Hidden Cameras & Mushrooms with Diplo I Scumbag Dad DSH #407

I think one of their

cardinal sins is that they pretend like it's random.

A guy did a video where

he approached, he approached a disabled kid and his dad, you know, I don't have a dollar.

Do you have any money for me?

The kid just happens to be a fan of Travis Barker.

But that was a super well-planned thing.

Like the guy had contacted the family months ago.

The dad had already agreed to be part of this play.

But in fact, this was like a well-planned and articulated advertisement.

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Welcome back to the show guys.

I'm your host as always Sean Kelly.

We're here on the digital social hour.

We're here with scumbag dad.

And I gotta say, you don't seem like a scumbag.

Yeah, the name, the name is

sort of evolved when when it first started.

When it first started, I used the name scumbag dad to sort of make fun of a bunch of like nice guy dads on TikTok.

You know, I saw them, you know, people like Korean Dad and Proud Dad, they're treating the camera like a kid.

They're like, oh, hey, let's go get grapes or something.

And I was like, well, wouldn't it be funny if they were negligent or alcoholic or, you know, they were actually criminals?

And so.

As time went on, I wanted the name to be sort of subversive.

I wanted it to be like, okay, you're getting information from a guy called your scumbag dad.

Like, is that really trustworthy?

And so I've sort of built it on from there.

No, I'm actually, I think I'm a pretty good dad.

I've got a kid.

Nice.

And I hang out with him all the time, and I think I'm giving him a pretty good childhood.

Okay.

So you put these nice guys out of business and then you became a nice guy.

Yeah, yeah, pretty much so.

Yeah.

Once I had a kid, it's not so much that the goal was ever to put them out of business, but I wanted to like highlight that it's sort of more funny if.

the story is more silly.

Right.

You know, like it's very easy to go to the camera and be like, hey, let's go get grapes.

but for us to like take the kid or take the camera on a drug deal or something like that, I thought was like inherently funnier.

Because I wanted to do action movies.

You know, at the end of the day, like when I started to do TikTok, I wanted to do like high-octane action shorts, but TikTok kept banning me over and over again.

Why?

Because there was too much violence and implied drug use.

You know what I mean?

Because the guidelines were very strict.

You know what I mean?

They would say, I would get a video taken down because of a drug reference.

And so now I'd need to change the language.

So it's not, you know, it's now it's special sugar.

Now I have to say it's special sugar instead of like a different type of thing.

And TikTok would ban a video if now, if someone throws a punch, that's okay.

But if someone throws a punch that is, that connects on camera, they're taking the video down.

Really?

And I got banned.

I got post-banned so many times about two years ago, I was like, I have to kill the series.

I had like a huge vision for the series.

And even though it's what like blew me up on TikTok, I don't really think that's what I'm known for anymore.

Now I'm known for like making weird satire and like deconstructive comedy on on like bigger creators and trends.

So yeah, I think I think

I keep the name.

I keep the name your scumbag dad because I want it to be one of those sort of off-putting things.

Like you don't expect this like wild guy with a mullet called your scumbag dad to be speaking facts.

And I like coming at comedy and I like coming at critique from that angle.

Did you have that name before you had a kid?

No, no.

Well, I'm sorry.

Yes, I actually had the name Scumbag Dad before I had a kid because my entire goal was to

sort of make fun of like nice guy dads.

Like the Scumbag Dad project started very simply, but then I wanted to use it to actually make fun of parasocial relationships.

I had a storyline that I wanted to progress that ended up getting nerfed by TikTok.

But I wanted to show people that just because someone loves you and just because somebody's fun doesn't mean they have your best interests in mind.

And you could become like a worse person by choosing them over you.

Like a lot of the comments in Scumbag Dad videos were like, still better dad than mine, even though like the dad character literally took them on like a

drug deal or like a trap, like a like made the kid an accessory to a crime.

People are like, well, he's fun and he's funny.

And that is what I wanted to deconstruct.

Like long term, I wanted the story to evolve such that the main character becomes horrible.

And I wanted people to leave the series knowing like it would have been better just not to ever trust the dad character.

But life happened.

You you know, times changed.

And now I'm just a regular dad who makes like crazy skits online that make fun of other creators.

Nice.

Yeah.

You built a huge following, three mil on YouTube, six mil TikTok.

