 Welcome to the hottest goss in the universe, the only show where everything is a lecture I am your host Digi Bro and with me today is a bunch of students who are here to learn about the hottest goss in the universe. Yes Munchie. If you have people with no context and my mind is open please share your wicked troops with me. And some of you, I know some of you in the audience know about the dick show, some of you probably know most of the stuff on this board, you can help me, some of you know nothing. Good, so this is going to be a like full bore everything you need to know to get caught up on the whole story of this shit because there's a lot of people talking about it now. Ever since this thing happened at the very end here, this 400 million dollar lol suit that you might be curious about through the course of this video, ever since this happened lots of people have been making videos explaining this whole thing. Now I was already planning to do this lecture way before that happened and frankly I think that I have a lot more context into all this shit than most of the people talking about it because I've actually been a fan of these two guys for a very long time and was a huge fan of the biggest problem in the universe podcast which is sort of the core center of this whole clusterfuck that we're going to go through. But really this is about the battle of two men, once friends turned very bitter enemies, this much bitter of enemies and those are Maddox and Dick Masterson. Now Maddox is one of the first people who was ever famous on the internet. I'm going to fucking knock my whole tray over. This ran a website called the best page in the universe that he created when he was in high school in the late 90s and it was basically just this very like curt aggressive masculine writing style where he would just complain about random petty things and it was fucking hilarious. In fact I want to read a passage from a Maddox article just to give you all an idea of what his writing style was like because as this goes on you're probably going to develop some ill will towards this man hearing about his stories and it's hard to remember that this guy was literally one of the most famous satirists on the internet for like well over a decade. So let me read you a passage from my favorite thing he ever wrote which is anyone who doesn't like onions is a fucking idiot. Says everything has onions in it. I love onions with all my heart and soul. My girlfriend was giving me a piggyback ride to the grocery store the other day because I didn't want to scuff up my new shoes. She was huffing down the frozen pizza aisle when I overheard some hipster chicks saying ew onions. I jumped off my woman's back and slid over like a smooth criminal. Her boyfriend shrieked dude what's your problem? That's when a clerk tossed an onion at me from the produce aisle. I immediately dropped into a handstand and donkey kicked the onion into the hipster chicks yapper. She started chewing like a horse and crying tears of joy. She was so happy that she gave me her number which I dropped kicked out of her hand and into her boyfriend's skull. She asked me how she could ever repay me and I gave her a stern look. She thought that look meant suicide. She was right. She said I know what I have to do. Then she waddled over to the house where I'll grabbed a potato peeler and started peeling off her own face. Then I watched as she slowly ate her face for the next 15 minutes piece by piece until she bled to death. Her final words to me were forgive me. I said no in sign language and then she died. Anyway, that's enough of that. So yeah, hilarious guy, great writer. This website was up forever. His whole style was that he built the website himself. He was on this cheap local hosting called Xmission that allowed him to run this site when everyone else was kicking him off hosting. He was not, in the early days of the internet, first of all, if enough people complain about you, hosts are just going to be like, well, let's just kill him. Let's just take his stuff down. But he was very anti-censorship. He was very like, I'm going to have my message out there, goddamn it. This was in the era when feminism was starting to get really rampant in popular culture again in the 2000s. And like, yes. What year exactly are we talking? We're talking just, I mean, Maddox got famous in the late 90s, early 2000s. But his website was relevant all the way up to the early 2000s. Nigger's old. Nigger's old. What? Nigger is old. He's old. Yeah, he's old. They're both in their 30s, like mid to late 30s. So, I mean, he started this website when he was in high school. And most of the time that he was working on this website, he was working after high school because he tried to go to college, he dropped out, because what you will eventually learn about Maddox is that he is a fucking idiot. Like, he is literally developmentally disabled in some way. But he has managed to conquer this through the fact that he just works insanely hard, yes. I'm sensing no bias here whatsoever. I mean, he is literally developmentally disabled. It's impossible to rationalize all of his actions without that. I mean, if you listen to, if you were to think about that and then go back and listen to the biggest problem in the universe, you're like, oh, I should have known. Like I should have known this all along, yes. I just want to say right out of the gate, he sounds like a hero. Like a man who was really disadvantaged but overcame the sheer force of will. Maddox was a hero, but he lived long enough to see himself become the villain. What made Maddox funny is his intensely autistic way of analyzing things and tearing them down. And as the story goes on, he makes some pretty spurgy decisions. And so it's like his greatest strength is also his greatest weakness. And that is autism. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing. His posts, the way he would write, because he posted very infrequently and they were all super short. His writing was just like one page little articles, but they were extremely tight. And it's because he would go back through them and like agonize over every sentence and word choice and like spend months just like writing one article. But because he was so early into the internet's existence and there was so little competition, it didn't matter that he was that infrequent because back then people like went to a website to read it as opposed to just going on Twitter and only reading whatever just came out. So yeah, he was pretty big online and he was very particular about the fact that he never ran ads on his site because he wanted to be able to say whatever he wanted. And so all of his, you know, all the money he made was through merch sales. And for like, I think it was, how long did he work at the fucking telemarketing company? Was it nine years? 13 years? So after high school, after he fails to get into college, he goes to work for some telemarketing company. Now this to me is the first sign of knowing that there might be something wrong with Maddox because telemarketing companies have the highest job turnover rate of like any job and he gets into a sort of tech position at this company and works there for like a decade and never rises through the ranks or anything. He just kind of works there doing code for this telemarketing company while running one of the most popular websites on the internet. But because he won't run ads on it and he's just, he's very shy about taking opportunities because he's so protective of his reputation and he's so worried that like he'll look like, like he'll look like less of a man or something if he takes some of these opportunities, even though no one would be grudge him for a lot of the shit that he's been offered. But I don't know. He's very principled and people respected that at the time. You know, he was seen as kind of a, here, he has his, his famous avatar is him as Shea Guevara, which was also a t-shirt. This is kind of like that, except I drew him bald because he's mostly a bald Armenian guy. That's how most people know him as, used to be real fat back in the day too. But he's, you know, Maddox in many ways got his life together. This is the weird part of this is that this man built his life up. He was from Utah, the middle of nowhere. His parents, his dad is like super fucking old and like a real, like hard ass who never really communicated with him. And it's just like an old, surly Armenian guy who he doesn't really know that well and he hates his mom who, I guess just because she didn't want him to do comedy, you know? Yeah. It's easy to go through this story and regard Maddox as a complete fuck up and a loser and an idiot. But he was and is very successful and very influential. Yeah. I don't know if he is still successful. Like, I don't know if, I think he's pretty poor now. Considering like where he came from. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's from, he's from the middle of nowhere in Utah, a family who was not supportive of him at all. And he worked this shitty job for a long time. Well, eventually he gets a book deal. And this is where he changes his whole outlook on everything. He moves from Utah to California, becomes an LA boy, gets a book deal, and publishes the alphabet of manliness, which ends up being a New York Times bestseller. So this book is fucking huge. This was everywhere in the mid-2000s. Every college kid had this, like every college bro had this book, you know? And comedians loved him. He was like considered one of the godfathers of internet comedy, you know? Lots of people copied his style. Arguably the origin of the Chuck Norris jokes from the mid-2000s, if you remember that meme. He, there was a section in the book is the Chuck Norris section. I think that's where that whole. I think he stole it from Conan O'Brien. Oh, did Conan come up with that first? Yeah, I think Conan's the technical genesis of the Chuck Norris. He was around for it in any case. But he did a lot of, like the alphabet of manliness is just basically, for every letter of the alphabet he thought of some like ultra manly, like B is boners, C is copying a feel. You know, they're all goofy. And he, for the sake of making this book, and this is the second sign that Maddox might be insane because this is something he brags about, but to everyone else just sounds like, why the fuck would you do this? He spent, he wrote 2,000 lines of code to create his own chat, chat like service with which to share images with his illustrators because there's tons of illustrations in this book. So he spent like almost as much time as he spent like writing the book itself, creating a program just for file sharing with his. Why wouldn't you just use one of the many fully functional file sharing services? I mean, it was 2004 or five. The Dropbox didn't exist today. I am a professional coder at this current lifestyle and at this current point in time. And I was going to say exactly that, that I have made programs that do exactly that in my professional job, but I have the advantage of software that has come out since like 1999 or whenever the hell he made this. This would have been like the mid 2000s. I mean, honestly, from the way people talk about it, like it doesn't seem like anyone who he's told this story about the code was like that sounded necessary even for the time. Like it was totally unnecessary. All I care to say to comment on that is that it sounds like something that is designed to impress people who don't know anything about coding. It goes 2000 lines of code is not a large amount of code. I think that's the number I could be. Well, whatever, okay. Anyway, that's what it's about. I believe he said 2000. He must be that, because he said it a thousand times. He said it 2000 times and that's how I know. So yeah, he writes the alphabet of manliness, big deal, very successful book. He moves out to LA, loses a lot of weight. Here's the most tell, because okay, in the time since Biggest Problem, Dick Masterson over here will commonly speculate that Maddox has autism. And it seems that other people who know him kind of think it's probably the case. What tipped me off was he tells the story on Biggest Problem about how he read a book on social cues that like changed his whole life. That like he literally did not understand how to talk to people until he read a book on like what facial expressions mean and hand gestures and stuff. And ever since then, he takes a very literal interpretation of that stuff. So if he were to see you making a face, he will then like project, oh, you must be feeling this way because the book told me that's what that face means and then he will act that you accordingly regardless of whether you have made him aware that you feel that way. You see what I'm saying? He's very assumptive about people and like basically thinks he's right about everything all the time and makes judgments on that basis. But all of this is funny. I need to emphasize this. This guy is hilarious. Biggest Problem in the Universe is the best podcast I've ever heard and it wouldn't be funny if not for Maddox being such a fucking weirdo about things. But the point, and especially if you read this book, he comes off extremely self aware about how stupid this all is. Like in the book, there's lots of sections where he'll just go off on like a tangent into his imagination sort of where he sort of peels back the cover a little and like is self-effacing in the humor, which is extremely rare for him. Yes, Jess. Yeah, Maddox is definitely not oblivious to his own weirdness and listening to the biggest problem in the universe. It's clear that he does have a sense of humor about himself and he does like to laugh at himself when he's among friends or people he feels are his friends. It seems like when people accuse him of being thin-skinned about being joked about, it's just because so much has happened and Dick is not his friend anymore and he probably feels more attacked now than he ever did on the show. Definitely. And I would say that, but I also think that his self-awareness, like he's self-aware about a lot of things, but there's certain things he's not. And I think that because he was a writer for so long and he did slave over everything for so long, he was able to make sure everything he published came across right. Now when he's doing a podcast, sometimes you get those moments where he gets stuck in something that he doesn't realize he's fucked up real bad. The most infamous example of this is there's an episode of the show where, so Dick Masterson's a staunch libertarian and Maddox thinks libertarians are annoying, but he has no idea what they are. And there's an episode where he decides to bring in the problem. The concept of the biggest problem is that each of them has two problems that they talk about each episode and the fans vote on which problem is a bigger problem. And basically they're just trying to argue why my problem's a big deal and yours is not. So it's like a debate. But Maddox had an episode where he talked about libertarians and his idea was homeowners associations as a representation of libertarian governments. Now for those who don't know what libertarian government is, they want small government, meaning a government with a small amount of influence. What Maddox thought it meant was a physically small government, such as a homeowners association. Although homeowners associations, libertarians fucking hate them because they're extremely controlling. They're actually big government just in a small form. Maddox didn't understand that and about 15 minutes into his argument, you can tell he realizes this, but because his character is that he's always right and totally unflappable, he just pretends for the rest of the episode that he hasn't recognized that he's completely wrong. And the next episode just totally brushes it off like, oh you know, I guess I was a little wrong about some things, but mostly I was right. So this is where we start to see that I think that doing a podcast may not have been the right choice for Maddox. As somebody who says awkward things is awkward and won't like own up to it when he didn't see it coming. Like I think in his book, he wrote about embarrassing things that he wanted to talk about. It wasn't him getting embarrassed by accidentally speaking wrong. Yes, Munchy. That example just sounds funny though, like he is a comedian and turned a mistake into a comedic joke for the sake of a show. It's actually a really frustrating episode to listen to where he clearly is like, it's probably the hardest episode of the show to listen to because of the fact that Maddox won't just acquiesce to the fact that like he's obviously wrong about this. Like he continues to argue from the perspective as though he was right. And it doesn't make any sense. That's the name of the show, dude. I guess. I was just gonna say, yeah, it doesn't come off like he's trying to make a joke. It's like, you can't really tell what he's getting at. That was the first episode I think where a lot of people who like thought Maddox was always playing a character when he was like, you know, being a moron started to go like, maybe he's actually just a moron about some things, you know? I mean, not that you would, everyone would think that about both of these guys about certain things. Like these guys have a lot of weird out there political ideas and like just ideas about the world and how it works. But that is part of the comedy. These two guys are fucking insane. They're both very broken. They're comedians, you know? They're comedians living in LA. They are like beyond edge comedians at that. So yeah, like it's an edgy show and that's part of the charm of it. So anyways, Maddox makes this book and it just so happens that the editor on this book is also the editor on this book, Men Are Better Than Women, written by this guy, Dick Masterson. So Dick Masterson is a troll chauvinist. His whole thing is that he's sort of like a performance artist, especially back in the day. But nowadays he's more of just like himself but like a, you know, an extreme version of himself like anybody else on the internet. But anyways, so his whole gimmick was he had a website called Men Are Better Than Women and it was all about making fun of feminists and just like being really bitterly shitting on women. Like the way this book is written, it is like aggressive. It's like the whole first chapter is just telling you if you're a woman put this book down cause you're too stupid to read it. Like that is the entire opening chapter. And then the next chapter is like, all right men, now that we've been liberated from those bitches, like so the whole point of it was just to offend people. Like he wanted to see if I play this over the top character who's obviously fake and I'm wearing fucking, you know, aviator shades and he had a giant fucking mustache. He looked like the dude from Reno 911, the bald guy with the mustache. He's playing the super over the top character and of course everyone falls for it. People get super offended and lash out at him and he just thinks it's funny because it just kind of proves him right. You know, like when he calls, like when he's like, oh feminists are all like they're a bunch of fucking dumb like sensitive assholes, you know, and then they're all like, no I'm not. And he's like, there you go, you know. So that's sort of the concept behind the character. So he ends up getting a book deal just, you know, again, this is a period where the idea of oh manly is cool is like a big deal. You know, 300 comes out around this time. Like that's the tenor of internet culture. These two meet because they have the same editor and they become fast friends because they're both writing about, I mean, it's alphabet of manliness. Men are better than women. Obviously there's a men theme. Both of them had been trying to write for TV around the time. So they team up and they start trying to write TV pilots. They wanted to create a sequel to The Man Show and also there's a section, I guess, is Mansur's a show in itself or a section on The Man Show? Okay, so yes, Monchi. The Man Show? The Man Show was a show on Spike TV that was just like, it was like a, how would I describe it? Like a talk show? It was like a talk variety show but all about manly stuff. And there was also a show called Mansur's, which is like- Is this old nigger shit? Oh yeah. Yeah, this is from the mid-2000s. Okay, old nigger shit, all right. Yeah. It was sort of like a throwback to like Gentleman's Club Playboy comedy, like a skit comedy show but also what I just said. Yeah. You want? So there was also a show that's similar called Mansur's about answering man advice basically. Dick