I actually believe most of what Mitchell says. God, some of you people are no better than Redditors. I get that skepticism can be a virtue, but after awhile the constant beeping of your bullshit detectors sound like inverse virtue signaling to me.
I have a completely different, but similarly unbelievable life story (wait, one year your family went to Disney world twice, and five years later you're homeless sleeping on relatives floors in Philadelphia? Wait, you were born with brain damage and had to go to Easter Seals, but you got a fellowship for graduate school?) Guess what, contradiction is actually pretty common as most people's lives aren't linear in the kind of episodic fashion people here seem to expect.
Florida IS a whole different world. My parents lived there for a bit and almost every industry has a seedy, sleazy edge to it. I believe that Mitchell is on the spectrum because he seems to be very focused on Rules and Frames and Percentages. A decade ago he would have been probably considered to have high functioning Asperger's.
I haven't finished yet as I am only 38 minutes in, but what is the Abortion video he references? This is why I also believe Mitchell is right when he talks about being on the spectrum, as he does this very spectrumy thing where he assumes we all understand his reference points.
Good job, Katie. This is one of the better eps so far!
I didn’t hate this episode like some of the comments do, but the last fifteen minutes are basically a PR piece for a book and I don’t think the podcast should be doing that, even for people Katie likes.
The background on Vice and their transition from frat house to woke was awesome. I think there’s material for a lot of stories along this line. That said, I think Mitchell’s own story was a bit underplayed.
But when Mitchell started talking about Calloway it felt like he really slipped into PR mode and started working Katie. He was grinding hard to make Calloway sound like the next F Scott Fitzgerald and kinda dismissed the shady stuff she did that Katie kept bringing up. Like seriously Katie needs to send him a bill for the ad time.
I would be great to pull Mitchell in as a semi-regular guest weighing in on PR strategies of Internet main characters.
Katie & Jesse, I'mma let you finish, but this breaking news has to be shared with the BaRpod community: someone is crowdfunding a Rebekah Jones documentary right now: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joshfox/rebekah-jones-whistleblower?ref=section-homepage-featured-project A member of the BaRpod team should back it at $1 so you guys can follow the updates on it if the creator switches updates to be "backers only" like that enemies list project on Kickstarter a few years ago.
I had to stop listening after his gleeful retelling of his puppy mill childhood. I’m not extreme, I have a purebred dog myself, but puppy mills suck and are horrible for both the sick, mistreated dogs and the heartbroken people who buy and fall in love with a dog only to have it meet a tragic and early death due to poor breeding and health screening. I automatically distrust anyone who knows how the sausage is made at puppy mills and doesn’t see a problem. What would Moose say?
Enjoyed the episode, really interested in the story, but it wasn’t really the whole story - it was an entertaining softball interview. Usually Katie does a lot of follow up digging and I get that it’s hard to do that without a cohost for conversational framing, but this guy was so braggadocios that I can’t completely trust everything I heard. He and Katie rail a bit on the nepotism and transactional friendliness of media types, but it almost seem like that’s what was happening here to a degree. I bet most of it is true, but you’ve gotta have your bullshit meter finally tuned and prepared when you speak to people who talk this way. Otherwise, small and important inflated details easily slip through as fact.
I'm kind of flabbergasted by the autism truthers here.
So I've mentioned before that I have Aspergers and ADHD, diagnosed through neuropsychiatric testing, and I completely believe he's autistic - at least, the same flavor of sperg I am. We'd get along like a house on fire. Probably. There's different flavors of autism - some of us are just socially impaired enough to not be able to adroitly handle complex social interactions in real time, but have other areas where we're more impaired.
The "exaggerating" /"lying"? Some of it is definitely generalizing errors - or at least, the phenomena of having difficulty of judging what people already know (beginning in the middle if the story, sort of), not being able to always understand/communicate what details are important and generalizing the wrong ones, and THEN not understanding that your spergy overly concrete generalization will be not be interpreted in the way you actually intend by your audience. It's the theory of mind issue I struggle with a lot - I either skip steps and lose people, or overly explain minutiae no one gives two fucks about.
Extraverted autists are a thing, some of us find people interesting, and we try to figure out ways to, if we can't be like everyone else, find a way to make our weirdness palatable in social situations, and that kind of flamboyance/theatrical mode is one way people do it.
I'm also not shocked he's in PR, especially crisis management. I'm in marketing research and strategy - those of us who are lucky enough to be wordcels, highly intelligent, and find people and human behavior fascinating tend to be really good at creating models of certain kinds of social behavior. Crisis management is basically predicting what inputs will make certain groups leave you alone. From going through it himself he has good, concrete detailed exoerience to have a pretty good idea on how journalists react, how crowds react, and how a cancelled person should/should not react. Makes sense to me.