What were those first few viral videos about?

Well, when I first started, I only had a couple viral videos.

I started, my first viral video ever was actually a watch video.

Not this watch, but a different one.

It was a Clock 2.

And I had

hardly 2,000 followers.

I was just sort of using TikTok as a way to

promote music that I was posting to YouTube and stuff.

And I viewed it as very subsidiary.

Once I posted that watch video and I got 2 million views, I was like, oh, it's possible to grow here in a way that I can't on YouTube.

So I started to expand.

I started to make skits.

So watch videos were the start.

And then I made a really dumb song about putting an egg on my wife's head.

And it was real.

Like I made the song because I knew I had eggs in the fridge and I had a friend over and I'm like, let's do a dumb song that's like part prank, part like weird musical.

And so I literally cooked an egg.

I put it on my wife's head while she was asleep.

And that song like went super nuclear.

So that was like the first sort of big hit.

And then I started to get a little weirder with the skits until the Scumbag Dad project was like the main thing for a little more than a year and a half.

And then as I started to get banned more, I started to do more

satire.

I would pick like larger creators or things that were trending and I would, you know, find meat to pick at them.

Right.

And then I would find a funny way like or an absurdist way to make fun of that.

Yeah, I've seen you go out some big creators.

I saw you go after people that use hidden camera for their pranks, right?

Yeah, I think hidden cameras are like a real pox on society.

And I think that a lot of people aren't really educated enough to understand that.

If you film in public, any creator knows if you've got a cell phone out or a camera out in public, you know, 99% of people walking by, they're going to say, as long as I'm not in the shot, I don't care if you're filming, whatever, as long as you're not in the shot, as long as you're not in my way, they don't care.

But a lot of folks who don't create, they don't see that.

They don't see how upset someone can get when they even think they're in your video.

And so creators who are fairly selfish, they understand they can get around that by just using the hidden camera.

So, okay, if you aren't very creative, you want to, say you're not very creative and you want to succeed on social media.

Well, if you can't sing, dance, act, edit, whatever, like, what are you really going to do?

Well, it's really easy to strap on a hidden camera and turn other people into your actors, whether they know it or not.

And then what, the way things have evolved, like it's basically a prank.

And as times evolved, people have started to view pranksters as like cringy and horrible, right?

But now they've taken that ethos and they ameliorate it with a money giveaway.

They put on the hidden camera, they film them, they screw with them.

It's basically a prank, but oh,

I'm going to give them $1,000 at the end, so now it's okay.

And that's where we start to get into like weird concepts of ethics.

Is that what I think a lot of the audience, a lot of the short form audience doesn't understand the definition of work.

Work is not just swinging a hammer and hitting a nail.

Work is giving your image and your voice and presentation to someone.

When someone doesn't know they're on camera and they essentially behave normally in front of an influencer, they have become an actor in a play that they never agreed to.

And part of the reason that that influencer chose that person is probably because of their look.

You know, a lot of the kindness videos tend to involve folks, they tend to involve minorities, people, disabled people, people who, when you initially see them on camera, there's somewhat of an interest there, somewhat of an interest because a lot of us don't get close to homeless folks.

A lot of us don't get that close to people who aren't doing well.

But immediately, when they're on camera in that first second, there's immediate interest by the audience.

And even though that homeless guy is getting $1,000 at the end of that video,

the comment sections aren't understanding that that was a hire.

That was a hire by any other name.

And there's a lot of sort of ethical ways to warm around that.

But at the end of the day,

you just hired that guy.

You didn't actually give him charity.

If I give you, if you need $10 from me, you're like, oh man, I need $10 to afford this thing I really need.

I just don't have it.

And I give it to you with no expectation of paying back.

I have now done it a charity.

And I forget about it.

We never bring it up again.

I have done you a kindness because I gained nothing but the feeling of the kindness.

But if I give you that $10 and I ask you to do a dance for a video, I've just done a hire.

Even if it's $1,000, even if it's a million dollars, and even if the dance took you 10 seconds, it's still a higher at the end of the day.

And I think that that is probably the toughest mental bridge for the audience to understand.

You know what I mean?

So that's kind of like philosophically, that's where I'm at.

And that's why I go after the hidden camera guys a lot, because unless you're a content creator, you don't understand just how few people want to be in your video.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, for sure.

