Colin is joined by Erika Ayers Badan, former CEO of Barstool Sports and author of the new book ‘Nobody Cares About Your Career’.
They start by diving into the reasons nobody cares about your career (3:00) and the first changes Erika made when she first arrived at Barstool (5:00). They get into the reasons why starting a business isn’t pretty (9:00) and she gives her definition of success (12:00).
Next, they debate the state of sports betting and the podcasting business (18:00) and talk about why it’s so important to be willing to grow (21:30). They discuss the problems with young people not being challenged enough (26:30) and how long you should commit to an enterprise before it returns a profit (33:00).
They weigh the downsides of “getting the bag” (36:00) and share their feelings on the state of the economy (40:00) and stories of big swings they took that missed (45:00). They wrap up the discussion by stressing the importance of knowing what your company is paying you to do (50:00) and knowing when to bail on an idea (53:30).
Finally, Colin gives his take on Donald Trump being found guilty on 34 felony counts and why the process wasn’t “rigged” (55:00).
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
The volume.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
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This is a paid advertisement. Well, I have leaned on
my next guest from time to time, I DM, but
it was totally appropriate. Formerly Eric and Ardini now Erica
airs but On is the first CEO of Barstool Sports,
(01:32):
now the CEO of Food fifty two. She has written
a book, Nobody Cares About Your Career, which I laughed
at because I watched a stand up comedian on TikTok
a couple of days ago and he said, you know
that thing about your anxiety, nobody cares because we all
have it. You care your therapy, Your therapist cares. Talk
(01:55):
to that person. So when you say nobody cares about
your career, what do you mean by that?
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Yeah? I think so. It's always great to see you.
I'm so happy to be here. One of my favorites.
I think, Nobody Cares about your career is exactly that,
which is it's a good reminder that really nobody cares
what you do all day. And I think a lot
of times people get tripped up in their careers, especially
when they're young, of what's everybody else going to think?
(02:24):
And what will people say if I take this job,
or I don't succeed at this job, or I'm an
absolute mess, all of which will be true and I
really thought it was important, just coming out of my
barstool experience, coming out of you know, twenty plus years
in media and marketing and sports of you know, hey,
(02:46):
like nobody really cares what you do all day, So
do something that makes you happy. You know.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
When you first took the barstool job, Dave's a very driven,
very polarizing, but hard working guy, and I viewed barstool
as a viable brand, a bit of a tornado that
kind of needed guidance. It was just kind of flying
all over the place. When you got to barstool, What
was the first thing as you kind of take a
(03:14):
couple of weeks to kind of get your arms around
the girth of it, the size of the company, what
was the first thing you said, Okay, this is good,
but this we have to course correct.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
So the first there was a lot of smiling like that.
I'm like, where to begin, I would say the biggest
things were there was two things that were very distinct
at the beginning. One was that Dave wasn't exactly sure
who was on the payroll or not. It was a
(03:46):
lot of like there were a lot of guys in
Boston with Barstool, JJ Barstool's insert first name here, and
they seemed like they worked for barstool. They didn't work
for barstool. Dave wasn't clear they paid them or not,
So that that there was a lot of like who
(04:07):
is this person and do they actually work here? That
was I would say, the first chapter of like, Okay,
we've got to solve for this. And then the second was,
you know, those first couple of years, we had a
lot of people who had Barstool in their handle that
had nothing to do with Barstool. They just liked Barstool.
They were fans, and they just looked like they worked
for us. And then the second was the P and L.
(04:28):
So no one at barstool had ever seen a P
and L, managed a p and L, thought about a
P and L. The Barstool p and L had horses
on it. It was you know, it was just this
cockamami assortment of costs. And Dave had run from the
beginning of you know, really profitable business, like once he
(04:49):
got this thing up and running, it was profitable and
it was private, so nobody ever looked at what the
costs were. And one of the things when I got
there was like, okay, we actually need to get a
handle on what the costs are. So those are the
two things.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
Yeah, and you know, sometimes your greatest asset can be
your greatest liability. Dave is very strong willed, obviously, and
it's a controversial. Maybe that's too strong. It's a polarizing
brand to some. I don't think it's audience sees it
as that. But you were put in the position multiple
(05:24):
times in the first couple of years to defend it.
Were you always comfortable with it? I mean, did you
have to kind of shift who you were from a
Microsoft and a Yahoo that are more corporate to barstool.
Did you find yourself in the first couple of years thinking, man,
this is this is a little bit of a tsunami.
I haven't fink it.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Yeah, yeah, it's like the tiger by the tail. I
remember the day I got hired. I was watching the Rundown,
which was live from Dave's apartment in Manhattan, and they
had a guest done and the guest it was live,
which they rarely did. But I was really pushing them.
I had worked for Barstool probably for three months by
(06:03):
the time I actually started, Like from the minute I
got into the process, I was working for Barshol, but
the guest made a bunch of racial slurs, and I
remember watching it and watching it live and just being like,
oh my God, Like what am I walking into here?
And Barstool was very, you know, much smaller at the time,
(06:25):
so the only people that picked it up were local
Boston you know, kind of Boston sports media folks. But
it was a very It made me realize how fast
it was and how what a tightrope Barstool was on.
And you know, one of the things that I think
is really the Barstool talent, Dave Dan, Kevin Clancy. They're
(06:47):
very disarming. They they seem very affable. They're very charming
you know to some maybe not others, but they're wickedly smart.
And so to keep up and to tread the line comedy,
it was very difficult. So, you know, there was a
lot of that. I was never public. I was you know,
I had worked in startups and at big companies. Barstool
(07:10):
was just very a lot it still is very alive,
and that it was real time. It was building a company,
real time in the in the public eye.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
So I had worked in Oregon for several years and
befriended Phil Knight, and I'm a broadcaster, but I've always
liked business. My dad got me into the stock market
when I was young. My kids, my kids have been
in it since they were like eight nine years old.
And so he had a manifesto and opening manifesto when
(07:42):
he started Nike, like number one was we are in
the business of change, that you know. But number nine
is something that I've experienced at the volume my little podcast,
digital company number nine. And I talked to my staff
recently about this, was it won't be pretty. Yeah, And
(08:03):
that's something I think as younger people tend to be
a tad more fragile, yeah, and easily offended. I try
to I've talked to some people and said, I'm not
sure you're a good fit for my company. I view
fragile as a weakness and relentless as the ultimate strength
(08:23):
that we all step and shit and you've got to
get over it fast and not let one interception become
two and one bad day become a week. So it barstool.
It's anti fragile, but there are lines across that, and
so was there ever a line for you that you
even with Dave a strong willed person that you had
(08:44):
to say, you know, because he's a bright guy obviously.
But but but let's talk about that that it's not pretty.
Starting a business is not it's not pretty all the time.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
It's rarely pretty, you know. And I think I love
that line, and that's really the sense of this book,
which is your career is built over a lot of mundane,
ugly days with a thousand mess ups, and if you
cannot you know, if you can't fail, you're screwed. And
what was brilliant about Barstool was that it was always
(09:18):
trying to understand the line. And that's what made it
so interesting and also so alive and so captivating to fans,
but also so difficult on the business where I always
had to have multiple lines of revenue because I didn't
know Tuesday afternoon we could be offending an advertiser. We
(09:40):
could have said something that's flaring up in the New
York Post. I never knew what was going to happen.
So safety and calm could come from having multiple levers
to keep payroll going in the business happening. But I agree,
I think the bigger you know, it's funny, there's it's cool,
not to like work now. I think there's thing leisure
(10:01):
seems more fun than work and building a company and
a brand and a business like the volume or building
barstool is it's a it's it's a mission. You're it's
going to be ugly. Everyone's going to screw up, You're
going to yell at people, You're going to get yelled at,
you know. So it's and it's it's a it's becoming
a smaller and smaller number of people who want to
(10:23):
sign up for that, which I think is really unfortunate.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
Yeah, well it's fortunate for us boomers who like to
work and get greatly. I love working. I think, you know,
it's interesting how people view success. For me, in my
little world, I viewed success is the ability, without meddling,
to create the best creative content I can with a team. Yeah,
it could be a podcast, television, radio. If I have
(10:50):
a team, we're being creative doing the best we can.
I thought yesterday I had my best show in six
months and there was nothing going on. Our staff had
a really good meeting. That to me is success.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
When how and in a company with multiple units and platforms,
there's varying degrees of success. Did you have an overarching
theme or belief system on what success was for now,
Food fifty two or Barstool.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
Yeah, it's it's similar. I'm I'm like you were. Success
is success is hard earned and hard fought, and it
also can feel it can be quite small. It's a
good show, it's a great meeting. It's accomplishing something, getting
something done. You know, Look when I got to Barstool,
(11:38):
I just didn't want to get fired. Like my I
was like what I've stepped into. Everyone was like, this
is going to be your last job, because there's no
way this is going to work. But success was for us,
it was really always about learning, like can we do
something we don't think we can do? Can we go
someplace where we've never been before? Could we invent a
(11:59):
way of doing things that hadn't been done? And Food
fifty two will be will be the same. It's a startup.
It's you know, how do we create content? How do
we showcase stories and products and bring joy to people's homes?
And Barsool's different. It's making people laugh and talking to
guys and mostly covering sports and entertainment. But it's really
(12:21):
not that different.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
At the core, yeah, it's You've got multiple things here
in terms of advice, and I wrote some of them down.
I'm always a little reticent to give advice. I'll give
an opinion, okay, but my life. But my life, child
of divorce, growing up really kind of a lonely kid.
(12:47):
I always feel like, well, nobody had my childhood. So yeah,
what am I giving advice?
Speaker 1 (12:52):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Yeah, but I do have strong opinions on on advice.
Have you ever I'll give you the best piece of
advice I got, and then I'll and then I'll ask
you for the best and worst piece. So I was
in college and I was broadcasting, and I called, uh,
(13:14):
the Seattle Mariner announcer, and I said, I want to
be a baseball announcer. What should I do? And he said,
go to the Baseball Winter meetings. Peter Eubroth was commissioner,
and pass your card out. And sometime over the course
of a year, I went to a Mariner's game. Daveney
House was a legendary broadcaster of the late Daveney House.
My oh, my big, you know, resonant, rich voice, And
(13:36):
when I got into the upstairs, I don't know how
the hell I talked my way into it. But I
got into the Mariner's booth and he grabbed my program
and he was just about to do the pregame show.
And he was a classic smoker, had his rich fos,
kind of intimidating like the Marlborough Man. And he wrote this,
He wrote this down in my program, and I think
this was the best advice. And it was so simple.