was a writer on that show and him and Maddox tried to launch a bunch of pilots. One of which was Manformation, a sequel to Mansur's that they pitched, they almost got it, didn't get it off the ground. They tried to write animated shows together. I guess they, I think they sold at least one show. It never got made but they did successfully sell a show together before. But like so they were trying to get something off the ground for years but nothing ever like actually materialized. So in the meanwhile, these two guys start hanging out and they would get into arguments all the time about dumb bullshit because I mean we all know that we also have a podcast based around arguing about dumb bullshit all the time. So these two, like they would get into these long arguments and Dick told Maddox like, look, I'm not gonna waste my time arguing with you like this all the time unless we do it on a show. Like let's make this a show and it took like two years of him constantly hammering Maddox about making this a show before he finally would do it because Maddox was so like against this whole type of content and like doing podcasts and he wanted to record like tons of preliminary episodes and like make sure it was perfect and everything before he would do anything. Yes, Dick. To his credit, he may have been right. I mean- At least for his own sake. The funny thing about it is that the original, there was six episodes that were recorded like an entire year before the show eventually got made and Maddox had formatted the show very weirdly at the time. I can't tell you exactly what the format is because I haven't actually listened to those episodes but it was different and worse and I think that because those six episodes just didn't come out that good and they kind of shelved the show but then when they came back and Dick convinced Maddox to make it less like weirdly formulaic and to like just make it a little more basic and just the content is that we argue which is why the show is great. Then they eventually did, they came back to it and tried it again and part of this was because of a producer named Handy Randy. Handy Randy is this Japanese dude who is friends with both of them for whatever reason and he was the one who produced the show. He helped fund it and got encouraged Maddox to actually do it, help them get the guests that they would have on the show shit like that. So, but before we get to that before we get to this podcast we need to continue talking about these two and their friendship. Both of them worked at this place called UCB Theater which is a comedy like improv theater in California in LA. Really big, really famous, really old and lots of people go there and they do comedy shows all the time. They had a I think either weekly or bi-weekly thing called the Tournament of Nerds where basically it's just like an improv competition between a bunch of comedians and a lot of the people who were guests on Biggest Problem were from UCB Theater including Asterios Coconos who we'll get to later but he's the most important person from there. But like, so these two would do all these comedy shows at UCB that's how they knew each other. They had a lot of the same friends. They went to a lot of the same functions and parties so like it's not like they were BFFs but they were just around each other for a very long time before this show came together. So they know each other pretty well. Medics in like 2010 or so tries to write his second book, I Am Better Than Your Kids, Huge Flop. The concept of this book is that he takes children's artwork and just like gives it a grade, always an F or a D minus and then just like writes a paragraph about why the artwork is shitty. Unfortunately, it just wasn't funny. Like he had a whole website dedicated to it and everything and I read it and it was not funny. Let me, let me, I gotta chime in on that one. Okay. Oh, okay. Oh, God. That website is how I first knew about Medics and I thought that shit was hilarious when I was 14. You thought crappy children's art was funny? Yeah, that's how I first knew them. That's all I knew them for was the crappy children's art and I thought it was really awesome. Cause the art was always super shitty and it was funny. It was a good bit. I love the concept. The problem was that it was an old bit from like 15 years prior that he was now turning into an entire book. I see. Yeah, because he had already done the making fun of children's artwork and like it's funny one time in the article and you're like, okay, I get the joke but years later you tried to read a whole book about it. I didn't even know that this book existed. I bought the alphabet of manliness when it came out. I loved it. Medics, I thought he would use a big influence on me and like I did not even hear that he had a second book until years later when like Dick mentioned it. Incidentally, the reason I knew about Medics is that there's an anime blogger called Bakaraptor whose gimmick was that he was literally Maddox for anime and like his site even looked exactly the same and he wrote the same style and I was friends with Bakaraptor so I found out about him and like I would just periodically check the website every couple of years. That's how I do about all the books and everything but the Crappy Children's Art Book which originally was called I Am Better Than Your Kids but because it was a huge flop they re-released the book with the changed title Crappy Children's Artwork Still a Flop. Yes, Munchie. I Am Better Than Your Kids sounds like a Munchie Shatsky podcast title. It does. I actually love this title and I love the concept of shitting on children's artwork. I just didn't think the things he would say about them were funny because he'd only write like a sentence or two usually and I was like, I can find way more to break down about this picture than you just did. I Am Better Than Your Kids a prequel to Still and Your Dads if it was easy. Yeah, exactly. So this book, Tanks, Medics is now in like, you know, he's kind of in decline. He hasn't really been updating his website very much over the last few years. Like in the 2010s, Medics kind of goes quiet for a little while. Yes, Nate. I'm just curious. What is his like income stream if he's kind of dying off? Well, I mean, does he have a regular job or something? The book got a second release. So there was like a special edition with some additional shit, you know? That got him a little extra money. Again, him and Dick were like selling shows and stuff. They just didn't eventuate. So like you can make money selling a script even if it doesn't get turned into a show as long as they buy it. So like these two had revenue streams, but like for the most part, people were not talking about Medics anymore. He'd kind of blinked off the face of the internet until he reappears with the best show in the universe, his YouTube show. And his YouTube show is actually pretty great because it was right around the time when like analytical style videos and comedy videos were all getting big. And he was basically just writing like his articles, but he'd convert it into a YouTube video. It was like him in front of a green screen, just like talking into a lapel mic. He sounds like shit. His audio was always garbage and he can't read a script to save his fucking life. I'm sure that those took like hundreds of takes to do because apparently when he used to do ad reads or he, first of all, he never did an ad read on biggest problem, Dick did all of them because Medics was so bad the one time he tried that they just never let him try again. One of the things that I like about Maddox, which became apparent once he started doing like YouTube videos and stuff, is the way he talks because he sounds exactly like how he writes. Like he speaks in these like short, curt sentences like, yeah, that's why it's great. I'm better than you. You're a stupid idiot. A lot of his YouTube videos are great. The Spider Woman's ass one really blew up. Some of these had millions of views because they were about like relevant topics relatively soon after the things happened. I mean, Medics took like three weeks to a month to make a video every time, but like they were good videos. Obviously not the best release format for YouTube to take that long on it, but this was slightly before the algorithms got to where like you have to make long videos. So I think he pretty much got fucked when that happened because his YouTube channel completely dead in the water. Not relevant to this, but someday, Redcon4 YouTube algorithm lecture you. Oh, I need fucking, I would need to consult MatPat on that one. So anyways, that's Maddox up until the biggest problem. He started a YouTube show. He's actually kind of on an upswing because of this YouTube show. He's like kind of coming back. People are hearing about him again. And then him and this guy, Dick Masterson. Now, Dick, I didn't mention this, but when he made the book, Better Better Than Women, like right after that book came out, the thing he was most famous for is trolling Dr. Phil. So Dick Masterson went full performance artist and had to be, he was invited to come on the Dr. Phil show, which, and a lot of people don't know this because there's a YouTube video of his appearance. That's just like three minutes. That's just from one episode of this. He was in five episodes of Dr. Phil because during this period of Dr. Phil, it was like a reality TV show where they would get five or six people who are like, like in this episode, it was, or the series of episodes, which came out like one after another every day. It was five people who, like women who hated men, men who hated women. And they were all fucking, you know, put into this house. And it was just like any other reality show. They had like secret cameras everywhere and fucking the whole nine yards. But unfortunately, this footage has been scrubbed from existence because Dr. Phil's team is so embarrassed about this. Dick credits himself with having destroyed the reputation of the Dr. Phil show because its relevance kind of ended around this time. When it was becoming a goofy reality show that nobody could take seriously anymore with an obviously fake troll character on it. But so he goes on Dr. Phil. They have to put him through tons of psychological screening and everything to make sure he's legit. Of course it's all, he fakes it all. He makes it through all the hoops. He makes it on the show. He keeps up the character, the whole show. It was a terrible experience for him, but he's famous as the guy who trolled Dr. Phil. Now, lots of people have seen the clips because he has great zingers and fucking one-liners. It's a great appearance. You should definitely check out his Dr. Phil appearance. And he tells the entire story on the first or second bonus episode of the Dick show. He goes through like the entire experience and it's a great insight into what reality TV is like, yes, much. You say it's scrubbed from existence. Is there literally no way to hear this? No one knows where those episodes are. There's the three-minute clip and otherwise Dick has put out a like $1,000 bounty on anybody finding those episodes. But no one has found them. I mean, they could exist in a vault somewhere in the studio's library, but otherwise nobody knows where they are. Terrifying. So that's what he's most known for. That wasn't like the late 2000s, but Dick was not famous when this podcast started. He's just a guy who Maddox happens to know. And the main source of income for him is that he's a co-owner of like a company, like a contracting company, like something totally normal. He has a totally norm, he still has a totally normie job that he does aside from all this. So like Dick, his real main revenue source is just this job he's been doing for like a decade that has nothing to do with comedy and that he has done an amazing job of not doxing over all these years. Yes, Nate. I'm just curious. Like how much time does his normal job eat up out of his day, out of his week, you know? I don't think much because I think he's just like a name on the company. Okay, okay. Like I think he co-owns it, but I don't think he really runs it or anything. So that's just the sense I've gotten from like what little info he's shared about the company over time, which is just like, like he's never said like what it is, what they do, like what's going on, just like a vague sense of what it's, what he does. But that's his normal job. So these two create this podcast, bam. Now, Maddox, as we've gone over, this guy is weirdly like terrible at marketing and really bad about like, how do I put it? He just throws away opportunities. Like there's lots of stories about him like having where he went into like TV stations and like was pitching and he just pitches everything really badly or he constantly like is demanding things that can't be done or just won't promote his own shit because he's scared his fans won't like it. Like he's so terrified of disappointing his fans. When the reality is his fans just want more fucking content but like he's so terrified of disappointing them that he didn't even advertise the show at all until seven episodes in. So literally no one was listening to it. Like the first six episodes of Biggest Problem, no one knew it existed. And when he finally did announce it, he just put like one post on his site and that was it. But then later, once the show started taking off, he added it as like a permanent link at the top of his site and that's the only reason his fans really know about it. But like because everyone who listened to this show loved it so much, it literally just word of mouth spread. Like I only found out about it because that guy, Bakuraptor, wrote a post about it. Like, hey, Maddox is back and he's got a podcast. So this was around episode 22 when I found out and what Bakuraptor had said about it which has stuck with me ever since as the most interesting thing about this podcast in terms of Maddox's career is that this podcast made Maddox human. Maddox had tried very hard over his whole career to be a God. Like he always presented himself as like I'm smarter than everybody, I'm the coolest. At his book signings, he used to do book tours all the time and at his signings, he would show up in a crown and he would make people kiss his ring and like you had to wear formal attire to his like signings or else he wouldn't do it and stuff like that. Like there was all these crazy rules that he had that if you showed up, you had to follow. My friend Bakuraptor went to one of those. Like there's a picture of him with them and like yeah, he did all the stuff and like, cause I mean it was seen as like cool and kitschy and it's funny, it's definitely funny but he is legitimately kind of like that. But like what this show allowed for is to pull back the curtain a bit and we hear stories of Maddox and Dick go into parties, being friends with lots of people in L.A. Like this is the first time he comes off as like a fairly normal guy and you're like, huh, man, Maddox actually seems like he might be fun to hang out with or like personable or like a human and it was like yeah, I kind of like this Maddox guy, he seems fun enough and this Dick guy, he's a goofy, hoopy fruit, I like these guys. This rock's looking kind of cute, starting to like this rock. Yeah, yeah so here's the thing about biggest problem though. Here's the thing, is that over the course of this show most listeners will experience a sort of shift because at the beginning almost everyone who watched the show was a Maddox fan, nobody knew who Dick Masterson was. So in the beginning it's like all Maddox's fans and they were always on his side because in the beginning Dick treated this as purely a comedy podcast. He was like, this is supposed to be funny, it's not really arguing, we're not really trying to make points, I don't really give a fuck about any of these issues. But Maddox has this growing sense of self-importance over the show where it seems as though he has come to believe he really is solving all the problems in the universe or like detailing them all because it's actually important work to be done. And as a result as this goes on the arguments get a lot more serious and Maddox is like it's all him driving it this way. Like he makes it very clear to Dick, like I want us to be having serious arguments. Problem is once Dick actually starts being serious it starts to become apparent that Dick is a lot smarter than Maddox about most of these issues. And so a lot of fans of this show gradually you start off always being on Maddox's side and by like episode 60 or so you're always on Dick's side with exceptions here and there, you know. And also Maddox as he starts taking his arguments more and more seriously that's when we get stuff like the libertarian government argument where he's taking it very seriously he's just totally wrong. So yeah the show gets, it gets weird as it goes along but it also gets better because when Dick stops fucking around he's actually more interesting. Like this is when we started to be like, oh wow this guy's actually got some unique perspectives on the world and yes, Jesse. Maddox himself on the show always seemed to be caught between trying to be like a social satirist and also being an absurdist comedian. Because like one of the reoccurring arguments on the show was that Maddox would always say to Dick it's not a contest because in his mind he was legitimately trying to compile a list of what in order the biggest problems in the universe were. And so Dick would treat it like a contest and he felt that like the fans were voting as if it's a contest who they like more and that was eschewing the poll. And so Maddox would often want to bring in more serious topics and like social issues but at the same time, Maddox would also occasionally bring in dumb shit like horses and like just absurdist stuff. So for what it's worth horses are like one of the biggest problems. Like I was on board for horses, monkeys, every stupid animal problem he brought in I was like Maddox this is the one time you're getting my vote. Fuck all animals. Yes Nate. You know as someone who's seen I think around seven or eight episodes of this show. So I have not gone through the arc that you described basically everyone who seems to watch the show has said the same thing that you've just said but there's a certain everything that you're saying about sort of the way that he's really trying to solve the problems and it's not a contest. All of this seems to be sort of like weirdly utilitarian in essence. Maddox is okay. I know that you- So I have a lot of sympathy for where he's coming from. Loving Maddox. No, well that's- I already do. That was the funny thing is that cause I knew that you would listen to the first seven episodes and came out always agreeing with Maddox and I felt the same way in the beginning but again he's literally competing with somebody who is not taking it seriously at all. Like all of Dick's early problems are retarded. It's all shit like, you know- Stepping in dog shit. Stepping in dog shit, piss driblets on your pants like, you know- Don't shit but relate- But yeah, but it was all great. Yes, Mushy. Do not tell me piss driblets are not serious. Do not fucking say that to me. No, I'm with you. I'm with you but I'm just saying that like Maddox would bring in stuff like female genital mutilation. And Dick would bring in like motorcycle fairings. Like police motorcycle fairings, you know? You know, I totally understand that the audience will witness the show but I just wanna say I have some real sympathy for Maddox in this particular area because it seems like he had an idea of where he wanted the show to go. And he's a very, you know, one track mind static kind of guy. And when he, even if he was able to detect the shift in the show and see the audience preferring it like it moving in a different way. And of course the clash between, you know, Autist and goofball, preparing degrees with something they enjoyed. There's that inner struggle of no, this isn't what it was supposed to be. I feel my soul being twisted into a comedy show that I want to be serious. And that's the thing. That's what I feel for him. Well, like Jesse said, I think that the show ended up being kind, like that Maddox was just kind of confused about what he even wanted the show to be because he did want it to be a comedy show. Maddox is now flat out doing a news show where he just reads news articles and gives his hot takes on them. And I was listening to a recent five minute podcast by a Stereos where someone asked him to say some nice things about Maddox. And he brought up that. And he said something that puts a lot of Maddox into perspective is