I can see how he could have done a lot of sketchy/unethical stuff at Vice and not understood that even if 'everyone' knew they were skirting/crossing the line. I've been in situations where I've shrugged, thought "Oh, I guess this is just how things work" and tried to replicate what others were doing with all the subtlety of a bull in a China shop. I bet everyone else emailing with "the other side" was being much more careful about it, adding plausible deniability or covering their tracks better. I bet he was even chosen for it because of his naivety/lack of guile.
The thing with the lawyer also made me laugh, because that's the exact kind of thing I'd've done when I was younger - "They're breaking the law! Therefore a lawyer will be able to help me!" it's such characteristic autistic naivety.
I see a lot of people hated it, but i didn't mind this episode. I also pinged that there was most likely some exaggerating happening by Mitchell, re: drunk friends fighting PETA, beating up a jock, etc. I got the vibe that these were not outright lies, but embellishments. Which, eh. Kinda lame, but not an egregious offense imo. The REAL issue for me was the 15 minute adulation and unchecked praise by Mitchell of Caroline Fucking Calloway. Like...what is happening??? I adore minor pop culture side characters as well as internet drama, so I'm well aware of Calloway and even find her to be pretty entertaining/undeniably alluring in a manic, WASP-y, unhinged way. That being said...why is there someone on fucking Blocked & Reported ravinggg about her being the great American millennial author?? Like, she is decidedly NOT that. She's smart and semi-entertaining, yes, but has anyone checked Goodreads regarding Scammer? The book has a 2 star rating. It's being ripped to shreds on every reader review site. Isn't BARpod's whole thing being critical of and deconstructing what the mainstream media represents and is presenting to the world? Maybe they shouldn't be completely trusting WaPo reporting on an industry insider like Calloway. I dont know, the Calloway bit was just so jarring and I kept thinking, why is Caroline Calloway being discussed in this manner on this particular podcast?? Bringing up the book is, I suppose, sort of relevant, but letting a PR guy ramble on and on with no pushback about his client/friend being the next Truman Capote was, um....odd, to say the least.
Ah yes, Caroline Calloway, the true voice of our generation. And a true victim in all circumstances. The thing that makes her at all interesting is how incredibly spoiled and messy she is; to completely write that off makes her boring and no one will want to spend $60 on her self-published book. Also a little disappointing Katie didn’t push back on any of his ridiculous claims about her.
I feel like the weird art kid I was never friends with just cornered me and told his life story at our high school reunion.
Jesse, can you please do one of your deep-dive fact checks this episode. I don't think I believe anything this guys says.
I actually believe most of what Mitchell says. God, some of you people are no better than Redditors. I get that skepticism can be a virtue, but after awhile the constant beeping of your bullshit detectors sound like inverse virtue signaling to me.
I have a completely different, but similarly unbelievable life story (wait, one year your family went to Disney world twice, and five years later you're homeless sleeping on relatives floors in Philadelphia? Wait, you were born with brain damage and had to go to Easter Seals, but you got a fellowship for graduate school?) Guess what, contradiction is actually pretty common as most people's lives aren't linear in the kind of episodic fashion people here seem to expect.
Florida IS a whole different world. My parents lived there for a bit and almost every industry has a seedy, sleazy edge to it. I believe that Mitchell is on the spectrum because he seems to be very focused on Rules and Frames and Percentages. A decade ago he would have been probably considered to have high functioning Asperger's.
I haven't finished yet as I am only 38 minutes in, but what is the Abortion video he references? This is why I also believe Mitchell is right when he talks about being on the spectrum, as he does this very spectrumy thing where he assumes we all understand his reference points.
Good job, Katie. This is one of the better eps so far!
I didn’t hate this episode like some of the comments do, but the last fifteen minutes are basically a PR piece for a book and I don’t think the podcast should be doing that, even for people Katie likes.
The background on Vice and their transition from frat house to woke was awesome. I think there’s material for a lot of stories along this line. That said, I think Mitchell’s own story was a bit underplayed.
But when Mitchell started talking about Calloway it felt like he really slipped into PR mode and started working Katie. He was grinding hard to make Calloway sound like the next F Scott Fitzgerald and kinda dismissed the shady stuff she did that Katie kept bringing up. Like seriously Katie needs to send him a bill for the ad time.
I would be great to pull Mitchell in as a semi-regular guest weighing in on PR strategies of Internet main characters.
Katie & Jesse, I'mma let you finish, but this breaking news has to be shared with the BaRpod community: someone is crowdfunding a Rebekah Jones documentary right now: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joshfox/rebekah-jones-whistleblower?ref=section-homepage-featured-project A member of the BaRpod team should back it at $1 so you guys can follow the updates on it if the creator switches updates to be "backers only" like that enemies list project on Kickstarter a few years ago.
There are only 3 languages in America: Coastal elite, Midwest maga, and Gay as a French horn
I had to stop listening after his gleeful retelling of his puppy mill childhood. I’m not extreme, I have a purebred dog myself, but puppy mills suck and are horrible for both the sick, mistreated dogs and the heartbroken people who buy and fall in love with a dog only to have it meet a tragic and early death due to poor breeding and health screening. I automatically distrust anyone who knows how the sausage is made at puppy mills and doesn’t see a problem. What would Moose say?