He said. He had one of those sharpie pens. He goes,
(14:00):
if you want to sit here, really want to sit here,
you will, And so he put it all on me, right.
It wasn't about his advice, it was about my will attention. Yeah,
And I always thought, God, that's great advice. What's what's
the best advice, Erica, you've ever you've ever received, the.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
Best piece of advice I've ever received. I received two
pieces of advice, one for my dad, which was, you know,
my dad was a philosophy professor, and.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
His advice, I wonder you're so smart.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
I don't know. His advice was always the best control
is no control, which paid out handsomely in my barstool time.
I will say but that you shouldn't try to hold
anything so tight, like you've got to let things you
have to move with things, and you have to watch
how things. And then the other piece of advice was
(15:01):
just to work your ass off in your twenties that
you will never regret just doing any job humanly possible
in your twenties, learning as much as you can, doing
as much as you can, working as much as you can.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
God, that's great advice.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
It's just good advice.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
Nothing to lose, well, you generally don't have kids, You
don't have a lot to lose. You have tons of energy.
I mean in my twenties, I could drink back to
back to back nights, show up Thursday, ready to go,
ready to go.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
Again, like start it up again Friday night. Now you're
like a.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
But on joining us. So when so any in my business,
this is almost me asking for your opinion. I kind
of feel like we're in the fifth inning of sports betting.
Is that the easy money, the handout money, is gone.
You have to earn it now you have to have
(15:56):
a following. People have made their big bets on personalities
and companies, but there's it's still We have many states,
California eventually that will have legalized sports gambling, and I
think podcasting similarly isn't about in the fifth or sixth inning.
I still think there's tremendous growth, but people have made
their bets and will continue to. Am I wrong? Do
(16:18):
you think? I'm I think we're middle innings to middle
to sixth inning on both sports betting and podcasting. What
say you?
Speaker 1 (16:27):
I agree? I think sports betting there was such hype
at the beginning, right the past but repealed, and the
frenzy and the energy and the delusion that the TAM
which would be the total addressable market was infinite, right
like every state is going to legalize, there's going to
(16:47):
be millions and millions and millions of sports betters. They're
going to spend all of their disposable income betting. A
lot of that proved to be false. And you know
what I think you're also seeing in sports betting. It
became very quickly an arms race between really two big players,
maybe three on the outside, but two, and it became
(17:08):
increasingly prohibitive to play. And the business itself isn't that
great like that. I think the big sober you know
there's sports betting has has sobered because it's it's quite
an ugly business. If you cannot take that customer and
convert them into something else. So I'm with you. I
(17:29):
think that you'll see in sports betting, you know, Texas, California,
you see bigger states roll out, There'll be a mini,
a mini hype. I think affecting both sports betting and podcasting, though,
is a bigger trend, which is it's impossible to break
out talent now. You you know, if you look at music,
(17:51):
when's the last time that you that an unknown star
out of nowhere became huge on the pop charts? Like,
it's not happening anymore. Same out of TikTok and YouTube
and Instagram, Like you're not seeing the come ups of
stars the way the way you did two years ago,
(18:14):
four years ago, five years ago. You know, one of
the one of the things that made barstool so powerful
was we had built enough scale so that we could
launch our own stars inside of barstool, and you will
do the same. But unless you have that platform, unless
you have that lily pad to launch from, it's becoming
very hard to get talent. And so I think that
(18:35):
will affect both the sports betting business obviously, but certainly
the podcasting business.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
Yeah, it's it's it was a double edged sword when
FS one lost Shannon Sharp. It definitely really punctured my
network or our network.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
But I remember telling my staff, We're going to do
whatever it takes to find the money to pay Shannon Sharp.
And we created a show Nightcap with O Joe, Gilbert
Arenas and Shannon and it's it's been good for everybody.
He wins, we win. But I remember I remember telling
people like Logan Swain that this, this just doesn't happen.
(19:13):
This is basically Matt Stafford on the market and the
Rams get him, Like you just do whatever it take.
Jim Harbaugh's on the market him to be your coach. Yeah, right,
and we did. I was literally I was I was
literally like do I have to buy him a Range
Rover to it? What do I gotta do? I'm like,
he's a Hall of Famer, what do I do? How
(19:33):
do I get him? And then I didn't want to
intrude on his life, so I had to wait like
three weeks before I, you know, I made an offer
to but yeah, I don't want to be weird guy
jumping in. He worked for my company, our company in
chapter six of your book and the book again, nobody
cares about your career, and I strongly just so many
little lessons in here in chapter six. All start the
(19:57):
sentence and you can finish it. But it's an interesting
chapter if you're not willing to grow. Tell people what
that's about.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
Oh so, I think you're wasting everybody's time and mostly
your own. And what I really have come to believe
about work, and I'm more like you, Colin, which is
I don't think anyone should really follow my advice. I
wouldn't necessarily follow my advice, but I do have a
lot of opinion and I've spent a lot of hours
doing this, But I think work is tuition you get
(20:28):
paid for. So you know, when you sat in the
mariner's box and you know, an luminary said it's up
to you to fill the seat. Work is tuition. It's
you are getting paid to learn, You're getting paid to
be smarter, you're getting paid to do the reps, you're
getting paid to work out. And I think that kind
(20:50):
of mindset is very important to being fulfilled at work
and happy at work. Like I'm very fulfilled at work
if I'm busy and I'm learning and I'm doing things,
fixing things, and I'm jumping in things. If everything is
great and easy sailing and you're coasting and it's you know,
it's predictable, that's when I get nervous. And I think
(21:11):
that mindset of being willing to put yourself out there,
to fail and try things as much as you can
is ultimately what gets people the opportunity for that dream
job or that dream moment or that dream experience, because
you have built yourself into a new person who is
ready for that and capable of it. You know.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
It's funny my sister and I talk about this that
we had a British mother and a successful optometrist, small
town optometrist dad, who later in life was an alcoholic,
but never he was like a happy drinker. Yeah, he
went to work, he was sober. He was never cruel,
mean spirited. So I didn't have any of that kind
(22:02):
of stuff. But I've said to my sister, we lived
in the same house. I said, you know, I like
to sort of you know, it's it's probably some psychological
term I'll project when I talk to people about my
child and how rough it was, and oh boy, small town,
and and then and and then I think to myself,
(22:24):
my stepdad was my little League coach. My mom was
British and really funny and had a British accent and
just saw the world differently. My dad was really a
bright guy, like had these little nuggets of wisdom. And
but the one thing my parents gave me is they
didn't helicopter they maybe they were.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
My mom was.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
Huggy, kissy. Dad wasn't most dads weren't. And that I
was allowed to fuck up a lot and my mom
My mom grounded me one summer. You know, I started
a small fire that was not great near the house.
So but one of the things I see is that
I think parents think they're doing a great job. They're
calling on their kids behalf, they're getting them internships, they
(23:09):
go to prep schools, and I got to tell you,
it creates this sort of personality where you just things
are easy. It's like and there's just something about being
allowed to mess up and your And I've told my
(23:29):
kids before, you know, my kids are really good students,
and I'm like, don't ask questions and I'm like, you
figure it out, it's not it's not my paper, and
I don't I'm not harsh on my kids if they
get a you know, they struggled in a class. But
when you were hiring a lot of people at the bar,
(23:50):
at Barstool, and it's something at the volume we've really
we really vet who we hire, like we really vet
and still you know, sometimes you miss. But the average
person you were hiring, were you impressed, were you disappointed?
Was it what you expected? Talk about and now that
at food fifty two, talk about the process of what
(24:11):
you're seeing. Bill Maher complains that all of his young
writers see the world the exact same way, and he
doesn't want that.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
Yeah, yeah, I think, you know, I think one thing
we did well at Barstool was we just hired. It
was misfits, you know. It was we hired young, and
we hired out of college. And we mostly our best
hires had worked for Barstool for four years being interns
(24:39):
for us on you know, doing the Viceroy program, which
is the college program. But I would see the kids
roll in from the prep school or the big you know,
the nice college, and they were A were boring, and
B they were vanilla and kind of uninteresting. And it
(24:59):
was all we always hired the kids and the people
who I like now and always frankly have liked are.
You know, it's the it's the guy who's editing basketball
trick shots in his bedroom instead of going out and like,
you know, drinking four thousand high noons. You know, it's
not it's not the popular kids. It's not the kids
(25:20):
who did everything right. It's the kid who had something
they were interested in and worked really hard at it.
And I think resilience. You know, I think there's two things.
I think kids right now are very very rarely bored
because they mostly have phones, which just placate them. And
two they are they are helicoptered. You know. It's funny.
I remember interviewing a guy once and he was like, hey, look,
(25:44):
if I'm to take to take this job, I really
need you to talk to my mom. And I was like, bro, like,
but you know, like sure, I'll talk to your mom,
But like, if you need your mom's approval to do
this job or you're somehow I'm beholden to your mother
because you work, oh, I was like, forget it. I've
(26:05):
had people be like I need you to talk to
my wife, and I also like, I don't love that either.
So I think people are co dependent in weird ways,
and people aren't able to think independently. And you know
this if you're in a startup or you're in the
heat of the moment, or whether you work in something
glamorous like content or radio or sports or you know whatnot,
(26:29):
or you work at like a computer company. You got
to be able to make decisions. You have to be
able to work under pressure. You have to be able
to mess up and be like, oh shit, I fucked up.
I got to fix this. And if you can't do
that when you're young, you're kind of screwed by the
time you're fifty, because then you what do you know?
What have you learned? What have you done?
Speaker 2 (26:50):
Can I cannot imagine? First of all, I wouldn't hire
somebody who said you got to talk to my mom.
And the reason I wouldn't is because your judgment so
poor When that came out of your mouth, you thought
that was a sales pitch. It's like, for fuck's sake,
what are you saying like that? You should literally say
(27:11):
you you have to talk to my mom about her
castle role. It's the best castle role. You God, you
got to stop that sentence right there. You know, it's
interesting I saw something, uh, you know, browsing the Internet
and I and I do think there's really a lot
(27:32):
of smart people. I've hired people off you know, Xah.
I called you one time for advice and I said,
should the volume? Should I be on TikTok? I said,
I don't know how to monetize it? And do you
remember the advice you gave me.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
I probably said, like, get on TikTok? Who cares about
the monetization.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
That's exactly what you said. You said, get on it,
build an audience. You'll figure out the monitorization later. And
that's an interesting part because when you're at barstool or
now the CEO of food fifty two, how long are
you willing to commit to something before you see profits
(28:16):
or at least reasonable monetization.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
Oh, if I see audience growth forever. I am a
highly impatient person. But if you put talent on a
platform or create content for a platform and it gets traction,
you've got to let The longer you do that, the
(28:40):
more you let that marinate, the further you explore with it.