That makes sense.

And it seems like a lot of those skits or pranks seem fake.

A lot of them are.

A lot of them are very well planned.

Like a lot of the big guys, I mean, they've got big sponsors.

And if anything, if you know anything about sponsors, you know that sponsors don't play games with their money.

When you pitch a sponsorship, that goes through nine layers of people.

And

they don't want you to pick someone random.

They want you to pick the disabled person or they want you to pick like the most sort of sad character you can find.

And I think one of the cardinal sins of,

these hidden kindness pranks or kindness content, I think one of their

cardinal sins is that they pretend like it's random.

They pretend like they just walked up to a guy in the middle of the parking lot and like, oh,

can you give me a dollar?

I can't afford a taxi.

That was not a random person.

That person was either a plant or someone they spent a while waiting for.

They're like, that guy looks, he's got the right look.

We're going to go after him.

Right.

You know, and

that sort of,

did I answer the question?

Or did I go on a rant?

I forgot the question, honestly.

Oh, okay.

Oh, wait, pranks were fake.

But, but, yeah, but, but, I mean, a great example is a guy did a video where

he approached, he approached a disabled kid and his dad, and he said, hey,

you know, I don't have a dollar.

Do you have any money for me?

And the dad has $100 bills in his wallet.

And basically,

by the way,

the dad has $100 bills in his wallet.

And, you know, the kid just happens to be a fan of Travis Barker.

You know what what I mean?

It seems like a very candid, beautiful moment, like a disabled kid

gets to meet his hero.

But that was a super well-planned thing.

Like, the guy had contacted the family months ago.

The dad had already agreed to be part of this play.

You know what I mean?

So,

no matter like the story behind that is inherently deceptive to the audience because they think you just found some random kid and gave him this amazing day.

But in fact, this was like a well-planned and articulated advertisement.

Whether it's an advertisement for a product or not is irrelevant because

it wasn't presented to the audience honestly.

And what these guys do is they hide behind the money giveaway.

They hide behind, they're able to hide behind these certain ethical defenses.

They're like, well, how many people did you help today?

And I'm like, my entire point is don't post people that you're helping because you're hiring them.

Why would I have posted any of this?

It's a very disingenuous sort of form of defense.

And that's kind of like, you know, I'm definitely losing this fight because

at the end of the day, people's little, you know, due to the nature of algorithmic content, people's feelsies are like upped by these.

They get a little serotonin dose because they think someone's being helped.

But at the end of the day, it's just a staged scene, whether it's actors, you know, at the end of the day, the debate's not about whether or not the bad outweighs the good.

The debate is whether or not their intentions were ever good.

Pablo Escobar is a murderer.

You know, he was a violent man, but he built schools.

he helped people,

he built a zoo.

Like there are some people who'd be like, he was a nice guy, but that doesn't distract the fact that he was objectively responsible for violence.

I'm not saying the kindness guys are responsible for violence, but just because you do good in certain situations, just because you do good in certain situations does not make you a good person.

And it's just tough to articulate that.

Now, how do you feel about the way Mr.

Beast does it?

Because he gets some hate, but I think he's a little more...

Well, I'll tell you, my philosophy of Mr.

Beast is a lot more neutral because Mr.

Beast videos are more about the ostentatiousness of the video, right?

He doesn't focus on only poor, disabled people with sad music who are crying.

He's like, hey, whoever takes their hand off the car last gets the car.

The focus, the narrative focus isn't on...

surprising somebody or turning them into like a an I've got cancer sob story.

He's he's like I don't agree with the criticism of Mr.

Beast because it's about the narrative focus.

And I think think his is more based on like how much silly crap can I do with a lot of money rather than how can I turn strangers or how he doesn't focus on turning strangers into actors and he doesn't focus on staging scenes because he doesn't need to.

Whereas these other guys, these sort of wannabe Mr.

Beasts, they know, you know, they know that if they just walk around Walmart with a camera, they'll eventually find somebody who like doesn't see the camera and plays ball.

I even did an experiment where I strapped a hidden camera to myself and I started to do these and people, like, people looked at me, they, they hated it.

One woman caught me, she's like, what's that?

And I did this experiment just to see what would happen for my own purposes.

I felt horrible because I knew, I was like, I only have a dollar, but I know I'm lying to them.

Right?