that he's finally doing what he wanted to be doing from the beginning, which is talking about the news and stuff. Yeah. So I think Maddox wanted this to be a semi serious, semi comedy thing. And I think Dick recognized that like, because Dick is fairly nihilistic about things. Like he's very much like, I don't give it, like why are we worrying about talking about all this, these high minded things? There's just a lot of parallel going on. We're just a bunch of comedians, you know. PCP. Well, I know you feel that way. But the funny thing, like I said, the problem is that once Dick did start taking it seriously, once Maddox was like, once Maddox had beaten it into Dick's head enough that he was getting more and more serious with his problems and more and more serious like about, you know, arguing like really heatedly with Dick. Dick's a fairly passive guy. Dick is a guy who puts up with a lot of shit for a long time, but eventually he will snap. And it tended to be that if Maddox pushed Dick to the point where he would actually have to formulate a real argument, he would make an incredible argument. And I would always be like, where the fuck did that come from? Like how did this goofball caricature? And it's because whereas Maddox is like using his own awkwardness as like his humor. He's like, I am actually awkward, but that's the joke. For Dick, it's like he's actually just a smart guy and he's pretending to be a dumb shit, you know. So when this dude, you know, eventually takes off the reins and it starts going hard, it just, and I'm not saying it's like a blowout. I'm not saying Dick's always in the right because a lot of the shit he believes in, you're probably gonna disagree with. But he just starts putting up much better arguments than Maddox and that's why generally people tend to start liking him more as the show goes on. But nobody hated Maddox during the course of, I mean, some people did, but some people hate everybody, you know. But like by the end of the biggest problem, it's not as though Maddox was like suddenly like, oh wow, he really like fucking went to shit on that show. No, the show is good all the way to the end. Everybody loves it. Great show. So here's some people you need to know from the biggest problem in the universe. There's some important names who will be in this going forward. First of all, Sean, the audio engineer. It's a big meme in the Dick show fan community that you never spell his name correctly, so I've written it here in Japanese characters. Sean, the audio engineer, is just a very old friend of Dick's who goes back to him since high school. Apparently Dick used to buy drugs from him in high school and then they became pals. He was, Sean and Dick were basically just like a couple of alcoholic mad men in their 20s who like went around the world, fucked random chicks and drank lots. Sean is now a recovered from alcoholism. Straight sober. Sean's a very like straightforward guy. He's not involved in comedy at all. He's just an audio engineer, but because he's friends with Dick, they have a great like back and forth. So in the biggest problem, Sean was just like kind of in the background and he was only brought in in episode two because Dick had tried to produce the first episode and it sounded like shit. So he brought in, you know, he hired on his buddy and Sean does a great job and he would chime in every once in a while and the fans just loved him. Like everyone loved his voice. Everyone loved when he would chime in with his little, you could always hear him laughing in the background at the really funny jokes. So people just really liked him as like this charming little guy in the show. He will be way more important in the Dick show when he's actually the co-host. But well, he's like, they say he's not the co-host but he is the co-host. At this, well at some point he like officially became that but like, so he was the audio engineer. He was very quiet on the original show. He was supposed to bring in a problem for episode 50. He did, but he cut it because he's like such a perfectionist that he like hates anything he has produced. And that's why like there's no content from him online. Like him and Dick had a band together, like a comedy band that they would perform like random theaters and like a shit in LA back when they were younger. But Sean has no like finished albums or recordings because he's such a perfectionist that he'll throw it all away. He deleted his own audio from that episode and just it never got released. And also he deleted one entire episode of the biggest problem by accident and no one has ever let him hear the end of it for the rest of time. That has become his entire reputation is Sean who deleted that episode. Also they call him Sativa Sean because apparently his equipment all smells like weed. Not his fault, he doesn't smoke, but you know, Sativa Sean now. And then we also need to know Osterios Coconos. So this guy is one of the people who Maddox and Dick had both met at UCB Theater. Osterios had no idea who they were. He just thought they were a couple of random comedians who were also at this theater with all these other comedians but they were fun to hang out with. It wasn't until later that he finds out Maddox is the guy who wrote this book which he had heard of and that Dick was on Dr. Phil which he'd seen that appearance. He had known about these guys, just didn't realize it was them, I think. So he meets them at UCB, he starts coming on the show, I think his first appearance is episode 20 and he becomes like the most regular guest. He's like the fan favorite, especially because of in episode 50 he does this epic prank called the unexpected guests problem where he was calling in on Skype and they had spent two hours before the show started trying to fix Skype. Like they had all these technical difficulties with Skype and they were fucking spent two hours trying to resolve it. So everyone's got a headache when the episode starts. They're all like pissed off. They're like, all right, Asterios, do we have you? Do we have you on the Skype connection? He's like, yes, yes, yes. So he says like, all right, I have my problem. Unexpected guests and then he walks into the studio. Whoa! This man lives in New York City. Whoa! So he had completely in secret. That's fucking sick. Completely in secret, flew out, made them do all that Skype renegaling for two hours while he sat in the car waiting to come inside just for this joke. Instantly became the fan favorite guest. Oh, so I was gonna ask, did he somehow orchestrate this two hour delay? But no, that had to be done so that he could do this bit. Exactly, he wasn't intending for it. It just, they had to get the Skype working for the joke to work. And the only person who was in on it, I think, was Sean. So anyways, so he becomes the favorite. He's on all the time. Now, I've written here, this is a comedy podcast and everyone is friends. This is important to remember. Everyone's friends, all friends. Maddox and Dick, good friends. Talk about parties they go to, have lots of mutual friends, you know. Sean, hey, Sean, we all like Sean Osterios. We hang out, Randy, yeah. Everybody's best fucking pals, right? However, underneath the surface and unbeknownst to the fans, Maddox is a gigantic pain in the ass. And constantly is hammering Dick about every episode of the show, everything he says, essentially, Maddox will send him these enormous emails complaining about everything he talked about. Like, first of all, rehashing the arguments, like going back through quoting individual quotes, like taking screen caps of random comments. Like, there would be like, a commenter might say like, oh, Dick was really, like, like Dick was really hitting you some real low balls on this episode or something like that. And he would like screen cap that and send it to Dick and be like, see proof that you're bad at this show. My fans say so. He would send him just constant emails and like long lists of complaints and he would edit the shows for like, he would edit out some of the stuff Dick said because he thought it was too offensive without consulting him or asking him what he meant or anything. So basically, Dick just kind of shrugged all this off because the way he saw it, Maddox is the famous one, I'm writing his coattails kind of, you know, whatever, it's his show. No big deal. He's willing to put up with it for a while. Yes, Munchy. What exactly do you mean by complaints? Like like he would nitpick things Dick had said on the podcast. Yeah. He would like just nitpick his entire approach, essentially. He hated some of Dick's bits. Like they had a bit where every time Maddox lost, he would play a 30 second clip from the movie Titanic because Maddox had written an article once where he like said that he would never watch Titanic. And so this was the, it was fucking hilarious and it was everyone's favorite bit. Maddox killed it because he thought it made the show too much of a contest. He thought people were voting up Dick's problems just to make him listen to Titanic, which is not even true because Dick would lose all the time. So like, if that was true, it would have always been Dick who won, but it wasn't. But in any case, he killed that bit. He would complain about like just lots of random stuff. I mean, the way Dick talks about it, he was like, this is how Maddox has always been like even before the show, he just complains constantly and sends people emails all the time. And he's, the way I imagine Maddox's life is, is mostly sending emails because he has described that it takes him like hours to compose emails. Like he writes an email like he writes his own articles for his website to literally everyone he writes them to and he writes them constantly. Yes. You know, I don't know if this is another real parallel enough, but since I am also a programmer in my job, in my, you know, the company I work at, I actually spend a lot of time composing long, extremely detailed emails. So I'm just wondering if perhaps the corporate world is that he's a, yeah. Well, has it made him to be this way? It's such a like a detail oriented, because clarity is super important in that sort of thing. So I don't know. But he was writing that way when he was in high school too. Yeah. Well, we don't know that. It's just that the emails he was sending to Dick, right? His writing style was always to like comb over every word of every sentence though. You know? I mean, he would, and granted like Maddox is aware of this as a problem. Like he talked about perfectionism as a problem on the show once and like went into depth about how he's got, like I guess there's a, there's some kind of app you can install that makes it so when you send an email, it actually like captures it and lets you check over it again and that this had made it so he was like able to confidently hit send on emails because he would knew he could look at it again. You know, like, so that's the kind of level of thinking this guy is on of like real obsessive about these kind of things. But anyway, Dick just kind of shrugs most of these annoyances off, whatever. It's a fun show to do and it's got lots of fans and it makes a little money. They have advertisers, Harry's Razors, I bought them, GoodRazors, Casper Mattress, I sleep on one, promo code biggest, you know, I bought into, I literally bought everything they advertise on this show, I think. So, the show is mostly paid for by ads. Now here's the funny thing about it again. Remember, Maddox is the worst at marketing himself ever. He doesn't realize that the biggest problem is pretty big. It's got millions of downloads, lots of people like it. They were only making like 22 grand a year on it total from all the ads and everything. So like, this was not a sustainable career for both of them to have doing this. Like, they also have to pay Sean and each, you know, both of them have to take a cut. This show could have been making a lot more money, I think. I mean, Dick's show makes that much literally every month now. And it was, Dick's show is a less popular or less beloved podcast and the biggest problem was, I would say. But it makes way the fuck more money because Maddox just thinks for some reason he thought the only way he could make revenue was to work through ads. He just didn't even think about opening a Patreon, I guess. Even though this Patreon was well established by this point. Like, everybody knows you can crowd fun shit. And Maddox is a beloved internet personality. So if he had opened a Patreon at this time, would have been huge. But anyways. Let us move along to chapter two. The Red Wedding. Just like in Game of Thrones, everything goes to shit. So, it's a very simple story. All that happened is, Dick and Maddox are at a wedding. They both happen to be there. Dick starts talking to a hot girl and leaves with her. Turns out this hot girl was Maddox's girlfriend three and a half years ago. Now, Maddox is currently dating someone else. He's dating a girl named Mental Jess who he's still dating to this day at the time of this wedding. Mental Jess. That's what they call her anyway. Mental Jess. He's dating her at the time. But he sees Dick leaving the wedding with his ex-girlfriend. Now, unbeknownst to Dick, Maddox has a lot of unresolved feelings about this woman. But he doesn't know that yet. As they're leaving the wedding, Maddox, who is paranoid about anyone who he cares about driving with Dick because he knows that Dick has driven drunk many a time before. So, he's concerned that Dick has had any alcohol consumption and that this girl should not drive with him. Maddox texts her all night long in all caps. Like, did you go home with Dick? I hope you didn't go home with Dick. Like, don't drive with him. He's a drunk driver, like just obsessively texting her all night. She is freaked out by this. She turns off her phone, says, thank God that Psycho doesn't know where I live and her and Dick go to her place and fuck. So, Maddox does not know that they did that. The next day, Maddox asks Dick, did you fuck my ex-girlfriend? Dick knows that if he says yes, this will kill the biggest problem in the universe. So he says no, but this is a lie. Now, over the course of this entire story, Maddox and Dick will both frame it that this is what killed the biggest problem, is that he went home with Maddox's girlfriend and Maddox didn't find out that he actually was fucking her until much later and this killed the show. Are you saying fucking like repeatedly? Like, more than once? They're still dating. Dick is currently dating this girl who he left the wedding with. That is who 80s girl is. Oh, no. That's 80s girl. Okay, well, that's more serious than just a single fuck, yeah. Yeah, well, I mean, they live together now, like. Oh, no! They're serious about each other. But this was the first, I guess this was their first, their first, I don't know. Oh, God, there's no way this has ever gotten resolved. He's still dating the girl that caused this whole problem. This is over. It's fucking, it's done forever. So, okay. So, okay. So yeah, Dick leaves the wedding with 80s girl. Foxer tells Maddox he didn't. Maddox is so upset by the fact that he even took her out of the wedding. Like, even if he didn't fuck her, he still doesn't want him on episode 77 of the show. He tells Dick he is so distraught about him leaving with his ex-girlfriend that he cannot feel comfortable with him being on the next episode. So he does an episode that's just him and hysterios, but he tells the audience that Dick couldn't make it, which pisses off Dick immensely, because this is slamming his credibility in his eyes. He's like, I could have made it. You fucking told me I couldn't be on the episode. At this point is essentially when the friendship between these two men ends. Dick is sick of Maddox, especially after this, kicking him off the episode and everything. Dick's like, I'm done with this fucking guy. I'm like, he's constantly like this and I can't fucking take it anymore. Maddox is on the long road to trying. Like, I think at this point, Maddox decided I do not want to work with Dick Masterson anymore. Now, it's been apparent from the beginning that Maddox does not like that he has to work with Dick because he sees Dick as a controversial figure, someone who's like always shaking things up, who's like going to get him banned from places. When they did, during Briggs Problem, there was a live version of the show that they decided to do. It was a catastrophe because not only did they do it in a very weird way and they did it at the fucking YouTube space, which is a terrible place, and they decided to cut the episodes down to 15 minutes. Like, they recorded 45 minute episodes and then cut them down to 15 because Maddox just thought that like on YouTube, nobody will watch more than 15 minutes. Even though by this point in time, that was no longer even remotely true, but he was like, my retention rates say that people only watch three minutes, so if it's more than 15, like, nobody's gonna watch it at all. Everyone hated the show. They ripped it to shreds because it just wasn't, people wanted the same thing as the podcast, but live. What they got was some really bizarre thing. The worst part is, he wouldn't let Dick use the name Dick Masterson. He made him use his real name because Dick Masterson is technically banned from YouTube. But like, okay, that is totally inconsequential to anyone, but Maddox took it very seriously. And he was like, you can't use this name because Dick Masterson is blacklisted from YouTube. Yes. Is that due to the Dr. Phil stuff or something? It's just like, I think he had a YouTube channel at some point with maybe some stuff related to his website. I don't know exactly, but he's supposedly, he's, it doesn't fucking matter because it's irrelevant. No one is- It's on YouTube now. Yeah, no one is banned from YouTube. That is not a thing. Maddox just took it weirdly seriously. I'm very confused right now. When did this live show happen? This was like 20 episodes into the podcast going on. Okay. Or maybe 25. Do they try and switch over to this method and then they went back? No, it was just supposed to be an additional show. They produced four episodes of it and it was just gonna be like, hey, we'll also have a YouTube version of the show. And it was kinda like, they were on a stage and they were on Thrones and stuff and they would have guests and they had like a whole live audience and everything. But it was just weird and corny and I mean, I thought it was all right. I didn't hate it, but a lot of people hated it. They only made four of them and because people hated it so much, they just quit and didn't do anymore. But it was, I mean, honestly, a dick also tells the entire backstory of the live show in one of the bonus episodes. And it's pretty much another case of Maddox's weird obsessiveness is what ruined it because if he had just done it in the normal way that a YouTube video was made, it would have probably been fine. But anyways, so red wedding happens. Now I think my theory is that Maddox wanted dick off of the show pretty much from the beginning. Like he always had a problem with Dick's bits. He hated his ideas. He hated his presentation. He hated that he was controversial. He was constantly insisting that he tried to go under different names. He would, apparently at one point he pitched the biggest problem to a TV network or it was in a collection of things he was pitching. But he pitched it without Dick and did not mention Dick because he's afraid that mentioning him will mean it won't get picked up. He seems to see Dick as like this guy is a dangerous blacklisted artist which is not true. It becomes true later thanks to Maddox but it's not true at this point. Maddox is just weird about it. By making it true in the future, he's now able to justify it in the past. It's a brilliant move, really. It's final fantasy logic. It's perfect. All the lectures are connected. So. Rose boys, rose boys, rose boys, rose boys, rose boys, rose boys. You just got a giant blammer on underneath. That was deep ground, not me. So basically the red wedding puts the biggest problem into its death spiral. This was episode 77 was when this happened. The show is 105 episodes. About 30 weeks later, the show is dead. And during this time, Dick and Maddox stop hanging out and they start getting way more contentious. If you listen to the show and you pay attention to what it feels like after this episode, feels very different. They're way more at each other's throats. There's moments where Maddox is talking about his friends and Dick is like, yeah, I don't understand the people you hang out with. And like, oh yeah, you're always around weirdos. And it