I will wait weeks, months, I would wait years, because
the reality is if you the more audience you grow,
and if you find you've got to first, you know, first,
you have to have something to say, right, And then
(29:01):
you've got to find people who actually want to listen
to you and care what you have to say. And
then you want them to play with you, right, You
want to engage with them, and then you want them
to advocate for you. And maybe then you start not
just saying one thing, you're saying three things or doing
three things. The longer you wait to monetize that and
(29:22):
ask them to do something for you in return, which
is to buy a product or support a sponsor, it
creates this pent up demand that is really really palpable.
You know, if you look at Dave's the best at this,
if you look at Miss Peaches, Miss Peaches is arguably
the biggest personality of barshol sports right now. Do you
(29:42):
know miss Peaches?
Speaker 2 (29:43):
Yeah, I'm sure the dog, yeah, the dog yeah, so
remote and stuff, yes, exactly.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
But there are a lot of companies I imagine who
are like, oh, Dave like pimp our dog food, and
Dave like, you know, support this, support that, and he
held and the hold is of that pause. That hold
before you monetize is not lost time. It's actually a
huge advantage. And that's how I think about platforms. If
(30:13):
you can grow, it's like having a baby, you know
what I mean, You're just like really pregnant and then
you have the baby. Like growing audience and waiting to
monetize it is a very powerful tool that most people
don't have the stamina to wait for.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
Yeah, we didn't at the Volume take any you know,
VC money. It's it's we just I just said I
won't a salary. Yeah, we bootstrapped it. And I don't
necessarily know. I'm not. I'm not a control freak. I
like to pass the ball. I've got really smart people.
(30:50):
What is the value? You don't get the big payoff?
What is the value? Because whether I sell it or not,
I think I want the control to make make sure
I don't feel responsible necessarily for Fox Sports employees or
iHeart employees. I feel incredibly responsible for Volume employees. I
(31:12):
lose sleep. Yeah that's you know, they're my people, They're
my army, and so you know, it's it's and I'm
being selfishly. I'm asking this and I've thought about this
before because people say, oh, you're just you built it
to sell it, and I'm like, no, I didn't, really
I would I would consider a really cool partnership. But
(31:35):
you know, obviously Dave at some point could have didn't.
Now Dave was different. Dave bootstrapped it for a decade
before he made the money. Long people don't know Dave
was out there making nothing forever, twelve years of nothing,
just hustling. I get that. What is the downside? I
(32:00):
yes to the bag, to selling it big.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
The bag has huge downside, and I think you're right.
I think you're building something. Look, if you, Colin wanted
to be like I want the highest ROI on my
dollar invested, you would not probably create a media company.
You would put it in the stock market, or buy
(32:24):
a piece of r or do something. So this is
a labor of love, I think, and that's partly what
makes it important. I think the bag is tough because
the bag, when you sell out for the bag, unless
you have a huge motor to keep going, and you
have a big reason now that you're richer and you know,
(32:46):
more comfortable than ever before, if you you have to
find that's an obstacle to overcome with fans, and I
think a lot of times when people get the bag,
they become a little lazy, Like you get better taste,
you want to travel, you buy your second house, like
you're not hungry to go build the mission, continue on
(33:07):
the journey, Like there's something to being hungry, you know.
The best years at Barstool, I think people would say
were probably the earliest years, and then they were the
beginning of my years because it was such a grind,
you know, we didn't know if we would make it.
We still had so much road to climb. The best
(33:29):
years were not after the pen acquisition, you know. So
I think getting the bag also comes with responsibilities and
changes things, and that's hard for a mission driven, passion
driven brand.
Speaker 2 (33:44):
Yeah, my favorite part of the Barstool story is my
least favorite part of traveling, which is turbulence. So I
love I hate it on planes, and I love it
when I read the PHILM Night book. By the way,
people have no idea how close they were out of
money multiple times all the time. Yeah, all the time.
(34:07):
So when you entered Microsoft, what years were those?
Speaker 1 (34:11):
Oh, my gosh, that was like early two thousands, like
two thousands, Okay, so.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
They were established, Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Baer. That
was good time. But what were the challenges of being now?
Apple was a rival, but what were the challenges of
a company where everybody was at least stockwealthy.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
Yes, I mean that. What you find, I think is
you become more bureaucratic, you become more inwardly focused. The
problem has become turf wars inside of a company or
which group is going to get I mean I worked
for a group that lost I think five hundred million
dollars a quarter, and we traveled first class all around
(34:52):
the world like nobody cared. But it was a lot
of politics, and I think those those are I think
that's what you trade. You trade politics and posturing and
bureaucracy that comes with cash. When you're hungry and you're
on the jump and you're on the come up, it's
(35:16):
so satisfying because it's all new and it's all fulfilling.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
Yeah, there's the old axiom. It's a truism. Actually, is
that in wartime comfort food sales skyrocket in America and
in peacetime bungee jumping, sky diving adventure sales go up. People, Right,
your problems are different, your fun is different, based on
your economic set. For the record, there is some argument
(35:44):
in America, I don't think the economy is great, but
I also don't think it's in a free fall. I mean,
if it was, then volume wouldn't be growing at the
rate it's growing. Your CEO of food fifty two, I
often mentioned that I get on planes, there's no empty seats,
and these are not rich people. I don't fly a
(36:04):
lot of private if at all. Hotels try to book them.
They're busy. You tell me, as a CEO of food
fifty two, how is your economy? What do you see?
Speaker 1 (36:17):
I see that people are spending. You know, I think
there's angst. I think there's like low level angst. You
look at the housing market and the interest rates like that.
You know, the houses aren't moving, which is actually kind
of interesting for the food fifty two business because if
you don't have a new house, you don't need so
much stuff. You're not redecorating, you're not not setting new tables,
(36:40):
all that kind of stuff. So in my economy, that's
an interesting factor that I'm watching. But by and large,
people are spending. Americans are great consumers, and that you know.
Americans like things. They want new things, they want to entertain,
they want a T shirt, they want better cookwar like
(37:00):
the consumption. Americans like to buy things and to consume
and I think we'll always like that, you know.
Speaker 2 (37:17):
One of the lessons we learned early, and it was
hard because we looked at Barstool and we watched The
Ringer and a lot of different companies. And one of
the things very early I said is there are things
Barstool does well, but we never will. I said, I'm
not into selling merch. If we could sell some hoodies,
but that's a merch company, I said, we're not, and
(37:41):
we fooled around with it and I said, guys, it's
just not what we do. There's things that I think
the writing arm of the Ringer, I'm like, I don't
have the passion for writing my bag. It's not my bag.
So but I love doing live stuff and YouTube stuff
and gambling stuff and that's what we did well. But
it's are there things somebody once gave me advice, double
(38:06):
down on stuff that works and bail immediately if something doesn't.
Don't fall in love with your ideas, fall in love
with people. Is there anything you did at Barstool that
just didn't work in you're life? Okay about instincts?
Speaker 1 (38:19):
Yeah, a thousand things. I think you're right, So you know,
barstool thinks in T shirts. That's how people signal they're
part of whatever brand. And what we did well was
we grew you know, grew ninety brands in my time there,
and you know, twenty of them were pretty successful. But
because we thought in T shirts, everybody thought in T shirts,
(38:42):
and we hilled T shirts the same way we you know,
pimped out podcasts. But there was a lot that we
failed on. One thing that we failed on was we
built this really stupid subscription product called Gold because at
the time, and this is also like I think a
cautionary of having an investor is you know, the Charning guys,
(39:04):
and I love the Charning guys, but they were like, hey,
at some point, somebody is going to need to buy you,
so you need to hustle up and figure out, like
who's that going to be. And until passovers repealed, it
always looked like it would be a media company. Now
it was very obviously not going to be a media company.
But media companies wanted subscribers, right Everyone's moving to the
race to subscribers and the race to streaming.
Speaker 2 (39:26):
So wild the New York Times exactly.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
So we built a subscription product, but the barstool guys
and girls are such you know, their whores for attention.
And I say that in the best way possible. The
idea of putting something only behind a paywall was it
was it was against the religion, and it was so stupid.
(39:51):
And we built great tech. We built, you know, a
seamless way to do it. Stooley's, to their credit, bought it.
But it was a really it was forced you know,
you know, you know when you feel like you're doing
something wrong and like your heart's not in and you know,
isn't working. That was one of those things. We launched
a grooming product called wood, which you know, I still
(40:14):
think was, you know, kind of an interesting concept. We
partnered with a company. We made a line of grooming products,
but there wasn't a talent or personality behind it, and
no one felt like it was their own, so it
became nobody's and it was a failure. So we had
things like that littered all over the barstool road.
Speaker 2 (40:33):
You know, it's interesting. The paywall. I've been again kind
of reluctant to go there, but I have serious and
Netflix and Apple TV and Amazon Prime and I buy UFC.
Is it inevitable? I mean, is it just I say
to myself, I don't want to go behind a paywall,
(40:53):
but frankly, I'm behind eight of them. I pay for
eight of them, nine of them. Where are you on
the paywall?
Speaker 1 (41:02):
I don't. I I don't love a paywall either. Why
I get the paywall? I get it. My friend Barry
Weise created an amazing cted the Free Press created an
amazing paywall business, which is news, but it's not I
don't love it. I'm more interested in how many people
(41:25):
can you entertain or how many people could you talk to?
And the idea of only talking to a certain group
I think one I think is kind of problematic for
society where everybody's just in their own little echo chamber.
And two I think it's I think it's for me,
it's less interesting, and that probably is wrong from a
(41:46):
business perspective, but I I think broadcast is interesting.
Speaker 2 (41:52):
You know, I didn't like when the MLS went to
Apple because my takeaway is they lost casuals. Yeah, and
that what what happens is you only get a tribal following,
and I don't want just a tribal following. I like pushback,
I like I like I want to hear from my haters.
I want to I don't want to go and just
(42:13):
be comforted with all my opinions.
Speaker 1 (42:16):
I like to know.
Speaker 2 (42:17):
I say, my audience drives the bus. They tell me
where to go. I don't form my opinion on them,
but I picked my topics based on my audience what
they're interested in. And it's so I'm I am a
believer that if if when when MLS went to Apple TV,
now I still watch it because I have Apple TV
for a lot of things, the Patriots Dynasty, but that
(42:40):
that's an example where I think you lose casuals and
I like I like casuals. I want to there's there
was a chapter in this book you talked about know
what your company's paying you to do?
Speaker 1 (42:50):
Yes?
