The Dogg Zzone by 1900HOTDOG - Dogg Zzone 9000 - Episode 27, The Man vs. The People of Comedy

Episode Date: June 16, 2021

Seanbaby and Brockway subpoena author and extremely long podcast veteran Jason Pargin to talk about all the times THE MAN tried to dictate our comedy (and won).

One nine hundred hot dog. One nine hundred hot dog. Out of podcast slams with maximum hype. Say hot dog podcast word. When you taste that nitrate power, you're in the dog zone for an hour. Come on. You know the number.

One nine hundred hot dog. One nine zero zero. One nine hundred hot dog. One nine hundred. One nine hundred hot dog. One nine zero zero zero. Yeah, nine thousand. Welcome to the dog zone nine thousand.

The official podcast of the one nine hundred hot dog hilarity webpage. I'm TV Sean baby from the internet with me as my partner in website. He's the Trex fan with the facts man Robert Brockway. I'm Robert Brockway. Here's a Brockway fact. It's a simple one. I once robbed an Arby's. No follow-up questions. God, I had so many follow-up questions.

Our guest today, you all probably know. He's a novelist. The writer of John Dies at the End, which was made into a film starring Paul Giamatti and his new book, Zoe Punches the Future in the Dick. Available now everywhere you get books.

The wives Yoda of the cracked golden age. Jason Parjan. Here to ruin the vibe again of the dog zone. And I don't know if I feel like the listeners, I feel like it's my high school all over again, where every time I came past a group, I could just see them like, oh Jesus, here he comes. This guy.

He's here to ruin the vibe. It's like he doesn't, he doesn't laugh at our jokes and we don't laugh at his. And here the dog zone is where people come to relax and to have fun and make fun of bad. But you guys consistently pick topics to have me on that are things you know upset me on like an unironic level. The secret to good podcasting is just outright harassment.

There's always a point where I, I'm like so upset that I'm not even thinking of jokes anymore. So yeah, again, once we get into the main subject, everyone will understand why what I'm talking about because I'm going to get wind of getting mad about the industry again. And I, there's nothing we can do about it. This is, these are the only conversations I have with people

other than my wife and my dog. So it has to come out in podcast form. That's perfect. You know, you said something the other day that was really funny. I posted a collection of my man comics on the 1900 hot dog. And they're these things I'm very proud of and they're really dense and there's one that you pointed out. You're like, this has like fucking 24 punch lines on it

and it like pissed you off about the industry. And I thought it was really funny how you went from zero to 60 about this thing that clearly brought you joy, but somehow still like made you angry about like the state of internet comedy. Yeah, just makes us mad now. I feel like the listeners don't understand why it makes me mad. The main comics, when I was an editor,

when I was an editor at crack, you got to understand as an editor, there's certain stuff that comes in that you know you're going to put a lot of work into. And this is not any insult to the writers. Some articles are difficult. There's a ton of researchers, a ton of fact-checking. Brockway can verify this. Sean, you edited the stuff for us.

Of course. There's some drafts. Some of it's in English as a second language. Some of it is not everyone is as smart as you and me. Yeah, and that's what you get. We paid a lot for this industry and I felt like we were paying an insultingly small amount. Okay, so at the time like a beginner writer is 150 bucks.

Now there's websites that pay $15 for that. Right. For that length of content. But from my point of view, it's like that this thing they wrote, I know it took them 15 hours. We paid them 150 bucks. That's not great. That's below minimum wage in some states.

Okay, so it was a beggar's KB choose type situation. So I didn't get mad at the drafts that took a lot of work. But still, when you got stuff that you didn't have to mess with, that was a treasured moment. And when you got stuff that you just enjoyed reading, that's like, I'm getting paid. I get to see this before anybody else and I'm getting paid for it. So those are like, so the man comics,

which those of you who somehow don't know better listen to this or where I show them to take these very old comics, scan the entire page and then redub every pixel and build an elaborate overlapping series of jokes and callbacks and backstories that seemed like it took him a year to put together. They're by far the most labor intensive thing I ever did. They're awful.

They're terrible. And yeah, yeah. Broadway has unfortunately attempted to do it himself. I just in a monument to my own hubris. I believe I even suggested like, let's trade. Let me do your Photoshop heavy. And me knowing very, very little about Photoshop to this day and so much less back then.

And still, I was working in cracked full time at that point too. So I had my edits and then I had this column, this comic switch and then I had I think like a light workshop day. So I ended up putting I think about 100 hours into that man comics of trying to stitch together old comics and Photoshop them and put all the jokes in and work it all together. And then I had my normal.

So I worked like probably 150 hours that week. And you probably hated me for at least a year for that. Yeah, absolutely. At least a year is a very polite way to put that. Still trying to get that revenge to this day. I'm watching out for it. As for an editor still saying, well, why would this make you mad? Because I also was at that point toward the end,

I was the guy in charge of programming the site. Used to be Jack O'Brien before he pulled the eject lever on his seat to fly out of the proverbial plane was cracked. And then I took over. So I was programming the site and you're putting it together based on like you've got to meet traffic goals every day. That's what puts food on the table. That's what keeps the lights on.

And on a day that we had man comics, I had to find myself saying, well, we've got a man comics that's going to do a quarter of the traffic of a normal feature or column or just a straight up list. So I'm going to pair that with something I know is going to hit big, which is usually something that's either a long list of short entries or a really strong like photoplasty contest or the image macro, the pictor facts that we did that people love that were really like perfect mobile content.

Or something about celebrities. Anything about celebrities. You're right. Without exception, almost the man comics were like the lowest performers of mine and or anyone's on crack like quarter traffic. And I'm not I'm not mad at the cracked readers for this. The reason for this is because there was a shift in the industry. And here I am freaking seven minutes into your podcast using the phrase.

There was you're still in your industry. We're still in my intro and in the dog's own podcast, I'm using the phrase there was a shift in the industry. Where overnight within about 18 months, all of the readers went from browsing on desktop to browsing on a phone. Man comics are impossible to read on a phone unless you are extremely dedicated. Yeah, because you have to pinch the zoom the whole thing. You can try it like you can pull up.

It's all in one large thing. So on your phone, every inch of the text is unreadable. So you have to zoom, scroll, zoom, scroll, and it's laborious. And so I believe it fully rewards that effort. But I also know in this industry, when you're giving away content for free and you're trying to catch and grab people on social media who are just scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, they are not going to stop and put in that effort. So this thing that was my favorite thing in the entire site

that I knew you had put effort into. I do Photoshop work myself. I am slow at it. Like I can see what you did, like having to tilt text to make it fit and having to to word your and phrase your punchlines in a way that will make them fit into the tiny box for the font you've chosen. Like I can see the effort and then I can see that nobody's going to read it. So so it is.

Yeah, it's wonderful. There's a place they can live now. I hope that the the hot dog readers now treasure them and appreciate like this is what my money is going toward. But it symbolizes what hurts so much about that industry because it got toward the end where people only want stuff they can quickly scroll through. And that's right. That's rough if you care about detail.

If you're if you're a craftsman in for this type of stuff, or you actually care about word choice and all that. And now we don't have to give a shit about traffic at all. And we don't. That's true. Brockwood just did one on a thing called Dick Fight Island, which was a Japanese comic book about men who fight with their dicks. But two Porter.

Yes, but more sexual than that sounds because they weren't just smacking their dicks against each other. They were battling each other and the losers, the first one who climaxes. And it was kind of amazing. Like, you know, normally I see anime stuff like that. And I'm like, yeah, I just turned my brain just turns it off. It's like this is this is noise. But this was so compelling because a lot of my conflicts in real life are solved this way.

And so for me, it was just something that I relate to really strongly. They're one sided fights. But but that's how you get them out. And again, tying into what Jason was saying. Obviously, I could have never done that on crack. I could have done a third of that. And again, since it relies just solely on on images that would have probably got copyright stricken, which ties again into the theme of this podcast.

Nobody would have let me do this. And instead, I get to write, I believe, over 5000 words across the two parts about Dick Fight Island, about just men fighting with dicks to see who comes last. This is the best job I've ever had. I want to say that that writing for one hundred hot dog is like where it's at. Sean, if this is not the best job you've ever had, I cannot fathom. I can't fathom what job that would even be. You're your own boss.

Like I get that it could it could pay more because it's what might seem like a huge amount of money in your Patreon. Like you're spreading it out to now several people like people have to get that this is not. Well, yeah, we're not super well. It's not the best pink job I've ever had. By far, I wake up every day happy that that's what I'm doing with my day. You literally answer to no one. Like if you were not happy in this job, same thing, Brock Graham, same thing.

If you're if you find yourself miserable in this job, I'm going to tell you, you just can't be happy. It's not going to get it's not going to be better than this unless you're doing the same thing five years now, only making $50,000 a month like that. Yeah, that's that's the goal. I'm going to get happier. Like the Chapo Traff House guys or whoever, whatever much they make on Patreon. Like that's the only different thing that could happen.

But if if you find yourself like getting up mad every day, I think, ah, I got to crank out the hot dog article. Imagine feeling like you have to write about dicks. Like I found Tick Fight Island. I'm like, oh, man, I hate to ask this question because I feel like it's going to take us to kind of a I know you don't like to work blue on this show. Right. Yeah, we're very PG. When I was reading the Dick Fight Island thing, usually when I see like erotica or

stuff that's like sexual, that's not for me. Like it's not. It's like clearly not my personal fetish. I can usually still kind of tell where you're supposed to masturbate. DCM saying, yes, like I can tell like what's the like what's the thing. Like you're like, I think I see where you're going with this. You're clicking around, you know, like YouTube, for instance, is full of porn, but it's it's not flagged as porn because people don't know it's porn.

