Throwing My Hat in the Ring About the Psyguy Saga

I’m glad that people are finally starting to band together and open up about their own personal interactions with Psyguy without fear of being targeted by his followers. My story isn't as horrendous as any of the other stories I've read about Psyguy, but I feel my story is important to help paint a picture of how this guy really is as a person. I feel it becomes easier to believe he's as horrible as people claim he is behind closed doors when stories come to light about how horrible he can be out in the open, so I hope with my story it'll be easier for people to accept this guy for who he is: an asshole. Anyways...

My name is Kris Kail, some might know me as the infamous “Sonic Bed Sex Haver” from Kotaku, others might know me from my Twitter presence (@DudeGurlz), but at one point I was a pretty popular podcaster who ran the website MUSCLETOWER, which also famously hosted Whachow. A few years ago, back in May 2011, MUSCLETOWER needed more regular content and I saw Psy on Twitter asking fans for money so he could continue to host Whachow online. I sent him an e-mail offering to host Whachow for him free of charge, with the trade-off being that we would get more regular visitors on MUSCLETOWER, which would greatly help out the other shows on the network. He accepted my offer and started uploading his backlog of shows that week, within a few days the show was off and running on our site.

Immediately the problems started to arise. I expected this mutual business agreement would lead to a happy acquaintanceship, perhaps even a friendship, but after reading the other posts about him I understand now why this didn’t come about. Seeing as our site was built from the ground up by our fantastic webmaster Pete, there were bound to be a few problems here and there that he couldn’t catch before updating the site, so the only time I ever heard from Psy was when he encountered any of these problems. As soon as he realized Pete was the one in charge of maintenance, I never heard a word from Psy again.

Later on, we noticed that while the site was experiencing quadruple the amount of traffic (and bandwidth usage) thanks to Whachow, nobody was going to the other shows, so I sent him an e-mail asking if I could come on Whachow to help promote MUSCLETOWER. He gave me the run around for a few weeks, but eventually there was a week where he had nothing planned so he let me come on, and during the pre-show in front of everyone (and not realizing I was listening) he began to shit talk me saying “oh yeah this Kris dude who runs MUSCLETOWER wants to come on the show today and of course he has to get his way because he runs the site”. Uh dude, not for nothing but I host your podcast for free, the only thing I’ve asked for is a little shout out here and there to get the other shows some traffic. I didn’t ask him to run regular commercials before the show (which was discussed at one point but I shot down because I didn’t want to infringe on Whachow), I didn’t ask him to contribute to our server costs (which were graciously covered thanks to The Spriter’s Resource who have hosted MUSCLETOWER since the beginning), I didn’t ask for much aside from a little recognition here and there for saving him from e-begging.

I let that go, it wasn’t a big deal, it was just a little joke after all, but then we found out that Psy was planning to re-route the Whachow domain to a page on HIS site, where he would forward the download links from MUSCLETOWER to, this way people could listen to his show and avoid visiting MUSCLETOWER entirely, while still enjoying our free hosting. His excuse was “you guys asked me to come over, I never asked you, and even still you guys are making ad revenue off my show.” It’s true, we did run ads on our site, one banner ad on the top and bottom and one on the side, but the revenue these ads brought in wasn’t much, especially since most listeners didn’t even come to the website thanks to iTunes. He backed down from this, for the time being, and a compromise was made where he could have his Whachow page on his site, but he would post links to the MUSCLETOWER site so people would still have to visit our site to download the episodes.

Another smaller incident, but still significant as it says a lot about his character, was when a mutual friend and I got into a friendly pissing match over Twitter followers. The unnamed chum, who I’m sure wants nothing to do with this so shall remain anonymous, had just blown past 1,000 followers I think it was, so Psy congratulated him by saying “wait until you have 2,000 followers like me”, or something to that effect. At the time, I had about 6,000 followers, so I responded to the both of them in the same light saying “I remember how good both of those milestones felt, but now I’m hangin’ with the big dogs.” Without any indication that he was joking, he says to me “How do you have 6,000 followers? Everything you do sucks.” Of course, in online conversations context is key and you can’t exactly tell a person’s tone, but by this point we’d been business associates for the better part of a year, and this was probably the most conversing we’d done. Had we been long friends, yeah it’d be a funny joke, but alas he’d made no attempt to be friends with me, thus this didn’t come off as a joke. Again, after reading the other posts about him, it seems he said this to me in an attempt to put me down so he could feel better about himself.

Things were okay for a while, the dust settled and everything was fine for a few years, but last year Pete and I were discussing revamping the entire website, mostly because it basically became just Whachow and nothing else, and because the layout was a complete eye-sore. While poking around, I came across the Whachow page that Psy had established where he had a big banner that said “Donate to help keep Whachow alive! I pay for the servers out of my own pocket!” While this may be true of Fireball20xl, this certainly wasn’t the case for Whachow, which again we hosted COMPLETELY FREE OF CHARGE. Also of note, Liz mentioned in her post how Psy’s parents are basically wealthy and pay for everything he needs even though he’s in his 30’s and that he’s never had a dire need for money and basically lives off of these donations. I’m over here in Jersey supporting a family with my one meager job and you’re living off donations you’ve begged for by lying and saying you’re paying for a service that we’ve given you for free. Lovely.

Basically the lesson to be learned here is not to do business with Psyguy. He may have a loyal following of fans 14 years strong (and 14 years old), but he will do everything in his power to make sure you do not benefit from the deal and when you confront him about it he’ll throw the blame on you. Had I known then what I know now I would’ve pimped him out and forced him to put commercials on his show with 100% of the revenue going directly to me for no reason other than for me to get fat off of. Or I would’ve told him to take a hike. Probably the latter.