Speaker 2 (42:51):
And I think it's the downfall of Belichick in New
England is that bill Ois said do your job, and
then he got successful and the rings and he started
doing the general manager's job and the coaching job. And
he's a lousy He's a lousy GM. And I want
to talk to talk about that know what your company
(43:13):
is paying.
Speaker 1 (43:13):
You to do? Yeah? I think, Look, I say it
in the book, which is the stupidest person at your
company is the is the person who doesn't understand how
your company makes money. And that may sound harsh, but
I think it's true. Like, if you do not understand
how your company makes money, who your company's customer is,
(43:36):
if your company is making money, then you really have
to be wondering, like what are you doing all day?
And the reason I think this is important is there's
people get really whiplashed with layoffs and reorbs and job
changes and retitling. And the reality is, if you don't
(43:58):
understand what your company is paying you to do in
the context of what your company does at large, you're
probably not on a great path. And it's, you know,
to the Belichick check example. You know, when people aren't
clear on what their job is or their ambition is
for two jobs, when they're really getting paid for one
(44:20):
and the second is more interesting, you put you make
yourself vulnerable. You know. Jeff Zucker always had this like
really great quote which is like, don't give your company
the gun that shoots you. And I always liked that.
I think that's a great quote, which is, don't give
your company a gun to shoot you. And the you know,
(44:42):
beyond like a sex scandal or whatever, like, cause the
way your company is going to shoot you is if
you're not doing your job. And I think that's sometimes work.
You know, you get lost in the Mondays and the
Tuesdays and this and that and this project and that
deadline and whatever, and you lose of like why did
they hire you in the first place. And I think
(45:03):
it's just good to keep a firm hold on that. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (45:08):
So when I started the volume, you know, it's like
Jerry Seinfeld used to joke about his show. He goes,
I'm the world's worst actor. That was my show Number one.
So I like business, but I didn't go to Pan
or Wharton, and I don't know business. But I only
had a couple of things that I was already strident on.
One of the things I would say to my people,
(45:32):
and I would say, let's not worry about being right.
Let's get it right. So I don't give a shit
about your ideas. If they work, great, If they don't,
they're done. Yeah, Just I don't keep score. Yeah, And
I said, let's find what works. Do that. Yeah, be loyal.
(45:52):
Don't be loyal to your idea. Now it sounds smart,
but give me an example. What is the line on bailing.
Have you ever had an idea that you're absolutely sure
works and you stay with it too long?
Speaker 1 (46:06):
Oh yeah, I mean so much. I had a startup
before Barstool that was a brilliant idea. It was a
social network for Justin Bieber and forty other music artists.
It was it was going to compete with Facebook and
you know, Instagram and Google, and it was. It was
a good idea. It did not work. And you can
(46:30):
only put your head in the sands so long, where
you're like, this isn't working. I worked for another startup
in the fashion space, really interesting concept which was Hey
Vogue and the idea of one editor in chief and
one way of saying fashion is it's dead. It's going
to be very democratized. The company was pre social, so
(46:51):
it like never had any distribution. It didn't work, So
I stayed in a lot of things. I think too long.
I think what's hard? Is?
Speaker 2 (47:01):
It?
Speaker 1 (47:01):
Kind of manifests in two ways. You either put your
head in the sand and you're like, I don't want
to know, I don't want to see, I don't want
to know. I love you know, I love my idea,
I love this, I love the image of this thing
or the second is like everybody plays like sixth grade
soccer or fourth grade soccer, where like everybody's glomed onto
the ball and it's such a pack that like you
(47:23):
don't know who's kicking it, you don't know who's receiving it.
You can't tell who's good or not. And I think
that happens a lot, which masks both success and failure.
Speaker 2 (47:34):
All Right, the book is nobody cares about your career Erica.
You know how highly I think of you, and you
did not have to spend thirty minutes of your day.
Speaker 1 (47:44):
I'm so happy to.
Speaker 2 (47:46):
Uh for the record, and I'm not flirting because I'm
happily married. But you have the best hair of anybody
I've ever interviewed in my entire life.
Speaker 1 (47:52):
It's so dirty. I'm like, this should have like judged
up for you.
Speaker 2 (47:57):
Now you're a rock star. Hey, thanks for doing this
a thousand times over. Well, I have to talk about Trump.
I've said this for a long time. I've always considered
myself sort of a left leaning independent. I'm kind of
a conservative on fiscal issues, more of a probably liberal.
I don't know. I don't think pro gay marriage is liberal.
I don't think pro pot is liberal. I think those
(48:19):
are moderate stances today. But I was in, you know,
supportive of those twenty five years ago. So I kind
of consider myself a moderate that if I am up
in the air on something fiscally, i'd go conservative. Socially
i'd go left. But you know, I've said this about
Trump before. He's trying to sell me in America that
doesn't exist. Like I'm sixty, I don't remember anything before
(48:41):
like six or seven years old. But for the last
fifty three years of my life, outside of the pandemic year,
I've loved America. I've lived everywhere Tampa, Vegas. I've been
kind of poor, middle class. Now I'm better off than most.
But he's trying to sell me this America stinks, and
I just don't see it. I live in a nice
neighborhood in LA. It's not a Top six or seven
(49:02):
neighborhood in LA. It's not a Beverly Hills of Malibu,
of Brentwood, of bel Air Hancock Park. It's not like
one of those swanky neighborhoods. But I don't see crime.
I'm not stumbling over homeless people. I see happy people.
Dodger Stadium's full leads Major League Baseball and attendance. Laker
games are full, NFL games are full. People they have
money in their pocket. Lax is packed. I just saw
(49:24):
a record airline revenue over the weekend. I'm constantly being
sold in America by Donald Trump crime rates or skyrocketing. No,
they're actually not. Starting In twenty twenty three, they have
plummeted coast to coast over two hundred cities. Violent crime
rates are down. I mean Los Angeles and some cities
may tick up in certain areas, but it's in America
(49:47):
he's selling me. It would be like watching your football
team and they play well and win, and your neighbor
says they're playing terribly and keep losing. No, they're winning
and they're not playing terribly. Like, you can't keep selling
me on how bad the country I live in is,
because it's not bad for me or my friends. I
have a friend that's a stay at home dad. He's
not rich. I have friends who work part time, starting
up businesses, who have worked at the same place forever.
(50:10):
I have middle class friends. They're not complaining about their
life constantly, and there I don't know what they are politically.
I really don't don't. I don't talk about politics with
my friends. I talk about my wife, I talk about sports,
I talk about you know, we talk about guy stuff.
I'm not somebody that is. If you don't have policies
that I connect with, and you're always grouching and bitching
(50:30):
about the other side, I'm not really interested in you.
You know. Trump once tried to sell a vodka and
acknowledges he never drank. Ever, he's never really drank alcohol,
but he tried to sell a vodka. So I've thought
for a long time he's just kind of a con artist.
But I was sitting there thinking this morning that if
let's say I got busted for some really bad crime
(50:52):
in court, a drug crime, and my wife did too
in a separate case, and then so did one of
my kids, my manager, my agent, and my attorney, it
would be reasonable to conclude that I'm shady and involved
in a business that's not terribly legal. Well, Donald Trump
(51:13):
is now a felon. His campaign chairman was a felon.
So is his deputy campaign manager, his personal lawyers, chief strategist,
his national security advisor, his trade advisor, his foreign policy advisor,
his campaign fix and his company CFO. They're all felons,
judged by the company you keep. It's a cabal of convicts.
(51:33):
It's not that I'm not willing to vote for conservatives.
I said I would have voted for Mitt Romney. Seemed
like a decent family man. Now he looks like he's
the publisher of Yachting Weekly, so he's not terribly relatable.
Is a big money guy. But I'm not somebody that
I liked the second bush Bush senior son. I liked him.
(51:54):
I thought he was a decent American, a decent human.
I guess he's got some artistic qualities. Now he paints
a lot. I liked his wife, Laura Bush. I thought
they were decent people. I liked the Obamas. I didn't
understand the outrage. Good family. Seemed like nice people. But
if everybody in your social circle is a felon, I
(52:14):
don't think it's rigged. I don't think the world's against you.
And to get people who agree on anything, thirty four counts.
Oh for thirty four, I mean that's a that's a
batting slump. Even the New York Mets could be impressed
with oh for thirty four, so when you're constantly trying
to sell me on an America that I don't see.
(52:35):
I'm not saying inflation is not an issue. But I
get on airplanes all the time, and it's not a
bunch of rich people. I don't fly private. I couldn't
tell you the last time I fly private. Maybe every
couple of years. It'll be a family thing. We're trying
to get everybody in the same flight, but not very often.
I don't live in a fancy neighborhood. I get on planes.
There's people in normal clothes, don't look rich to me,
(52:56):
and the planes are all full, and the hotels are
all full, and the freeways were all full. That means
people are going to work. You're trying to sell me
on this story, in this narrative that's just not true. Well, Colin,
you're out of touch, out of touch to what I have.
Single people that live next to me, young families that
live next to me. People aren't grousing, they're not miserable
(53:16):
all day now, they're not talking politics. But you know,
Trump's entire game plan is the country isn't a free fall.
Maybe in the Trump centric neighborhoods it is. It's not anywhere.
For my sister, who lives rurally, doesn't have a lot
of crime in her neighborhood. I don't my friends don't.
We live all over Los Angeles, in one of those
(53:38):
big scary cities that voted for liberals. Oh scary. I
don't know. Everybody was saying, hung jury.
Speaker 1 (53:47):
I didn't know.
Speaker 2 (53:49):
But when everybody in your team, everybody in your group,
your cabal is a felon, maybe maybe the world's not
against you. I mean, it is New York City. It
is New York City. I get it. They're gonna have peel.
Maybe it'll drive up his fundraising. But stop trying to
sell me on. Everything's rigged. The country's falling into the sea.
(54:11):
The economy's terrible. The economy's okay, it's not like on fire.
But get on a plane. Find all the empty seats.
I don't see them. Those aren't cheap either. A hotel
rooms over Memorial Weekend. I like living in Portland. I
like growing up on the coast of Washington. I like
living in la I have a place in Chicago. I
(54:33):
love it. I have really good friends and go regularly
to Rhode Island. I love that. Maybe maybe some of
you are just unhappy. Maybe you're only happy when you're unhappy.
But the America that I live in is imperfect. But
compared to the rest of the world, I think we're
(54:53):
doing okay. And if you're not, is it possible, just possible.
I'm not even saying probable. Is it possible if your
life has just been miserable for the last four years,
it's not exclusively the fault of somebody in sixteen hundred
Pennsylvania Avenue. Maybe it's not all their fault the volume.