So we did a thing on cracked about there's this entire lineup of YouTube videos about about women sitting on balloons and popping them. Right. And it's like this long process that's like, oh, the moment the balloon pops, that's when they they climax the people who are not my thing. But I know that's the you can tell like it's building tension. And it's like, oh, the sexual tension is waiting to see when her her butt pops the balloon. So in Dick Fight Island, it was not clear to me.

Is it like the moment the guy loses? That could be it could be like a power dynamic. Like, yeah, maybe the guy like a donation thing. He does. And then he's embarrassed and he's failed. Could you make it clear on the podcast for people? I've not read that article yet. It's about who can avoid.

It's like who doesn't ejaculate wins. It's like forcing right to sell the article a little bit. It's not just two guys showing up and jerking each other off. They wear elaborate dick armor that they have constructed according to the personalities of their of their clan and their fighting style. Like one guy will have he's like a fisherman. So he has like a huge fish hook covering his dick and he uses that to attack. And he like split some other guys dick armor straight in half with it.

And it's fucking rules. You made a good point in the article and this already sounds sarcastic, but I do mean this. And that there's nothing sexual about it like in the narrative because one dude like gives a guy a prostate massage and no one had seen anything like it, which implies these are not like gay men having like intercourse with each other. The twist. It's the big twist of the fight island is you're like these dudes are gay and then

no, they're the least gay dudes that ever lived because anal sex had never been invented on dick fight island. Not until this guy showed up. You couldn't even see it. Yeah. Not until this guy showed up and with the secrets of the outside world that allowed him to bang asses. And who was the genius on Twitter that pointed out that the title dick fight island that you can put those three words in any order?

It was amazing. That's another good point. I don't remember the Twitter name. And it works exactly. You are a hero if you're listening to this. Fight dick island island dick fight. It's I'll walk. I'll buy every single island dick.

Yeah, I'd buy that too. I'm if I have a boy, I'll name him fight island dick. And like just the original title of that in Japanese was the eight warriors. Imagine that. Imagine calling that that fucking story the eight warriors. Nobody would ever. It's nothing. It's literally nothing.

Oh, man. No, I mean, I disagree so hard because what you do is you put that into a bookstore right next to like the World War Two books for all the middle aged men and you give it like a fancy leather cover. Yes. Whoops. You just found a fetish. It's like right next to Winston Churchill's biography on the shelf.

You get like this. You get boomers and non vets, just amateur dick fighting. The eight warriors. I wonder. Oh, it's for welding up their own dick armor according to their personalities. Well, today we're not just talking about fighting dicks. We sort of hit on this already in Jason's very short intro. We're talking about the copyright violations that we've run through.

And I guess the minefield of that. Am I making sense? Any legal intersection between when a lawyer has to pull a comedian aside and be like, let's talk about the legal implications of this joke. It's always so fucking ridiculous. And you have to take it seriously. You have to like, they take it seriously. They look you in the eye and take it seriously and talk to you about it.

And you have to be like, yeah, but I really just want to call the guy a poon hound. I can't call him a poon hound. And this is going to get into why one of my articles has been pulled from the hot dog Patreon. We're going to tell the story in a moment, correct? Yeah, let's do it. Let's start with that one because that's okay. But before we even get into that,

I would like to propose a hypothetical to you guys if it's okay. Sure. So let's say it's tomorrow morning. It's six a.m. at the hot dog influencer compound where you guys all live with several other influencers, including I think Minecraft, Speedrunner, Dream and other. Okay. No, he turned out to be racist. And we had to kick him out.

We voted him out of the internet house. So we replaced him with five really energetic twinks. And Gary Coleman. Gary Coleman's there. Is he still alive? Okay. We're getting off. Oh, we're getting off the ghost of Gary Coleman.

Okay. We're getting off topic. You get a heavy knock at the door and you, one of you comes down to open it to dance to the door or both of you simultaneously in your, in your bathrooms. Who's standing there? Hulk Hogan. Okay. And Sean, and knowing the life.

I pictured this a thousand times. Yeah. Yeah. Sean's response is greeting would be something to the tune of going to something to the tune of, Oh, it's you, Hulkster. Did you leave something here last weekend when we had our hot tub party? But no, that's not why Hulk Hogan's there. Hulk Hogan says, and I was going to do a Hulk Hogan voice, but I practiced it before and I

just start coughing if I try to do it too much. But he says, Hey, it's me, Hulk Hogan brother. It's the Hulkster. And I've read the article you wrote about me. You making fun of me and my family and a brook and, and, and of the lovely Miss Elizabeth. I don't know who else who all is in her circle. I didn't watch wrestling, but, uh, and, and I'm telling you, you have to have that article down off of 900 hot dog in your page on by the end of the day today or else I'm

going to, I'm going to, uh, he points behind him and he's, he has pulled up to the cliffside, compound in that boat from that, that show he was on the, the Trumpets. Thunder and paradise. Thunder and paradise in that boat are all of his lawyers that he used to take down Gawker because as some listeners know, some actually probably do not. Hulk Hogan sued Gawker into oblivion. That entire company was collapsed by a successful lawsuit brought by Hulk Hogan. When he demanded they take down a piece of content that we will discuss in a moment

and they refused and now they're dead. So the Hulkster has, has given you an ultimatum into the day to day. You have to pull this article you wrote. Now here's the thing, both of you know, you've spoken to your own lawyer and you know for a fact that what you wrote is protected speech. It is a series of jokes. It is a series of clear exaggerations, community exaggerations and the statements of fact you've made are not only true, but they are sourced to mainstream sources. So you are not the one making the claims. He has no grounds whatsoever for libel

definition, whatever. What do you do? Here's the thing. I didn't want to interrupt, but I would have started kicking his ass six or seven minutes ago. The second he brought up lawsuits because I know his weakness. All you do is stop kicking his ass right before he hulks out because eventually you'll punch him and it won't hurt him and then you're just screwed. He'll, he'll just eat those punches, throw you against the ropes, big boot, drop the leg, it's over. You just stop right before then. So that's how I would solve that problem. I would be making margaritas for the inevitable moment when you both really start respecting

each other because of the fight. Like you just need somebody to step in with two margaritas and be like, let's take a breath here. And then we would all become best friends. We'd raise each other's hands. But to your actual question, I would leave it up. I mean, we, we not to jump the gun or anything, but in a much smaller, sadder way, we have already done this with your article with the minis. I don't want to leave it up. That being said, it's not always up to me. Like a crack, of course, the final decision is not up to me. Even at Seanbaby.com, I have a hosting service. And if they say something has to come down, like that's a difficult discussion. I have to talk them into it. It's not, I can't say fuck you to them. Yeah, it's never really up to you.

It's somebody just immediately takes it down. Right. But at 1900 hotdog, it is our final decision, and we've already set the precedent that, you know, go ahead and try to sue us. Hulk Hogan. The guy who directed the minis is no Hulk Hogan. Sir, I do not know Hulk Hogan, but you are no Hulk Hogan. Even the Hulk Hogan lawsuit, I don't remember all the nuances of it, but it was not Hulk Hogan's passion project. It was like secret billionaires behind Hulk Hogan using this lawsuit as a way to destroy their enemies had to be against against Gawker because they had come after him a few times. They actually, I guess, outed him as a gay man. And that I, I think they argued it was kind of an open secret or whatever, but he held that so he basically funded Hulk Hogan's

lawsuits and then got they got a very friendly jury to deliver a judgment that basically Gawker couldn't afford to appeal, but they would have eventually won on appeal. Now, for the listeners who don't know the piece of content, it was Hulk Hogan's sex tape where he was recorded having sex with the wife of a radio personality named Bubba the love sponge because they were in some sort of an open plural relationship and Hulk had talked about it and then they got recorded. Now anyone who has not seen the Hulk Hogan sex tape, it of course is out there. You can't take something down from the internet. Not really. Not something as enticing as the Hulk Hogan sex tape. That's all right. That's got that wants to be free. Sean and Robert, both of you, if you close your eyes

right now, can you see the Hulk Hogan sex video? Only the thumbnails. I literally have never watched it. I have not seen it. But if I if I close my eyes right now, I can watch it. Yes, I can watch the one anyone at home who has never watched the Hulk Hogan sex tape. It looks exactly like what you're what you're picturing. The Hulk Hogan is not a terribly he's not as flexible as you would expect. Or maybe he just didn't feel the key blew his knees out in like 1979. I would imagine. Yeah, very. Yeah, it's it's it's understood. So now most people who have seen the full tape have not been able to achieve any kind of sexual arousal since this is in 2012. I trust the tape. Yeah, fertility rates in America actually started dropping that exact year. And it's because anyone

steals your orgasms and gives them to the Hulkster. Is that true? Do they does the data correlate that way? I put yes, it's exactly that year. And I fully believe now I've never seen a scientist admit that that's the reason because they don't want to get sued by Hulk Hogan. Exactly. But it's not like it can be undone. So anyway, but yeah, the point is in this is something that we need to make clear off the top. That's why I wanted to pose that hypothetical because right now the way it works. Any we've cracked was owned by three different companies and all three three very different companies. One was a billion dollar basically tech company that ran a bunch of websites. The next was a equally large 150 year old journalism brand that owns radio stations, newspapers, local TV

stations. And then the third was a much smaller outfit that owns just a bundle of websites and and and all three had the exact same policy. If there's a complaint, the piece of content comes down immediately, no questions asked, because the threat of being sued. Even if it doesn't matter the way America works, the cost of having to counter the suit, even if the only thing that happens is they file and you respond with a request for summary judgment and it gets dismissed, that will lose you tens of thousands of dollars that comes right out of your budget. And it's easier to just pull the content. So if you are a celebrity, a public figure, politician, anyone, if you see an article that is critical of you, if you want it taken down,