'The whole world became Sarah Lawrence'. Hilarious. And true.
Enjoyed the episode, really interested in the story, but it wasn’t really the whole story - it was an entertaining softball interview. Usually Katie does a lot of follow up digging and I get that it’s hard to do that without a cohost for conversational framing, but this guy was so braggadocios that I can’t completely trust everything I heard. He and Katie rail a bit on the nepotism and transactional friendliness of media types, but it almost seem like that’s what was happening here to a degree. I bet most of it is true, but you’ve gotta have your bullshit meter finally tuned and prepared when you speak to people who talk this way. Otherwise, small and important inflated details easily slip through as fact.
I'm kind of flabbergasted by the autism truthers here.
So I've mentioned before that I have Aspergers and ADHD, diagnosed through neuropsychiatric testing, and I completely believe he's autistic - at least, the same flavor of sperg I am. We'd get along like a house on fire. Probably. There's different flavors of autism - some of us are just socially impaired enough to not be able to adroitly handle complex social interactions in real time, but have other areas where we're more impaired.
The "exaggerating" /"lying"? Some of it is definitely generalizing errors - or at least, the phenomena of having difficulty of judging what people already know (beginning in the middle if the story, sort of), not being able to always understand/communicate what details are important and generalizing the wrong ones, and THEN not understanding that your spergy overly concrete generalization will be not be interpreted in the way you actually intend by your audience. It's the theory of mind issue I struggle with a lot - I either skip steps and lose people, or overly explain minutiae no one gives two fucks about.
Extraverted autists are a thing, some of us find people interesting, and we try to figure out ways to, if we can't be like everyone else, find a way to make our weirdness palatable in social situations, and that kind of flamboyance/theatrical mode is one way people do it.
I'm also not shocked he's in PR, especially crisis management. I'm in marketing research and strategy - those of us who are lucky enough to be wordcels, highly intelligent, and find people and human behavior fascinating tend to be really good at creating models of certain kinds of social behavior. Crisis management is basically predicting what inputs will make certain groups leave you alone. From going through it himself he has good, concrete detailed exoerience to have a pretty good idea on how journalists react, how crowds react, and how a cancelled person should/should not react. Makes sense to me.
I can see how he could have done a lot of sketchy/unethical stuff at Vice and not understood that even if 'everyone' knew they were skirting/crossing the line. I've been in situations where I've shrugged, thought "Oh, I guess this is just how things work" and tried to replicate what others were doing with all the subtlety of a bull in a China shop. I bet everyone else emailing with "the other side" was being much more careful about it, adding plausible deniability or covering their tracks better. I bet he was even chosen for it because of his naivety/lack of guile.
The thing with the lawyer also made me laugh, because that's the exact kind of thing I'd've done when I was younger - "They're breaking the law! Therefore a lawyer will be able to help me!" it's such characteristic autistic naivety.
I see a lot of people hated it, but i didn't mind this episode. I also pinged that there was most likely some exaggerating happening by Mitchell, re: drunk friends fighting PETA, beating up a jock, etc. I got the vibe that these were not outright lies, but embellishments. Which, eh. Kinda lame, but not an egregious offense imo. The REAL issue for me was the 15 minute adulation and unchecked praise by Mitchell of Caroline Fucking Calloway. Like...what is happening??? I adore minor pop culture side characters as well as internet drama, so I'm well aware of Calloway and even find her to be pretty entertaining/undeniably alluring in a manic, WASP-y, unhinged way. That being said...why is there someone on fucking Blocked & Reported ravinggg about her being the great American millennial author?? Like, she is decidedly NOT that. She's smart and semi-entertaining, yes, but has anyone checked Goodreads regarding Scammer? The book has a 2 star rating. It's being ripped to shreds on every reader review site. Isn't BARpod's whole thing being critical of and deconstructing what the mainstream media represents and is presenting to the world? Maybe they shouldn't be completely trusting WaPo reporting on an industry insider like Calloway. I dont know, the Calloway bit was just so jarring and I kept thinking, why is Caroline Calloway being discussed in this manner on this particular podcast?? Bringing up the book is, I suppose, sort of relevant, but letting a PR guy ramble on and on with no pushback about his client/friend being the next Truman Capote was, um....odd, to say the least.
Surely the most unbelievable thing is that he knew a trans person who never complained.
People in this comment section are wild. “I think this man is lying about autism. Also, these twelve times he acted socially abnormal annoyed me.”
This episode was one of my favourites. Good job.
Ah yes, Caroline Calloway, the true voice of our generation. And a true victim in all circumstances. The thing that makes her at all interesting is how incredibly spoiled and messy she is; to completely write that off makes her boring and no one will want to spend $60 on her self-published book. Also a little disappointing Katie didn’t push back on any of his ridiculous claims about her.
Oh man, I love the Gold Star Gay. What a star. Reminds me of what life used to be like before the Left was overtaken by a cult.