Who Are These Podcasts? - WATP Admits Defeat - A Very Special WATP

Episode Date: March 15, 2018

This is a bonus episode where I admit that I was forced to take down episodes 88 and 97 due to cyberbullying. Anyone who is interested in my response to a bunch of strangers hoping to get me fired can check it out. Spoiler - they're all heroes.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome to another episode of Who Are These Podcasts. I'm your host, Carl. This is a special bonus episode of WATP. It'll be a different format than usual. If you didn't like episode 94 titled Twisted Filly, you probably won't like this one either. I need to address something that happened recently. I've been in a little bit of a battle with another podcast reviewed. I'm here to tell you that they have won.

I have taken down both episode 88 as well as episode 97. So here's what happened. Last week I landed in Las Vegas for Kevin's wedding. Very stoked to see my friend and long-time podcast co-host Ty the Not yet again. I woke up to a social media shitstorm. There is a host of a podcast that we reviewed not too long ago, who decided to get as many of her followers together as possible and tweet and use other forms of social media to try to get me fired. They reached out directly to the company they believe I work at, my actual business partner, as many different connections to my real life as they could find in an attempt to get me fired. And, you know, honestly,

the idea was to get me in trouble. And I thought being an adult would be different than this. This is little kid shit, but it's real. There are adults who decide that they want to get people in trouble. And the way that they try to do that is to use social media to at-mentioned people who will see the information that they're spewing. They're one sided argument. to at-mention people who will see the information that they're spewing their one-sided argument, get all of their following together to just harass the shit out of someone and try to ruin their life. I gotta say that it worked. I have taken the show down, but I do have a response. So anyone who's interested

in listening, here's the problem with what's going on here. And it's not just me. It's happening in a lot of areas in our society now. The podcast host is pretending that the issue is things I said about people that she was talking about in her podcast. People who I'll never meet, people I was talking about while attempting to be humorous. My co-host and I were making jokes. We have a comedy podcast. It's a joke show that makes jokes. I am not an important person. Nothing I say has any impact whatsoever on anything that happens in the real world.

Putting on a podcast that is one of the hardest things to find in the world could not be any more harmless. And I want to give the host of this show credit that she's not so dumb that she thinks words I say have an impact on very unfortunate missing persons who are victims of crimes and their families. This is what she and her followers are trying to say on social media, and it's disingenuous. What really happened here was that this host's feelings were hurt because we made fun of her and her show. And I think I can prove that's the real reason for this response to try to get me fired from my job. Her response when she first heard the show was to have it removed from the internet. She reached out to our hosting company and told them to take it down, threatened legal action

to take it down, threatened legal action to take it down. I had a conversation with people at my hosting company who had my back because everything I, I reclipped that I used is fair use. There are, there's a fair use clause within the copyright laws when you're using something for use as part of a critique. It is perfectly legal to use it, especially when you're only using samples and snippets to make your point, which is exactly what we do. So her first response, and she's the only podcast who has had this response of the over 90 that we reviewed, was that we need to be taken off the internet. So that didn't sit real well with me. I'm a big first amendment guy and I thought that was pretty un-American. When that didn't work, she

then reached out to iTunes and again threatened legal action and wanted this taken off of iTunes. and fortunately, iTunes did not take the show down. Unfortunately, I did, and that's because she finally decided that she was going to ruin mine and my family's life by getting me fired. Not to mention the people and the families who depend on me to do my job. I have a pretty important position at my job and if I were to lose it it would affect many people. She did this because we called her names in a bit that we did on

our most recent show episode 97. It wasn't angry in any way, it wasn't malicious. In fact, it was ridiculously joky. It was over the top joky. We were singing names that we were calling this person. It wasn't even close to serious in any way. It was the kind of silliness that it's so obvious anyone with a sense of humor about themselves would easily laugh it off. So this person thinks that angry mob justice is more important than free speech or free

expression or art. And let's talk about that. that the punishment for something that she didn't like, her goal was to ruin me and my family and think about what the ramifications are here. I said something in an attempt to be funny to entertain the fans of our show. We didn't push this on her. There was no attempt to ruin her show