all you have to do is get your lawyer to stamp out a letter saying two things. One, claim it's defamatory and then two, claim that it's a copyright violation, that anything that they've quoted from you, any stills of videos, any photos they've used. And then the most sites, whether they admit it or not, if it's a comedy site, any kind of a media site, they will pull it immediately. Unless that site is something like the New York Times, Washington Post, NBC News, some multi-billion dollar, some multi-billion dollar powerhouses of journalism, corporation that will back you up. Anyone else, they just comes right down. It's true because they don't want to spend the money to fight it. It does not matter

whether or not the content is actually protected speech. It's still, because in America, we don't have a thing where if you win the lawsuit, they have to pay your bills. It doesn't work like that. You're just out the money. You're out the money that it costs to defend it, so anybody knows they can send these basically these harassment suits because they know you can't afford to fight it. And that's where in the case of 1900 hot dog, if you actually got, like if they actually did go the next step to file in court, which I think, I can't imagine the minis guy would ever do that, you would have to hire an attorney to counter it and that person would bill you like 300 bucks an hour. Right. We would just counter it very poorly

with an extremely bad attorney trusting that comedy would take us through. We go to legal zoom.com and get some boilerplate, add some jokes. I think that's the way we'd handle that. Yeah, probably. And then we'd really just blow it up and make him personally embarrassed and regretting. I think one other thing, like I have stories, I guess, where people tried to do that. They tried to like strong arm me into like taking something down. And all I would do is just point out the thing that they did. And that just made the thing that they were trying to get taken off the internet, like richer and funnier, you know what I mean? Like it's just that's dry sand effect is maybe too big a term for it. But like all it did was make things worse. Right. It makes

it worse for you if somebody fights back, but everybody's it's all corporate run now. And I know that a corporation won't or can't do that and won't take that risk. I cannot us we're we're on Patreon. And it wasn't us. He didn't come to us and say, take this down. Here's my cease and desist. He contacted Patreon. Yeah, like a narc. Like a narc. And they just they took it down. No questions. They were just like, you're you have violated copyright. We took that down. And if you don't agree with it, we'll take the whole thing down. All right, let's let's back up if we can back up and you guys go ahead and tell the story of the many things starting with for those I know the listeners have not read every single article that has been posted to 1900 hot dog. I have

I get not everyone has that kind of spare time. And almost a little over a year ago in May of 2020, I wrote a review of a movie called the minis, which is about Dennis Robin and former basketball player taking a team of dwarfs to a basketball championship. Fantastic movie is amazing. It has brought me more joy. I've seen this movie probably five times. I've only seen the Godfather all the way through once. This movie is probably more joy than the Godfather. I will say that easily right now. But I wrote an article that was in pointing out, you know, it was the article that I felt like that movie deserved. And apparently, I did not know this till a long time later. I guess the was it the production company? Or what did you what? How did you know the director Valerio

himself? Here's the first part of the email from Patreon. Hi there, period. That's how they open. Hi there. Fucker. Hey, fucker. That is corporate speak for a fucker. We recently received a copyright claim for works you are making available on Patreon. Specifically, the claim comes from Valerio Zanoli, Narc, who owns some of the images that are being utilized in your posts on Patreon. We ask that you remove all copyrighted works from your Patreon page. If you do not, Patreon will remove them. Right. The copyrighted works, which again, like fair use. It's it's one of those things where you can talk about a movie and if you're talking about the movie, you put a picture in the movie.

No one thinks you made that movie yourself. It's it's yeah, every time like you can't just use images to promote something like we couldn't have put that in a banner like a still from the minis unrelated to anything and been like come to our website. It's it's got the minis. No, we are tiny shoes endorsed by these people from the minis. Yeah, we had still screen grabs from the movie that those frames represent a small enough percentage and were as part of a critical work. They are 100% fair use under every single court ruling about fair use ever, ever, ever. There has never been a ruling saying you cannot take that because it always comes down to like what percentage of the work you're using and why are you using it? There can be no argument whatsoever

that we are taking the work and then profiting from it. It is a criticism of the work and in the course of the criticism, we have individual frames that amount to 0.0001% of the film because they're individual frames, not even clips. And you're talking directly about them. Yeah, talking directly about them. If that was not fair use, all internet criticism of media would have to be taken down like all YouTube movie reviews would have to come down, but that stuff is not up and monetized. It only exists because it is clearly fair use. But if and if our article had been about how good this movie was, about how it is a hidden gym, one of the best Dennis Rodman movies, there you would never have gotten that takedown.

What they do these days, if someone is upset about the jokes you have made about them, they will file a copyright complaint because no one again wants to have to fight one. And because there's, you know, in theory, you can be fined a many thousands of dollars for using copyrighted material. So it will come in the form. What they will often do is they'll send a lawyer letter that says in like a couple of sentences, well, this is libelous and defamation, blah, blah, blah. And then they'll spend the rest of the letter talking about, oh, and it also violates a copyright. We'll have an example of that later. It's because they know there's no basis for the first part. But the copyright thing, they figure again, it's, you know, they know you won't

fight it and the threat is all it takes. If there's a threat on any kind of copyright, on crack, we would just often remove the images. They would take the entire article down. So Patreon, did they only ask you to remove the stills or they ask you to take the whole review down? No, all works. They wanted to, well, they did. We, they just, they just, they did it for you. Well, we, we didn't want to, I wanted to, to like not appeal. And so I replied and said like, I can prove this is fair use. And they were, they just took it down. Because they say here, you will remove these works in a timely manner, or we will remove them. However, you can still read that article on 1900hotdog.com, our main site, because we control that. And it's up.

I believe it's free. I believe it's open. Go ahead and read it. Enjoy it. It's funny. Yeah. It's great. The reason I said all that stuff before getting this is I did not want it to come across like we are crapping on Patreon saying they are cowards. As I said, crack was owned by three very different companies, three very different size companies with three different legal departments. They all had the exact same policy. You get the, they're all cowards. It comes down. Imagine being this Valerio dickhead and like, like what, what does he think the outcome is going to be from this movie? It could only be positive. Like nobody has heard of your movie. And now everybody that read that

wants to immediately, I know we've pushed so many people, everybody that read that went and watched that movie. I intentionally linked directly to the Amazon Prime download of that movie. This is a movie that on Amazon, by the way, if you're looking for it on Amazon under the minis, they re-released it under Little Hoop Dreams. Is that what they called it? Some even more insults. It's inextricable. Godfather part six. It's called Godfather part six on Amazon Prime. It has six reviews on Amazon. That means the total number of downloads it's ever gotten. It's got to be like, like, like 55 or 60. You get like one review for every 10 or 20 or whatever

download. Is it that good? I would figure one every thousand. Oh, maybe I'm wrong. Whatever. It's not a lot. I don't think, I personally do not think that 6,000 people watched this movie on Amazon Prime. But I think that my, that column, which linked directly to it, I think I sold more downloads of the minis that day. No question. Then they've ever had in the entire time since they uploaded it to the service because it never got it. It has to be what tipped them off. They had to be like, what? Where's the supply coming from? Because whatever else you can say about my column, and I do think it's good. I worked really hard on it. It's, and I feel like you cannot read that column without coming

away with saying me and the dudes are going to watch this movie this weekend. I must watch this. At our dorm, whatever. I read this column, but this has told me that if I show this movie, get the guys together this weekend. The whole gang at the Vine influencer. We're all, we're going to get high, and we're going to watch the minis, and we're going to have an incredible time because this column. Somebody might die from laughing at it too much. It is amazing. It is so bad. It's bad in a way in that there's something spectacular to notice in every scene. Again, I've seen it over and over again, and I notice something different every time. It's so bad. This guy cannot just do the Tommy Wiseau thing and just embrace. I made

something that these American dummies think is funny, so fine, whatever. I'm still getting paid either way. I don't know a lot of you realize this. In the modern media environment, whether someone paid to watch your thing because they loved it or they paid to watch the thing because they hate it, it's actually the same money. The money, like still, you deposited the bank. The bank is not like, oh, these are hate dollars. We don't take these. They're wrinkled and they're stained. I love the idea of how on the fucking moon this dude's brain is to think that anyone in the entire world would watch this movie and write a good review of it. I mean, he's going around finding minis reviews. He's like, I'm going to take down the

mean ones. This is the most kind-hearted review of his film that will ever be. Yeah, there was nothing super specifically mean about it. It was like, this is ridiculous. Look how ridiculous this is. What was this decision? It was not... comedy isn't great when it's just like, this sucks. This is bad. You're a piece of shit. To think that he's made good art, that he's like, oh, this guy just didn't get it. He didn't understand my true artistic vision. It's like, no, you made a fucking silly movie and you did a bad job of it. He's taken down everybody that's ever talked about his movie. That's your legacy. You're stuck hunting down anybody that watches and talks about it. The entire joy of the movie is that it accidentally makes the opposite point

because it was supposed to be an inspirational movie about how anybody can achieve their dreams if they work hard. Even these dwarfs can be a championship basketball team. And then by the end of the movie, it's revealed like, oh no, not really. It turns out that's not... so the theme winds up being like, well, you know what? Maybe it's okay to just not be good at basketball. The way it gets there is amazing. A valuable lesson on its own. And then the whole thing that they... I'm not going to recap the whole review, but the whole plot is that this team of dwarfs plus Dennis Rodman, because of the freak show appeal, they invite them to this streetball tournament in Venice, Venice Beach, California, where the prize is $50,000. And they're one of only eight