And I know I'm filming someone who never agreed to be a film.

And one woman, she said, oh, what are you doing?

She saw the camera in my collar.

And I'm like, oh, I'm actually doing a YouTube video.

If I give you $500, would you agree to be in it?

And she's like, don't film.

And I go, but look, it's like a kindness thing.

Like, you give me the donut.

I'll give you $500.

She's like,

she didn't want to hear it because I'm a stranger to her.

It's a weird agenda.

And I think if you try this stuff in real life, it doesn't work.

And that's really my big problem.

My problem isn't that people are being helped.

It's that I feel like being genuine is important.

And when you present a lie to the audience, you are sort of giving them like a false worldview.

Anyways, that's an aura map.

I think we've covered that.

Yeah, Mr.

Beast is fine.

Yeah.

Yeah, when he got hate for caring blind people and deaf people, I was really confused.

No,

I never got into that conversation.

I'm specifically going for like hidden camera people and like stage.

Like I'm super against filming strangers, super against it.

There was a Melbourne woman, I always mispronounced that, but there was a woman who received flowers from an influencer.

He pretended to tie a shoe or whatever.

gave her flowers and she looked around right and they played sad music and she spoke out against him she's like you filmed me without my consent.

You're a jerk.

This was patronizing.

You dehumanized me.

And the audience was mad at her.

Like, her feelings didn't make any difference to them.

They're like, screw you.

You got flowers.

Why don't you be appreciative?

He was trying to be nice to you.

Like, she's the person there.

And that's where the new sort of media is making it so that a person's feelings and a person's self-worth are only important insofar as they appear on the video.

If you're entertaining to me, that's all I care about you for.

But if you hated that video, I'm going to react defensively and say, oh, well, you should be happy to be in that video.

He gave you flowers.

He gave you $1,000.

You know, nobody wants to look at like the dark elements of this because it,

nobody wants to look at the dark elements of this because it contradicts.

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The nice feelings they have when they see these types of videos.

Yeah, that makes sense.

How long have you had the mullet for?

Oh man, the mullet I started to grow when the scumbag dad series started.

Yeah, so once I started to do scumbag dad, like I grew the mustache first, right?

Because I'm like, I'm going to look like a woman.

That's impressive too.

You just get the stash.

Oh, thank you.

Thank you.

So, like, one of my buddies, he's like, Brad, you'd look great with a mustache.

So, I'm like, I'll try it.

And I had very short hair.

And then the first scumbag video, I'm sorry, the first scumbag dad video blew up.

And I was like, oh, this is fun.

I can make myself look like I'm like a crazier guy if I keep growing the hair.

So at this point, I'm like, I'm going to start having long hair for as long as this like TikTok thing is doing well.

And if I ever cut it, it means that I've either super succeeded and I don't even need to deal with this anymore or I failed and like, it's okay.

Like I still have a great job and I'm happy with my life.

Like I could go back.

I could go back to my sort of like daily life as Northadonist in Iowa and not really be sad about it because it's a good life.

You know what I I mean?

But yeah, if I cut my hair, it means that I've that something big has happened.

It's like a girl when they break up with someone.

Kind of, yes.

It means I'm entering a new relationship or my old one fell apart.

But yeah, the mullet, I think, has helped a lot with sort of recognizability.

And like, you know, it's people see me in public all the time and they recognize me from the mullet.

Yeah, it's the good branding.

The loud way I dress.

You're the first person I met from Iowa.

What's it like over there?

It's quiet.

It's quiet.

It's quite a thought.

Yeah.

Property values are cheap.

I live in an amazing house out there.

Oh, you're still there?

Well, no, I mean,

I'm going to be renting it out to a friend.

Like, we just started to make the transition to California.

But, like, we live in a house that a member of Slipknot used to own.

You know what I mean?

At one,

less than a quarter of the price of a similar house in LA.

Oh, yeah.

And like, everything's super cool.

You know, I could be just retired there, but my wife and I, we want to move to California.

We want to give our son sort of a leg up in case he wants to go into the arts professions.

And we have just sort of a better network of other actors and creatives here.

Like I've got a band here.

I've got like a lot more creative resources.

But Iowa, I was quiet.

Like there's some really quite good restaurants in the Des Moines area.

But it is more difficult for me to find collaborators in like the art field.

For sure.

