Damn bois, I have been up the last few nights before bed reading through this thread and its both hilarious and eye opening.
A little bit of background:
As the community is aging, I am seeing a lot of the older guys leaving and a lot of information being lost to the sands of time so I figured I would contribute my information before it is also forgotten.
In short I started off as a Maddox fan back in 2000 as a middle-schooler. I enjoyed this content and back in the day it as one of the few sites that would easily load on my 28.8k dialup connection. I purchased his Alphabet of Manliness and went through every xMission article multiple times, enjoying a great laugh. During my early years in college I remember stumbling upon the Nothing-Toxic(maybe Orgish?) clips of Dick Masterson on Doctor Phil and I fell in love with his work, reading through all of the satire. It was really awesome stuff back in its day and if I recall I believe for a while Maddox had
www.mabtw.com under this "cool shit i like" links at the bottom of every page. So of course, in ~2013 when Maddox announced a podcast on his webpage, I was fucking stoked then even more stoked when it turned out his cohost was none other than Dick Masterson himself.
I enjoyed the entire BPiTU saga. Tim Chaingzzz, Denzel, the apple test, etc. and, like most folks, was shocked when it ended early. I continued to listen to both of their separate podcasts despite Maddox's being absolute dogshit.
I was very involved in the TDS community from the start but as life got busier I became more of a casual fan. I went to multiple road rage events, using them as my sort of mini-vacations during an otherwise hectic work schedule. The first event in Philly was absolutely an awesome time. Very cheap tickets, cheap liquor, and located right on South Street in Philly. I was an alcoholic at the time so it made the event all the better. To be honest, I blacked out on the walk back home and woke up pissing in a random porto-potty in a construction site early that morning so I don't remember the show entirely but I do remember it was very loud and completely absent of security.
The Community:
As the show matured past the "Maddox lost" phase it started to shift more from a libertarian boomer-hate tank into this weird degenerate furry/polyamory/tranny show base and I started finding myself turning the episodes off halfway through and then altogether skipping entire weeks. I'm not too sure at what point this happened but somewhere after episode ~100 the entire fanbase just shifted to degenerates and had much more of a Howard Stern feel and a lot less of the original feel that attracted me to BPiTU.
The TDS community was always been divided up amongst four main groups: Reddit, Facebook, Discord, and IRC.
The Reddit started off more based but as the fanbase grew the hordes of furries and college kids nerfed it quite hard. Dick's participation in the group meant that the subreddit seemed to be interactive which I think is one of the reasons is steamed way past 5k members within the first few weeks.
The Facebook group was cancerous and was filled with the kind of people who were 100% all natural lolcow. The kind of people who openly have suboxone addictions and use their real name in discussions involving illegal and degenerate things. After being nuked multiple times it seemed that the TDS Facebook died out rather young and deservedly. It was dogshit and at the Road Rage events it was evident who was from the Facebook groups as the members were always the most openly vulgar and disrespectful idiots in the entire crowd. I'm not one for censorship, but this community 100% had it coming and needed to be neutered.
The Discord was always a weird one. There was a core group of 10-20 folks who would never fucking log off and constantly had to be online. IMO it was mainly busy during the Sunday live feeds as a sort of green-room or warmup for the live streams. I spent very little time here so I can't comment past that.
The IRC is the gem of the 4 communities that tends to be overlooked during the entire saga. Mainly because the members tend to be working professionals, programmers, the kind of people who are old enough and competent enough to use an IRC node. With that being said, the IRC was a spot where Dick used to idle quite a bit. He was very engaged with the fans there was would notoriously respond almost any time of the day, rapidly, so long as he was not asleep or podcasting.
The IRC split
As I mentioned above, the IRC was quite busy at times and would regularly host 80-100 active members for the better part of 2016-2019. Some of the highlights include: Denzel leaving because he was directly called a crybaby bitch and being accused of grifting for black sympathy despite being a computer engineer for San Diego, the #feminism raid which resulted in legitimate levels of lulz, and consistent based and balanced quality rants about how Dax sucked, etc. Dax himself was very responsive to this and would constantly bullshit back and forth with the IRC guys. However, the IRC had a somewhat code-of-silence about their actions and generally the channel would contain itself and not spill any information.