teams that were invited and they've never played together before as a team. And it's like, you know that they displaced a team of actual inner city ball players who probably could have used the $50,000. And the movie repeatedly makes the point that none of these guys, the dwarfs nor Dennis Rodman, need the money. And they say repeatedly, like, well, I don't care about the prize money. It's like, well, then let some kids let this group of 16 year olds who've been playing ball for six hours a day to get ready for this tournament to win $50,000, make a pretty... that's split, that's 10 grand each on a team of five guys. That could mean quite a bit to them. It's like, now let's just do it because it'll be because to prove that dwarfs can play basketball and then

inadvertently prove that they cannot because we've lost. I want to make the point that at one point Dennis Rodman picks up one of the little people while he's holding the ball and throws him like from deep, like top of the key. It might have been a three pointer and they dunks. You get more than three points for that. I think so too. But I also think it's a travel. Like, I don't know if it's like on the books, but I don't think you're allowed to pick up another player and throw them. Like, I'm not sure how the best would rule this. I've read the books. I know it's not on the books that you... Not the books. Like, you can have a dog, right? We know you can have a dog, but I don't know if

you can pick up a dwarf and throw them. Well, no, it's not banned that the dwarfs can stack together like Voltron and power up, which they also do. I mean, I know that's a legal move in the NBA, specifically. If you can stack up like Voltron and still make the shot, you get like 16 points for that. Yeah. Okay. Can I point out, if you make a video about dwarfs playing basketball and in the video, a normal size, a person of normal height picks up a dwarf... 6'10". Yeah, 6'10". Yeah, of above normal height, picks up a dwarf and throws him at the hoop to make... You filmed a hate crime. Yes. That's the most meaning thing you can do. Like, no dwarf is out there. I would not think. I don't want to speak for them. There's like, my dream is for someone big to pick me up and throw

me at the goal. That makes me feel like an adult man. You're treating me like the ball because Dennis Robin could have just taken the ball and thrown that in and scored those two points. A bad three-point shooter. Yeah. Instead picked up the entire human being and treated him as the ball. This is not a triumphant moment. The fact that everyone involved thought it was, I felt there was humor to be drawn from that. So... I'm not a comedy scientist, but I find this grave error to be very funny. Yeah. And apparently legally, actually. This dehumanizing element of the inspirational comedy, which tells you that it would never work, is quite funny. There's irony in this bigger mistake. So, I guess... I'm just beating a dead horse because the whole premise

that this is damaging to this guy's business or to his brand is ludicrous. Because it's like, oh, we're not going to make the next space jam with you because we read this article making fun of you. Like, if my takedown of the movie had been inaccurate, they could just go watch the movie and see, oh, he was very unfair. I don't know if the average listener realizes that's the environment we're working in. If you work for a company, every single publisher, whether you're talking about college humor or whatever is left of it, any of the remaining ones are operating on razor thin margins. No. For the most part, they cannot afford to pay an attorney to even do up just a basic response to a thing like this. So, there is content that I promise you you have run across

and found now it's a dead link. It's like, oh, what are we having that article? They got a takedown request on it. And they just took it down. And just pragmatically, it cracked 99% of the traffic happens in the first day or two. So, if someone says, hey, take this down and it's already been up for a week, who gives a shit? Right? They won't even notice. Yeah. And in fact, now, we have had, it cracked, we, broccoli, did you ever have a piece of content taken down, it cracked? No, the closest I got was when the, at cracked, at least when the choose your own adventure people came after me for, at the time they were, I was just writing choose your own event called them choose your own adventures. Because this was the bad old days of the internet. This was like 2009

when we could just do that. Right. And nobody had even heard of lawyers. We were like lawyers, like the people on TV, like the sexy people on TV, they're not going to intersect with comedy. What is that about? So, I was using, just, I was using their images, I was using their titles, and nobody gave a shit about it until, God, maybe two years later, like 2011, they messaged, and I think it was Jack, it was Jack that got the email and came to me and had to say like, well, you know, the days come, choose your own adventure people have found it. And they said, if you don't stop selling these books immediately, we will pursue legal action. And it took us a while to figure out what they were talking about, because they thought we were selling books,

right, of them. They thought my articles were like a preview for actual choose your own adventure books using their art that we were, and they just, they let us keep the articles up if we agreed. And of course, we did agree to so reluctantly, oh man, oh, it's going to break our hearts, it's going to break a bank, we're going to go under, my kids will starve, but I'll stop selling these books. And then they didn't even make us change the name, I changed the name just to be like, oh, okay, listen, I understand this is your title, I'm going to change it to choose your own drug field misadventure, which is my cute way of doing that. But they didn't even ask us to change the name, they just like, you have to stop selling these books, whatever you do on the internet is

fine. This is the Wild West still. So that's the closest I ever came at crack. Before corporations ran the internet and controlled all of the content delivery systems and would just coward out automatically. There's an opt in coward solution. It works so well to just make fun of them. And that that would be the end of it, you would destroy them and it would elevate the story and then they would learn their lesson. I cannot emphasize enough that that the degree to which Hogan versus Gawker was the turning point. I cannot emphasize enough because that because you have to understand, Gawker tried to do the same thing, like that he sent the take down a quest and they actually did a bunch of follow up articles and tweets and everything.

It's like, oh, we're going to get we're going to milk this for months like Hulk Hogan. Of course, there is not a funnier headline than Hulk Hogan's lawyers threaten us to make us take down his sex video of having sex as part of the thrupple he was in with Bubba the love sponge, like it's amazing. It's itself. You don't need to do anything to that. You can just the text of that article would be look at the fucking headline and I'd be very satisfied. I clicked it. Yeah. And they thought, well, we're just going to it's because this is the internet, you know, it's it's 2012, you know, we're just going to going to joke our way right through this. And then he just kept on it and actually had enough money as again, backed by a billionaire

determined to take Gawker down and got a friendly jury, got it. The location of the case moved to Tampa, which is Hulk Hogan territory, as you could probably guess. Hulkamania country. Yeah, Hulkamania. We're all the Hulkamaniacs. The energy of the Hulkamaniacs kind of influenced the the proceedings. Anyone will will tell you that you put your hand to his ear and just listened for all of the support coming in. That's that's how they decided that verdict. And basically one of the suburbs of Tampa, Thunder and Paradise. Is that that has to be true, right? It's absolutely true. I just made it up and there's no fucking way. It's not true. There's no way. So the message was sent and then the template was set what that you again, you do not have to win this case. Like

you could have appealed this up to the Supreme Court and somebody would eventually said, look, they weren't even hosting the video. They just linked to it. There was hosted elsewhere. Like, how can that possibly be? And Hulk Hogan had gone on radio shows like boasting about his sex life with with Bubba the love sponge or his wife or whatever. It was a whole thing. Like it was a part of his entertainment life as a reality show. It was part of the K-Fate was was that he is a sexually adventurous wrestler. So he had no case, but he they rigged things in such a way that it didn't matter the cost of defending it was ruinous. And what's happened is in this era, in the social media era, in the $150 is a lot of money to pay an internet writer.

Margins are so thin, they're just not going to risk it. It's always easier to take it down. Again, unless you've got like a pristine reputation, you're trying to uphold like if the New York Times pulled a piece like it would be news, it would spread everywhere. But who cares about crack? Who cares about college humor? Who cares about any of these? Like some comedy outlet that is, you know, it's got a couple dozen employees and you're scraping to get by and you're making $27 in ad revenue on every piece of content that goes up. It's just not worth it. And that was when it stopped being worth it. So the internet became a much more careful place. People don't seem to remember that like Perez Hilton and all of these celebrities, you'd had these celebrity

gossip websites, like one was just called Defamer. Right. Like they literally would just run these totally unverified rumors claiming that, you know, that this George Clooney has herpes and they were just competing. As a sex pig was an actual one. I made fun of that in an article, but that's where I got it. They made an article. I don't know to this day. It was on the internet. It must have been true. But yeah, they said he had some kind of a sex pig. But if it seems like there's less of that stuff now, and then like there's also there are all these celebrity writers back then like that was their whole thing was having the dirt. I think Nikki Fink was one of them. Like it was there are all these and that's over. Like that is over. That era when you could

just like all of internet comedy back then was about defaming people. Like it was. Yeah, I wrote a thing in Wild West in 1999 about Alyssa Milano and she did a workout video called Teen Steam when she was a young girl. It's so cringy. She like records the theme song and like she's holding the headphones in the recording booth. It's it's it's really bad. And I was kind of a dick back then, I guess. I mean, I'm obviously have some dickish tendencies, but I think I picked my targets better now. But back then I just was sort of a dick to everybody. And when I wrote an article is a little more mean spirited. And and so when people found themselves in my articles, they were never like happy. I was always like too mean for them to enjoy it. Anyway, I think I've

trended the other way. Like now when people make fun of people, they're like, Oh, haha, you got me sometimes. But back then, obviously, I was a dick. And so she sent a cease and desist letter. And of course, I just made fun of that. But she kept doing it like every three or four years. And eventually, somebody at like my website hosting got one of them and was like, take it down. And then I talked to them into leaving it up for like a year or two. And then they kept getting more letters. And then eventually, like, I could see the trend in my own Alyssa Milano article of how the industry went how it's like, no one gives a shit, no one gives a shit. Okay, take it down. So yeah, as as the saga of Alyssa Milano is like, cease and desist letters, they kept coming in and

