When David was debating Christians and holding their feet to the fire, he was okay. Was never great at it, but it was at least entertaining. Now? Now he uses the same bad logic and irrational thinking to defend his world view.
He started going downhill when he created an episode that consisted of him crying and whining about how not enough people are donating money to him. He was threatening his fans with shutting the podcast down if more people didn’t start paying. Clown much? The show isn’t worth paying for. I pay for 5 other podcast bonus and patreon content, but what Smalley has isn’t worth $1 a month.
Worst part now is that he’s enabling false victims by setting up fundraisers for them without properly vetting them first. I did my own research on his last charity case and even contacted him to let him know she was scamming him. He insisted that he properly vetted her and got upset at the suggestion. Then when he found out on his own she was scamming him, he shut it down! Not only that, but he never apologized to me for it, and never admitted that he didn’t do a good job of vetting her. Then it turns out that her brother is a low budget film director, which makes complete sense because Smalley wants desperately to be an “actor” and was trying to impress this guy so he could get a role in one of his C movies. Yes I found all of this out on my own and he has a “team of researchers” that vet his fundraisers. Right.
He labels episodes “cult sex slave survivor speaks out” when it turns out the cult was a baptist church and she was never actually assaulted or abused. Nice.
In short, the old episodes were good, the new ones are all garbage. Also, his patreon setup is the worst. He cuts discussions off halfway through and tells people they have to pay to hear the rest. Not very bright... there’s a podcast formula that works for many people and it doesn’t involve splicing discussions, it involves creating new content that only patreon members can get, not just an extra 20 min conversation that already started. He obviously has no clue what he’s doing.
There are so many good podcasts that have logical thinking hosts, better guests and not so much guess work.