(55:18):
Thanks so much for listening. If you've enjoyed the podcast,
take a moment rate and review.
Speaker 1 (55:23):
Hey everyone, it's Jason Tipp, host of Hoops Tonight.
Speaker 2 (55:25):
Make sure you check us out live after games on
the Hoops Tonight YouTube channel as we provide instant reaction
and analysis of all the big NBA playoff games.
Speaker 1 (55:34):
Again, that's the Hoops Tonight YouTube channel and wherever you
get your podcasts.
The volume.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
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This is a paid advertisement. Well, I have leaned on
my next guest from time to time, I DM, but
it was totally appropriate. Formerly Eric and Ardini now Erica
airs but On is the first CEO of Barstool Sports,
(01:32):
now the CEO of Food fifty two. She has written
a book, Nobody Cares About Your Career, which I laughed
at because I watched a stand up comedian on TikTok
a couple of days ago and he said, you know
that thing about your anxiety, nobody cares because we all
have it. You care your therapy, Your therapist cares. Talk
(01:55):
to that person. So when you say nobody cares about
your career, what do you mean by that?
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Yeah? I think so. It's always great to see you.
I'm so happy to be here. One of my favorites.
I think, Nobody Cares about your career is exactly that,
which is it's a good reminder that really nobody cares
what you do all day. And I think a lot
of times people get tripped up in their careers, especially
when they're young, of what's everybody else going to think?
(02:24):
And what will people say if I take this job,
or I don't succeed at this job, or I'm an
absolute mess, all of which will be true and I
really thought it was important, just coming out of my
barstool experience, coming out of you know, twenty plus years
in media and marketing and sports of you know, hey,
(02:46):
like nobody really cares what you do all day, So
do something that makes you happy. You know.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
When you first took the barstool job, Dave's a very driven,
very polarizing, but hard working guy, and I viewed barstool
as a viable brand, a bit of a tornado that
kind of needed guidance. It was just kind of flying
all over the place. When you got to barstool, What
was the first thing as you kind of take a
(03:14):
couple of weeks to kind of get your arms around
the girth of it, the size of the company, what
was the first thing you said, Okay, this is good,
but this we have to course correct.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
So the first there was a lot of smiling like that.
I'm like, where to begin, I would say the biggest
things were there was two things that were very distinct
at the beginning. One was that Dave wasn't exactly sure
who was on the payroll or not. It was a
(03:46):
lot of like there were a lot of guys in
Boston with Barstool, JJ Barstool's insert first name here, and
they seemed like they worked for barstool. They didn't work
for barstool. Dave wasn't clear they paid them or not,
So that that there was a lot of like who
(04:07):
is this person and do they actually work here? That
was I would say, the first chapter of like, Okay,
we've got to solve for this. And then the second was,
you know, those first couple of years, we had a
lot of people who had Barstool in their handle that
had nothing to do with Barstool. They just liked Barstool.
They were fans, and they just looked like they worked
for us. And then the second was the P and L.
(04:28):
So no one at barstool had ever seen a P
and L, managed a p and L, thought about a
P and L. The Barstool p and L had horses
on it. It was you know, it was just this
cockamami assortment of costs. And Dave had run from the
beginning of you know, really profitable business, like once he
(04:49):
got this thing up and running, it was profitable and
it was private, so nobody ever looked at what the
costs were. And one of the things when I got
there was like, okay, we actually need to get a
handle on what the costs are. So those are the
two things.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
Yeah, and you know, sometimes your greatest asset can be
your greatest liability. Dave is very strong willed, obviously, and
it's a controversial. Maybe that's too strong. It's a polarizing
brand to some. I don't think it's audience sees it
as that. But you were put in the position multiple
(05:24):
times in the first couple of years to defend it.
Were you always comfortable with it? I mean, did you
have to kind of shift who you were from a
Microsoft and a Yahoo that are more corporate to barstool.
Did you find yourself in the first couple of years thinking, man,
this is this is a little bit of a tsunami.
I haven't fink it.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Yeah, yeah, it's like the tiger by the tail. I
remember the day I got hired. I was watching the Rundown,
which was live from Dave's apartment in Manhattan, and they
had a guest done and the guest it was live,
which they rarely did. But I was really pushing them.
I had worked for Barstool probably for three months by
(06:03):
the time I actually started, Like from the minute I
got into the process, I was working for Barshol, but
the guest made a bunch of racial slurs, and I
remember watching it and watching it live and just being like,
oh my God, Like what am I walking into here?
And Barstool was very, you know, much smaller at the time,
(06:25):
so the only people that picked it up were local
Boston you know, kind of Boston sports media folks. But
it was a very It made me realize how fast
it was and how what a tightrope Barstool was on.
And you know, one of the things that I think
is really the Barstool talent, Dave Dan, Kevin Clancy. They're
(06:47):
very disarming. They they seem very affable. They're very charming
you know to some maybe not others, but they're wickedly smart.
And so to keep up and to tread the line comedy,
it was very difficult. So, you know, there was a
lot of that. I was never public. I was you know,
I had worked in startups and at big companies. Barstool
(07:10):
was just very a lot it still is very alive,
and that it was real time. It was building a company,
real time in the in the public eye.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
So I had worked in Oregon for several years and
befriended Phil Knight, and I'm a broadcaster, but I've always
liked business. My dad got me into the stock market
when I was young. My kids, my kids have been
in it since they were like eight nine years old.
And so he had a manifesto and opening manifesto when
(07:42):
he started Nike, like number one was we are in
the business of change, that you know. But number nine
is something that I've experienced at the volume my little podcast,
digital company number nine. And I talked to my staff
recently about this, was it won't be pretty. Yeah, And
(08:03):
that's something I think as younger people tend to be
a tad more fragile, yeah, and easily offended. I try
to I've talked to some people and said, I'm not
sure you're a good fit for my company. I view
fragile as a weakness and relentless as the ultimate strength
(08:23):
that we all step and shit and you've got to
get over it fast and not let one interception become
two and one bad day become a week. So it barstool.
It's anti fragile, but there are lines across that, and
so was there ever a line for you that you
even with Dave a strong willed person that you had
(08:44):
to say, you know, because he's a bright guy obviously.
But but but let's talk about that that it's not pretty.
Starting a business is not it's not pretty all the time.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
It's rarely pretty, you know. And I think I love
that line, and that's really the sense of this book,
which is your career is built over a lot of mundane,
ugly days with a thousand mess ups, and if you
cannot you know, if you can't fail, you're screwed. And
what was brilliant about Barstool was that it was always
(09:18):
trying to understand the line. And that's what made it
so interesting and also so alive and so captivating to fans,
but also so difficult on the business where I always
had to have multiple lines of revenue because I didn't
know Tuesday afternoon we could be offending an advertiser. We
(09:40):
could have said something that's flaring up in the New
York Post. I never knew what was going to happen.
So safety and calm could come from having multiple levers
to keep payroll going in the business happening. But I agree,
I think the bigger you know, it's funny, there's it's cool,
not to like work now. I think there's thing leisure
(10:01):
seems more fun than work and building a company and
a brand and a business like the volume or building
barstool is it's a it's it's a mission. You're it's
going to be ugly. Everyone's going to screw up, You're
going to yell at people, You're going to get yelled at,
you know. So it's and it's it's a it's becoming
a smaller and smaller number of people who want to
(10:23):
sign up for that, which I think is really unfortunate.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
Yeah, well it's fortunate for us boomers who like to
work and get greatly. I love working. I think, you know,
it's interesting how people view success. For me, in my
little world, I viewed success is the ability, without meddling,
to create the best creative content I can with a team. Yeah,
it could be a podcast, television, radio. If I have
(10:50):
a team, we're being creative doing the best we can.
I thought yesterday I had my best show in six
months and there was nothing going on. Our staff had
a really good meeting. That to me is success.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
When how and in a company with multiple units and platforms,
there's varying degrees of success. Did you have an overarching
theme or belief system on what success was for now,
Food fifty two or Barstool.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
Yeah, it's it's similar. I'm I'm like you were. Success
is success is hard earned and hard fought, and it
also can feel it can be quite small. It's a
good show, it's a great meeting. It's accomplishing something, getting
something done. You know, Look when I got to Barstool,
(11:38):
I just didn't want to get fired. Like my I
was like what I've stepped into. Everyone was like, this
is going to be your last job, because there's no
way this is going to work. But success was for us,
it was really always about learning, like can we do
something we don't think we can do? Can we go
someplace where we've never been before? Could we invent a
(11:59):
way of doing things that hadn't been done? And Food
fifty two will be will be the same. It's a startup.
It's you know, how do we create content? How do
we showcase stories and products and bring joy to people's homes?
And Barsool's different. It's making people laugh and talking to
guys and mostly covering sports and entertainment. But it's really
(12:21):
not that different.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
At the core, yeah, it's You've got multiple things here
in terms of advice, and I wrote some of them down.
I'm always a little reticent to give advice. I'll give
an opinion, okay, but my life. But my life, child
of divorce, growing up really kind of a lonely kid.
(12:47):
I always feel like, well, nobody had my childhood. So yeah,
what am I giving advice?
Speaker 1 (12:52):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Yeah, but I do have strong opinions on on advice.
Have you ever I'll give you the best piece of
advice I got, and then I'll and then I'll ask
you for the best and worst piece. So I was
in college and I was broadcasting, and I called, uh,
(13:14):
the Seattle Mariner announcer, and I said, I want to
be a baseball announcer. What should I do? And he said,
go to the Baseball Winter meetings. Peter Eubroth was commissioner,
and pass your card out. And sometime over the course
of a year, I went to a Mariner's game. Daveney
House was a legendary broadcaster of the late Daveney House.
My oh, my big, you know, resonant, rich voice, And
(13:36):
when I got into the upstairs, I don't know how
the hell I talked my way into it. But I
got into the Mariner's booth and he grabbed my program
and he was just about to do the pregame show.
And he was a classic smoker, had his rich fos,
kind of intimidating like the Marlborough Man. And he wrote this,
He wrote this down in my program, and I think
this was the best advice. And it was so simple.
He said. He had one of those sharpie pens. He goes,
(14:00):
if you want to sit here, really want to sit here,
you will, And so he put it all on me, right.
It wasn't about his advice, it was about my will attention. Yeah,
And I always thought, God, that's great advice. What's what's
the best advice, Erica, you've ever you've ever received, the.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
Best piece of advice I've ever received. I received two
pieces of advice, one for my dad, which was, you know,
my dad was a philosophy professor, and.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
His advice, I wonder you're so smart.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
I don't know. His advice was always the best control
is no control, which paid out handsomely in my barstool time.
