The pair have a second podcast, The Past Times, where Anthony picks a paper from a day in history and reads it to Reynolds and a special guest.
David Sean Anthony was born in Marin County, California, on August 26, 1967,[1] the son of a hairdresser mother and lawyer father.
[3] In one instance, his father was reprimanded in court for showing up too drunk to represent his client, leading to the postponement of the trial.
[6] He graduated from Marin Catholic High School[7] and earned a degree in physical geography from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
He grew up listening to the comedy albums of comedians such as Richard Pryor[9] and the fact that Robin Williams was also from Marin County was significant to him.
He was the political editor for SuicideGirls,[8] wrote for the Comedy Film Nerds website,[18] and had a blog called Stop All Monsters.
[19] As a television writer, he has written for Talking Dead, Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis, Pretend Time, and The Greg Behrendt Show.
[21] He was a story consultant on the scripted audio drama Bronzeville written by Josh Olson and starring Laurence Fishburne.
[30] In 2012, Anthony and Behrendt appeared on stage with Anderson and Clausen during the Melbourne International Comedy Festival in an event billed as Superpod.
[31] The Festival immediately lost the recording, and the four podcasters discussed the loss that night on the episode "The Death of Superpod.
[6] The pair hit it off, and Anthony invited Reynolds to fill in for Behrendt on Walking the Room a couple of times.
[34] On The Dollop, Anthony presents an event or person from American history that he has researched to Reynolds, who usually has no idea what the topic is going to be about.
The Dollop has toured across the United States, Europe, and Australia, where live podcast performances have repeatedly sold out theaters.
[30] He credits Howard Zinn's book A People's History of the United States, which he first read in high school, for "radicalizing" him.
The pair have collaborated on a number of projects, including a book based on their podcast titled The United States of Absurdity: Untold Stories from American History, which was released in 2017.
[37] They also made a web series called Trash Toons, in which they watched and discussed old cartoons, and put out webcasts of political coverage.
In 2020, they did a special episode of The Dollop on Comedy Gives Back to raise money for comedians whose careers were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dave, Josh, and a rotating coterie of guest hosts consume so-called educational content, then offer a review detailing the sociopathy and insanity they find in the messages.
[40] The podcast festival ran for six years and featured many comedians, including Marc Maron, Aisha Tyler, Doug Benson, Greg Proops, and Paul F.
[41] Their guest to tell a hometown murder story was Anthony, who talked about a serial killer who stalked women on hiking trails near San Francisco.
[42] On July 9, 2015, Alan Bellows posted a letter accusing Anthony of plagiarizing Damn Interesting's content for use on The Dollop.
In a response on Reddit, Anthony said that he had made a mistake and apologized for not attributing the stories properly but claimed that this did not constitute plagiarism.
[45] In a reply to the thread, author Paul Brown stated that The Dollop had also plagiarized sections of his book The Rocketbelt Caper for a 2017 episode.
[48] Anthony told the San Francisco Chronicle, "We want people to find the source material and know who's writing it.