rogen continued, referring to Weinstein, “and you know they are going to die in prison. That doesn’t happen often in life, and that I do not take for granted.”

Source: Life is Short