becomes very apparent that they don't hang out anymore. Like these two used to go to all the same parties. They do not anymore. They do not want to be around each other. They don't like each other. But the show is still going. And they have not made, none of this is known by the way. This whole wedding shit, none of this is known until way later. It's all explained in Dick's show episodes at a later date. And it only gets explained because of some drama that starts up right here. But we didn't know any of this. It's only if you listen back that you're like, oh wow, like yeah, episode 77. Obviously things were going downhill. At some point, Maddox gathers Randy and Dick into a bar and he has this enormous list of problems he has with the show. And he goes through like hours and hours of like just grinding them about everything. This gets to a point where Dick is finally just like, dude, fuck you. Like I'm not putting up with this anymore. Like we are done as friends. We are only professionally in a relationship now. Like this was like the moment that everyone was just like, I don't want to fucking, ah, they didn't want to work together anymore. So, but this is still, it's still very much in the background. Like it hasn't reached a boiling point quite yet until Maddox decides to launch a podcast network. Now, my theory here is that the reason Maddox launched this network is that he was trying to continue doing podcasts, but no Dick. And I also have a theory that this was all one big ploy to eventually make it so he could do the show, the biggest problem in the universe without him, but without having to just kick him off and look like the bad guy. Unfortunately, he ends up looking like the bad guy in a much worse way in the future. But so around this time, he starts planning his podcast network. He's gonna involve different sponsors, different shows, his other friends who aren't Dick Masterson in this network. He wants to take a two week hiatus to finally prepare for it. So during the two weeks that they're not gonna be able to run the show, Dick says, well, how about like that time that you kicked me off the show and replaced me with a Stereos? What if I just do the show with Tim Changs? Now, Tim Changs, did I even write him up here? I don't think so. Fuck is Tim Changs. Yes, oh, he's up here, he's right here. Tim Changs the Ryehorn, right? Yes, Tim Changs the Ryehorn was named after Tim Changs. I totally like missed this whole line of people. These are just like supplementary characters of the biggest problem. You've got Dick's man, Steve. This was a guy who Dick met at Burning Man, which is a festival in California where a bunch of rich people drive into the desert and live in huts and build things and get fucked up on drugs for like a week. And he went to Burning Man and he met this guy, Steve, who saved him from getting Chlamydia by advising him not to fuck this girl because she had Chlamydia. And so Dick took him in. This guy was like, he was like, he had just become homeless or something like that. And Dick took him into his house and let him live there for a while. And he would call him my man. He would just insistently refer to him only as my man. Eventually Dick's- The man's service was the part he didn't say. Eventually Dick's man, Steve, when he finally leaves Dick's house, moves in with what he referred to as the Duke and Duchess of Weed. It was like, basically, the Duke of Weed is like a high level weed sale, like a high level drug dealer. You know, like a few levels above the guys you would actually buy from. And Dick's man, Steve, ends up stealing this drug dealer's wife and marrying her. What? Yeah. What man? So he's now married to the Duchess of Weed and they got married at Burning Man, by the way, like a year later. So yeah, it's a great story. You just have to listen to the podcast. Yeah? Cancel this fucking day in this lecture. I wanna know about Dick's man, Steve. You just gotta listen to the biggest problem in the universe. There's Dick's life coach who's important. He's just a friend of Dick's who's just like, he's kind of like just some big fat libertarian guy who's like real into guns and drinking. And Dick calls him his life coach because he always gives him the best advice. Like, yeah, you should definitely take three more shots. Or of course you need more guns. Like that's the kind of advice that he gives him. And as a result, he is called the life coach. People did not understand for a long time that he's not literally a life coach. I did not do that. But no, he's just some guy who's good friends with Dick who's a little older than him. I thought I was confusing. Like Dick doesn't need a life coach. He doesn't seem like a kind of guy who would hire a life coach. No, no, no. It's just a meme. Because Dick, in order to avoid doxing all his friends, he just gives them all goofy nicknames. So like there's his friends, like he's got a guy named Rocket Man. There's, you know, I mean, my man, Steve. Like just, yeah, all these random people. Then we got Denzel. He was a regular guest. He's black. The most important thing about him is that he's one of the only like guests who people liked from the old show who came back for the Dick show along with the Stereos. Now Tim Changs was a guy who is sort of also a performance artist who's friends with Dick whose character is that he's like a lift driving DJ who's just like, he's just dumb. Like his character is that he's just some dumb DJ guy. And he's Asian, but he has like a real black voice. And it's hilarious. He was there because there was a couple episodes where Sean wasn't there. And so they replaced him as the audio engineer with Tim Changs. And the way that Dick presented it was that this was just his lift driver who he had invited onto the podcast. So the whole time, they're pretending that this guy is just some lift driver who talks like an idiot. It was invited on. But he's actually just a friend of Dick's. So when Maddox tells him, we're gonna do a two week hiatus because I wanna work on my podcast network. Dick says, why don't I just do an episode with Tim Changs like you did with the Stereos? And Maddox is like, no, because I'm worried you'll like damage my personal brand if I'm not there to monitor everything you say. Which, I mean, he could have edited the podcast anyways or listened to them before they went live. I don't know, but he refuses. Instead, he runs a clip show. He runs two episodes of just random, like popular bits from previous episodes. So it's two weeks, we just got recap episodes. Everyone, of course, was fucking pissed. Yeah, no, it was terrible. So instead of letting him do a show with Tim Changs, he does recap episodes. Now in this period is where some real fucking stuff happens, and again, the way that this story has been presented by everyone involved is that on the day of episode 107, Maddox just somehow that day finds out that Dick had in fact been fucking 80s girl all this time. Apparently someone in their friend group had told him because he was the only one who still didn't know, apparently, and he rounds up Stereos, Randy, and Sean into a room and tells them all we're killing the podcast. I can't work with this guy anymore because he fucked my ex-girlfriend and I'm upset about it and all this stuff. Dick is in Mexico at the time, because he's like, I've got weeks off, I'm just gonna go fuck off to Mexico. Now, before this happened, they had gotten into some kind of monetary dispute, the results of which are not clear to me, but basically Maddox was trying to take more of the cut. I think what he wanted to do was try to incorporate this show into his podcast network and then take more of the money for administrative reasons because Dick was doing a lot of the admin work on the site. He was the one updating the RSS feed, he was the one posting the shit online, he had coded the website, I think, so I think that my theory is Maddox wanted the show to himself and it's a real strange coincidence to me that the day he found out that Dick fucked his ex-girlfriend just happens to be one week to the day before his new show was going to begin and his podcast network was opening and apparently, though, he did, in fact, cry in front of everyone while telling them about 80s girl sleeping with some other dude, so. Out of his one good eye, he cried. Yeah, out of his existing eye, he shed one single tear. So yeah, this is the death of the show. Maddox refuses to even let Dick's name be mentioned on the final episode. Episode 107 comes out, it's just Maddox and Asterios talking about the end of the show for about 20 minutes and then it's another clip show after that. And yes. Well, if you wanna finish your point, I have a larger question about kind of why the fuck is Maddox so deeply upset about, I mean, I get like your friend fucking your ex-girlfriend that's going to be, you know, uncomfortable but this level of vitriol seems strange. What's the deal? So what Maddox has said is that he was trying to rebuild his relationship with 80s girl. Mistake, what is he doing? What, okay, here's the popular theory. This is what most fans believe. I'm skeptical but I could see it. Is that Maddox would talk a lot about like open relationships and stuff and a lot of people think that what he thought he was going to do was convince 80s girl and mental Jess to become friends and that they would initiate some kind of weird threesome thing after that. He is from Utah. He is from Utah. Yep, they know how to do it out there. So that's the popular theory. I mean, he insists that like, I mean, later into this, we're going to find out that some time after they broke up, he sent her this like long, I wish you'd get back together with me letter that is deeply unsettling to have to listen to, yes. So I guess we can just infer that he just simply is not over. He's not over. It's been three and a half years and he's with someone else but he's not over her. And apparently him freaking out about her going home with Dick was in fact really hard on his current girlfriend. She was not happy about it. Didn't break up with him though. Don't know why. They do live together. They were living together at the time, by the way. He was living with his new girlfriend, texting his ex all night about leaving with another guy, yeah. Where was this information revealed about Maddox's side of the story saying, because I haven't heard him say much about anything. Which side, which part? About how his girlfriend was mad about him freaking out. Apparently, there was a quote I saw where he had said it was quote, really hard on the poor girl. It was the exact phrase he used. I think it was just in one of the leaked. He's talking about it like she's a horse. Yeah. Well, there's- It was hard on the poor girl. I mean, basically a lot of the info about how Maddox perceives all this has come from the fact that since all this drama down here began, lots of fans, everyone wants to know answers, and Maddox's approach was total media blackout about everything. He will not talk about anything publicly. However, a lot of people would curry his trust, which is not hard, on places like Snapchat and then just leak whatever he told them. So there's a lot of leaked info of things that Maddox has said about this whole situation. All of which are written in the most manic, like, I really get the sense that he, when he does interact with fans that way, is when he's at his lowest times, because man, they are all very desperate and very sad to read. So, yeah. All right, so biggest problem in the universe has ended very sad. In the last episode, Dick's name is not mentioned once. It's just Maddox and Asterios, which is extremely fucking weird. So immediately, this has already caused way more questions than necessary, because all Maddox had to come out and do is say like, hey, we're ending the biggest problem in the universe over creative differences. And there it is, you know? Instead, this weird, non-even mention of Dick just sends everyone into like, what the fuck is going on mode? I remember immediately, yes, Nate? Oh, sorry, I just had a question. So when 107 comes out, is that one ever and wasn't formed? This is the final episode, out of the blue. Literally, out of the blue. Out of the blue. After two recap episodes in a row. Oh, those have been right before this? Yeah. So it was two, because the hiatus was just for him to open the podcast network, supposedly, but then episode 107 comes out and it's just suddenly the show's over and it's completely canceled. Dick's not even mentioned. Asterios is there. Asterios just sounds like he's overwhelmed and confused because he didn't know it was gonna be the last episode until he was there. Yes, Tom? It's funny, I distinctly remember you freaking out on Twitter about this. I immediately went out and bought all four of the main spirits, the four alcohol spirits. I got a bottle of tequila, a bottle of rum, a bottle of scotch, and a bottle of gin, probably. The biggest problem ending is the biggest problem in the universe. Yeah, probably something like that. Some hacky fucking joke like that. So yeah, biggest problem is kill. Lasted two years. Everyone loved it. Now it's gone. So immediately, everybody wants to know what's gonna happen next. Yes, Mashi? Just to be clear, you recommend the show still and it still is a classic. Yes, I would say it is worth listening to all 100 episodes of The Biggest Problem in the Universe. Even if you just ignored this whole lecture and you decided to only consume all this by, yes, just here, give me that. I just want to say I really love The Biggest Problem in the Universe, regardless of all of this that's happened since, whose side you take, who you listen to, it's probably the best podcast ever. And I don't think either of them have done anything as good since. I love The Dick Show, but even that is nowhere near as good as The Biggest Problem was. It was the greatest concept for a podcast possible. Those two personalities were so fun and just the central conceit of comparing problems. And it could go on forever. Maddox would always say, the purpose of this podcast is to compile every problem in the universe. So he intended for this show to go forever. To the last minute, he continually implied the show would go on forever. And because of some things that happened later, I think he still wants that to happen, but without Dick. But we'll get to that at a later point. But remember, these two created this podcast together. It is equally their brainchild. Maddox may have been the one who had the fame to make it work, but it's entirely a co-production, yes. I just want to say for Munchie and anybody else who doesn't know the cons of this, the way it works is that you vote on the problems, but then all those votes are tallied and ranked. There's a big master list of every problem in the entire show ranked from biggest to least big. So at any point, you could look through and see what is currently the biggest problem. Yeah, yeah. What is the biggest problem? I think it was still slactivists at the end. So it's like, slactivists and female genital mutilation were always like at the top. And then there was another one that came in later. We're about male genital mutilation. We've got to protect our boys. Uh, you know, I think they said they were going to get to that and never did. But I think they were intending to talk about it. There was also the bonus episodes of the podcast, which will become important. The bonus episodes were once a month and they were the biggest solution in the universe, where they would each come up with solutions. Also a great show. The bonus episodes were sold for like a $1.30 a piece or something like that. Well worth it. They were great. Everything to do with the show is worth listening to. And I'm going to warn you right now that we're about to get to the part where you can't like Maddox anymore after hearing all this. So if you want to listen to this show unbiased, at least to some degree, like listen to it now. If you're like curious about the show and you don't want to have your perception of it colored by the things that happened here, because it will be colored. Going back to listen to this show and knowing what you will know in the future does change how the show feels a little bit. Because you're just like, I don't know, it's just like a lot of the things Maddox says you're a lot more like... More woke to. About, you know. I listened to the first like 20 episodes kind of recently while playing video games and I was just like, let's just say that the part of the show where I had initially been more in agreement with Maddox I was less so than I had been the first time just because like I don't trust him anymore. So some of the things that I could just like let slide because I just thought they were just funny, I would be like, oh wait, he probably actually thinks that based on what I know about him now. So there's just little subtle differences but I mean, either way it's a great show and it's worth listening to but it got killed after two years. Dick's show is about to be longer than it ever was like pretty soon. So they're both about 100 episodes at present. These ones were at first always an hour long. They eventually became almost always like an hour and a half because they got really front loaded. Dick's show is usually like fucking almost three hours. It can be honestly a slog sometimes, yes. When did all this, what are the biggest problem then in? The big problem ended early 2016. So it started early 2014, ended early 2016. The very next week, both hosts have new podcasts. So immediately, now the show came out every Tuesday. At some point someone had advised them, you know, you've been missing a huge opportunity by not saying at the end of every show, see you next Tuesday. Cleverly concealing the word cunt. So see you next Tuesday. Oh, yeah, okay. So Dick started, from that point forward, Dick started saying that at the end of every episode. So the show came out every Tuesday and once it ended, the next Tuesday, the Dick's show comes out as does the best debate in the universe. Yes, Machi. I think you can tell which one's more important by the space they take up on your board. The best debate in the universe, literally no one cares. No one cares. This show is not good. But when it first came out, okay, no one knew. Again, no one knew any of the drama. No one knew any of this was going on. We were just like, sick, two shows now, you know? Yes, Jesse. I did listen to the first like maybe five or six, five or 10 weeks of the biggest, the best debate in the universe. Maddox, at that time, was still a fun guy to listen to, but I just dropped it, not even because fuck Maddox, just because I didn't have time in my life for two weekly podcasts and Dick's show was better. And I mean, let me tell you, I'm gonna explain the concept of the best debate to you just because all you need to hear is the concept and you'll immediately know everything you need to know. So whereas this show was these two guys argue their points, oh, and keep in mind, Sean, audio engineer, is on both shows now. Sean has two Christmases, he's been split in the feud, he is now on both shows. You all laugh, but that's Dick's joke, I stole that one. Best debate in the universe, the concept of this show is that Maddox, first of all, Sean is his co-host, but Sean doesn't really do anything. On each episode, he has a guest who is the moderator in a debate that Maddox has with himself. Oh no, not the best concept for a show. No, no, so for instance, he'll have an episode like with a question such as the new Ghostbusters movie, is it shameless pandering to women or is it actually progressive or something like that? The idea was that Maddox literally believes he is so good at arguing that no one would be able to tell which one he actually believed in. That was the idea, is no one will know which side I'm actually on, so I'm gonna present both sides equally, yes. If you made a video called New Show, Best of Being in the Universe, with that same concept, I would not be surprised. I wouldn't either, but I could do it better than he did because the problem with this show is that Maddox is fucking awful at this because it's immediate. And you told him he was fucking awful. I did, in fact, I got a douchebag of the week one time, which is there. Another thing I wanna talk about with all of this, all of these shows had a lot of fan interaction. Like the biggest problem in the universe, a big element of the show was Collins, where they had a voicemail and you could leave voicemails and they'd play a bunch of them at the beginning and end of the show and they were fucking hilarious and they would be recurring characters