or do anything to her show. Her show, just like the other over 90 shows that we reviewed, have gone unscathed after we've had reviews of them. But she deemed that that was punishable by trying to ruin mine and my family's livelihood, which is, I would say, a bit of an overreaction. I don't think that that punishment fits the crime and I don't do a crime podcast but I'm pretty smart about how what kind of punishment fit what types of crimes because I'm a rational adult. All right I've received a lot of

response since this happened. Obviously a lot of negative tweets and a lot of negative reviews. I'm proud to say that we're up to 149 one star reviews on iTunes, which is pretty goddamn impressive. If you ask me, I challenge another show to have as many negative reviews as we do and still be around. But it was interesting. You know, I got some support from people who saw this come through

and I did want to read one of the emails that I received from someone who had a similar issue with this host and sent me a note that's pretty long. I don't want to read all of it, but she said, I saw this person bashing you on Twitter. This person cannot handle a bad review. She is known to bully and use her rabid followers to bully anyone who doesn't talk about her like she is the saint of all podcasts. And she goes through some examples of things that she's gone through.

What's interesting is that I'm sure that her and all of these followers who were trying to get me fired think of me as the bully. I'm trying to create an entertaining show for people who enjoy this style of podcast. This podcast host and her followers are quite literally bullying me. It's the definition of podcast. This podcast host and her followers are quite literally bullying me. It's the definition of harassment. And I hate these people who pretend to mistake

jokes for real opinion. This is everywhere. This is the majority of the tweets because they want to pretend that why they're so outraged and why my life needs to be ruined is because I made a joke that is so harm. No, no, I didn't make a joke. I was serious about this thing that is so harmful to the world. Now, granted, I didn't actually do anything. I said words that were so bad that I needed to be taken down. It's preposterous. Did you know George Carlin once said he roots for major disasters?

Do you know a harmful major disasters are? He must be the worst human being to ever exist to be rooting for major disasters. What pisses me off the most about this is there are actual bigots and racists out there. There are people who are spreading hate, who are committing crimes, real-life, Sons of bitches. And yet these fucktards are wasting their time Trying to take somebody down who's doing a comedy show and trying to entertain people And I'm totally fine with And I'm totally fine with negative reviews. If people hear the show and they don't like it and as I mentioned, a lot of them haven't

and they want to give us a negative review, they want to tweet negative tweets, they want to email the show and tell me what a shithead I am. That's fine. That doesn't bother me. That is well within your rights. We all have our opinions. I know that what we do is niche. It's not for everyone.

I don't understand this sense that you can have, you try to have power over somebody else because you think you're in the right and they're in the wrong. What's funny is what this podcast toast has accomplished is actually what's known as the strizand effect. And for anyone who doesn't know what the strizand effect is, it is a phenomenon where an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information, has the unintended consequence of publicizing

that information more widely. And this happened when Barbara Streisand attempted to have pictures of her Malibu home taken off of the internet, and because she was so adamant about this, actually more and more people saw pictures of her home and exactly where she lives. I can tell you that virtually 0% of this podcast's fans ever would have heard our show. There's no overlap there.

The people who listen to our show are not the same people who enjoy what this other person is doing. But thanks to the huge promotion on social media, it's now this episode that I've taken down, Episode 88, is one of the most downloaded shows we've ever had. It is been gangbusters. So way more people have heard the show than would have. I've received notes from many people who've discovered our show and are now subscribers because of the promotion that this person has put out. So it seems to be having the opposite of fact of what they're trying to accomplish.

You know, as I mentioned, we've reviewed over 90 podcasts. This show host is the only one who's tried to take us off the internet. Really, she is the only one who's tried to take us off the internet. Really she's the only one who's tried to get a ground swelling of support to get me fired and ruin my life. Our show has had no effect on other people's podcasts. We reviewed Adam Corolla, come town, WTF, these shows are still doing fine. And you know what I haven't heard from any of those hosts?