At some point, ~3 months before the episodes where JLH was guest hosting, there was an interaction where JLH nodded that she had been at some point in contact with Dick years back while he was participating in amateur body-building. JLH was a fairly regular user in the IRC community and would drop little hints which would be impossible to know unless you were somehow living with Dick. After a while it came out that JLH had filed for divorce with her husband in Texas, then on a whim packed her car and drove to California to live with Dick and 80's girl in an implied poly relationship. She continued to post until an incident at the Dallas Road Rage event in which a few of the members complained that JLH cold shouldered them during the event, then pretended it didn't happen on the IRC channel later that weekend. She would never log back into the IRC after that confrontation.
The IRC then splintered off into two channels after a particular Dickhead and cohorts took issue with Dick living in a poly relationship but simultaneously making profit for making fun of Maddox for attempting the same exact thing. It was somewhat of a hot button for a while but the IRC in general seems to think that Dick is a degenerate. After being confronted on his degeneracy multiple times, Dick has rarely posted on the IRC and when he does its notoriously late or brief.
Some tidbits:
Dick practiced Wing-Chun for some time. Being involved with this community I was able to verify this but out of respect for his trainer and the retard MMA community at large I'm going to let that one lie. I think he practiced for 1-2 years but I cannot verify his time in the gym.
Dick's father is very well off and they grew up with a mother who worked speech pathology and a father who was a business manager and day trader. Allegedly his dad owned 2 McDonalds franchises and given his constant mention of the Costa Rica trips as a kid, being a student pilot, and going to Cal Poly for computer engineering, this seems right in line with an upper-middle class threshold.
According to IRC posters Dick claims to have graduated college then immediately founded a start-up using his knowledge of SEO information. Dick claimed to have been working with some Indian Reservation in the early mid-late 2000's programming those old "NO PRESCRIPTION CIALIS, VIAGRA" adverts you would constantly see on porn and gore sites. Dick claims at the time there was a loophole where Indian reservations could sell cock pills without a prescription and he was being paid a healthy monthly sum to manage their traffic with the understanding that the loophole would be closed by the USFDA in ~2 years. My understanding is that Dick became very wealthy off of that gimmick and when the cash flow stopped, he used the money to live in downtown LA and take up UCB acting as a hobby.
Somehow "Coach" and Dick are related through some sort of computer-science related venture. My bet is that they were working at this alleged dick pill front straight out of college.
Why I wasted my time bitching:
I've never taken a huge issue with Dick on his degeneracy. I am frustrated that the community shifted as it did but unfortunately that is life with almost any radio show, podcast, etc. in the internet age. I am frustrated with how quickly he embraced the degeneracy instead of slowly trying to rite his ship and move to other venues instead of continuing to milk furries and troons out of money.
The biggest issue that I have is the fact that Dick has always poised himself as "every man" Dick while mocking Maddox throughout the last ~6 years. Dax undoubtedly grew up in a very well privileged family with far more than enough to survive but constantly grifts for handouts and donations. Dick seems to go out of his way to downplay his upper class family and in one of the earlier episodes with "Coach" you can hear an entire segment come to a screeching halt when Coach makes an offhand joke about the Herrera family renting multiple Land Cruisers during an excursion in Costa Rica.
Dax was pulling $30k a month during the court case era but refused to lend money to Coke-in-Nose for a law suit which was undoubtedly caused but Dax's own actions. Dick closed his house at $1.1m according to the doxxing last year so hes in no way hurting for money but tries to play off every minor inconvenience as being broke or some fault of politicians screwing the middle class.
He's also notoriously cheap and is known for shafting his artists or fucking with their money ($50... $50 fucking dollars) when it's evident that he is in no way hurting for cash. One of those would later contribute to a suicide that is never mentioned.
Say what we will about Maddox but the guy worked his way out of lower middle class immigrant family and made his own money. I have to respect that, regardless of the lolcow that he has since become.
Anyways, that's all of the information I have. I've expressed my autism for the evening.