like this guy, weird Matthew McConaughey, who just sounded like Matthew McConaughey but like really fucking, like fucked up drunk every time he called in. And he'd leave like eight messages from like 2 a.m. to 4 a.m. in the middle of the night. And it all just be like, hey, I heard you guys talking about that motorcycle fairings. It is a pretty big problem, man. And they're like, you know, shit like that. Just weird people would call in. DeVoo, one of the members of the Procrastinators podcast, was not only did he get played on the show, not only did his voicemail get played, but his problem was then brought in as an actual problem on the next episode by Dick, which was the artificial scarcity of pretzel buns. So our little clubs, yeah? What the fuck are motorcycle fairings? Like on a motorcycle, if you try to make it look like a cop motorcycle, like that shit that's on a cop's motorcycle. Yeah, and like people put those on their shit, which makes them look like cops and it pisses Dick off. I just want to say you blew my fucking mind. I just listened to the show like a couple of months ago. I had no idea that was DeVoo. Totally went over my head. Yeah, DeVoo got a call in. I called like five times and never got played because I wasn't funny enough, but uh... There's a big gap between DeVoo and DeVoo. Oh, DeVoo's call was great. It's a great call. DeVoo's got that gymnastic voice. Well, because he sounded like he had literally like woken up and called. Like that's how it sounds. I wouldn't put that past him at all. I can just imagine like the frantic tone of his voice No, it was the opposite. It's more like he's like, well, what is it with all of these fucking groceries? It's much closer to that. We all know DeVoo very well, but nobody is ever ready for DeVoo. No, not quite. So yeah, great call from DeVoo. Great show. Anyway, so yeah, audience participation was always a big part of it. So best debate in the universe. He also had call-ins and every week he would choose a douchebag of the week. And one time I called in just really laying into him about something and I got that. And that was the last time I ever listened to the show. I was so satisfied with that. Cause I made a great point and they all just I think that was the last episode I listened to as well. Yeah, it's like episode five or six. I don't remember which. But the show was just again, Maddox is really bad at not making it apparent which side he's on. He would explain each side in such a way that only someone who already had like a set opinion would explain it. Like he'd explain the other side in terms that were clear he thought it was retarded, especially that Ghostbusters episode. And I think that was the one that turned most people away from the show where they were like, okay, well Dick's show is actually funny now and this show kind of blows ass. However, here's where the fuckery starts. When the two shows split, Maddox takes the iTunes feed of biggest problem and jacks his new show into it without Dick's permission. Remember, biggest problem is entirely a joint venture. They have total joint control over it, but Maddox decides that the iTunes feed for the show is for his new show. So for fans of the show who didn't even realize that the old show was over for a lot of them or that there was a Dick show, this just started coming into their RSS feeds instead. And so for a lot of people, they just kind of defaulted to this as the new show and were like, what the hell happened to Dick? Like literally people would be like calling into a show all the time, like where's Dick? Like why does the show not have Dick anymore? Cause they just didn't know what happened to him. Cause if you're not following Dick on Twitter, you wouldn't have known about the Dick show and like it only spread through word of mouth eventually. Because Maddox refused to acknowledge his existence whatsoever. He would not say anything about Dick on any social media. He just completely tight lipped about it, wouldn't say anything. So everyone's just confused and wondering what the fuck's going on. Now here's where I want to go on a little tangent and talk about what could have been, where this all should have gone. Because Dick immediately starts a podcast, opens a Patreon, his Patreon's instantly successful. Maddox opens a Patreon, not very long afterwards, specifically for his YouTube channel, the only advertising he ever does for it is that it has a little graphic at the end of one video that's it, that's all the mention he ever did of his Patreon. So his Patreon at the height had like $300 a month, while Dick's had like 5,000. Now what Maddox easily could have, not you, what Maddox easily could have done is open to Patreon and just said to his fans like, hey, doing Patreon now, got a new show, come on. Like people still liked him. Nobody thought he was an asshole yet. Unfortunately, he totally doesn't advertise his Patreon at all. So nobody finds out about it. Nobody donates to it. The only people who ever talk about it is to make fun of it for being smaller than Dick's. And he just, God, it's such a clusterfuck. Best debate sucks. His YouTube channel starts going downhill, which even by the time the biggest problem was over, like the videos he was putting out, people were just like, what the fuck is this? He had infamously a video explaining why everyone needs to stop saying the word cuck, because he- Oh no, that's a bad look. So, Maddox makes an entire video explaining that, guys, there's nothing wrong with being a cuck. A cuck is just a sexual fetish. He are here, his nightmarish. He's so bad at even explaining his own point because the point that he had was a good point, that people just latch onto buzzwords and it becomes annoying and stupid. He could have just said that, but instead he said, guys, there's nothing wrong with being a cuck. That's not how you argue that point. The funny, okay, the thing about his video is that from the way it's presented, I know, I know Maddox well enough to know for a fact, he legitimately thought people didn't know what it meant. I think he thought people did not know that it was just a sexual fetish. And so he was like presenting that information like it was new and everyone was like, no shit, that's why it's funny because it's a fetish where you like other guys to fuck your wife and that's hilarious. So, but he made this whole video, it has like overwhelming dislike bar. This is like. The thesis of the video could have been one that everyone agrees with. Stop using dumb buzzwords and have an original thought for once. But when you make the thesis of it, there's nothing wrong with being a cuck. Then immediately everyone's reaction is the same thing as what Dick famously said on the next episode of the podcast. There is everything wrong with being a cuck. Yeah. I mean, Maddox makes a lot. One of the things that makes him frustrating to listen to is that he will take an argument and make it, like he'll take a good argument he has and make it shit. For instance, in one of the biggest problem episodes he brought in, people who make left turns. He then goes on to make a very compelling argument for why left turns are a problem because like most accidents are a result of left turns. You can navigate most cities by taking just right turns consecutively. He talks about how UPS trucks don't do left turns. It's like completely UPS trucks never turn left because it's faster to go right if you have to drive all the time. So lots of great points, but the problem he brings in is people who make left turns because he's trying to say that because we're all participating in it, we're perpetuating the problem of left turns in spite of the fact that literally everyone has to make left turns because sometimes you have to. It's not always an option. So no one wanted to vote up people who take left turns, but if he had just made left turns, he'd be successful. Same problem with the Cuck video and a lot of his other stuff. In defense of Maddox, and this goes back to what I was saying earlier about how his autism is his greatest strength and his greatest weakness. In the case of the Cuck video, that was an example of him being autistic and doing something stupid and saying something stupid, but around that same time, he also made a really great video of him artistically rampaging against a cricket in his house and eating it. That was awesome, yeah. That's peak Maddox, that's the good Maddox. That's actually in this late era of biggest problem. In like episodes like the 80s or 90s or so, Maddox starts bringing in really weird shit that was really entertaining because it was so bizarre. Like there's an episode of The Biggest Solution where he brings in springs as a solution and his argument is that literally everything is a spring. What the fuck is that? Like the entire nature of the universe is a spring and therefore like everything is a spring and therefore it's the biggest, it's very weird. Stuff like that. And there's a whole saga about him having a cricket in his house who he stalks and kills, puts its head on a stake in the yard and eats the rest of it. It's fucking, yeah it was great. Stuff like that is so funny that it really makes you sad that Maddox is so unlikeable because you want to like him for doing stuff like that. And here's the weirdest part, is that after this point Maddox has not made anything good and that's the weirdest part of this because he was making good shit for like 15 years and after this everything he's made has been dog shit and that I don't know if that's a result of what's going on, if it's incidental, if it has to do with the people he surrounded himself with now. I'm just dying to know, what did that cricket do? It was just in his house for like days. It was just like, was it making a lot of noise? It was inside of one of his speakers and he couldn't get it out. So he had to like, he was trying to lure it out by like playing, he looked on YouTube and played like a 10 hour video of the sounds of bats because it's like a natural predator and he was trying to scare it out. That's just fucking maniacal. How could you do that to another living creature? The idea that you're annoyed at the sound of a cricket and it's a illusion. It's the house with the bad noises out. Bad noises out. Yeah, unfortunately this is the last really funny video on his YouTube page. So yeah, so best of eight comes out, nobody cares, but he's jacked the iTunes feed. Now this is the first of many things that are going to piss off Dick in the coming weeks. So Dick has launched the Dick Show and the very first episode of the Dick Show, he just casually explains with much frustration over the fact that he is apparently Voldemort and cannot be named in the last episode of the show. He just explains to the fans, like look, it was creative differences, we just don't want to work together anymore and like, that's it. That's all he says. He's just like, yeah, creative differences, let's move on, let's do our show. You know, the first episode of Dick Show is a little rough but after that it's fine. The central conceit of the Dick Show originally was that he was auditioning people to fill Maddox's spot because in his own words, no one can fill Maddox's spot. Right, he had a lot of respect for Maddox after the show ended, like, literally it was, okay, the concept of the Dick Show is that there's a rageboard and he's trying to figure out who is the biggest rage and because Maddox was such a rage that he needs a new rage. Also, yeah, shitty grammar is like a part of the Dick Show. Man, so it's a rage is what you are. And he asks people when they come on what makes you a rage. And then fans can vote on whether this person is a rage or not a rage. He deemed a rage as one of the highest accomplishments you can have in life. Like, as soon as a Stereos finally came on the show, instantly top of rageboard. You know, he's like the most popular guy. Taking it over from Denzel, who was on one of the early episodes. He was the first person from the old show to come back. But the new show had a lot of new guests who would sometimes be regular. First one being Larry Blidner. He's just like an old guy who rambles about how millennials are too coddled. And he's all right. But he's also got a podcast. A lot of people who go on the Dick Show end up with their own podcasts. To the point where he, originally the tagline of the show is the show where everything is a contest. Because on the old show, Maddox would constantly insist it wasn't a contest. Now it's the show, or eventually it became the show where everything is a podcast because everyone had a podcast. Now it's the show where everything is a lawsuit for reasons that we'll learn about later. So the Dick Show comes out. He's just like, hey guys, creative differences, whatever. But Maddox has taken the iTunes feed. So Dick's talking, Maddox's strategy for everything is never say anything about anything. Maddox's whole strategy is don't announce anything. Don't tell anybody what I'm doing. Just make decisions and go. Well, in the social media age, you can't really get away with that. Especially when you've got another guy who is willing to tell his side of the story extensively. So every time Maddox would do something that was unexplained, Dick would explain his side of the story. As a result, Maddox's side of the story, I keep fucking, why didn't I put them, I should have put them on the opposite side. So it would have just made it easier. Maddox's side of the story just never really gets heard unless you happen to glean it from people leaking stuff of his private messages, all of which sound terrible for him. Cause they're private messages and he's weirdly loose. Even though he knows people leak all of his private messages, he is weirdly loose in his private messages. I do think it's a little disingenuous and unfair to shame Maddox for things he has said in confidence that were leaked. It is, but at the same time, it's like this is all we have to go on from him for a lot of stuff. The only reason his stuff gets talked about so much is if he actually made public statements about literally anything, people would be like, okay, but he never does. So people are always just desperately trying to, and a lot of the people who- Is that true though, or if he came out and said more of his side of the story, would he just be ridiculed more? I mean, a lot of the info that has been leaked from Maddox is from people who actually were like genuinely caring about him. I can absolutely understand being in Maddox's position and not wanting to say anything. Oh, I could too, which is why, but I also just wouldn't talk to my fans. I don't understand why he does that. That's what I was gonna say. Just for a practical matter of PR, like seeing this happening before him, the first week it's understandable, the first month it's understandable, but at this point, it seems- It's very strange to me that after- As you said earlier, to be confiding in fans of all people in private means that he's probably at his lowest point. I can understand that too, after the long battering that he has been given. Deserve it or not, when I can see why he would crack occasionally and say things to fans and confidence. So I don't think it's fair to shame him for that. Yeah, no, I don't think that he should be shamed for the things he has said in these messages. It's just unfortunate that we have to talk about them because it's the only information we have about certain things. Why the fuck did he do this? And then the only answer you get is from some leaked thing that, and most of the leaks are from people who were genuinely caring. A lot of them were not trying to be spies or anything. Most famously, Water Boy, who made the opening song for the Dick Show, was legit just concerned about Maddox and kept up a rapport with him for a while, but as of this stuff going on, he leaked all of Maddox's messages because he doesn't like him anymore. And I guess thought it would be helpful for the lawsuit because you kinda need as much information as you can gather for something like that. So anyways, Dick's like, yeah, creative differences, whatever, everything's fine at first. This is a little fucky taking the stolen iTunes feed. Then a few more fucky things happen, such as that suddenly the original Biggest Problem website disappears and is replaced with just RIP and a SoundCloud feed of all the episodes on SoundCloud, which Maddox had just taken down the site and replaced it with this. And Dick was like, well, what the fuck? Like this is our, again, joint project. It is not Maddox's show, it's both of their show, but Maddox is making all these decisions. Dick re-hosts the whole website on his own site. So if you go to BiggestProblem.thedickshow.com, you can see the original site in its entirety with the original voting because the RIP version of the site didn't even have the voting on it. So it's just, it's not the same. You can't, the entire interactivity of the show is stripped away by taking away the voting system. So it ruined the legacy of the show. And I was so fucking pissed when this happened because I really thought it was gonna be gone. I was like, we'll never know what the biggest problem on the voting board was. Thankfully Dick saved it. Then Maddox releases all the bonus episodes for free out of nowhere. His justification for this later is that apparently when a fan had asked Dick, can I like share the bonus episodes or whatever? Like can I download them illegally? Dick had responded, what am I? The copyright police? And according to Maddox, this was permission to just steal the episodes and therefore he just released them for free anyways. Without Dick's permission, remember, joint venture, all the money that they were making off of those, that's now no longer a revenue stream. So Dick's starting to get mad, but again, he's keeping this all kind of on the download. Well, you see where this says nuclear goss incoming? Wee, you better get fucking ready because we got a hashtag. Hashtag Dick Live. This, this is the drama. This is the reason this all exists. All this, this is just a fun podcast you can go listen to. You could have figured out most of what I just told you anyways. This is where shit gets serious. So, Maddox does yes, monchi. As someone who has never seen the biggest problem in the universe and only has barely heard about Maddox and Dick, only through passing, always mentioned in hushed breaths and at late hours of the night, never else has gone to sleep, but I've had to put my ear up to doorways to understand what was happening and had to piece things together in my mind. With the sounds of mining and all faded away. And it was the dead of night. And there are only crickets decapitated chirping. I'm so fucking strapped in and ready to understand what the fuck is this? Okay. Good, you need to be. Because up until this point, Maddox is doing some weird things still fine. Fans don't hate him. People are still kind of listening to best debate. A lot of people have fallen off because Dick shows just better. And like I stopped listening to it. Here's where Maddox permanently and forever murdered his entire career. Hashtag Dick Lies. Maddox makes a YouTube video, a vlog, that is hidden behind, it's on his website, hidden behind a password. The password is hashtag Dick Lies. Which is why this is the famous, very famous password. Cause he was trying to make this a trending hashtag. It did not work, except in fact, it now works in his, the opposite of his favorite. Like Dick now like champions this hashtag because it has profited him in the long run. But Maddox makes a video called like what really happened with the biggest problem in the universe. This is around episode 17 of the Dick show. So it's been 17 weeks. We've already, we're months into these shows existing. They're already continuing on their way just fine. But fans have been really curious about what the fuck's going on this whole time. And lots of rumors have been spreading because there's, you know, there's lots of fans who are just trying to, again because of the fact that there's so much like fan interaction on these shows. The fans are a little entitled I think on in these guys fan bases where they think they just, they give them an inch and they'll take a mile. You know what I'm saying? These guys really wanted to know what the fuck was going on. Dick show immediately has an explosively popular Reddit and Facebook group. And it's the people in these groups who are really like trying to get to the bottom of what actually happened, especially because they don't appreciate this fucky stuff that Maddox is doing. So rumors are spreading around. Everyone's talking about like, ooh, like