Like I've got a group, but it took me a long time to sort of like suss out friends and like people flake and then they don't want to do it anymore.

But like I finally have a decent core group there, but it took me forever to find those people.

That's how I felt in Jersey.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, at the end of the day, West Coast is sort of like where a lot of people go to, you know, pursue more creative professions, podcasting, for instance, and like, in my case, doing comedy.

Absolutely.

So, in terms of social media platforms, which ones are your favorite?

Which ones pay out the most?

I'm hearing good things about Snapchat right now.

Well, Snapchat's a huge pot shop for me.

I get paid from Snapchat once in a blue moon because some of my videos do not go viral.

I'm very consistent on YouTube.

YouTube is sort of like YouTube and TikTok with the new creator fund, they pay like pretty decently well.

So I focus more of my efforts on gearing for those two platforms.

Snapchat's a gamble.

I still repost to all of them.

Whenever I make a video, it goes up to Instagram, Snapchat,

Facebook,

and TikTok.

And through the money I get from all those, plus a couple of pretty regular sponsorships, I'm able to eke out a pretty decent living just doing this.

But if I ever fail, it's okay because I'm not really leaving my office.

I've got this great, you know, job and I have the luxury of knowing that like I can sort of be an

to the system because if this all goes

like I still have like a valuable profession that I can support my family with.

Yeah.

What are you learning about the brand deal side?

A lot of creators struggle getting brand deals.

Well, brand deals for me have been like a bit of an uphill battle because of the genre that I'm in.

Like I know several people who are in, I know several people who are in like very easily definable genres and they get brand deals like pretty easily like if you're a food person if every post you do is food yeah like it's fairly simple for you to have your agent plug you to a restaurant company or a hotel right you know if you're a fitness guy it's very easy to get a supplement to sponsor you right but but what am I it's like it's very difficult who am I my agent talks to me about this sometimes and he's like he's like yeah well it's just sort of a little tough because you know, even the name scumbag dad immediately like family-friendly companies are going to be like, nah.

Yeah, yeah.

And so now I have have to sort of resort to, you know, getting like alcohol sponsorships, which is great.

Like, I like to party and I like, you know, they got money too.

Yeah, they got money.

Like, I have no problem with that.

But it does, you know, because of the genre I'm in, it does limit me a bit.

That makes sense.

So it is a bit of an uphill battle, but some of the relationships I've built up have been very, very good.

That's cool.

Did you go on America's Got Talent?

I did.

I was on America's Got Talent ages ago, and it was part of a villain origin story.

Me and my best friend were writing pirate raps about Captain Dan and the scurvy crew.

We were the number one pirate rap group in the world.

And we were making, like at the time, bear in mind, like the numbers don't sound impressive, but at the time, we were selling thousands of CDs

out of my house.

Like I would walk to the post office and just be like, ah, we got a ton of these.

And, you know, we got like a viral video on YouTube that had like 200,000 hits.

Nice.

But that was very serious, like very serious number back then.

And so that launched like a five album, you know, career of this like parody rap.

And what it was, it's just one of those jokes that like high school kids make, like, ha ha, you know, wouldn't it be funny if like pirates were rapping instead?

And we, and we did it, and we were, we were invited on to America's Got Talent.

We were invited on, I think, to be kicked off because we were just a bunch of jerks.

But it's still like, it still set me off on a path.

Because at the time I was in school, like, yeah, I made art and I made comedy, but I had no intention of making it my career.

I was going to dental school, like,

but that getting kicked off,

seeing the inside of the reality show scene it made me be like oh all this is fake all this is a little

like like just the fact that we were shooed in we didn't have to wait in any lines they invited us like that alone sort of started to deconstruct the barrier because because they weave this tail and and sometimes when you weave a tail it's okay and it's honest and sometimes when you weave a tail it's less than that yeah but but america's got talent in these shows they weave a tail like oh they didn't know they'd get on tv they waited in line for hours to show their talent to the judges.

When in fact, like eight out of ten of those acts are just sort of like,

somebody gets an email and they're like, could you come on?

And then for the line, like they show all the acts like standing in line, pensive.

They just bring us out of the studio, put us in line, to like run the camera up in front.

They're like, okay, come back.

And that's it.

And so that was sort of the first big disillusionment I started to have.