kept getting ignored until the finally, you know, closer to 2010 or so. The people hosting my website were like, dude, we have to take it down. And I was like, Oh, all right. I mean, if I can't talk into it, I can't talk into it. So now if you go there, which again, I one of the reasons I didn't care is because it wasn't a very good article. It's one that, you know, I see it online, I'm like some of these jokes are real weak, but also it's just like super mean, like it's a bad video, but I didn't really make fun of the parts that were bad so much as just like, look at how dumb all these people are, you dumb dummies, because I just hadn't been getting sued for it, you probably would have taken it down earlier. And yeah, I would I would think so. Yeah. Can I point out that

there's a really I'm assuming that Alyssa Milano herself has no idea about that. Like this was just her people running across it. I think it was her mother was on the letters. And it's crazy, crazy mom. I can relate. She knows about it. And then and she was like a big cracked reader. I have a feeling. Yeah, she went on to become a huge fan of correct, probably never knowing that she was also at some point for a while there trying to sue you. So I would read your articles and enjoying them. That may not herself never even knowing about it. Because a lot of times when we say like, Oh, you know, whatever it's named name a celebrity of somebody that yeah, Tom. Tom Cruise is coming after me over this video I made. It's like, well,

that's not Tom. Tom Cruise has no idea who you are. It's his production company spotted a clip you're using in your YouTube video. It's not Tom. Tom Cruise would not know you even if you showed up at his house. So it's like, you know, I can't verify Alyssa Milano personally hates me. Yeah, I just wanted to yeah, because I don't want anyone God forbid anyone listens to this like tags her on Twitter. It's like tries to resurrect the beef. Yeah, who knows. If I did speak to Alyssa Milano about this, I would probably air towards an apology. Then Hey, did you have fun reading that? I'd be like, I know I did something wrong. Alyssa and I could have been kinder. The video was bad. But I think you know, it was bad. No one, you know, we have no illusions. I just

could have if you would just stop suing me for a minute. I would have taken it down in the same way that like in 1999, if one of us wrote a thing about Dick fight Island, it would like for me would just be like, Oh, these guys are gay. Whereas now it's like so much better to actually understand what's going on and that it's as Brockway points out in the article, that it's an extremely well written like this. It actually it has more character development than a lot of the movies are going to come out this summer. All of us create expectations and subvert them. There's genuine like it's it's amazing how well done the entire thing. Yeah, I hope they never sue me so I get to continue liking. Yeah, because it is and there's yeah,

we're able to make fun of something in a way that appreciates it. Yeah, somebody got better when like so it's just like when somebody tells you when we go on a podcast or whatever and they're like, Okay, you can't swear here. And then you get so much more inventive and it turns out so much more vile and just worse than anybody could have anticipated. It's better that you took away the really weak tools that we shouldn't have been relying on anyway, because it forced us to get better and get more inventive along the way and actually point out stuff that that doesn't hurt the wrong people and maybe makes the comedy stronger. Now, Sean, you have had two columns taken down from cracked. That's right. That I don't know, do you even want to talk about this here?

Or is that igniting the threat that I think we mentioned the Hungarian scam artists even on the dog zone where I did an article about mobile game scams or mobile app scams. And I tried to hit on like a lot of the different ways they do that, whether it's through like hitting your dopamine center with like a an addictive game or in the case of this Hungarian business, their whole model was based on getting you to sign up for like a monthly fee and then just charging like 80 bucks a month until you noticed. And so they were like leading, at least on the Android charts when I wrote the article, they were leading an income, even though all of their apps were total garbage, like obviously garbage, they were things like weather alarm. And you look at it,

it's just like the weather app, but worse. And the premise was that it would, right, it would warn you that like if a tornado was coming, for instance, which sounds like, oh, that's, I need to know that. But it's like, that is not protected information. No one has any reason to like not tell you about the tornado coming. There's entire government industries or government book and programs. And the media is obsessed with telling you about tornadoes, right? Or just tornado Gus, like a normal person tornado, just call tornado coming. I can feel it in my knee, mid or get moving. So like, anyway, like the whole premise of these apps were stupid, or like it's a calculator app, but it would charge you $80 a month. And so I did a lot of research.

This was an obsessive amount of research, even for me, where I had to go to Russian websites and try to find like times they were sued, because it was illegal for this company to operate in Russia. That's how fucking scandalous holy shit. I didn't know that was possible. Yeah. And so I was like, this is fascinating. And I looked it all up and so much of it was impenetrable. And I took the information I could verify. And even Jason, when he read the draft, he's like, dude, you got to fucking make this airtight because these guys are going to sue us today. Like the second it goes up. And so and of course they did, they sent the cease and desist. And I think their their premise was that like, it was a copyright violation or something, something silly. They sent the standard

lawyer letter, the first couple of sentences were about, well, this is defamatory and libelous and so on. But it wasn't this is we went back and forth on this because, you know, every statement is either a clearly joke, clearly just comedic exaggeration, like there's nothing to even be determined there. And then when it came to any statement, you made a fact, the amount they're charging, you know, the revenue model, anything else, anything like that, the fact that they had been banned in Russia, we linked to the source of it being true or had a screen grab of the of the price. Like, you know, it was I'm I have. Shit, did you do journalism once? I am. Yeah, I'm actually a trained journalist. And so I actually know what's was protected or

whatever. This is some this was part of my job at Crackers to make sure. And this was the type of thing I knew because this was where I knew it was there was a chance they're going to come after us, not because what we had done was legally questionable. It was not. This was absolutely protective speech. This is the kind of journalism that, you know, an actual newspaper does all the time. But because Crackers is a big site, that's a lot of traffic. The SEO means that when someone would Google the name of that company, I can guarantee you Sean's column would come up on the first page of Google results went going forward. And they knew that. See, so they knew that this was like an actual threat, like people would avoid their company based on this. So they send the

letter that is the standard where it's a couple of lines hinting at defamation or whatever that they knew they couldn't back up. And then all of the rest of it was copyright. Your screen grabs and screen captures of our app and all that and of our website is a copyright violation. Therefore, you need to take down all of the text criticizing us too. And what an easy day for a lawyer would be to say, like, yeah, OK, cool, prove to us that we lied about like your income and send us your records of like your scandalous behavior. And right, but that's up to like $300. You might have to pay that lawyer. You're not making that you're not making that from ad revenue. He'll charge you for the full hour. Yeah. I'm not going to be the I'm sitting here rebutting a joke.

The lawyer will milk it for a lot of money. Yeah. For sure. I'm not I don't know if you've ever had to do any kind of legal stuff with a lawyer. They're not going to like something that seems like they could knock out in an hour. You're going to get billed a lot for that. So man, it is. Yeah, it is absolutely true that the minimal, minimal stuff that you would have to because even though like, you know, like Scripps had an in-house legal team, but it doesn't matter. They're still billing by the hour that it's like, this comes out of your budget. And so it's like, okay, you can either make five videos or else you can pay to counter this takedown request on a piece of content that

is Sean mentioned a little while ago. No one's looking at it anymore. You get all your traffic in the first few days and then it dribbles in over Google searches. Now that's still extremely dangerous to this company because again, when people search for the name of the company, they're going to get Sean's article. No question because what else who else is out there covering this company, right? So they were right to try to get it taken down from if I was running a scam operation, scam being the, the humorous term I am using. I'm not saying what they did is illegal. It is, it is, it is in our opinion, a very misleading and shady revenue model intended to get people to sign up and then they sign your opinion in your opinion. In my opinion.

Um, so it is, if I owned a website and I had, and I knew I had to make that choice and I knew that it was actually like, they, like if they send the letter so what they send a letter, if they follow it up with a court filing in their district, whatever, and now I've actually got to have a call with our lawyers and then another call with our lawyers and then a follow up call and then have them prepare a thing and then they have, and they're billing us every every hour for this. I admit, like if I'm, if it's between being able to meet payroll that month and actually having to fight this, I gotta admit, I would probably back down because I would, I would just fight myself by saying, look, it's already got the traffic. We said what we had to say,

the people who saw, our readers saw it. They're, they don't look at the archive. So it's kind of lost to them anyway. Just, just, I admit, I would probably say, just take it down because I want to get that out there because this is a system-wide thing. Like the system is screwed. It shouldn't be this easy to do this. And it wasn't because we kept capitulating on stuff like, I mean, I totally understand what you're saying. And if I was in charge of, you know, people's livelihoods and had that same thing, I would do the same thing. But on the flip side, that's also why we're in this scenario now is because it kept working. It didn't used to work and we weren't in this scenario and then it just kept working. You know,

it kept getting easier and easier until now it's automatic, which is interesting. There's an article I wrote in 2012 on Cracked and it was called, Album Covers White People Could Never Pull Off. I don't know if you remember this one, but it was, I took a bunch of hip hop albums or funk albums and I recreated in Photoshop like, Uh-oh. What? Uh-oh. What do you mean, uh-oh? I'm just worried about where this is going. Oh no, it's, it's very racial, but I think I got away with it. Where I took, I took the hip hop albums and I made all the people white and it became, you know,

obviously funny in context because of the humorous ways in which different cultures are different. Okay. And so, um- That's the best way that could have gone. I think, uh, actually, I remember Jack O'Brien just like leveled with me over in emails that this is the funniest idea anyone has ever had. Like he loved this idea. And so, so there was no push back against it. I love Jack's support. Yeah. Jack's support was the best. It was unusual for him to say something like that to me. So that was great and I remember it. So I got to the end of it and it had this, this album that it was called,

Shut Up and Dance, I think was the name of the band and the album was called Dance Before the Police Come and it was two dudes. They had their shirts off and they were holding like Chinese Wushu weapons. And so I was like, okay, if this was white people and I just kind of like was searching around the internet for like the perfect image to Photoshop. And I found this picture that was like heavily memed. So heavily memed that I almost didn't use it. And it was two very morbidly obese people. The woman was completely naked. The guy was in jeans and no shirt holding a broadsword and she was like draped up against him to like cover all of her naughty bits. And it, it's objectively hilarious. This picture, like, and the internet agreed. It was everywhere.

