The Legend of the Homeless Cats

Have you ever heard of PF Changs? Of the homeless cats? It’s a tale I have alluded to before here, but it needs its own space.

*Lights cigarettes*

A theme I’ve been exploring at THE ZONE this year is the cannibalistic nature of the online media. I wrote:

Scandal, intrigue and hostility are often more compelling than impersonal imaginative and educational content. Fans have also learned that it allows them to be participants themselves and not passive consumers of entertainment. The more ambitious of them rise to prominence off the backs of the creators they deride and critique.

Thus, anybody who fails to create entertaining content is in danger of becoming entertaining content. Just as spiderlings eat their mothers, audiences tear down a creator once they have no inspiration or their personal demons become too much to suppress.

In one of the more compelling moments filmed inside the classic studios of The Joe Rogan Experience¹, the world’s most famous podcaster tried to convince his buddy Brendan Schaub, a UFC fighter, to give up MMA for the sake of his health. It was hard to watch, because poor Schaub had effectively been ambushed in front of millions of people, but it was also rather moving. Schaub was a funny, interesting person who could have success behind a microphone, Rogan told him, and he shouldn’t jeopardize those opportunities by taking damage in the ring.

He had no idea what sort of monster he had created.

Schaub had been quite a charming and popular guy in the UFC (once he had dropped his arrogant “legend killer” gimmick). His podcast with the comedian Bryan Callen, The Fighter and the Kid, made for easy listening. I remember laughing at the episode where they discussed Rogan giving Schaub “the talk” — with Schaub mocking Callen for flip-flopping between them.

As Schaub found success in podcasting and comedy, though, his head began to swell as if he had been sucking on an air hose.

Most of his success had come from being friends with Rogan. It was like opening a coffee shop when you were best buds with the head of Starbucks. There’s no shame in that. Everyone has to start somewhere. Schaub’s problem was that he behaved as if he had achieved success through his blood, sweat and tears.

He was soon handed a comically undeserved Showtime special — the comedic value of which can be discerned from the fact that he attributed a Breakfast at Tiffanys-level Asian accent to the UFC’s doctor when the doctor, Greg Hsu, speaks better English than Schaub. The special earned a 1.7/10 rating on IMDB. 

At the same time, Schaub had picked up quite a bullying streak — even talking down to Bryan Callen, the comedic veteran who had first taken a chance on him. Pseudonymous comedy critic and MMA commentator Beige Frequency made a satirical YouTube documentary about him — which was soon deleted as a result of a copyright claim.

Around this time, the subreddit of The Fighter and the Kid turned on him. Instead of being a forum for his fans, it became a forum for his enemies, who were annoyed by his perceived hubris and incompetence. Schaub had a dismissive attitude towards “haters”, or, in Schaubenese, “haders”. He viewed them “the same way I view a homeless guy critiquing my art,” he said, “They do not madder.” A “hader” opening an online account, he said, was also “the same as if a cat created a profile”. The denizens of the TFATK subreddit began to call themselves “homeless cats”. Schaub complained about people giving him advice even when they were mere waiters at PF Changs. The homeless cats began to call the subreddit “PF Changs”. 

They developed a whole dialect around mush mouthed Schaubisms. Dedicated posters have a great “work ethnic” (which Schaub often attributes to himself). Events under discussion are debated with reference to “the nairdiv” (“narrative” being a word that Schaub often uses when attempting to sound smart). When a female comedian accused a married peer who sounded very much like Schaub of asking her to walk him to his truck, the term “trugg walg” took off as an inspired piece of sexual euphemism — even inspiring its own popular song.

This all sounds quite mean — and it is. But Schaub has an unpleasant habit of justifying the subreddit’s critical focus with his own unpleasantness. He starts feuds with people who have done nothing to him (and then comes off comically worse). He makes wild allegations against his peers, in bouts of feline-fuelled paranoia — dangling the name of Rogan over them like some kind of sword of comedy Damocles. He has built such a toxic work environment at his floundering podcast empire “Thiccc Boy Studios” that when he fired his social media manager, Mark Harley, the man headed to PF Changs to expose such unflattering details as that Schaub allegedly paid for YouTube views on his ill-fated second special “Gringo Papi” and has an addiction to peeing in the sink at his studio in front of his staff. Such was the annoyance, or opportunism, of the ex-employee — and such is the carelessness of Schaub — that he signed into Schaub’s official Twitter account — the password of which had never been changed — to promote a podcast in which he lambasted him. 

Critical to all this, though, is that as much as Schaub sounds like an arrogant, bullying, dishonest character, he does not seem to be a real villain. It’s really grim that he has bought not just one but two demanding and potentially dangerous dogs over the wishes of his less than dog-loving — but it’s also pretty funny. (The dogs were probably off for being rehomed.) To the extent that he is a villain, he is a sort of Elmer Fudd character — inventing diabolical schemes that farcically backfire. 

Some of his peers, on the other hand, have been accused of rape and abuse — accusations (true or false, and I can’t speak to how true they are) from which there is no comedy to wring. They won’t have massive fora devoted to them because it’s not an entertaining subject to discuss.

So, for all its frequent and often justified outbursts of moralism, it isn’t outrage that has attracted a whopping 100,000 “homeless cats” to the TFATK subreddit but entertainment. Schaub is a fun guy to dislike — which makes me feel a bit bad for him, inasmuch as there genuinely evil people who don’t have a single “hader” never mind 100,000. But it would be ludicrous to deny the humor.

There’s a broader point as well. The rise of podcasting encouraged some comedians and commentators to believe that they didn’t really need a product. They didn’t really need to create anything at all. They could just be their own big beautiful selves and people would adore them. It can be true. Some people have enough wit and charisma that they can stroll into a room, sit down and make magic. (I wish, for example, that Peter Cook had been alive in the podcasting age.)

But it’s a rare skill and it gets old really fast. At such times, “content creators” are liable to discover that they stop being entertainers and become entertainment — transmogrifying into the hapless raw materials for criticism, satire, gossip and abuse. Other subreddits have become hostile towards the performers they were established to support — because of valid grievances but also because of the fun cooperative nature of memetic mockery. Hey, it beats listening to other people enjoy themselves.

This also speaks to the dangers of pretending to be someone you are not. That is easier when famous people are glimpsed for ten minutes at a time at awards ceremonies and on talk shows. It’s much more difficult when they are ranting on Twitter and rambling on their podcasts. People often talk about how bad social media has been for the reputations of the rich and famous but I don’t think it has changed them into different people but shed light on elements of who they always were. Piecing together the contradictions between the image and the reality is a great little detective game. You think yourself beyond it at your peril — because homeless cats are always lurking in the shadows.

1. I originally stated that this was filmed as part of a JRE episode but it was in fact a TFATK7-year-old episode being filmed inside Rogan’s studio.