Like, yeah, we all know it's stage to a certain extent, but to be part of it, to be in it is like a totally new, you know, system of experience.

right and then like as time went on i started to learn about like uh what is it joey salads is like another big you know item i bring up because he was one of the first social experiments i heard that was completely debunked and what the guy did is he brought a car covered in trump stickers to like a predominantly black neighborhood and then he's like here's an experiment to see what's going to happen to this car and and a bunch of people destroy the car and and it the video did very well and then somebody posted on twitter like oh this is joey salads like you know, we see all the attackers of the car behind the camera.

And it was, what's so crazy is that like the call out and like the information that it was faked didn't get nearly the reach of the initial video.

And like, to me, that shows an absolute monster of a person to sort of paint a group of people

in a negative light for views and pretend it was real.

Yeah.

Like, because that's the reason why it went viral.

The reason why people saw that.

And the reason why people passed it to their friends is like, I can't believe this happened to a Trump car.

They just destroyed a car.

They just destroyed a car.

And that's one of the seminal examples I bring up when it comes to this debate about social experiments, is that if your heart is in the place where you're willing to lie to your audience for views and profit, you are a bad person.

Even if you play sad music and it's about giving to a homeless guy, you've still taken a step in

very serious dishonesty.

You're willing to lie to millions of people.

And they're too,

they never had anybody to explain to them why this is bad because it takes a couple levels of understanding.

It takes a couple levels of philosophical comprehension and social media comprehension.

If you're not well versed in this stuff, if you've never tried to make content, it's very difficult for me to explain just how awkward it is to film a stranger or how awkward it is to ask a stranger to help and they tell you to f off because most of them do.

I was filming at the mall recently and there was a guy who wasn't even in our shop, not even close.

But I was like pointing at a table.

I was like, you sit here.

And then, and this guy was like, don't film me.

And I was like, no, no, sir, we're not actually not filming you.

He's like, I don't care what you do, but I better not be in the shot.

He went out of his way to tell us not to film him.

A lot of people have that attitude.

For sure.

And when you market something as a social experiment, when you say the word experiment, you are telling the audience, I don't know what's going to happen.

And that if that is a lie, you have now done a skit.

You have now done a skit.

And people with limited creativity or limited ability they can just have their friends pretend to do something real and label it a social experiment and get a viral video and they can churn them out so much faster than anybody doing an actual social experiment or prank i mean let's call them what they are they are pranks but they are reframed as social experiments so that they can sort of get that initial hit of engagement you know because if i tell you If I run up to you and I, you know,

sorry, let me reset.

So some of these folks, they look at the social experiments, the staged videos, and they say, this is no different than a movie.

This is no different than any piece of fiction.

Why are you so mad?

But if I ran up to you and I said, oh man, I just saw this video, a guy got shot, and you'd be like, oh, my God, a guy got shot in the video.

I'm like, yeah, let me send you the link.

And I send you the link to Die Hard, starring Bruce Willis, you're going to look at me like I'm a jerk.

You're like, yeah, it's a movie.

It is different.

When you present a work of art as a fictional piece, you are being honest with the audience.

Nobody thought Titanic was a documentary.

You know what I mean?

Nobody is assuming that like that really happened because it's being presented in a certain way.

But because there's so little control over social media, it's very easy for

bad actors to pretend something is real when it's not.

And that's sort of like sort of the midst of what I'm doing now is trying to sort of through satire show that, but through these podcast clips, just talk about it plainly.

Yeah, it's good to get it out there.

Well, the one that stands out to me was that, I forget his name, but he claimed to be able to talk to ghosts.

And then as soon as a celebrity would die, I think Malcolm Miller just overdosed and then he made a whole YouTube video talking to him.

And that to me was so extreme.

It's sort of a sign of the times that

people want to believe in something so much that they're willing to watch a guy pretend to talk to ghosts because they're just so disillusioned.

And it's tough to fight that.

It is.

And it turns out it was all BS.

And he had like hundreds of videos like that whenever a celebrity died.

Oh, of course it's BS.

Lying to the audience is a tried and true,

tried and true business model.

Yeah.

Is it true you saw Diplo on mushrooms?

Yeah, yeah.

That story is 100% true.

Whenever I come down to Vegas, you know, obviously my friends and I, we get like really, really, really rowdy.

I usually organize trips, and that was fun.