Everyone was making fun of it. You might even like recognize it from my description, my masterful erotic description. So what happened was it was up for like a week and Jason, you might have been on this thread. Were you on this thread? I think Jen intentionally left me off those conversations. Okay. Because he wrote it, the dude from the picture wrote in claiming that we did not credit the photographer, which I mean, I'm good at research, but I can't even imagine like how many hours it would have taken to track that down, right? Like it was, it was literally all over the millions and millions of impressions on the internet. And I thought that was really funny that he was trying to get it taken down through something

that otherwise we'd be very eager to like do. Like there's no reason to not credit the photographer, but this case would be like crediting like grumpy cat's owner, like this, the internet owned this image. And so he wanted that taken down. I remember being on this thread and it was almost like I was getting scolded. Like how dare you not like change anything. And I mean, I fucking like cropped it, added titles and tilted it. And it was, it was so transformed. Obviously, we did not in the middle of an of a meme heavy article, do a photo shoot at the end of something where we didn't do our photos for the rest of them. I don't know. It just seems so obvious to me that this was an internet meme to the point where I almost didn't use it. I'm like, ah, do people need to see this picture

again? I'm like, no, it's funny. Anyway, I guess my point is this, I was just trying to bring up another avenue people use to like get the shit taken down. That's making fun of them. And this one was like, how you need to pay my photographer, blah, blah, blah. I mean, you don't need to explain the idea that once a photo gets out there, it's kind of just belongs to the world. Anyone who has used the internet for more than half an hour. The idea that someone would on their Twitter post a grumpy cat or whatever, and then get a takedown from the grumpy cat, you'd be like, what? This is a prank? Like, no, it's the internet we post. Like this is all the chive is nothing but other people's photos. It's just other people's stuff taken from Instagram and their Twitter, their

tweets and their viral memes, their cat memes. It's like the entire internet runs on this concept that there's a very tight idea of what copyright actually is. And that otherwise, once it's out there, it's kind of just out there. The idea that this meme photo that you're supposed to pay a photographer that everyone who has is using that has been paying a photographer's whole time, that it's ridiculous for you to not to think otherwise is bizarre. But I've got to say everywhere, like it doesn't even matter which of the three companies that came from if that was the demand days or the script days, it doesn't matter because it's you get the same tone from the legal team where it's like you used a photo without permission. It's like, yeah, this is that guy.

I expected we all got so excited before we knew about the script merger when we were like, holy shit, a journalism company like shit is gonna they're gonna change this is gonna be different. Like they know about fair use and shit, they're gonna have a crack legal team, people will know not to fuck with them on this. It'll was somebody will have our back rather than like this tech company that just runs a wiki how rip off and is built on the the hobby funds of the guy from mice, one of the guys from my space, we were actually genuinely excited at scripts before we knew that not only would nothing be different, but they would also just fire everybody because people kept bugging them about stuff like that. We don't don't go down that road.

We're already like an hour and 15 minutes in the recording. It's don't you're right. You're right. You know, we should talk about this. No one wants to hear me. This was it was like four years ago now. Nobody wants to hear me talk about this again. It's it's I've got I could scroll up through your guys is you people don't know that you know, 1900 hot dog has an employee slack like every company in America, where they coordinate. It's all very lighthearted, but they're coordinating work and it's like, you know, it's like, Oh, that's really funny. This is going to go up on Wednesday or whatever. And then it's just that we're fun professionals. Yeah, I gotta say any workplace. We're not like, you don't have to be crazy to work here, but it helps. Yeah. And you

scroll up far enough and you'll find just the block just a block of text of me complaining about the industry. And I don't be clear, everybody, I don't work here. I should not be in their employees like I'm not sure why I have access to it. It'll just be a block of me not helping. I love it when you check in. Yeah. Yeah, checking in to to make everyone feel bad about the industry again, because another company has gone under and they it's like, ah, did he hear everybody too much fun? We need you. It's all slide whistles and goop. It's just a Nickelodeon set. We need an adult to come in and yell every once in a while. Okay. And then we've got at least one more example that is actually my favorite. Sean, what was the other one that got taken down?

Oh, that would have been the fighters who led their way to legendary. That was a bunch of MMA fighters who weren't actually MMA fighters who just like went on the internet said, Hey, I'm the grand champion of like the Combat Secret League. And anyway, I just collected a whole bunch of information and made fun of them. I also used a few real examples. One of them was I think the person who sent the takedown notice Frank Dukes, who was the the person who the real story of Bloodsport was based on who Bill Bloodsport, I was making the point probably did not go to China and fight in a secret underground tournament and was also not a super ninja or a secret spy. I just didn't buy it, but probably. But apparently he is. And so he sent the takedown notice. You can't prove that.

I couldn't prove that he wasn't a secret spy. Yes. Now, this one I don't have much to say about because it's my position before until like the very end, I was at a step below where stuff on this level happened. Like I didn't actually know about takedown matters, usually until after the fact when the writer would tell me about it or someone would a fan would just ask me, Hey, what happened to this article? I don't know. There's probably something you're doing wrong. Because and I think it was because I definitely didn't hear about this when it occurred. Sean, I only know about this because for you telling me the story. So I didn't see the letter or anything. I don't know. Like I like people like he's not he doesn't have he's not like famous is he to see

he have like, Oh, he's an ace lawyer, too. He is kind of litigious. There was this movie called The Quest with Jean-Claude Van Damme that was more or less Bloodsport again. And it apparently isn't that high. Yeah, it had a story by credit by Frank Dukes. So apparently Frank Dukes and Jean-Claude Van Damme hung out and wrote this movie together, which again was just Bloodsport. And he sued Jean-Claude Van Damme for like half of the gross like an obscene amount of money for a story by credit, where it's $42. Jason could speak to this better than me. But yeah, I would imagine a story by credit is somewhere in like the low four figures at best. Basically, you sat down with a guy for a night and sort of spitballed the story. And so he said that no, he has a

document that proves it, but it got burned up in a fire. And the fire was like the secret attic fire that only burned like a one box of documents. And so it's a suspicious story that does not lend to his credibility. And I think they settled out of court. I think this is another example of how like just being an aggressive and litigious asshole like kind of pays off. Like you can make it so people don't make fun of you can steal money from Jean-Claude Van Damme, whatever. Like a monster. That's the moral of today's episode is that go be an unethical monster. And sometimes it'll work out for you. Okay, how did this reach you, though? Did they did the article just come down or were you notified? Like some fans wrote in and said like,

hey, the article's down. I didn't think anything of it until I got like three or four more. And I'm like, wait, what the fuck? And then I think I did email Jack and he either didn't remember who did it or he pretended not to remember because I'm like, which one of those fighters told you to take the article down? He's like, I don't remember. And I was like, it's got to be Frank Dukes. You'd remember Frank Dukes. You'd remember Frank Dukes. It sucks because it's in this is not. I don't have no idea whose decision it was. That's no one, please no one get mad at Jack who was I would not be here without Jack Brockway would not be here. Nobody's getting mad at Jack. Jack's the best. It's nobody nobody who's ever worked with Jack

with Jack is mad at Jack that I can fathom. If they are, it's their fault. We're mad at the people picking on Jack. He did. Jack did not own the website. He was, you know, the editor for a giant company. And then they he does, you know, if they tell him, they take it down. Jack's like, no, they'll just go in to see him has to take it down. It's not like it's not like he can strap himself to the building like chain himself to the wall. He's like, no, you will not bulldoze this article. It's like, oh, no, it's gone. It didn't work if he wasn't being honest with me about like remembering who sent in the takedown. Notice is probably just to protect me from Frank Dukes secrets by a ninja.

You would have been absolutely dead by now. Yeah. So but yeah, but this is this one of all the ones we saved this one for last. I assume this is the last one I've saved some life because this one bugs me more than any of the others. And when I don't know the details on, I shouldn't know that there's no reason for me to know the details on it. It's not how this works. You get the thing from this guy or this guy pretending to be his own lawyer. And then you that's it. You take it down. He threatens the lawsuit. The company says, a this this dumb this this comedy article you written that's now getting 327 hits a day. Just just take it out. That's just the guy complaining. Take it out. And that's it. Like

there was probably like no discussion. Like it doesn't even occupy the legal team's time. You just you get it. You take it down. That bugs me because those of you who are tuning into this podcast who have never heard of Sean baby before, you got to be at least one person like you like you're following this link from my Twitter or whatever. Why not? Hi, Sean's I'm a delight part of what Sean may has made Sean famous as he covers as very ultra specific beat. He covers several ultra specific beats. My favorite is the fact that MMA fighters and people in the fighting world and people who claim to be martial artists in world class fighters, a huge percentage of them are crazy and actually cannot fight and are just lying about it. There's an even magic.

They believe in magic. They claim to have learned there's this thing where people cannot simply say, you know, yeah, a lot of it is just about, you know, strength and reflexes and leverage. And you know, there's basically some tried and true techniques. Everyone has to claim they have discovered like the Vulcan neck pinch. Yeah, like the part of the human anatomy that somehow doctors have never noticed and that their fighting technique is the one that's going to let you win. I'm going to let people and on pull the curtain back. It's a prostate. Yeah, it's a to come full circle. I want to pull the curtain back for a moment. I have not been in a fight since third grade and I lost. Sean, you have been in multiple altercations since that time.

