The Earwolf Challenge Last Words: The Complete Guide To Everything
Catch-up on The Earwolf Challenge! You can listen to the Week 3 “Concept & Content” Elimination episode here. Tim Daniels and Tom Reynolds from The Complete Guide To Everything had this to say about their Challenge experience:
Hi, we’re Tim and Tom, the losers you heard losing on the internet earlier this week. We have a podcast called The Complete Guide to Everything that comes out weekly, and we try to keep the losing to a minimum on that show.
We’ve followed Earwolf since the very beginning and have been fans of Comedy Death Ray/Comedy Bang! Bang! since back in the day. We kept up on every bit of Earwolf news as the network was formed and added new shows. True story: one time one of us had to be rushed to the hospital as a direct result of a particularly hilarious Bob Ducca bit. When the mysterious “Project Tippy Toe” was announced, we rushed to sign our show up for possible inclusion in the project.
Getting knocked out so early was a bummer because in addition to the severe blow to our egos (note to future losers: copious amounts of alcohol is a terrific remedy for this situation), we actually had fun participating and were looking forward to the future challenges. Being that we got voted off so early, we never got a chance to get to know the other competitors, who all seem like genuinely cool people with interesting shows. Overall, having been a part of The Earwolf Challenge will only make our own show better, and we are grateful for the opportunity and offer our sincere thanks to all involved.
When you do your own podcast, you have complete control over everything. That’s one of the amazing things about the medium. We’ve had more success than we had ever thought possible: thousands of listeners every week, sold out live shows thousands of miles from our homes… all for our little project we produce in a basement. And the entire way, we were in complete control of every decision we made, every joke, every word of every episode.
We originally had reservations about appearing on The Earwolf Challenge. We realized we’d be giving up a great deal of control. But ultimately we decided we were lucky to be asked and it would be an amazing opportunity to get criticism from some talented people and expose our show to a new audience. Then we got voted off almost immediately.
Last week, the Wrestling Team set the bar pretty high for graciousness in defeat and demonstrated how to walk away from a potentially negative experience having learned and grown. (Great, now we’ll look like dicks if we complain. Thanks a lot, guys.) They talked about applying the constructive criticism they received on the show and improving their own podcast and we’ve definitely learned some valuable lessons by participating in the Challenge. Just being asked to think about aspects of our show that we haven’t thought about in over a year was immensely helpful, and something we wouldn’t have done if it weren’t for this competition.
We can sit here and bitch about how reality shows skew reality, and how if you really want to judge the merits of a podcast you should actually have the judges listen to the podcast, but that would be missing the point. Ultimately, our failure on the show was a direct result of the decisions we made. The Earwolf Challenge was set up a certain way, and if we couldn’t operate within those constraints, no matter how great we think our own podcast is, we didn’t deserve to continue on The Earwolf Challenge.
Which brings us to the most valuable lesson we learned on the show: If you’re going to decide to do something that you don’t have control over, play ball. Do what you’re asked to do or don’t do it at all. In the immortal words of Bill Withers, “Go on and do it, do it, do it… but do it good.”
Unlike our own show, we weren’t in charge of this show. If we thought someone was missing the point when they judged our submissions to each challenge, we should have convinced them otherwise or changed the way we do things so that the judges liked it. If we couldn’t or wouldn’t do either of those things, well, by the rules of The Earwolf Challenge, we deserved to be voted off.
Overall, though, it was a lot of fun so we’d like to thank Matt Besser, Frank Cappello and Peter Moses for having us on. Frank and Peter are amazing dudes that deserve a plaque somewhere for figuring out how to schedule and deal with 10 shows and 3 hosts twice a week, if for nothing else. We’re really thrilled to be a blip on Earwolf’s radar, and thank Jeff Ullrich and Scott Aukerman for letting us on their network, if only for a few minutes.
-Tim and Tom
You can keep following The Complete Guide To Everything at www.tcgte.com.