That was a fun time.

My friend, she's like, we can get us backstage to Diplo.

And I thought that was great.

I love free stuff.

I will always go to something like cool if I'm invited.

And so my friend Melissa Ong, she's like an influencer, and she got invited.

And I thought that was pretty cool.

So the answer is yes.

So how much did you eat?

Oh, I'll talk about that some other time.

I'll talk about that some other time.

Sounds like a full trip.

No,

it was a good day.

Yeah.

I haven't done a full trip since college.

Yeah, well, maybe you and I should chat.

Yeah, maybe.

And lastly, I want to wrap up with Master Chef.

Yeah.

Because I'm a huge fan of food.

How did you even get on that shelf?

So I used to do a lot of rap songs about like Philadelphia food back when I lived there.

And like I was just sort of this like corny, corny kid.

And right after America's Got Talent, I wanted to sort of reprove myself.

You know what I mean?

And so I cooked a dish called Don Don Noodles that was, you know, I thought I was pretty good at it.

I love Don Dawn.

Oh, then you know what's up.

Yeah.

So

I made that dish a ton of times and I was pretty good at it.

So I auditioned with it.

But because I was like also going in as like a comedian orthodontist,

they gave, they fast-tracked me.

Like again, more reality shit.

Yeah.

So they fast-tracked me.

So I was like assured to go to Burbank to like go to like the next round of auditions.

But when I was there, you know, I totally boned my interview.

They, they asked me if I was willing to quit my job to be a chef and I said no.

And then like, bear in mind, when, once I knew I was going to Burbank, I called in every chef friend I knew.

I was like, train me, train me, help me become a better chef.

And to this day, I still like, you know, I still think I'm a pretty good chef.

So I've learned those lessons, but I was honest with them.

When they asked me how long I've been cooking for, I said July, which was true at the time.

I hadn't been cooking seriously like until I was trained.

And, you know, they, how am I supposed to compete with like tragic characters?

Like, my life was pretty good.

I had nothing.

They're like, so are you trying to prove anything?

I'm like, not really.

Yeah, no, I just really, I just really want to be on Master Chef.

They're like, are you willing to quit your job to be a chef?

No.

And, you know, it just didn't.

I wasn't really like a sympathetic character.

I was just a guy who cooked pretty good, who made doofy raps, who secretly wanted revenge on America's Got Talent.

And then they booted me.

Like that season, Top 100 did not cook for these celebrity chefs.

They booted 70 of us.

And it was a good learning experience.

Again, seeing more of the background of these things has sort of led to the evolution of who I am as a person.

And

yeah, I mean, I'm glad I didn't go very far because had I gone far, like they would have changed my contract to be like sort of like semi-working for them.

And I never would have wanted to leave my actual profession to be a chef.

I just wanted to like goof around.

You know what I mean?

I'm not going to quit orthodontics, the thing that I spent years and years and years to do to

become a chef.

I think that's insulting to all the work I put into it.

And it's not to say like being a chef's a bad profession.

It's awesome.

It's just like

I made my choice and I wasn't going to lie to America and say like, oh, yeah, I'm not going to be a doctor anymore.

I'm going to be a chef.

And that's probably where I boned it.

I should have been like, I hate teeth.

Teeth annoy me.

I want to be a chef now.

And then you had no villain arc.

No, I had no villain arc there, but I guess now I do.

I love it.

Well, scumbag dad.

Scum.

It's like a tongue twister, right?

Sure is.

Scumbag Dad.

It's been a pleasure.

Anything you want to close off with?

No, just

follow me on the socials.

Scumbag Dad.

Oh, look at that camera.

So I've got a band called The Bad Circus.

We're doing a bunch of work, so we'll be putting out songs soon.

And just follow me as the Scumbag Dad on TikTok and Scumbag Dad on YouTube.

And follow my wife, who is Meow YoFace on Instagram.

She designs some really incredible stuff.

And

we have some really cool stuff coming.

Well, I don't want to spoil it too hard, but I have a product coming that her and I designed together that's currently in manufacturer.

And I'm immensely proud of it.

So if you follow, you will probably be the first to buy this piece of fashionware that I'm super excited to show you.

Can't wait to see it.

Thanks for coming on, man.

Yeah, thank you.

Thanks for watching, guys.

Peace.