Like in sparring matches. I don't think I've like hit anybody out of anger since like 10th grade. But no, but you have you are a trained fighter. Yeah, I do. I do. I'm a fighter. Would you say if if I had access to all of the fighting knowledge on earth, every book on the subject ever written, but only one week to train, is there anything I could learn in those books that would let me defeat you in a fight? Oh, I mean, if you like dressed very convincingly like a beautiful woman, like Bugs Bunny style grift, I think that could work. Yeah. But I mean, I like my chances if you only have a week of training, then yeah, I think keep in mind, I cannot I cannot run on a treadmill for two miles before I get

gassed and I have to stop. I don't think it would be responsible to set this fight up, but I'd let you get some good shots in. I mean, I wouldn't I wouldn't like, you know, punk you out or anything. I know people would look at it and say those two gentlemen fought like, you know, but there's not a book buried in the library in the Himalayas that would show me something I can do to your body that would just incapacitate you that somehow no one has ever discovered up till now. Okay, there is an entire industry of martial artists and fighters who claim that they've got the equivalent of that. And it is amazing. It is just a wonderful nonsense, provable nonsense. Like I can knock a guy out by like not touching them. Like is it

is a genre of book I own. And it's my favorite when they forget that it's it's that it only works when the other person is in on it because they do forget every once in a while. And then somebody actually hits them and they go, Oh, right. Oh, shit, I've been I've been eating my own bullshit this whole time. That's the thing about like when you're trying to fight, like the first couple hundred times you get hit in the head, like completely shuts your brain off. Like you forget what you're doing. And like what's funny is when you see those like fake martial artists like get into a, you know, a semi real like competitive fight, you can see that happen. You're like, Oh, they look like I did the first year I was training like look at him. He

doesn't know where he is. It's yes. And I made an article and I wrote a column about the the movie Roadhouse where I touched on something that I feel like everybody knows but doesn't really stop to think about which is it in martial arts movies. You're watching two dancers, right? That's not an insult. It's a dance. It's choreographed like like the blocks and the kicks are the partner is cooperating with your blocks and your kicks that if you actually then watch an MMA fight, it does not look like that. It's like two people just like now hugging and now one guy's on the ground and his arm is broken. It's like, Oh, that didn't that didn't look like Neo fighting agent Smith at all. It's almost like Keanu Reeves and the other guy nobody did a flip in this.

Yeah, it's almost like they had to practice for six months to make sure they did not accidentally hit each other in the wrong way. Yes. And this changed everybody's life when the UFC came out was 1993. We all saw that who grew up with karate and it just instantly everyone with a brain was like, Holy shit, I don't know anything. And everybody who didn't have a brain was like, this is not real. My style would work here because they have they're not allowed to bite. Whereas in my style, we could bite and that's how I would win. And like there was like a, you know, a shattering of minds on this one side of the thinking. Yeah, that's just what happened. So they kept writing books that are that don't work. Like you can still go buy an Aikido book

despite the fact that there's never been like an Aikido fighter who had a professional career. Like there's just not a it's just not a thing. Oh man, you just got us so sued by Aikido. Steven Segal is coming after us again. But to bring this all the way back around, Sean had written this beautiful article chronically some of the biggest most flamboyant liars in the history of professional fighting. And to see the each of these guys like because they wrote like entire fake biographies, right? Wikipedia is getting Wikipedia battles where people have corrected and they'd correct it back and yeah, saga. So the idea that one of these guys, one of these fabulous could then send, well, if we had a copy of the letter they sent the take

down, I'm going to speculate that it probably is hilarious. Yeah, I wish that they can that they can send that in that I know that nine out of 10 organizations that publish comedy stuff would respond by by just taking it down is heartbreaking to me. And this is why here I'm here to bring down the vibe. It's legitimately heartbreaking because that's a piece of comedy that is someone who deserves to be skewered. But let me bring the vibe back up. You can actually read this article on 1900 hot.com. I like not only remastered the article, but I went and I tracked all the people down today to see like what they're up to. Most of them in prison. But but yeah, that's there's a happy ending to that one. This was all me leading up to that fact that it has a

new home now. And if you go read it and see Sean, whatever criticisms you may have of Sean, I'm sure he has many, many flaws. He is not easy. He is not a lazy writer. Like if he has taken you down Sean as exists now, not in 1999, you have he has put the work in like he has he has deconstructed what is wrong with you in a way that I would like to think even the target would say you know what? Fair enough. That's my problem. I've been trying to put my finger on it. I am a ridiculous person and I know I'm actually glad someone has alerted me to this fact. It is if you truly are in a position where if this guy were to turn up at your door at the 1900 compound, if he's still alive, is the guy still alive? Which one? Frank Dukes? The guy.

Yeah, the guy who we think something to take down. I think so. Can't prove it. If he turns up at the hot dog compound tomorrow morning threatening to threatening you to take it down again in the you would be able to slap in his face. I hope I hope that's true. I hope that his only recourse would be to send like one fake lawyer increasingly desperate and poorly worded fake lawyer letter after another and you could just keep posting them to the site as content. But if I did hear him coming, that couldn't be Frank Dukes. If I go to the front door and see a man there, oh, he's already inside. Ninja after image. Decoy jutsu. I have one story I wanted to tell where I was actually on the other

side of everything we're talking about. All right, it was me with a team of powerful lawyers at my back. And it was fucking awful. It was it was way worse. It was way worse than having the lawyers come after you. As I real quick, I just worked with this site called Adam. It was Adam Films at the time. And they wanted to launch a comedy section. So I launched a comedy section for them. I wrote stuff for them. This was when I was writing for crack. But before I had the column. So 2008, 2007, something like that. And they were owned by Viacom. So they had more money than they knew what to do with. And their their editor was just I don't want to say he's a coked out guy. He had some real nervous energy. Okay. And he would I would I would turn in a draft of a column and he

would call me without fail after midnight. And he would have a very tired lawyer or three on the phone. And they would make me read my jokes to them every single time to this team of lawyers. And then they would talk to me about like, everything that was wrong with the joke and like force work with me as we rephrased every single line of it until it was legally acceptable. And it's incredible. And I have a couple. Oh, please. I have a couple where I have my original version. And then what they made me go with because here's the crazy part. It's never what you'd think. Okay, can you give me a second to brace myself? Because I have to keep my depression at bay. And when I can feel something that's about to trigger my

depression, I have to get myself into a mental space where I can I can handle it. So I think this is good. I think this is a lighthearted thing to bring this is going to make me I mean, it was torture to me. It was it was a hellish period in my life that that just probably gave me an ulcer. But to you, it should be a good time. Can we do anything to help, Jason? No, no, go ahead. Go ahead and sing yourself. All right. Okay, there's one thing you can do. Can you do a Macho Man Randy Savage impression? Oh, yeah, Jason. Oh, trouble. I was there the whole time in the sex tape, brother. Watching the Hulkster go at it with Miss Elizabeth waiting on that top rope to drop this big elbow

right as he climaxes. But the Hulkster does not climax, brother. Wait, wait, wait. This is not a joke. Isn't Miss Elizabeth dead? They're all dead. So am I, brother. No wrestler lives past 35, even the women. It's all a wrestling tragedy. Jesus Christ, all roads lead to darkness. All right. That didn't help at all. I'm sorry, Jason, but it didn't help bring you up. All right, all right. Is Hulk even still alive? He is. Yes, technically. So is the undertaker. All right. The original I wrote, I was talking about Jack Palance in a in a my favorite piece. It was about Oscar controversies. And they specifically asked me to write it to capitalize on the SEO of the Oscars, because that's how people who don't think of writing. So they asked

me to write this piece and then called the lawyers on me. And we had, I want to say a five hour phone call. I want to say it was probably like 11 to four in the morning, where I had to read things like this to them. My line was, you know, Jack Palance from roles like terrifying skeletal cowboy whore monger or terrifying skeletal cowboy whore monger in space. Love it. This is just a fun way to introduce him. That's fun. So then the lawyers got ahold of it. And they turned it into Jack Palance, a man who's acting diversity runs from terrifying skeletal cowboy whore monger to terrifying skeletal cowboy whore monger in space. They had a problem with the intro. Not with calling Jack Palance a terrifying skeletal cowboy whore monger. Okay, did they explain the logic? That was that was that

was most of this. The logic here was that I said, you know, Jack Palance from roles like and they were convinced that nobody would know the roles terrifying skeletal cowboy whore monger and terrifying skeletal cowboy whore monger in space were jokes. They would think those were actual Jack Palance roles. And I could get sued for saying making a false statement about Jack Palance. Incredible. I like it because it is just just fussing. Like, I think your version is better. Can you imagine what how so exactly the same thing, just like a little bit fussy or wordy, right? They let the worst part stay. But we had to talk for like probably probably no exaggeration, like 10 minutes about that line, until they could tell me what the problem was and how to like phrase it. And it

made the same joke slightly more awkward. Yeah, it's still it still works. But but that probably cost 10 minutes. That's that's two or 300 bucks of lawyer money. Like, yeah, do you imagine how much money they made from me? Just just me personally, I paid them like, gotta be in the millions of dollars for this. I'm sorry, I know I should be laughing at this. I'm just sitting here making myself mad. So please because I know I know what they did. They made the change because they had to justify the billing. Because if they just rubber stamped it, that's like what I need lawyers for. So they needed it needed to look like they had done something. Yes. And this is what I'm saying that you about if you ask your lawyers like, hey, we got this take that thing, can you

just knock out a quick thing to it's like, Oh, no, before we can just knock out something, we need to have a call about it. So please clear your schedule from 8am till 6pm tomorrow. And we'll have all seven of us on the call, each of us billing $300 an hour to talk through these issues. And if you say, Oh, no, no, no, it's just a quick it's just it's just it's clearly like frivolous. Surely there's like a boilerplate response. You can send out like, Oh, no, that doesn't that doesn't exist in the legal world. That's being a lawyer is a license to print money. Anyway, I'm seeing I'm getting married lawyers. Maybe would cheer you up if I did a Miss Elizabeth impersonation. I'm sorry, I can hear a little bit of fry where trying to do macho man earlier has

ruined Sean baby's voice a little bit. I can't see the struggle to do the woman's voice because I can hear that because if anyone listeners tried to do macho man for a couple minutes, you will break down into a coughing fit. How he did it every day all day the entire every minute he was awake for 50 straight years. I'll never know. It is what killed him. He just died from doing the voice too much. I'm gonna I'm gonna end my little bit on a on the one time. Well, yeah, now the one time that I feel like you know what they were probably right. So I'll give you their revised version first, which is in the intro of a piece about Marlon Brando. Marlon Brando has always been, to put it politely, the iron fisted ruler of crazy town.