there's no clear answers about anything. Maddox makes this video, trying to clarify in his opinion like why the biggest problem ended. Now there's important things to note about this. One, he had only released it to like his fans and the password I think was given through one of his mailing lists or something. Do you know what, how he revealed the password? I think because Maddox had, he's been working on his third book since about halfway through the biggest problem. People are making fun of him constantly for the fact that he was taking way too fucking long on this book. But he claimed it was a book he'd wanted to do since the beginning of his career. So he starts working on his third book during the biggest problem. And he had created a mailing list for fans that was like a, you had to prove your worth to get on it. Like you have to send him an email with like an explanation of why you deserve to be on the mailing list to be on there. I think I got onto it and then canceled myself off of it later. Yeah. I just want to point out how cool stuff like that is. I love stuff like that. It's so cool. I really like Maddox's like whole mysticism thing. It's very powerfully, it's very internet, you know? Unfortunately, I think that he hasn't really adopted to the times very well with how the internet's changed over the years. Even this is a cool idea. Like, you know, releasing like a passworded video of like hot steaming gossip. Unfortunately, it's full of lies. So he creates the dick lies video. Not only did he release it to his fans and of course everybody found out about it immediately. Like Dick instantly shared it on Twitter with the password. We all knew what it was. But he also posts this video without password. Maddox does this to his own personal Facebook page where him and Dick have tons and tons of shared contacts throughout all of the comedy scene in LA. That's the most important thing about this video. In this video, first of all, he claims that Dick has been financially shady, essentially. Apparently, Dick had never sent him these W9 forms that he needed to file something. A W9 is literally just a request for your social security number and Dick had not given it to him because he just didn't trust him. He later found out there was another way he could do it and I guess he did or whatever, I don't know. Dick was the one managing the expenses of the show anyways. And like he has shown his documents. Like he's shown all the documents he had keeping track of the money. So this is just kind of horse shit. It's just something he could pin Dick on that sounded like it was important, but it's not. Rape apologizing. So he plays a soundbite that he had cut from the biggest problem. He was claiming that he had to cut soundbites like this all the time where Dick said really offensive and nasty things. So he plays a soundbite where Dick is explaining, and let me make this clear, even in this soundbite, like this is an out of context soundbite but even in the soundbite it's very clear that what Dick is saying is that women should protect themselves from getting raped. What he says is there is some level of personal responsibility to take care of yourself. He's not saying women are responsible for getting raped. He says you should take some responsibility to protect yourself. I think that's pretty reasonable, yeah? Agreed. Maddox frames this as he is a rape apologist. This is what gets, this right here, this and the rape list are what will do serious damage to Dick's PPR, that is his personal and professional reputation. Dick's PPR gets dragged through the mud because he claims- The PR levels were shattered down to zero percent. Maddox claims in this video that Dick's official website maintains a rape list. What he shows on screen is an eight-chan thread on the Dick Show eight-chan board, not official. Dick didn't even know it existed in which a guy was just posting pictures of women and just it said like at the top like rape list. And it's just pictures of women who are like vaguely involved with the show. It was just some troll. Like it's just some guy on eight-chan, a board where literally anyone can do anything and nothing to do with the Dick Show. And it was the only way that it was connected to him at all is that someone had linked to this thread on his subreddit like days prior. And a lot of people think it was Maddox who had posted that link on the Reddit so that it would be more closely tied to Dick. Eventually the guy who made that thread came out and was very apologetic. He was just like, I was just doing a goof, man, I'm sorry, it cost you so much. But because of the fact that Maddox posted this to his personal Facebook, all of those comedians, a lot of whom are like very liberal because we're talking about LA, now have a huge problem with Dick. Dick, again, personal and professional reputation utterly shattered. He gets banned from the UCB theater where he has been performing for a decade. He is banned from UCB. Most of his old friends from UCB break contact with him. Like lots of people who were guests on the old show aren't coming back. A lot of people are like resharing Maddox's video who think that Dick's like, oh, look at this, Dick's a monster, you know, like resharing this video and shit that is completely unfounded and based on nothing. So this is obviously a massive blow to Dick. This was a war declaration that Maddox should never have made because it was a war he could never have won. But I think that he just is self-righteous to the point where he just thought everyone would be on his side because he's Maddox and, you know, he's more famous and better. Maddox. Maddox was being calm in that video. Surely someone who is being calm and saying things in a calm voice can't possibly be lying in a deliberate effort to ruin someone's personal and professional reputation. You would think that someone speaking so calmly would just be telling you nothing but the truth. But unfortunately, no. He's just lying to his teeth about everything. It's a real, this is a hard video to watch, especially when he gets to the rapelist part and he like, he portrays it with no sound. It's just like a slow crawling image of the rapelist and you're like, ooh, it's like real spooky. He really tries to paint Dick as like a huge asshole in this video. That Dick really puts the jism back in rape apologizes. Yeah. Now, keep in mind, keep in mind, Maddox wrote the alphabet of manliness. That's what I was gonna say. This guy is like the manliness guy. What the hell changed? Chapter three. What's going on? Okay, so very quickly, people point out to Maddox, hey, can't help but notice, chapter three of the alphabet of manliness, copping a feel, is a whole chapter dedicated to secretly copping feels on women. It's literally an instructional guide of how to molest women. That is the joke. Maddox has been doing, one of the catch phrases of the biggest problem was get raped. That was one of the catch phrases, because it was the first comment on the live version of the show. And so they would mention it all the time, like every caller would always say get raped, you know? And it was hilarious. So Maddox who participated in all that rape humor over all those years. So of course people bring this up to him, like, hey, we can't help but notice, Maddox disavows his book. No! What the fuck? This is the worst thing so far. What is that even saying? If he's gone back on stuff that he believed in the first place, he's sacrificing his artistic integrity. This is fucking bullshit. Yeah, I almost burned his book after this, but I never remembered to do it. He disavows his own book? Yeah, he disavows his own book. He disavowed the alphabet of manliness and he claimed that he was like, oh, I wrote that 10 years ago, it's all immature, the only chapter I'm still proud of is boners, like that's the only part of it that I like. Now, granted, bear in mind that literally up until this very moment, Maddox constantly mentions the fact that he's a New York Times best-selling writer of the alphabet of manliness. He still mentions it. He still mentions it. Even though he disav... Oh boy, so yeah, this is where this... It's furiating. This was the moment where people like me who until this point were still fans of both of these guys were like, well, you're like, this ship's sailed. Yeah. This really brings to mind the psychological reality that becomes more clear as time goes on, that people just do things and then afterward they form justifications for them, which seems to be where we've arrived with the character of Maddox here. It's really upsetting. Here's the thing. Maddox around this time, my theory is Maddox thought I'm gonna, like this podcast is going really well, but I wish I didn't have to work with Dick Masterson. I'm gonna create a podcast network, do a different show, kill this one, kick off Dick, bring Biggest Problem back eventually with someone else once he's workshopped around and found a better co-host that he wants, then relaunch it and this was all going, this podcast network was gonna be his future because like he clearly was going all in on podcasting at the time. And he was planning to have tons of people on this network. Like he had open invitations for people to submit shows to the network. I think we even submitted some podcasts. I know several people who submitted podcasts to this show and were like almost approved, but like he never ended up actually adding any. Like he added one podcast ever to his network, which was, starred this another, yes? I assume it took off immediately and became a smash success. No, it starred this guy named Jesse, no relation, who was a total cunt. I don't remember the name of the show. Later called Denzel, very infamously called Denzel a nigger on his show. This got him in a lot of trouble, especially because remember at this point, Maddox is branding his part in this whole like thing is that like Dick is this like misogynist. He's like a, he's a problematic individual and Maddox is going all in on like weird SJW. So a lot of people's theory is that when Maddox started dating mental Jess and hanging out around her and her friends, that he got into all this SJW shit. Because Maddox is very easily influenced by the people around him. Like he's the kind of guy who kind of acts like the people who he's near. And so a lot of people think that he just kind of started talking about this cuck shit because he was surrounded by cuck shit. So, but in spite of that, he's still an edge comedian and he's got guys like this Jesse guy who are just fucking throwing out racial epithets at ex-co-hosts and shit. So yeah, this is a cluster fuck. That guy is really fucking weird. That guy is really fucking, that Jesse guy is real fucking weird. Constantly on the Dick Show subreddit like trying to troll people and piss people off. That's not a good look. Well, I'm done saying that. Yeah, well, I'm too late. Anyway, yeah, well, this is the point where like obviously everyone hates Maddox now after this and doubly so because of that Jesse guy. And like just, it was a fucking nightmare. This is where Maddox's PR just goes into an absolute death spiral that it's never gonna recover from. At least not in the span of this fucking lecture. This is where we spawn Madcucks. So Madcucks is a spot on parody of Maddox whose writing style is exactly like him. Clearly like a long time dedicated fan who like had studied Maddox's like writing and everything. And he created a parody of the alphabet of manliness. I don't remember what it's called. It has like a stupid long title, but it's basically the cuck version of the alphabet of manliness is the joke. And each one, each chapter is him like talking about some positivity, like togetherness shit, but in a real goofy way. But he was just like startlingly accurate to Maddox's writing style and it was really funny. And on the old show, Maddox has this voice he does when he's impersonating his dumb ass fans where he goes, but Maddox, how come you said that it was like this? Like that's his straw man voice. That is Madcucks' voice. Like that's, Mad, Madcucks just is, he just pretends to be Maddox as his shitty commenter voice. And so he started making YouTube videos that were also, you know, parodies of this. Dick loved it, immediately has him as a guest on the show. Turns out Madcucks is fucking hilarious. He's like real quick-witted. He could play the character so well, like he would react to things Dick said, the way Maddox would react to them, to the point that it was like creepy. And eventually they did a Dick show bonus episode called, yeah? Just the idea that the Dick show now includes this like this deformed, like this twisted like monstrous reflection, like retarded reflection of his old co-hosts. Well, it's especially, it's perfect because Madcucks is also just like a fat, dumpy, mid-western guy who just like wears goofy, you know. More crowns every time you see him. Yeah, every time you see him, he's got more Burger King crowns stacked on top of his head and like, he wears like, he wears the cape and everything. He's fucking hilarious and very quickly became one of the most popular guests on the Dick show. So, and he, they eventually would do a bonus episode of the Dick show that was the episode 108 where it's like they pretend like it's just right after the last episode of the show and Madcucks is Maddox. And Dick, it's so funny because Dick is like, okay, well on the old show, I was always just being nice to Maddox because I didn't want to like fight him actually. But now that he has Madcucks, he gets so angry, it's like he's actually arguing with Maddox and he gets like vehemently pissed. If you watch the video version, it's fucking hilarious to watch him just get so mad because Maddox is just that good at pretending to be Maddox. It's fucking great. So. So bizarre. It's the weirdest shit in the world. So now we've entered the Goss era. Like at this point, from this point forward, for a long time, the real central thing of the Dick show is the Goss, which is what he refers to all of this as. Like the hot Goss, hence the hottest Goss in the universe. There's a hot Goss t-shirt that I meant to buy for this lecture, totally forgot. So Madcucks spawns and I've got a bunch of notes of just like random little things that go. Cause at this point, like stuff starts happening rapidly. Like now fans are constantly hounding Maddox to try to get more information out of him. There's leaks everywhere. Everyone's fucking pissed now. Like this is dirty now. This has gotten to the point, you know, up until this point, Dick is trying to keep being civil and now he doesn't give a fuck anymore cause his PPR has been all fucked up. Yeah? I think you said, and it seems to me, this could have all just been avoid if Maddox had just said, like there's creative differences and then they just kept different shows. If he had literally said anything, it would have been better than what he did. He could have just said, we ended the show off with creative differences or like just even I don't want to work with Dick anymore. Like people would have understood. Like obviously people loved Dick on the show but there was no particular preference of like who the audience cared about more when the show ended. Like when both shows came out, the fans were equally excited about both until this one turned out to suck. So like Maddox had no bad will. He could have literally said, I just hate Dick and don't want to work with him anymore and that would have been enough. But like this whole thing, very bad idea. So Maddox appears, here's some stuff that happens. First of all, Shawn, who up until this point had been on both shows. Ironically, this attempt to kill Dick Masterson makes his Patreon fucking explode because now that Dick has lost all his comedy opportunities in LA and can't work, he looks like a fucking, he looks like the underdog and Maddox is this big famous internet guy. Dick is only really famous from the biggest problem at this point. So his Patreon fucking explodes. He's making like almost 20 grand a month. Yeah, right now he's making like 20 to 25 grand a month. That's a number. Yeah, it is a big number. Wow. What a number. Wow. Wow. There are too many zeros and that shit's me mad. What the fuck? What she reminds me of Mad Cucks actually in a way. You're a very similar style of humor to him. What do you mean me man? Oh boy, okay. Well now that Dick's making hella money, he offers Shawn a huge raise. Shawn's like, it's too stressful to work on two shows anyway and this isn't all he does. He also produces for like bands and stuff. He has other works. So he basically tells Maddox like, hey either pay me more, I'm leaving. Maddox can't afford him, he leaves. So Shawn's now just on the Dick show and he's basically the permanent co-host from this point forward. Shawn has, this whole time, Shawn never said anything negative about Maddox. He's never been like trying to get in on the drama. He's just like, hey man, I'm just here. And to this day, he'll offer his opinions but like he's not trying to, he doesn't wanna be involved. And he was the only person initially who was left out of the lull suit which is where eventually Maddox is going to sue literally everybody. But not Shawn at first. I think he's been added to it now over time. But so Shawn leaves the show. Asterios, Cocodos had not appeared on the Dick show for a long time. Like it was a while before he finally showed up because Maddox, it turns out, had put an embargo on anyone being on the Dick show from the start. Like as soon as Dick started his show, Maddox told everybody, if you're on Dick's show, you can't have a show on my network. This is why Tim Chang's never has been on the Dick show because he was terrified that if he went on, then Maddox was gonna come after him and make it so he couldn't have a career. And Maddox had already promised him a show on the network. So Tim Chang's just kind of runs away. That pineapple smells bad. It's fun, I like it. Man, that's so bad. Yeah. I'm sorry. Why? That's always not so sweet news like that. That's not what it's for. Tim Chang's never comes on the Dick show for this reason. Asterios, after Dick lies, is fully on Dick's side. At this point, Asterios is like fuck Maddox burning that bridge. He had been trying to, Asterios had been begging them to make up. He was begging Maddox, like please, can you guys just sit down and talk this through? There's gotta be a way around this. Even after Dick lies, he tries to reach out, but it's very clear Maddox is not gonna listen to him. Maddox then starts coming after Asterios as well for the fact that he's going on the Dick show. So Asterios pretty much breaks all contact with Maddox. Now eventually, Asterios is going to be the person who hates Maddox the most because he is a very spiteful man. And whereas Dick would prefer to just like, I mean, Dick's gonna make fun of Maddox all the time because it's funny, but he would prefer to not actually like have this, like just, he just doesn't care that much. Asterios is like, I am personally hurt by you and I want you dead to Maddox, basically. So yeah, Asterios took it very hard. Denzel is still around, Tim Chang's isn't. We've got Larry, Peach Saliva, the other people who come. Yeah. This is an incredible narrative woven in real life. But the thing that's memorized me the most is seeing your rendition of the thing that is on your t-shirt and then comparing them line by line over and over again for the past three hours. Why does the one on the board have bangs? No, it's just the lips. Yeah, it's just the lips. You see, there's a very, yeah. Anyway. I thought they were teeth. Beautiful. No, no, he would have like a hair lip, like a gross hair lip if those were teeth. Your version looks like the guy in bright. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Anyway. Yeah, all these new people come on the show. Fan interaction is even more so on the Dick show than ever before because he'll address the Facebook and the Reddit, he brings in this guy, Dustin, who's the leader of the Facebook group and has him talk about Facebook news and shit like that, which is terrible. Dustin is on the show for the first 30 or so episodes and eventually people just hate him so much that Dick tells him like, look, you need to go come up with a bit that's funny enough that Reddit approves of it and then I'll let you back on the show. He has not successfully done that yet. So Dustin kind of disappears after a while but the show is such an immediate success, like financially, that he quickly starts getting more guests to come in. The most famous ones, like there's tons of guests in the early days but like, in the early part of the show, the idea was it was the search for the co-host. So there were lots of co-hosts auditioned. After a while, it was pretty clear who the audience resonated with and it became more like whoever is actually friends with Dick are the people who come on the show. So at this point, it's like a pretty regular cast. We've got Sean on every episode. Asterios is there all the time. Denzel comes back a lot. Larry Blidner who's on episode two and he's been regular. Peach Saliva who is a writing partner of Asterios Coconos and she just wrote one of his bits that everyone thought was like the funniest bit he'd ever done and as a result, they were like we need to bring this girl on the show because like obviously she's hilarious and the fans generally liked her. She's also happens to be dating or was at least at the time one of the members of Two Best Friends Play. So yeah, she's, I don't know. One of the two main ones though. Yes? Luna Celestia, do you know? I have no idea. I think Celestia though. I think Celestia though. Shout out to Two Snacks. Also one of the original Patreon goals was, this is like the goofiest thing about the dick show that I don't think any of the fans really care about, but he had promised that he would have a news babe, like a hired news babe. And so he went through the first girl he ever brought on, nobody liked, but he ended up with this girl, Lacey, who's on, who's just like, just some chick he hired to be the news girl and she's all right and she does news. And then there's also Jamie Lynn Hughes who's like a friend of his who's like this hot bodybuilder from Texas with unbelievably massive tits. All the women on this show, giant tits by the way. Like very clear, no, not at all because it's a camera show. And if you, you know, you have to pay money to get the camera version. So entice with the tits. But yeah, so these, she's on all the time now. Dustin's not really on anymore, but he was regular. Eventually we will end up with the dick show lawyer, Kear McGanya, he'll get involved soon and become a regular guest. Yes. Can I get an official PCP lawyer to be on that show? I would love to have a PCP lawyer, but I don't think we have that kind of money yet. Sooner. Donate to, what is it? Patreon.com slash. They're procrastinators. Woo! I'm out of my element right now. Shout to the procrastinators. They need that. So okay, after the dick lives fiasco, for a long time, most of like the drama that comes from here is just a bunch of little petty bullshit from this point forward. Like tons and tons of like this fan talked to Maddox and leaked his info or this guy made a video about this. And because there's so much fan involvement, like it's, it gets really multi-layered. Like everyone's got drama with everybody in the dick show canon universe. Cause he'll bring on guests who develop drama with each other. There have been several boxing matches organized. Asterios, okay, one time on the episode that I was on in fact, Dick also had on a guy called War of the Fanboys who was the moderator of R slash the Donald. And War of the Fanboys and Asterios somehow got into enough arguing that War of the Fanboys challenged Asterios to a fist fight. Asterios was totally into it. This eventuated with War of the Fanboys driving six hours to New York City to fight him in a UFC arena at like two in the morning. It's all captured on camera. It's, yeah, but weird shit happens on the dick show. The dick show is just a home of bizarre stories. And the reason for this, what you need to understand about Dick, Dick is a hardcore like long time internet like four-channer. Like he is a long time troll, long time into like people who just do weird shit online, loves performance artists, Sam Hides on a couple episodes. So like, you know, he's closely related to that kind of stuff. Dick loves having people on the show who are just fucking strange. Like he loves bringing on just like weird artists and like people who make like, he had on recently like one of the heads of Encyclopedia Dramatica on the show. And like he's had low tax a bunch, the guy who runs something awful. Yeah? I thought too they were murmurs of some sort of Blackpill night. Blackpill night? Oh, Sernovich. Mike Sernovich is a very infamous, like right wing mouthpiece kind of guy who has this thing called gorilla mindset. And he's all about being a- Okay. Shut the fuck up, why don't you need to say something? No matter what, whether that's the animal gorilla or gorilla warfare gorilla, that is the funniest thing I've ever heard my entire life. It's the animal gorilla, the gorilla mindset. He constantly rants about being Blackpilled, how he used to be blue-pilled and now he's Blackpilled. Basically being Blackpilled, it's like being red-pilled except specifically about how the world is all a conspiracy out to fuck you. And that's what it means. Being Blackpilled is recognizing that essentially. Basically Sernovich is real fucking obnoxious and he talks with a terrible lisp and he had the worst episode of the dick show. He is totally unlistable. And he's also a real garbage human being who goes on Twitter and if he doesn't like someone politically, he just claims that they are a pedophile. Oh, that's right, it's that guy. Yeah. That's fucked up. Now the weird thing about it, see, it's weird that dick has Sernovich on the show but it's also like dick, he just, again, he likes having weird people on. So like, I don't think he really, like he brought in job lynch mobs one time as a problem on the biggest problem. One of his last problems was people trying to make you lose your job because you said something offensive, which is literally what Maddox did to dick with the dick lies situation. And he had on Sernovich to talk about the fact that this had happened to Sernovich. But the weird part is that Sernovich just does that to people. Like he was on the show complaining about job lynch mobs but he literally job lynches mobs people by lying about them being pedophiles. And even though dicks never had him on the show again and whenever he's brought up, you can see that dick is like kind of like about it but he won't admit that he thinks that Sernovich is weird if he thinks so. He just wants, he wants to preserve this image of like everyone can be on the dick show, anyone. David Clegg famously called in the pedophile, so it got blown the fuck out, that was hilarious. He was a, for those who don't know, commenter frequently on even our videos. So we knew about him even before he called into the dick show. But so yeah, like lots of weird people call into this show and as a result, when this all happened, it just, floodgates were open. Everyone's got drama, everyone's got rumors but we're just gonna focus on big stuff that actually matters and not every little fucking random thing that some fan leaked about Maddox. Cause frankly, that's, first of all, you shouldn't be leaking people's information, you assholes. And second of all, like I just, I don't really agree with the methodology that a lot of people have taken towards this which is like, basically to suggest that Maddox has sacrificed his ability to be a human and therefore everything he says is now open game to be posted and mocked, yeah? Hey man, you live by the guerrilla mindset, you die by the guerrilla mindset, I guess. So, all right, for a while, mostly rumors and bullshit after Dick Lies, all kinds of crap. Eventually things start to pick up again because Maddox, and this is where, this is my little theory that I've been talking about this whole time, I should mention, after Dick Lies, this is when we found out about the wedding, so it was in the episode, episode 18 of the Dick Show, Dick reacts to the Dick Lies video, like he watches it in the video, he hadn't seen it yet, he watches it and reacts to it live, obviously quite upset and offended, like one of the best things about the Dick Show is that if you're a patron, you can watch a video version of it and I strongly recommend this if you can afford even a dollar a month to give just because I just think it adds a lot to see their faces and you can really appreciate the room. During this episode, the tension is quite high and it's an entertaining watch. But at the end of this episode is where Dick explains, all right, you guys wanna know the real fucking reason the biggest problem broke up, it's because I left this wedding with Maddox's ex-girlfriend three and a half years prior. He doesn't tell any more of the story, he doesn't mention that it's 80s girl, we don't find that out so much later, but eventually he will tell the rest of the wedding story in a bonus episode of the Dick Show, which you get if you pay $5 a month. But I mean, you can pay once, download them all on Patreon if you really want to, you know. Just saying, so man makes enough money. I'm not gonna tell you, you have to keep patroning him every month, like fuck him, he makes 25 fucking grand every month. I'll tell all that to his face if he invites me on the show for this. Anyway, I probably won't. Anyway, oh, I wrote it here, I don't know why I wrote this sideways, but so there's a trademark dispute. So Maddox files for a trademark for the biggest problem in the universe. What could he wanna do with that, I wonder? So he's got Dick kicked off, now he wants to make it his own show. Dick, of course, immediately tweets, get your lawsuits ready, because he's like, I'm not letting him fucking take that. So they start having trademark disputes. Now, weirdly enough, this has kind of disappeared, like this trademark dispute was going on for a while and it was kind of a big deal, but like, because of things that would happen later, this kind of gets swept under the rug. So this was a big source of goss for a while, that like, whether they were gonna get the trademark, whether they were gonna have to go to court, everyone's preparing, fucking getting ready. I think this might be where Keon McGanya first got introduced, because he was just a lawyer who's a fan of the Dick show, who basically was like, hey, hit me up, I'm in LA. He's this big, masculine, cool, smooth dude. He eventually becomes a regular guest on the show just because Dick likes him so much. And he literally has an email called dickshowlawyer at gmail.com, like if you're a fan of the Dick show and you need legal help, you can literally contact this guy. That's fucking cool. Yeah, it's pretty neat. He seems like a real cool guy. He's been on a bunch of episodes. But I think this, it was either this or the next, they're gonna, there's three different lawsuits involved in this all told. But the first is this trademark dispute. So yeah, everyone's fighting over it. At some point, Mad Cux, so okay, Mad Hicks is still, he's gearing up to finally release his fucking book that he was talking about literally years ago on the biggest problem. And everyone is theorizing that this is going to be the best book in the universe because that's, you know, and I think someone had found like a secret Amazon listing of it or something like that. So of course, some fan of the Dick show immediately buys the bestbookintheuniverse.com, gives it to Mad Cux so that he can use it for his book. Mad Cux changes the name of his book to the best book in the universe. Here's, okay, here's where Mad Hicks makes a decision. I find it unbelievably strange and I don't, this is okay, this is just very indicative of his mindset because he is so concerned about appearances and like any little minor thing. He changes the name of his book to Fuck Whales, which is very strange because first of all, no one uses websites anymore anyways. No one was ever going to go to the bestbookintheuniverse.com if he actually was going to use that for his book. They would have just bought it on Amazon. This is just a joke. If this was done as a joke, Mad Hicks changes the name of his book entirely as a result to Fuck Whales, terrible name, and what's worse is he won't even write it as Fuck Whales. He writes it as Fasterisk Whales, F-Asterisk CK Whales. Yeah, so couldn't even be edgy with it. It's Fasterisk Whales. Yeah, fans were pretty disappointed. The worst part though is that it's not even a fucking new book. Half of it is just old articles like lightly rewritten into this book. It's mostly recycled material. A lot of it is recycled material from the biggest problem in the universe. So as this book was approaching coming out, everyone was just like, this is obviously a huge disappointment. They found Mad Hicks' original cover art that he had designed for the book, which looks fucking awful. Thankfully it was replaced by an artist rendering because the publishers were like, no, you cannot publish that. No, it wasn't even found out. He announced it himself. He was like, oh, this is what I was gonna use the cover art, but they told me I couldn't. And it looked like shit. And everyone was like, no shit, they wouldn't let you use that. Anyway, yeah, so he releases F-Asterisk Whales, totally bombs, nobody cares, nobody likes him anymore. His YouTube show's gone to shit. Best debate as it went along like transformed its gimmick over time. And I mean no one was listening anymore, but it made no fucking sense. Because originally the idea was that you had to vote for each debate. You would vote before listening to the podcast what side you were on and then vote again after listening. And the idea was to see if he could change your mind even though he was arguing both sides. So I don't know, it was a fucking weird, no one understood the voting. Eventually he changed the voting to something even worse, which is you have to predict which side Maddox is actually on before the podcast and then which side you think he's on after having listened to it. What, like he's gonna change his own mind during this podcast? Which one do you think he's on? And after gaining more information now, which is like were you right about what you said? It's literally him challenging the audience because they had said so many times that like it's obvious which side you're on and he's like, ah, we'll prove it. It's remarkably conceited and stupid to have a show about issues and debates and act as though the thing you're voting on is like you yourself, as opposed to the actual issues you just discussed. It's a fuck, it was a weird thing that he did. I've never listened to any of the ones from that era but like also weirdly enough, Rucka Rucka Ali, who has done a podcast with Nate became the like de facto co-host of Best Debate somehow because in like episode two he was a guest on the show and he just happens to have a home studio and since Maddox couldn't afford to record in a proper studio or wherever he was before, he just kind of takes up home in Rucka's studio and Rucka becomes like the new co-host slash audio engineer. I've never listened to the show, everyone says that if you listen to it, you just hear Rucka slowly like heading towards suicide like obviously realizing that this was a really bad idea and but he seemingly just, I don't know, I guess he values his connection with Maddox enough that he's no longer on the show as of recently but that's partly because now he's on his whole crusade to be like a mouthpiece, I guess. He's a big objectivist champion. He's out there every day changing parts of mind and God bless him on his path. So yeah, he somehow ended up being on there for a long time but everyone just kind of felt sorry for him. Even Dick was always just like poor Rucka, man. That guy, apparently according to Sean, he's a real nice guy and Sean never had a problem with him but like he's on that show for some fucking reason. So anyways, all this is going on. Finally, we got the nuclear gas bomb. It's a sound. It's a sound. Yup. It's a sound. That's why he has my spray. I have a fat, nasty shit brewing right now. Do I hold it or do I miss content? Let's take a short break so much he can go and get shit. I'm nasty. I'm talking hall cost level shit to a right in my colon. Let's take it. Class is temporarily adjourned so much he can blast at that shit. Fat shit. Okay, so. Boing. Nuclear gas bomb incoming. I mean, obviously I consider all of this nuclear gas because I mean, this was the most nuclear to be fair but this is literally referred to as the nuclear gas bomb in Canon. So at the Digg Show started doing live shows. Unlike the original live shows, these are like he buys a venue, like a proper concert venue and invites all the Digg Show fans and they're fucking utterly insane, rowdy, crazy events because the Digg Show audience is mostly like loud drunken artists who don't know how to talk in turn. So it's just constant shouting, especially for me. I was at the first show, drunk off my ass, screaming the entire time he was there. Met Dick and Asterios and Dustin and Sean. Got pictures of all of them. Great time. I had a fucking fantastic time. But at the end of this live show, Dick gets up and he's like, look, this is, we're still in this era. This is like, we're like a few months after Dick lies but like there's been constant like cold war fighting on both sides. We're like, Maddox has that guy Jesse from his other podcast. That guy is like some kind of weird covert operative or something for Maddox or he's just doing it out of his own accord but he's like constantly fucking around with people. And Maddox's girlfriend, mental Jess is constantly fucking around, especially with 80s girl. Like she's always trying to like threaten her in weird ways and stuff. It's very bizarre. So while this is all going on, Dick gets on stage at the very end of the show and he says, lately, Maddox's camp has been sending 80s girl all these private messages on Twitter and shit and they're like really fucking around with her. And I happened to find in her house, this letter that Maddox wrote her that is a please get back together with me letter kind of thing. Or just they like, it's not so much begging to get back together. It's more of like he's like just writing his heart out. He doesn't say like, please get back with me but. He's just that guy trying to get closure like a letter that everyone has written. Not, I've never written this letter. I had, I had a girl. I definitely had a girlfriend who I broke up with. I promise you, I swear I have had a girlfriend. And I mean, I just, if you, anyway, this letter is, it's a real embarrassing, real bad letter. But Dick finds it, he has not read it and he says like, if Maddox's camp doesn't stop fucking with me and 80s girl, I'm going to read this out loud on the show. Welcome to season two of the Dick show. That's how he ends the live performance. So he's just holding on to this letter and he's like, he says, yes. The context of this is off. And I don't have a pure straight shot here. But that's kind of fucked up, isn't it? What? It's a little weird. It's definitely, I mean, it's definitely fucked up. But the way he puts it is, if you keep fucking with me and my girlfriend, I'm going to read this. If you don't, I will not read this. He even says, if there's an apology or if this stops, this will never get read. This is skipping ahead a little bit, I guess, but when they finally did read the letter out loud, wasn't that bad. It wasn't like a devastatingly embarrassing like Maddox on his knees begging for her back or anything. It was just a typical breakup closure kind of letter. The only thing that's embarrassing about it is not that he wrote it, but that he wrote it and he is Maddox. Yeah, that is the worst part. And I mean, Dick knew, I think, that this wasn't going to be funny to read. He was like, the funny part about it is like, the point of this is to try to scare Maddox away from fucking with me. Didn't work, backfired actually, because they started fucking with 80s girl way worse. This is where we get to what is my personal favorite of all the goss that goes on, which is the weird mental Jess story. So after Dick reveals that he's got this letter and he holds onto this for like half a year or almost an entire year before it gets read, like he was really didn't want to pull the, he was only going to do this if it got that bad, and it did eventually get that bad. So the next super weird thing that happens is Maddox's girlfriend, mental Jess, calls up all of the schools within a radius of where they live. 80s girl is a teacher, by the way. We learn at this point that by this point, the story Dick has revealed that like 80s girl who he's dating now is the girl from the wedding. Like this stuff was unclear, but like all these things have sort of, you know, come to light over time. So 80s girl is a teacher. Mental Jess calls all the schools in the area trying to find the one that she works at because she doesn't know. And she's calling to make a complaint about her, literally trying to get her fired for her, like the fact that her boyfriend runs this show that talks shit about this other girl's boyfriend. So she calls up the school and she's like, her boyfriend's like got a harassment campaign against my guy and all this stuff, right? But she's trying to be like an anonymous source. But the lady at the school tells her like, you know, can you please like give us your information in case we need to contact you again? Like to follow up on these. And they get the information and of course it turns out it's Maddox's girlfriend. So the schools of course are just like, what in the fuck is this dumb crazy bitch trying to do? Cause 80s girl has not been involved with any of this. She's totally unrelated. She's never shown up on camera. She's never participated in any way. It's Dick's show. I mean, even the letter Dick took without her permission. Like he straight up said, like I just stole this out of her room. So I could use it for this threat. So 80s girl is like an unrelated party and so really is mental jazz, but she's taken it upon herself to try and exact some kind of revenge or something. So she contacts 80s girl school. 