This person's response, and this is a popular show, is way over the top. It's totally disproportionate to the tiny blip on the radar that is WATP reviewing your show. It won't affect listenership in any way. We're just doing this all for good fun. We're trying to have a laugh. We're not going out and trying to ruin other people's shows. I've never, ever posted a review about another

podcast. I don't care. I hope that all the other podcasts have huge listenerships. I'm happy for them. This is not a contest. This is a roast. This show is a roast and in a roast nothing is off limits. I've had co-hosts ask me if there's anything they can't say and I always say no. You can't have a roast if there's rules. Nothing is off limits. So if you want to address things that we've said or I've said on this show, I welcome your retort. Everyone we talk about has a platform they can use to respond.

We've had shows talk about us. I play clips on my show. I root for them to be funnier than me. I actually will take things out of context and make them even sound even funnier than they were because that's the fun of this. I get up and roast someone, they come back and roast me back. It's win-win. Everyone's having a good time. If you don't want to participate in the roast, then the best thing you can do is ignore it. Don't amplify it. Don't respond to it. If you don't want to be part of a roast,

then just keep walking and nothing bad can happen. This is where I told Dina Marie, when she called in and we did that show, the only reason why we've even talked about this show that we reviewed on episode 88, beyond episode 88, is because the host decided we need to be taking off the internet. I don't talk about other past shows. I just move on. The other thing I want to address are a lot of these people who are tweeting at me, tweeting at my company, or potential co-workers of mine and wanting to

tattle on me and be tattle tales. These dummies and this host specifically are tweeting at ad week because, as you know, I work in a marketing agency, I mentioned that before. So tweeting at ad week is if they have jurisdiction over marketing agencies, it's a publication. They're not regulating our industry. You're tweeting at ad week.

Can you believe what an asshole Karl is? Yeah, ad week's definitely going to take me down. They're tweeting at these different autism awareness organizations. And what they're saying is they're so offended by the content that we've put out, by the things that we've said or I've said, I don't understand these people who seek out content that is offensive to them. How boring of a person are you?

That you have to find things to then be offended by. If someone sends me a link to something, I know would bother me. I don't click on it. It's pretty logical. If someone says I keep with this person set on their podcast, it's so outrageous, it's going to offend you. Then don't bother with it. The only way I have a platform is if people react and amplify the message that I have.

It's why Trump won the election because the news media were covering every single thing he was doing all the time, trying to say, this is outrageous. This is terrible. And all it did was amplify that message and get it out to everyone. I mean, you think about a Trump tweet. How many people would know what Trump tweeted if it weren't amplified on every radio show and every newspaper, nightly newscast. But to these people who are seeking out

things that are gonna be offensive to them so that they can be outraged and upset about it. I'll tell you to Google Anthony Jessel next stand up. All right. This is comedy that you will find completely outrageous and offensive. And when you hear this, you might want to try to censor the internet and ban any speech that you don't agree with because here's the thing. There is an infinite supply of offensive things on the internet.

The internet is a huge place and there are people out there who can't handle it. If they were exposed to subreddits, they would be mortified. There are a lot of bad things out there. There are a lot of funny things that you would find bad and there are a lot of really bad things. You don't need to seek it out. It doesn't help anyone. And I'll tell you, we're doing an unscripted show. We're trying to be entertaining. Our show is for a very niche audience.

It's not for you. Okay. You know, I like to say the show is not for everyone. I think the host of this other show would say it's not for anyone. It's not for anyone. Get it? Okay. Apparently, when we say something that a podcast so it doesn't like, in an attempt to be funny, the appropriate response is angry mob justice.

And I have to tell you, angry mob justice is not what this country is all about. It's not what we were founded on. There are other countries in this world and throughout history that that is the appropriate response But if you want me silence because you don't like what I have to say I Have very bad news. It is the opposite mentality that this country was founded on You don't have the right to not be offended and

public figures like this podcast host who puts yourself out there Doesn't have the right to not be critiqued. And it wasn't even a real critique. We're a comedy show making jokes, attempting to make jokes. Let me correct myself. So you need to get over it. You need to get over it and move on.

Sleep well, everybody. So you need to get over it. You need to get over it and move on sleep well every pony