I will say but that you shouldn't try to hold
anything so tight, like you've got to let things you
have to move with things, and you have to watch
how things. And then the other piece of advice was
(15:01):
just to work your ass off in your twenties that
you will never regret just doing any job humanly possible
in your twenties, learning as much as you can, doing
as much as you can, working as much as you can.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
God, that's great advice.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
It's just good advice.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
Nothing to lose, well, you generally don't have kids, You
don't have a lot to lose. You have tons of energy.
I mean in my twenties, I could drink back to
back to back nights, show up Thursday, ready to go,
ready to go.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
Again, like start it up again Friday night. Now you're
like a.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
But on joining us. So when so any in my business,
this is almost me asking for your opinion. I kind
of feel like we're in the fifth inning of sports betting.
Is that the easy money, the handout money, is gone.
You have to earn it now you have to have
(15:56):
a following. People have made their big bets on personalities
and companies, but there's it's still We have many states,
California eventually that will have legalized sports gambling, and I
think podcasting similarly isn't about in the fifth or sixth inning.
I still think there's tremendous growth, but people have made
their bets and will continue to. Am I wrong? Do
(16:18):
you think? I'm I think we're middle innings to middle
to sixth inning on both sports betting and podcasting. What
say you?
Speaker 1 (16:27):
I agree? I think sports betting there was such hype
at the beginning, right the past but repealed, and the
frenzy and the energy and the delusion that the TAM
which would be the total addressable market was infinite, right
like every state is going to legalize, there's going to
(16:47):
be millions and millions and millions of sports betters. They're
going to spend all of their disposable income betting. A
lot of that proved to be false. And you know
what I think you're also seeing in sports betting. It
became very quickly an arms race between really two big players,
maybe three on the outside, but two, and it became
(17:08):
increasingly prohibitive to play. And the business itself isn't that
great like that. I think the big sober you know
there's sports betting has has sobered because it's it's quite
an ugly business. If you cannot take that customer and
convert them into something else. So I'm with you. I
(17:29):
think that you'll see in sports betting, you know, Texas, California,
you see bigger states roll out, There'll be a mini,
a mini hype. I think affecting both sports betting and podcasting, though,
is a bigger trend, which is it's impossible to break
out talent now. You you know, if you look at music,
(17:51):
when's the last time that you that an unknown star
out of nowhere became huge on the pop charts? Like,
it's not happening anymore. Same out of TikTok and YouTube
and Instagram, Like you're not seeing the come ups of
stars the way the way you did two years ago,
(18:14):
four years ago, five years ago. You know, one of
the one of the things that made barstool so powerful
was we had built enough scale so that we could
launch our own stars inside of barstool, and you will
do the same. But unless you have that platform, unless
you have that lily pad to launch from, it's becoming
very hard to get talent. And so I think that
(18:35):
will affect both the sports betting business obviously, but certainly
the podcasting business.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
Yeah, it's it's it was a double edged sword when
FS one lost Shannon Sharp. It definitely really punctured my
network or our network.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
But I remember telling my staff, We're going to do
whatever it takes to find the money to pay Shannon Sharp.
And we created a show Nightcap with O Joe, Gilbert
Arenas and Shannon and it's it's been good for everybody.
He wins, we win. But I remember I remember telling
people like Logan Swain that this, this just doesn't happen.
(19:13):
This is basically Matt Stafford on the market and the
Rams get him, Like you just do whatever it take.
Jim Harbaugh's on the market him to be your coach. Yeah, right,
and we did. I was literally I was I was
literally like do I have to buy him a Range
Rover to it? What do I gotta do? I'm like,
he's a Hall of Famer, what do I do? How
(19:33):
do I get him? And then I didn't want to
intrude on his life, so I had to wait like
three weeks before I, you know, I made an offer
to but yeah, I don't want to be weird guy
jumping in. He worked for my company, our company in
chapter six of your book and the book again, nobody
cares about your career, and I strongly just so many
little lessons in here in chapter six. All start the
(19:57):
sentence and you can finish it. But it's an interesting
chapter if you're not willing to grow. Tell people what
that's about.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
Oh so, I think you're wasting everybody's time and mostly
your own. And what I really have come to believe
about work, and I'm more like you, Colin, which is
I don't think anyone should really follow my advice. I
wouldn't necessarily follow my advice, but I do have a
lot of opinion and I've spent a lot of hours
doing this, But I think work is tuition you get
(20:28):
paid for. So you know, when you sat in the
mariner's box and you know, an luminary said it's up
to you to fill the seat. Work is tuition. It's
you are getting paid to learn, You're getting paid to
be smarter, you're getting paid to do the reps, you're
getting paid to work out. And I think that kind
(20:50):
of mindset is very important to being fulfilled at work
and happy at work. Like I'm very fulfilled at work
if I'm busy and I'm learning and I'm doing things,
fixing things, and I'm jumping in things. If everything is
great and easy sailing and you're coasting and it's you know,
it's predictable, that's when I get nervous. And I think
(21:11):
that mindset of being willing to put yourself out there,
to fail and try things as much as you can
is ultimately what gets people the opportunity for that dream
job or that dream moment or that dream experience, because
you have built yourself into a new person who is
ready for that and capable of it. You know.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
It's funny my sister and I talk about this that
we had a British mother and a successful optometrist, small
town optometrist dad, who later in life was an alcoholic,
but never he was like a happy drinker. Yeah, he
went to work, he was sober. He was never cruel,
mean spirited. So I didn't have any of that kind
(22:02):
of stuff. But I've said to my sister, we lived
in the same house. I said, you know, I like
to sort of you know, it's it's probably some psychological
term I'll project when I talk to people about my
child and how rough it was, and oh boy, small town,
and and then and and then I think to myself,
(22:24):
my stepdad was my little League coach. My mom was
British and really funny and had a British accent and
just saw the world differently. My dad was really a
bright guy, like had these little nuggets of wisdom. And
but the one thing my parents gave me is they
didn't helicopter they maybe they were.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
My mom was.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
Huggy, kissy. Dad wasn't most dads weren't. And that I
was allowed to fuck up a lot and my mom
My mom grounded me one summer. You know, I started
a small fire that was not great near the house.
So but one of the things I see is that
I think parents think they're doing a great job. They're
calling on their kids behalf, they're getting them internships, they
(23:09):
go to prep schools, and I got to tell you,
it creates this sort of personality where you just things
are easy. It's like and there's just something about being
allowed to mess up and your And I've told my
(23:29):
kids before, you know, my kids are really good students,
and I'm like, don't ask questions and I'm like, you
figure it out, it's not it's not my paper, and
I don't I'm not harsh on my kids if they
get a you know, they struggled in a class. But
when you were hiring a lot of people at the bar,
(23:50):
at Barstool, and it's something at the volume we've really
we really vet who we hire, like we really vet
and still you know, sometimes you miss. But the average
person you were hiring, were you impressed, were you disappointed?
Was it what you expected? Talk about and now that
at food fifty two, talk about the process of what
(24:11):
you're seeing. Bill Maher complains that all of his young
writers see the world the exact same way, and he
doesn't want that.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
Yeah, yeah, I think, you know, I think one thing
we did well at Barstool was we just hired. It
was misfits, you know. It was we hired young, and
we hired out of college. And we mostly our best
hires had worked for Barstool for four years being interns
(24:39):
for us on you know, doing the Viceroy program, which
is the college program. But I would see the kids
roll in from the prep school or the big you know,
the nice college, and they were A were boring, and
B they were vanilla and kind of uninteresting. And it
(24:59):
was all we always hired the kids and the people
who I like now and always frankly have liked are.
You know, it's the it's the guy who's editing basketball
trick shots in his bedroom instead of going out and like,
you know, drinking four thousand high noons. You know, it's
not it's not the popular kids. It's not the kids
(25:20):
who did everything right. It's the kid who had something
they were interested in and worked really hard at it.
And I think resilience. You know, I think there's two things.
I think kids right now are very very rarely bored
because they mostly have phones, which just placate them. And
two they are they are helicoptered. You know. It's funny.
I remember interviewing a guy once and he was like, hey, look,
(25:44):
if I'm to take to take this job, I really
need you to talk to my mom. And I was like, bro, like,
but you know, like sure, I'll talk to your mom,
But like, if you need your mom's approval to do
this job or you're somehow I'm beholden to your mother
because you work, oh, I was like, forget it. I've
(26:05):
had people be like I need you to talk to
my wife, and I also like, I don't love that either.
So I think people are co dependent in weird ways,
and people aren't able to think independently. And you know
this if you're in a startup or you're in the
heat of the moment, or whether you work in something
glamorous like content or radio or sports or you know whatnot,
(26:29):
or you work at like a computer company. You got
to be able to make decisions. You have to be
able to work under pressure. You have to be able
to mess up and be like, oh shit, I fucked up.
I got to fix this. And if you can't do
that when you're young, you're kind of screwed by the
time you're fifty, because then you what do you know?
What have you learned? What have you done?
Speaker 2 (26:50):
Can I cannot imagine? First of all, I wouldn't hire
somebody who said you got to talk to my mom.
And the reason I wouldn't is because your judgment so
poor When that came out of your mouth, you thought
that was a sales pitch. It's like, for fuck's sake,
what are you saying like that? You should literally say
(27:11):
you you have to talk to my mom about her
castle role. It's the best castle role. You God, you
got to stop that sentence right there. You know, it's
interesting I saw something, uh, you know, browsing the Internet
and I and I do think there's really a lot
(27:32):
of smart people. I've hired people off you know, Xah.
I called you one time for advice and I said,
should the volume? Should I be on TikTok? I said,
I don't know how to monetize it? And do you
remember the advice you gave me.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
I probably said, like, get on TikTok? Who cares about
the monetization.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
That's exactly what you said. You said, get on it,
build an audience. You'll figure out the monitorization later. And
that's an interesting part because when you're at barstool or
now the CEO of food fifty two, how long are
you willing to commit to something before you see profits
(28:16):
or at least reasonable monetization.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
Oh, if I see audience growth forever. I am a
highly impatient person. But if you put talent on a
platform or create content for a platform and it gets traction,
you've got to let The longer you do that, the
(28:40):
more you let that marinate, the further you explore with it.
I will wait weeks, months, I would wait years, because
the reality is if you the more audience you grow,
and if you find you've got to first, you know, first,
you have to have something to say, right, And then
(29:01):
you've got to find people who actually want to listen
to you and care what you have to say. And
then you want them to play with you, right, You
want to engage with them, and then you want them
to advocate for you. And maybe then you start not
just saying one thing, you're saying three things or doing
three things. The longer you wait to monetize that and
(29:22):
ask them to do something for you in return, which
is to buy a product or support a sponsor, it
creates this pent up demand that is really really palpable.
