Exactly a year has passed since Ariel Helwani obliterated Brendan Schaub’s career in media. As a reminder, Helwani took umbrage to the fact Schaub repeated a lie about why Helwani was blacklisted by UFC at which point Helwani came out swinging accusing Schaub’s career of failing, accusing him of plagiarizing others and of paying off guests.
“And then you steal our ideas and our contents. You do it to Luke (Thomas), you do it to Brian (Campbell), you do it to me, you do it to everyone. You steal our ideas and you sit there and you pass them off as your own and you even botch it when you do it. You botch it when you do it every single time. You sit there and you rip off our ideas. It’s plagiarism 101, except you’re not writing anything, you’re saying it and it’s harder to catch that way. But trust me we’re all on to you.”
“You sit there, and you talk about Tyson Fury being your favorite fighter. And then you say that you want to slit your wrist when you hear about mental health and Tyson Fury. You truly loveTyson Fury, you fake phony, you care about his struggles with mental health.”
“I will always love talking about the fighters and at least I don’t pay them to come on my show. At least I don’t have to pay them to come hang out and eat a taco with me. And at least I don’t have them say:” hey you got to do this show, if you want to do this show,”. You know what I’m talking about. If you want to shoot, we’ll shoot. Stop talking about things when you’re living in a glass house and you have no idea what is going on. ”
Helwani said among other things. The two also butted heads over their careers with Helwani hinting that Schaub’s time at Showtime would be coming to a close. This indeed happened and what was once a channel dedicated to Schaub’s Big Brown Breakdown and Food truck diaries went on to be a second channel for Brian Campbell and Luke Thomas’ Mortal combat who then tweaked Schaub’s format and made a new show titled Room service diaries.
Schaub would take the Food truck diary concept with him and keep doing it on his new ‘network’ a youtube channel where Schaub has been posting his own content along with the content of his underlings. But it was clear early on that Schaub had no way to keep paying to maintain production value.
One of the early episodes of the show featured Schaub and Francis Ngannou – who Schaub had served up food from the trunk of his swanky sports car. To make matters worse said food was a McDonald Chicken Sandwich.
But the production value has gone down significantly since then. After complaining about the sum required to rent a food truck for the day Schaub resorted to greenscreening in the actual trucks.
And while his team montaged a video of a truck in the background nobody was really persuaded until recently when Sean Strickland was basically duped into pretending the two were on the road while doing their episode of Food truck.
Thicc boy studios has been averaging about 30k views per day – a far cry from the glory days of TFATK podcast. The channel was launched independently and operates separately from TFATK channel (featuring Bryan Callen) and Schaub’s podcast with Theo Von (who jumped ship) and Chris D’elia – King and the Sting.
Bo Nickal might’be been the last guest to get an actual Food truck – but due to hurricane Ian, Nickal’s flight was delayed and he actually missed the actual truck with Schaub explaining he ordered the food for him.
This mishap might’ve influenced Schaub’s decision to start doing these over a green screen.