I hadn’t heard about the allegations about Cards Against Humanity.
For a while I listened to a podcast featuring Max Tempkin, mostly because I already listened to a few other podcasts with one of the other hosts. But I stopped listening, mainly because the weird vibe from Tempkin. I’ve worked for people like him before, in two different jobs, and leaving both companies felt like “an escape”, which is the same phrasing as ex-employees in this article I just read.
And in both those companies I worked for, the founder (or one of the founders) were, to put it kindly, untrustworthy in their history of sexual conduct.
If I had done more than simply stopped listening to the podcast and done some more research into Tempkin, I’d have found out about the past rape allegation. And due to my history with people like him, I’d have been zero surprised!
As Scott has said many times, why don’t we just make lists of all the people we think “Well that guy has probably been up to no good” and just check? It seems so obvious! But I don’t assume a history of abusive behaviour, I just assume… well, I don’t assume, I just stop listening to the podcast or stop reading their writing or whatever.
There’s also how Tempkin viewed himself and his company. There seemed to be a huge cognitive dissonance, with a huge mismatch on what he (and his company) did compared to how he did it and what image he thought he was projecting.
As it happened, last week I had finished all the podcasts in my queue, and was looking around for something to listen to. I checked out some episodes of podcasts I’d unsubscribed from for various reasons, and one was the latest episode of Do By Friday. Max Tempkin wasn’t on it, just the other two hosts, and they didn’t mention where Max was or what he was up to. He’d often turn up late to the podcast recording, so I assumed this was the same kind of thing.
To be honest, I only got about 10 minutes into the episode, and it had none of the same vibe or energy as it had before, so stopped listening again, totally missing the fact that Tempkin had been fired by his own podcast hosts. I didn’t know the full story until reading up this morning after hearing about it on Geeknights.