The original version that I gave them was Marlon Brando is the diaper king of bug fuck mountain. We all know this. And I had to I had to sit there at like one o'clock in the morning and tell a lawyer Marlon Brando is the diaper king of bug fuck mountain and then just wait for this long sigh. Jesus. So their concern was that the the the reader would think you were stating he literally held that title. I was saying that yes, I was saying he is the actual diaper king of bug fuck mountain and we all know this. For any you don't want to get sued by the actual diaper king. It went out there confused. America's libel laws, at least once per time, actually extremely difficult to win a ruling. It is actually very, very hard to prove it. If anything said

in the course of an essay that's clearly comedy, it's next impossible. It's next because you've set a tone like this has been this is precedent. You have set a tone that's clear, comedic exaggeration. No. And he went any comedy writers out there to be legally protected. You do not have to worry about phrasing where you have stated something true about someone where it is very obvious to any reasonable person that no, it's actually not true. And even if it was true, like if someone mistook it for true, that's actually if there were such a mountain, there would be a proud title to have. No one could argue that that would be like detrimental to that person's reputation or career to mistakenly believe that they are and then say the exact phrase

that the title you claim they held. The diaper king of diaper king of bug fuck mountain. Very prestigious. The advice bracket was getting there is not real legal advice. That is a lawyer feeling like they have to say something. Yes. No, it got to the point where I would do shit that I knew. I mean, because I knew these calls work every time. It was one of these calls. And I would put shit in there that I knew probably wouldn't stay in the article, but I just wanted to, I don't know, like push something so far that maybe the lawyer would laugh. And I really thought diaper king of bug fuck mountain was going to do it. And it did. They didn't give me the laugh out of those guys. It haunts me to this day. It's my greatest failure as a man. I loved it. I would be so proud

if I got sued for diaper king of bug fuck mountain. It would be called the people versus diaper king of bug fuck mountain. That's what that's what we were referring to the case as. People would cite it later like the people versus Larry Flint, which is sort of what Jason was referring to that the famous case that sort of said, Hey, if if if you're being funny and everyone knows you're being funny, you can say whatever the fuck you want. That's that would replace that people would call it people versus. I do. I've made once again made someone's podcast run twice as long as it normally does. Here's one thing I would like to leave you with because let's say for example, because once upon a time cracked, the publication was a tiny little magazine in like

why this started 1960, something like that was just a few guys, right? Like with a printing press and then it eventually got big. And then, you know, decades later became a totally unrelated website. But once upon a time, cracked, the magazine was exactly like 1900 hotdog, right? It was a few funny people in a small smelly office just putting putting together something that eventually caught on. So 20 years from now, imagine that 1900 hotdog has become an empire that is making tens of millions of dollars for everyone involved is publicly traded. Can you imagine getting to a point where of the hundreds of pieces of content you're turning out as one of your under one of your subsidiaries, you two have a legal team that is racking up

many hours by making some writer read their jokes one line at a time while they steadily ruin them because no one starts out wanting wanting to wind up there. But it seems it feels like one by one, they all, you know, because I would think, I don't know, it's the same thing like Saturday night live if they like you don't think they've got legal people to look at every one of their sketches and stuff in advance, making sure there's nothing there that's going to actually get them in trouble. Like you see how tame their stuff is like the comedians, you don't think they could go harder than that if they wanted to. But again, that first year when everybody was just on cocaine, do you think that's the show they wanted to make? It's like, no, over time you grow until

it's like, I don't know, I guess you just get hurt so many times that you just build up all these defenses was like, I'm not getting sued again. Yeah, can you see a day coming like when you're both in your 70s? And 1900 hotdog has gotten so big and said that you just you have become the careful lumbering like dinosaur that we now bemoan. I feel like that's so close to impossible that it's funny. Like there's no way that I would allow a team of lawyers to rewrite a joke to be worse. And I can stand by that. If you ever catch me doing that, just shoot me in the head because some sort of a mold has taken over my brain. I'm no longer the man you once knew was Sean, maybe. But you know, you know, who else said that exact same thing when he was young and

brash macho man Randy Savage? No, no, it's the one other voice you can do. And edgy young comedian known as Dennis Miller. And that that brain fungus is called $50 million. And imagine that you live in when you are when you have no reason to care when street cred means nothing to you. And it's like in a video game, we've been you've got enough hours in it that the game currency doesn't mean anything because you have so much of it that you can just buy anything. It's like the idea of people thinking you're uncool or needing to have some sort of integrity is like so distant. Which wrestler was it that had to film like that apology to China this week? I didn't see that. Yeah, John's saying it. Yeah, because he actually Sean, he accidentally

said in an interview that that tie that Taiwan is a country. Oh, right, right. Yeah. And so he had to film an apology in Chinese state. He does. He speaks Mandarin. Yeah, because once you were from when John's now because once you reach his level of wealth and riches, like the idea of losing a deal for the Chinese distribution rights to the whatever fast and furious whatever movies in is unthinkable. Then you find yourself apologizing to the Chinese government for admitting that Taiwan is a separate nation goes to dark places like to be able to think like a person could become Dennis Miller a second time and a human generation is just so dark. Because well, that's because we have his example now like some weekend.

You can tell the young comedians like a monster story. Careful, you'll end up like Dennis Miller. Can we see a picture of his house that he just sold? No, that's not part of the story. You're missing the point. That is the path to darkness. Go go back go back to writing articles for twenty six dollars for for whatever website. We'll still take them and at least hire some funny fucking lawyers instead of the diaper king of Bugfuck Mountain. What about the iron fisted ruler of not so town Zoinks? Could we add the Zoinks? You know what bothers me the most about that? And again, we're heading into the third hour of this podcast. Perfect. What bothers me the most is that that is a lawyer who thinks he's a comedian.

Yes, anybody can do it. Who thinks anybody can do this job? I can let me get it on. Maybe he came to that conclusion after like three months of me reading my stuff to him and he's just like, I could fucking yes. Easy. Why do they need a comedy department at all? Just go straight, cut out the middle man, have the lawyers write it. Therefore, you know it's safe. And it's exactly as funny. Oh, gosh. Yeah, the curse of the because it and again, I'm not calling it any specific person. You run a comedy website. You have people who are not part of the comedy operation. But they see that as like the cool part of the operation. Right. And sometimes they have their own ideas for like an article you should write. They're usually not not great. They mean

well, these people are lovely people, but usually their idea is like, you know what you should do? You should do something on this. That's a full idea already. All right. Well, before we go, Jason, do you have anything you'd like to plug, please? Only the one thing forever, because I my full time job, I guess, is I'm just a podcast guest now. But otherwise, once every two years, a novel comes out. So we love having you, except when you say we're going to become Dennis Miller. And then that's when it turns bad. I am the ghost of Christmas future here to steer you away from that. Oh, thank you. The last book was called Zoe punches the future in the deck. It is sci fi novel. Look at the user ratings on Amazon. Don't take my word for it. Of course, I will say it's

good. Of course, Brock Way and Sean will say it's good because they're terrified of me. Read what strangers have said about it. It's very well thought of. The next book comes out next year. Do not have a title yet. It is the fourth book in the John the John dies the end series. Well, thank you for coming. And stick around. We'll do a fun game on the bonus podcast by a popsicle Pete t shirt. Everybody Sean will not advertise this during the show because he feels like it's poor taste by by the by the shirt. It's why it will never become Dennis Miller. 100 hot dog wages war with the help of an elite fighting squad on demolitions. It's three finger Louie. Adam Ruth, Adrian H, Aidan Moette, Alpha Sciences, Java, Armando,

Nova, Benjamin Siren, and Brandon Garlock, Brian Whitney, Chase McPherson, Children of the Meat Millie, Dan Bush, the artist formerly known as Devin, David Fornafine, Costello, Dr. Awkward, Eric Spaulding, Haraka, Jaibur Al-Aidan, Jamie Gordon, Jeremy Neal, John, John McCammon, Josh Fabian, Josh S, Ken Paisley, Lyman, Matt Cortez, Matt Riley, Michael Rader, Mike Stiles, Moju, Neil Bailey, Neil Schaffer, Nick Ralston, Nick H, Polly Poisewough, Rhea, Rich Joslin, Timi Lahey, Toasty God, Yossarian, Zachary Evans, and Zadar Fan. On communications, intelligence, tactical, the vehicle pool, karate research, it's Patrick Herbst, who has just requested a transfer to demolitions.