You know, if you look at Dave's the best at this,
if you look at Miss Peaches, Miss Peaches is arguably
the biggest personality of barshol sports right now. Do you
(29:42):
know miss Peaches?
Speaker 2 (29:43):
Yeah, I'm sure the dog, yeah, the dog yeah, so
remote and stuff, yes, exactly.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
But there are a lot of companies I imagine who
are like, oh, Dave like pimp our dog food, and
Dave like, you know, support this, support that, and he
held and the hold is of that pause. That hold
before you monetize is not lost time. It's actually a
huge advantage. And that's how I think about platforms. If
(30:13):
you can grow, it's like having a baby, you know
what I mean, You're just like really pregnant and then
you have the baby. Like growing audience and waiting to
monetize it is a very powerful tool that most people
don't have the stamina to wait for.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
Yeah, we didn't at the Volume take any you know,
VC money. It's it's we just I just said I
won't a salary. Yeah, we bootstrapped it. And I don't
necessarily know. I'm not. I'm not a control freak. I
like to pass the ball. I've got really smart people.
(30:50):
What is the value? You don't get the big payoff?
What is the value? Because whether I sell it or not,
I think I want the control to make make sure
I don't feel responsible necessarily for Fox Sports employees or
iHeart employees. I feel incredibly responsible for Volume employees. I
(31:12):
lose sleep. Yeah that's you know, they're my people, They're
my army, and so you know, it's it's and I'm
being selfishly. I'm asking this and I've thought about this
before because people say, oh, you're just you built it
to sell it, and I'm like, no, I didn't, really
I would I would consider a really cool partnership. But
(31:35):
you know, obviously Dave at some point could have didn't.
Now Dave was different. Dave bootstrapped it for a decade
before he made the money. Long people don't know Dave
was out there making nothing forever, twelve years of nothing,
just hustling. I get that. What is the downside? I
(32:00):
yes to the bag, to selling it big.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
The bag has huge downside, and I think you're right.
I think you're building something. Look, if you, Colin wanted
to be like I want the highest ROI on my
dollar invested, you would not probably create a media company.
You would put it in the stock market, or buy
(32:24):
a piece of r or do something. So this is
a labor of love, I think, and that's partly what
makes it important. I think the bag is tough because
the bag, when you sell out for the bag, unless
you have a huge motor to keep going, and you
have a big reason now that you're richer and you know,
(32:46):
more comfortable than ever before, if you you have to
find that's an obstacle to overcome with fans, and I
think a lot of times when people get the bag,
they become a little lazy, Like you get better taste,
you want to travel, you buy your second house, like
you're not hungry to go build the mission, continue on
(33:07):
the journey, Like there's something to being hungry, you know.
The best years at Barstool, I think people would say
were probably the earliest years, and then they were the
beginning of my years because it was such a grind,
you know, we didn't know if we would make it.
We still had so much road to climb. The best
(33:29):
years were not after the pen acquisition, you know. So
I think getting the bag also comes with responsibilities and
changes things, and that's hard for a mission driven, passion
driven brand.
Speaker 2 (33:44):
Yeah, my favorite part of the Barstool story is my
least favorite part of traveling, which is turbulence. So I
love I hate it on planes, and I love it
when I read the PHILM Night book. By the way,
people have no idea how close they were out of
money multiple times all the time. Yeah, all the time.
(34:07):
So when you entered Microsoft, what years were those?
Speaker 1 (34:11):
Oh, my gosh, that was like early two thousands, like
two thousands, Okay, so.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
They were established, Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Baer. That
was good time. But what were the challenges of being now?
Apple was a rival, but what were the challenges of
a company where everybody was at least stockwealthy.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
Yes, I mean that. What you find, I think is
you become more bureaucratic, you become more inwardly focused. The
problem has become turf wars inside of a company or
which group is going to get I mean I worked
for a group that lost I think five hundred million
dollars a quarter, and we traveled first class all around
(34:52):
the world like nobody cared. But it was a lot
of politics, and I think those those are I think
that's what you trade. You trade politics and posturing and
bureaucracy that comes with cash. When you're hungry and you're
on the jump and you're on the come up, it's
(35:16):
so satisfying because it's all new and it's all fulfilling.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
Yeah, there's the old axiom. It's a truism. Actually, is
that in wartime comfort food sales skyrocket in America and
in peacetime bungee jumping, sky diving adventure sales go up. People, Right,
your problems are different, your fun is different, based on
your economic set. For the record, there is some argument
(35:44):
in America, I don't think the economy is great, but
I also don't think it's in a free fall. I mean,
if it was, then volume wouldn't be growing at the
rate it's growing. Your CEO of food fifty two, I
often mentioned that I get on planes, there's no empty seats,
and these are not rich people. I don't fly a
(36:04):
lot of private if at all. Hotels try to book them.
They're busy. You tell me, as a CEO of food
fifty two, how is your economy? What do you see?
Speaker 1 (36:17):
I see that people are spending. You know, I think
there's angst. I think there's like low level angst. You
look at the housing market and the interest rates like that.
You know, the houses aren't moving, which is actually kind
of interesting for the food fifty two business because if
you don't have a new house, you don't need so
much stuff. You're not redecorating, you're not not setting new tables,
(36:40):
all that kind of stuff. So in my economy, that's
an interesting factor that I'm watching. But by and large,
people are spending. Americans are great consumers, and that you know.
Americans like things. They want new things, they want to entertain,
they want a T shirt, they want better cookwar like
(37:00):
the consumption. Americans like to buy things and to consume
and I think we'll always like that, you know.
Speaker 2 (37:17):
One of the lessons we learned early, and it was
hard because we looked at Barstool and we watched The
Ringer and a lot of different companies. And one of
the things very early I said is there are things
Barstool does well, but we never will. I said, I'm
not into selling merch. If we could sell some hoodies,
but that's a merch company, I said, we're not, and
(37:41):
we fooled around with it and I said, guys, it's
just not what we do. There's things that I think
the writing arm of the Ringer, I'm like, I don't
have the passion for writing my bag. It's not my bag.
So but I love doing live stuff and YouTube stuff
and gambling stuff and that's what we did well. But
it's are there things somebody once gave me advice, double
(38:06):
down on stuff that works and bail immediately if something doesn't.
Don't fall in love with your ideas, fall in love
with people. Is there anything you did at Barstool that
just didn't work in you're life? Okay about instincts?
Speaker 1 (38:19):
Yeah, a thousand things. I think you're right, So you know,
barstool thinks in T shirts. That's how people signal they're
part of whatever brand. And what we did well was
we grew you know, grew ninety brands in my time there,
and you know, twenty of them were pretty successful. But
because we thought in T shirts, everybody thought in T shirts,
(38:42):
and we hilled T shirts the same way we you know,
pimped out podcasts. But there was a lot that we
failed on. One thing that we failed on was we
built this really stupid subscription product called Gold because at
the time, and this is also like I think a
cautionary of having an investor is you know, the Charning guys,
(39:04):
and I love the Charning guys, but they were like, hey,
at some point, somebody is going to need to buy you,
so you need to hustle up and figure out, like
who's that going to be. And until passovers repealed, it
always looked like it would be a media company. Now
it was very obviously not going to be a media company.
But media companies wanted subscribers, right Everyone's moving to the
race to subscribers and the race to streaming.
Speaker 2 (39:26):
So wild the New York Times exactly.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
So we built a subscription product, but the barstool guys
and girls are such you know, their whores for attention.
And I say that in the best way possible. The
idea of putting something only behind a paywall was it
was it was against the religion, and it was so stupid.
(39:51):
And we built great tech. We built, you know, a
seamless way to do it. Stooley's, to their credit, bought it.
But it was a really it was forced you know,
you know, you know when you feel like you're doing
something wrong and like your heart's not in and you know,
isn't working. That was one of those things. We launched
a grooming product called wood, which you know, I still
(40:14):
think was, you know, kind of an interesting concept. We
partnered with a company. We made a line of grooming products,
but there wasn't a talent or personality behind it, and
no one felt like it was their own, so it
became nobody's and it was a failure. So we had
things like that littered all over the barstool road.
Speaker 2 (40:33):
You know, it's interesting. The paywall. I've been again kind
of reluctant to go there, but I have serious and
Netflix and Apple TV and Amazon Prime and I buy UFC.
Is it inevitable? I mean, is it just I say
to myself, I don't want to go behind a paywall,
(40:53):
but frankly, I'm behind eight of them. I pay for
eight of them, nine of them. Where are you on
the paywall?
Speaker 1 (41:02):
I don't. I I don't love a paywall either. Why
I get the paywall? I get it. My friend Barry
Weise created an amazing cted the Free Press created an
amazing paywall business, which is news, but it's not I
don't love it. I'm more interested in how many people
(41:25):
can you entertain or how many people could you talk to?
And the idea of only talking to a certain group
I think one I think is kind of problematic for
society where everybody's just in their own little echo chamber.
And two I think it's I think it's for me,
it's less interesting, and that probably is wrong from a
(41:46):
business perspective, but I I think broadcast is interesting.
Speaker 2 (41:52):
You know, I didn't like when the MLS went to
Apple because my takeaway is they lost casuals. Yeah, and
that what what happens is you only get a tribal following,
and I don't want just a tribal following. I like pushback,
I like I like I want to hear from my haters.
I want to I don't want to go and just
(42:13):
be comforted with all my opinions.
Speaker 1 (42:16):
I like to know.
Speaker 2 (42:17):
I say, my audience drives the bus. They tell me
where to go. I don't form my opinion on them,
but I picked my topics based on my audience what
they're interested in. And it's so I'm I am a
believer that if if when when MLS went to Apple TV,
now I still watch it because I have Apple TV
for a lot of things, the Patriots Dynasty, but that
(42:40):
that's an example where I think you lose casuals and
I like I like casuals. I want to there's there
was a chapter in this book you talked about know
what your company's paying you to do?
Speaker 1 (42:50):
Yes?
Speaker 2 (42:51):
And I think it's the downfall of Belichick in New
England is that bill Ois said do your job, and
then he got successful and the rings and he started
doing the general manager's job and the coaching job. And
he's a lousy He's a lousy GM. And I want
to talk to talk about that know what your company
(43:13):
is paying.
Speaker 1 (43:13):
You to do? Yeah? I think, Look, I say it
in the book, which is the stupidest person at your
company is the is the person who doesn't understand how
your company makes money. And that may sound harsh, but
I think it's true. Like, if you do not understand
how your company makes money, who your company's customer is,
(43:36):
if your company is making money, then you really have
to be wondering, like what are you doing all day?