80s girl files a restraining order against her. This is the first time that we are led to Dick and Maddox actually seeing each other in person for the first time since the biggest problem ended. Maddox shows up to court quote, dressed as the Babadook as, Maddox, Dick keeps insisting, he's wearing like all black and he just looks like he's at a funeral and he's just like, basically at this point, even Dick's like, I'm starting to feel sorry for this guy because he's just like at the end of his rope. Maddox is dirt poor right now. Oh my God, I forgot one of my fucking, the most important details of all, Asterios reveals in one of the bonus episodes that the biggest, the best debate in the universe website, Maddox paid $30,000 for it. $30,000 he paid for this website. How? Yes. Yeah. The web designer who he hired just like charged him that much. He just thought it was worth that. I've seen the website. It looks like dog shit. It doesn't look like $30,000. No. Maddox not a programmer who made his own websites previously. Okay. Granted, Maddox is constantly made fun of for the fact that the best page in the universe is like 1990s code. Like it's an old, it's an ancient website that still looks the same way it always did. And so I think he thought that he had to like update it with more modern shit. But like, I mean, Dick built the biggest problem website and it was perfectly serviceable. Like he built the voting system, which Maddox obviously didn't know how to do. Exactly. There's no, and Asterios tried to talk him out of it and he just went ahead. Maddox does not have the money to spend $30,000 on this. His books have been failing. His YouTube is failing. Patreon did not work. This channel is failing after it launched. He banked everything on this podcast network and failed. So that's why all this desperation that's coming down here. Maddox is broke as fuck. They started a Maddox death pool at some point. Partially like how long, betting on how long it would take for the podcast to die or for Maddox to kill himself. Because a lot of people think that's coming. Cause I mean, he's just been in a real bad place. And he does, okay, Maddox does lots of live streams, like lots of gaming live streams. And it's just him sitting there stone faced, not saying anything, blocking people from his chat all day for bringing up shit and just being pissed. He goes on other people's podcasts and the most recent, I don't even think I wrote this up here, but the most recent goss news, this is like after all this, so I'm just gonna bring it up as an example of Maddox's attitude. He was on Drunken Peasants like a week after Dick was. And yeah, our boy Jesse over here. Our guy Jesse is a semi-regular guest now. I guess that's the way to play. Yeah, so. They're courting me currently. I'm playing hard to get. So Drunken Peasants had Dick on and Maddox like a week later, like not even knowing that they had. So Dick then Maddox. Yeah, but they didn't even know like that all this shit was going on. They just happened to get them both like in relatively quick succession. And one of the members of Drunken Peasants, I don't know which one, I don't know their fucking names, but one of them was at the latest Dick live show that was like a couple weeks ago. And he had now become abreast of all this. And told Dick that like Maddox had given them this like insanely long band word list for their chat before he would come on the show with like every conceivable misspelling of all the names of anyone involved in the Dick show. Like even if it's like got a one instead of an I, like every version that he could think of, he had to have that before he went on. And even still there's like one, there's like a clip somewhere online of someone says something in the chat about like if someone sleeps with your ex-girlfriend and all the guys are like, or like how they say something like, man, how much of a chump would you be if you were really upset that your friend got with your ex? And they were all like, oh yeah, that would make you a huge chump. And Maddox is just sitting there like, like it's, yeah, it's bad. He's not in a good place, but so he shows up as the Babadook to this lawsuit. By this point, it's become very apparent that mental Jess, I mean, we already kind of knew this. There's a reason Dick nicknamed her mental Jess, but she's fucking crazy. And Dick met her dad while they were, because it was 80s girl and mental Jess in the courtroom. They weren't, and Maddox as well, because he was involved in some way. He had like, Maddox had like mounted her defense or something or like contributed to it. He wrote this really bad defense. Maddox tries to write all his own legal documents and he is incompetent. He writes these like 60 page fucking like deep, like he like screen cap comments and shit and put them in his legal document. It's a lot. We'll talk about that more when we get to the lull suit. But so outside of the courthouse, Dick like meets mental Jess's dad and could see that he's just this like poor, exasperated soul who doesn't know how he ended up producing this creature. And it's just, this is just like, I love this story. It's real depressing to listen to in the funniest way. It's just like a real sad picture of this to me is the moment that Maddox fully transcends into just kind of, and I say this, not because I embraced this fact, not because I like this fact, but Maddox has officially become recognized as a lull cow as of this period. This is the point where everything Maddox does is now going to be dissected and ridiculed because it's just gone way too far. So. I'd say how did we get here? But the evidence. Yeah, it's, I mean, this is how we got here. Dick lies right there. So mental Jess gets a restraining order against her from 80s girls. So now she can't be within however many miles of her, whatever. And that's the last big thing for a while until suddenly trademark dispute doesn't matter anymore because bam, Maddox decides to sue everybody for $400 million. That's the total gross. He's actually suing everybody individually for 20 million a piece for defamation and I don't know, use of his nomenclature and just everything being a meanie. He's got a 60 something page lawsuit, I think. How long is it? How many pages? It's like six. Yeah. It's a giant. It's like a phone book lawsuit that's full of like constant typos and weird. And like jokes. Like there's a part where he says, how's that for irony in like the middle of the lawsuit writing. Like there's lots of weird shit in there. It should be noted that from what I have gathered about this lawsuit, Maddox's lawyer is not very good at being a lawyer and is doing Maddox a lot more harm than good. Yeah, I definitely think Maddox's lawyer is a big part of this. He's got a drop as that. Because, well, Dick recently formulated a theory because he was talking about that apparently Maddox is weirdly easy to be persuaded to do anything by handsome men. Which when he explained that, I got it. I was like, you know what? I'm more likely to do something if a handsome man tells me to do it too. No, Maddox apparently will just listen to anything handsome guys tell him to do. So Dick's current theory is that this handsome lawyer like basically tricked Maddox into thinking he had a case. But like if you read over his 60 page document, it is like this could not possibly hold water in court. Yes. You were saying before that like Sean, for example, wasn't implicated in this originally but now seems to be. How in God's name could like, you said it's 20 million per person. How was like, you know, Dick equally liable as like, you know, just one of the guests on the show or something. Okay. This seems acid. Here's where, okay. He's not only suing Dick. He's suing Dick's company. He's suing Patreon for not having taken down Dick's Patreon because he sees it, like he's been constantly trying to get them to take down Dick's Patreon, but like they won't do it. So he's suing them. He's suing Asterios. He's suing Madcucks. Madcucks who by the way- For 20 million dollars. He's suing Madcucks. Madcucks who is very clearly was at some point the biggest Maddox fan in the world. Like this guy clearly loved Maddox because he does his shtick perfectly. Now he's getting sued by the guy for $20 million. So yeah, at this point, no one's in Maddox's camp. But the worst part about this is that it's hugely expensive to get sued. You have to hire lawyers and everything. Some of these guys can't really handle that. Madcucks does not have the money to hire great lawyers. Asterios went into hiding immediately. Asterios just kind of blinked off the map for a few months and now he calls in and he'll only do it. He'll only like participate as other characters other than Asterios. Like he'll only comment on anything if he's performing as the enigma or some other weird character who speaks in riddles. So like. Natural. It's easy for me to believe that Maddox's lawyer is just a total fuck and kind of put him up to this. Because I mean, from Maddox's point of view, I can absolutely see that he has been through something real. Stuff, I mean, targeted harassment and from his point of view defamation, although we haven't heard much of his side of the story, he feels defamed. He feels like he's been targeted with harassment, which he very clearly has. Stuff like cyber squatting, these are crimes. And I could very easily see why he feels like he would need to talk to a lawyer at least. And I could very easily see why a person like Maddox talking to a lawyer from LA would get swindled into doing something fucking stupid. Like suing Patreon for $20 million. This is the we all fucked now. Cause literally everyone's fucked. Like this is not Maddox being evil. This is like. Maddox being incompetent. Yeah, this is don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity. Oh yeah, big time. Okay, and again, I do think, now there's been a lot of debate over like what is wrong with Maddox? Cause Dick always just says autism. There's been callers into the show who have their own theories because they think that Maddox seems too conniving in a way, or like he's too good at manipulating people to just be an autist. But I think it's mostly just learned behavior. I think he read a lot of books about manipulating people and thinks he can do it and he's not good at it. So I think that honestly, all of this was originally some grand scheme he had, but it failed so badly that now he's just doing whatever people asked. Like he has no ideas. Some lawyer had an idea and told him 400 million and he went, oh fuck, that'll save my dead career in having no money. So, this is where we are now and everyone is fucked. We are all fucked because, I mean Dick will live because he has lots of money from Patreon, but like for some of these people, it's like this is a huge fucking, yeah. For what I know of Maddox, his best skill is his writing. Right, like even you said yourself that he's not a talky guy. It's writing is where he really seems to be strong. I'm assuming, I'm gonna like answer my own question, I guess and say he's too egotistical, but why not just like start over as someone else? He's gonna have to before long. That's the only thing I can really imagine like saving Maddox at this point is if he just disappears as Maddox and like, or makes a big apology. Like I think there's a lot of people who want to forgive Maddox. Like even Dick up until the lawsuit, Dick would routinely say like, if Maddox ever wanted to do a show with him, he was like, I would do a show with him still. I just would not be nice to him anymore. Like I just would treat it like the debate I always wanted to have with him, you know, but he was, I don't think he feels that way anymore now that he's like real pissed at the guy, but you know, like I think there are a lot of fans who kind of want to see this man redeem himself, but at this point he is just going further into the extreme. What you wrote about how we are all fucked now because of this lawsuit, it's kind of very sadly true because I feel like no matter who wins this lawsuit, in a way, everyone loses. Because if Maddox wins the lawsuit, then it normalizes that it's okay to just make these spurious lawsuits against people like poor people and people who are like fans of yours. And yet if Dick wins, which he probably will, then that normalizes and legitimizes this kind of sick fucking culture where everybody has a personal army and every professional dispute devolves into harassment campaigns. See, both sides, we are, we're fucked no matter who wins. Everyone's fucked. This is the unfortunate thing. Like nuclear gas bomb, you gotta really think about this name, nuclear. There's a reason we don't use nuclear bombs, mutually assured destruction. And that's kind of the direction we're heading and not that Dick's going to be destroyed, but that like the results of this becoming a war is that Dick is not nice about it anymore and doesn't care what happens. He is now willing to involve like assholes on his side because at this point, when you sue someone for $400 million, you finally have given up some of your humanity in their eyes at least. Like if someone sues me for this amount, they are not a human to me anymore. They're just someone who needs to die. So I understand why Dick is taking this approach, even if it's, even though like honestly, the lawsuit is such a joke that it's obviously going to fail, but the fact that it's costing everyone so much money is enough that like people are just, so now everyone's dog piling on Maddox. And this is where we're at right now is that because of this lawsuit, because when money gets involved, everyone reports on it. This is like, this is why kick starters when they get big always get reported on by like Homestuck was suddenly talked about in mainstream media when the Kickstarter happened, you know, like, cause when people see $2 million, they're like, whoa, what does that mean? You know, so, so like, so now that there's $400 million floating around as a big ass fucking number, everyone wants to make videos about this. Everyone's got Maddox slam pieces. Everyone's got, now there is some interesting stuff. There's this guy called Rakita something. I don't, I haven't actually watched his videos, but I've heard they're really good where he just, he's like a lawyer who goes through the lawsuit and just explains in detail why it is so fucked and so badly written and why it will not work. But so like, if you watch Rakita's videos, you're probably confident that Maddox is not going to win this lawsuit. But like, again, it's a huge long pain in the ass. A lawsuit is like a years long process. Now, the drama from this is kind of, I mean, obviously this is still looming over everyone's heads, but the drama has kind of dwindled a little bit because we all know the state of affairs. There's a lawsuit. It's kind of been this way for a few months. It sucks. No one's happy about it. But this is where we are. And yeah, hopefully it doesn't get any worse than this. It has, I think, as a fan of the dick show, hurt the show, the lawsuit. Oh, definitely. Because it's just kind of like, I do kind of side with dick, but regardless of who you side with, it's sad and uncomfortable because it's real people's lives that are being destroyed. Maddox and dick, they're both getting constantly harassed by each other's fans. Both of their lives have been affected. And dick was a guy who talked about stepping in dog shit and ranted about it angrily, and it was funny, and you can relate to it. And now I listen to it. And now there's a $400 million lawsuit hanging over the thing. Now I put on the dick show and it's like, I don't want to fucking, this is sad. Yeah, especially when Asterios gets on, because Asterios, who by the way, works for one of the biggest ad companies in the world and is a genius at marketing, will really lay in that this is all depressing and horrible that Maddox has ruined his life. Like, dick tries to keep everything funny. Like his general policy is like, look, this all sucks shit, but I'm gonna make it funny. Asterios, not so much, he doesn't care. He'll just come in and like cry over it. It can be real fucking depressing. That's pretty funny. But yeah, that's pretty much it. And I mean, other than this, like all this goss is kind of, this all happens sort of in the background of the dick show. Like, obviously when something big happens, there's gonna be like a whole episode talking about it. But for the most part, these are all just like running stories that you kind of keep up with. And there's little updates here and there, little bits of new goss, you know, that are floating around the sphere. For the most part though, the dick show is just a fun show where dick, typically the first 45 minutes or so is just like Dick and Sean and Dick says what made him a rage this week goes on a fun rant just like the old days. And then the rest of it's like call-ins and guests and weird shit. And you know, you can turn it off after the first 50 minutes, you won't miss much. But you can listen to the whole thing, it can be fun. It's long as fuck, you're gonna end up behind. Honestly, I had to catch up to like, I had to watch like 10 episodes of catch up for this over the last week. And I had to be watching like nonstop all day to catch up on just 10 episodes cause they were all two and a half to three hours long. So dick show can be a little bit hard to keep up with especially now and you know, I would say it's lost a little bit of steam, but it's still fun. Lots of weird shit happens. They just established their own cryptocurrency, dickles. So there's still weird fun stuff going on in the show. You don't gotta pay attention to the goss but it's a huge part of why the show has been successful. Which I apparently have, but I don't because I don't understand cryptocurrency. Someone please explain it to me. Where are my dickles? He need my dickles. So in one thing, there was a great quote from Dick about this that I really love where he justified the, like putting so much emphasis on the drama in his show. Because especially early on, a lot of people complained that the show was like too drama focused. And he was just like, I'm sorry that I've taken this story of two human archetypes having a classic battle of the ages, like a real human story and made sequential entertainment out of it every week, just like a real show. Sorry I did that. And I was just like, yeah, I mean that's what this is. The reason Dick is playing this up is because he understands that even though it's happening to him, that makes it even funnier to him. Like the fact that this is happening, he thinks is the funniest thing in the world. Even if this is shit, this is the funniest thing that has ever happened. And he'll insist that over and over again. He loves that this is happening. Because this is a story you can only get on the internet folks. Like this is crazy. This is all crazy. And that's why I'm doing a lecture on it. You've all been entertained for hours just listening to some other guy talk about it. That's how great of a story it is. So yeah, there you go. That's everything. Catch up with them both. They're both worth listening to. But again, you can skip a lot of the Dick show. It's up, I mean, it's long. It's real long, guys. That's it. See you next Tuesday. See you next Tuesday. I found the Dickles actually, hang on. Wait, wait, wait. There's my Dickles! Hey! Hey! Hey! What? I think I'm gonna go watch them because probably the universe right now, my friend. Hey!