And the reason I think this is important is there's
people get really whiplashed with layoffs and reorbs and job
changes and retitling. And the reality is, if you don't
(43:58):
understand what your company is paying you to do in
the context of what your company does at large, you're
probably not on a great path. And it's, you know,
to the Belichick check example. You know, when people aren't
clear on what their job is or their ambition is
for two jobs, when they're really getting paid for one
(44:20):
and the second is more interesting, you put you make
yourself vulnerable. You know. Jeff Zucker always had this like
really great quote which is like, don't give your company
the gun that shoots you. And I always liked that.
I think that's a great quote, which is, don't give
your company a gun to shoot you. And the you know,
(44:42):
beyond like a sex scandal or whatever, like, cause the
way your company is going to shoot you is if
you're not doing your job. And I think that's sometimes work.
You know, you get lost in the Mondays and the
Tuesdays and this and that and this project and that
deadline and whatever, and you lose of like why did
they hire you in the first place. And I think
(45:03):
it's just good to keep a firm hold on that. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (45:08):
So when I started the volume, you know, it's like
Jerry Seinfeld used to joke about his show. He goes,
I'm the world's worst actor. That was my show Number one.
So I like business, but I didn't go to Pan
or Wharton, and I don't know business. But I only
had a couple of things that I was already strident on.
One of the things I would say to my people,
(45:32):
and I would say, let's not worry about being right.
Let's get it right. So I don't give a shit
about your ideas. If they work, great, If they don't,
they're done. Yeah, Just I don't keep score. Yeah, And
I said, let's find what works. Do that. Yeah, be loyal.
(45:52):
Don't be loyal to your idea. Now it sounds smart,
but give me an example. What is the line on bailing.
Have you ever had an idea that you're absolutely sure
works and you stay with it too long?
Speaker 1 (46:06):
Oh yeah, I mean so much. I had a startup
before Barstool that was a brilliant idea. It was a
social network for Justin Bieber and forty other music artists.
It was it was going to compete with Facebook and
you know, Instagram and Google, and it was. It was
a good idea. It did not work. And you can
(46:30):
only put your head in the sands so long, where
you're like, this isn't working. I worked for another startup
in the fashion space, really interesting concept which was Hey
Vogue and the idea of one editor in chief and
one way of saying fashion is it's dead. It's going
to be very democratized. The company was pre social, so
(46:51):
it like never had any distribution. It didn't work, So
I stayed in a lot of things. I think too long.
I think what's hard? Is?
Speaker 2 (47:01):
It?
Speaker 1 (47:01):
Kind of manifests in two ways. You either put your
head in the sand and you're like, I don't want
to know, I don't want to see, I don't want
to know. I love you know, I love my idea,
I love this, I love the image of this thing
or the second is like everybody plays like sixth grade
soccer or fourth grade soccer, where like everybody's glomed onto
the ball and it's such a pack that like you
(47:23):
don't know who's kicking it, you don't know who's receiving it.
You can't tell who's good or not. And I think
that happens a lot, which masks both success and failure.
Speaker 2 (47:34):
All Right, the book is nobody cares about your career Erica.
You know how highly I think of you, and you
did not have to spend thirty minutes of your day.
Speaker 1 (47:44):
I'm so happy to.
Speaker 2 (47:46):
Uh for the record, and I'm not flirting because I'm
happily married. But you have the best hair of anybody
I've ever interviewed in my entire life.
Speaker 1 (47:52):
It's so dirty. I'm like, this should have like judged
up for you.
Speaker 2 (47:57):
Now you're a rock star. Hey, thanks for doing this
a thousand times over. Well, I have to talk about Trump.
I've said this for a long time. I've always considered
myself sort of a left leaning independent. I'm kind of
a conservative on fiscal issues, more of a probably liberal.
I don't know. I don't think pro gay marriage is liberal.
I don't think pro pot is liberal. I think those
(48:19):
are moderate stances today. But I was in, you know,
supportive of those twenty five years ago. So I kind
of consider myself a moderate that if I am up
in the air on something fiscally, i'd go conservative. Socially
i'd go left. But you know, I've said this about
Trump before. He's trying to sell me in America that
doesn't exist. Like I'm sixty, I don't remember anything before
(48:41):
like six or seven years old. But for the last
fifty three years of my life, outside of the pandemic year,
I've loved America. I've lived everywhere Tampa, Vegas. I've been
kind of poor, middle class. Now I'm better off than most.
But he's trying to sell me this America stinks, and
I just don't see it. I live in a nice
neighborhood in LA. It's not a Top six or seven
(49:02):
neighborhood in LA. It's not a Beverly Hills of Malibu,
of Brentwood, of bel Air Hancock Park. It's not like
one of those swanky neighborhoods. But I don't see crime.
I'm not stumbling over homeless people. I see happy people.
Dodger Stadium's full leads Major League Baseball and attendance. Laker
games are full, NFL games are full. People they have
money in their pocket. Lax is packed. I just saw
(49:24):
a record airline revenue over the weekend. I'm constantly being
sold in America by Donald Trump crime rates or skyrocketing. No,
they're actually not. Starting In twenty twenty three, they have
plummeted coast to coast over two hundred cities. Violent crime
rates are down. I mean Los Angeles and some cities
may tick up in certain areas, but it's in America
(49:47):
he's selling me. It would be like watching your football
team and they play well and win, and your neighbor
says they're playing terribly and keep losing. No, they're winning
and they're not playing terribly. Like, you can't keep selling
me on how bad the country I live in is,
because it's not bad for me or my friends. I
have a friend that's a stay at home dad. He's
not rich. I have friends who work part time, starting
up businesses, who have worked at the same place forever.
(50:10):
I have middle class friends. They're not complaining about their
life constantly, and there I don't know what they are politically.
I really don't don't. I don't talk about politics with
my friends. I talk about my wife, I talk about sports,
I talk about you know, we talk about guy stuff.
I'm not somebody that is. If you don't have policies
that I connect with, and you're always grouching and bitching
(50:30):
about the other side, I'm not really interested in you.
You know. Trump once tried to sell a vodka and
acknowledges he never drank. Ever, he's never really drank alcohol,
but he tried to sell a vodka. So I've thought
for a long time he's just kind of a con artist.
But I was sitting there thinking this morning that if
let's say I got busted for some really bad crime
(50:52):
in court, a drug crime, and my wife did too
in a separate case, and then so did one of
my kids, my manager, my agent, and my attorney, it
would be reasonable to conclude that I'm shady and involved
in a business that's not terribly legal. Well, Donald Trump
(51:13):
is now a felon. His campaign chairman was a felon.
So is his deputy campaign manager, his personal lawyers, chief strategist,
his national security advisor, his trade advisor, his foreign policy advisor,
his campaign fix and his company CFO. They're all felons,
judged by the company you keep. It's a cabal of convicts.
(51:33):
It's not that I'm not willing to vote for conservatives.
I said I would have voted for Mitt Romney. Seemed
like a decent family man. Now he looks like he's
the publisher of Yachting Weekly, so he's not terribly relatable.
Is a big money guy. But I'm not somebody that
I liked the second bush Bush senior son. I liked him.
(51:54):
I thought he was a decent American, a decent human.
I guess he's got some artistic qualities. Now he paints
a lot. I liked his wife, Laura Bush. I thought
they were decent people. I liked the Obamas. I didn't
understand the outrage. Good family. Seemed like nice people. But
if everybody in your social circle is a felon, I
(52:14):
don't think it's rigged. I don't think the world's against you.
And to get people who agree on anything, thirty four counts.
Oh for thirty four, I mean that's a that's a
batting slump. Even the New York Mets could be impressed
with oh for thirty four, so when you're constantly trying
to sell me on an America that I don't see.
(52:35):
I'm not saying inflation is not an issue. But I
get on airplanes all the time, and it's not a
bunch of rich people. I don't fly private. I couldn't
tell you the last time I fly private. Maybe every
couple of years. It'll be a family thing. We're trying
to get everybody in the same flight, but not very often.
I don't live in a fancy neighborhood. I get on planes.
There's people in normal clothes, don't look rich to me,
(52:56):
and the planes are all full, and the hotels are
all full, and the freeways were all full. That means
people are going to work. You're trying to sell me
on this story, in this narrative that's just not true. Well, Colin,
you're out of touch, out of touch to what I have.
Single people that live next to me, young families that
live next to me. People aren't grousing, they're not miserable
(53:16):
all day now, they're not talking politics. But you know,
Trump's entire game plan is the country isn't a free fall.
Maybe in the Trump centric neighborhoods it is. It's not anywhere.
For my sister, who lives rurally, doesn't have a lot
of crime in her neighborhood. I don't my friends don't.
We live all over Los Angeles, in one of those
(53:38):
big scary cities that voted for liberals. Oh scary. I
don't know. Everybody was saying, hung jury.
Speaker 1 (53:47):
I didn't know.
Speaker 2 (53:49):
But when everybody in your team, everybody in your group,
your cabal is a felon, maybe maybe the world's not
against you. I mean, it is New York City. It
is New York City. I get it. They're gonna have peel.
Maybe it'll drive up his fundraising. But stop trying to
sell me on. Everything's rigged. The country's falling into the sea.
(54:11):
The economy's terrible. The economy's okay, it's not like on fire.
But get on a plane. Find all the empty seats.
I don't see them. Those aren't cheap either. A hotel
rooms over Memorial Weekend. I like living in Portland. I
like growing up on the coast of Washington. I like
living in la I have a place in Chicago. I
(54:33):
love it. I have really good friends and go regularly
to Rhode Island. I love that. Maybe maybe some of
you are just unhappy. Maybe you're only happy when you're unhappy.
But the America that I live in is imperfect. But
compared to the rest of the world, I think we're
(54:53):
doing okay. And if you're not, is it possible, just possible.
I'm not even saying probable. Is it possible if your
life has just been miserable for the last four years,
it's not exclusively the fault of somebody in sixteen hundred
Pennsylvania Avenue. Maybe it's not all their fault the volume.
(55:18):
Thanks so much for listening. If you've enjoyed the podcast,
take a moment rate and review.
Speaker 1 (55:23):
Hey everyone, it's Jason Tipp, host of Hoops Tonight.
Speaker 2 (55:25):
Make sure you check us out live after games on
the Hoops Tonight YouTube channel as we provide instant reaction
and analysis of all the big NBA playoff games.
Speaker 1 (55:34):
Again, that's the Hoops Tonight YouTube channel and wherever you
get your podcasts.
Hosts And Creators
Colin Cowherd
Jason McIntyre
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