The Bossticks - Erika Nardini, CEO Of Barstool Sports On How To Be True To Yourself, The Future Of Creators & New Media, & What It Takes To Stand Out

Episode Date: September 27, 2021

#395: On today's episode we are joined by Erika Nardini. Erika is the CEO of the wildly popular brand and business, Barstool Sports. Today Erika joins the show to discuss how being true to yourself and your brand is the ultimate unlock for success. We also discuss the landscape for creators and the future of new media and what it takes to stand out.  To connect with Erika Nardini click HERE To connect with Lauryn Evarts click HERE To connect with Michael Bosstick click HERE Read More on The Skinny Confidential HERE For Detailed Show Notes visit TSCPODCAST.COM To Call the Him & Her Hotline call: 1-833-SKINNYS (754-6697) Check Out Lauryn's NEW BOOK, Get The Fuck Out Of The Sun HERE This episode is brought to you by The Skinny Confidential  The Hot Mess Ice Roller is here to help you contour, tighten, and de-puff your facial skin and It's paired alongside the Ice Queen Facial Oil which is packed with anti-oxidants that penetrates quickly to help hydrate, firm, and reduce the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles, leaving skin soft and supple. To check them out visit www.shopskinnyconfidential.com now.  This episode is brought to you by Rothy's Rothy's comfortable, washable and sustainable shoes and bags make getting dressed easy. Rothy's shoes are incredibly comfortable with zero break-in period thanks to their seamlessly knit-to-shape design. With many styles to choose from, Rothy's shoes are the perfect way to add some comfort and style to your closet. Check out all the amazing shoes, bags and masks available right now at www.rothys.com/skinny  This episode is brought to you by Versed. Versed is the non-toxic, cruelty-free, and vegan skincare brand that's hyper-focused on bringing you real results at prices your bank account appreciates. Their products are made with proven ingredients at skin-changing levels, without the fussy packaging and conventional markups. You only pay for what matters—the goop inside the bottle Get 10% off for first time users when you shop at versedskin.com with promo code SKINNY This episode is brought to you by BEV Bev is a female-first canned wine brand that was founded to change not only the way a product is consumed, but the way an industry and culture have operated for generations. Their wines are dry, crisp, and a lil' fizzy, super refreshing and delicious. They have ZERO sugar and only 3 carbs and 100 calories per serving. We've worked out an exclusive deal. Receive 20% off your first purchase plush free shipping on all orders. Go to www.drinkbev.com/skinny or use code SKINNY at checkout to claim this deal.  This episode is brought to you by Match Dating App Let's talk about dating for a minute. I feel like it's become such a time suck, people are swiping away and not getting serious. You guys need Match --that is where you can find people who put actual effort into their dating lives and they don't waste your time - they're ADULTS. Download the Match app today and you can message your top matches for free!  Match, Adults Date Better. Produced by Dear Media 

The following podcast is a dear media production. We have now used one of our friends as a guinea pig for Match Dating App. We had a friend that was on all the different apps. Some of them were creepy. Every app. All of them. Yeah. No luck.

No luck. And then he went on Match Dating App and he has met a girl. And you know what he's doing right now? He's on a walk with this said girl having a romantic stroll. Looks like Sparks are flying. And it looks like it's all because of Match. And that's because Match dating app is all of a. people who actually want to put effort into dating. What a novel concept. It is a novel concept

in 2021. If I was single, I would be on the match dating app. In fact, shit, Michael, when you piss me off, I'm going to fucking sign up. Yeah, I always kind of do this fantasy in my head where I'm like, if I was single, what would I do in which house would I'd be on? It looks like this would be the one. Because I don't know if I would do, you know, I'm a pretty serious guy I learn, right? And I feel like I want to be held to a serious caliber. So that's kind of the one, that's what I would do. You do a fantasy in your head? I'll stop you later. Okay, this is for people who deserve real men and women, people who take care of themselves, people who like plants and dogs who like to go on hikes. This is different than the other apps, okay? Dating games were great. We've all been there. They're kind of fun, but you get over it. At some point, you want to date someone who's fully formed emotionally, mature. You know what I mean? It's a whole different level.

We definitely have some other friends who need to get on Match app ASAP. I feel like they need to find some. real people, someone who isn't wasting their time, who's authentic and badass. Don't you guys think? It's perfect for them. Look out for them on the app. You may see them. So if you're in to some real connection, like our friend who's on a hike, maybe next time I'll call them out. You can download the Match app today. That is the Match app and you can message your top matches for free. Match. Adult State Better. She's a lifestyle blogger extraordinaire. Fantastic.

And he's a serial entrepreneur. A very smart cookie. And now Lauren Everts and Michael Bostic are bringing you alone for the ride. Get ready for some major realness. Welcome to the skinny confidential, him and her. And they're becoming so scared and in such a shell that it renders them incapable of this connection that is required to be effective in business. and if you are afraid to take risks in business, you're fucked. And I think the other thing is that if you are scared to be yourself,

no one will really ever follow you or be loyal to you. All right. Stop playing with your balls. Let's go. I'm adjusting myself. I mean, it's a lot. Can I get through the intro here, Lauren? This is an important episode.

It's your balls. Let's get the show on the road. I'm making an adjustment. Speaking of balls, barstool sports. Yeah, speaking of ball, you're throwing me off here. I'm trying to do a professional intro here for Eric and Ardini. Guys, welcome back to the Skinny Confidential. Him and her show.

I'm not playing with my balls. I'm adjusting guys out there. You were playing with your balls. Sometimes you've got to adjust before you get into a podcast. Do you have a half-heartedly? No, I don't. I'm good to go. Okay.

I don't know that you are looking pretty good. Anyways, guys, let me get back on track. Let me get professional. Welcome back to the Skinny Confidential, him and her show. Today, we have a phenomenal guest, someone that Lauren and I really both, look up to and really enjoyed speaking to. This episode is filled with a ton of wisdom, ton of gems, ton of knowledge, dropped a lot. Eric and Ardini. What I personally love about Eric and Ardini is she is so comfortable with who she is and she's a boss and she has a lot of

masculine energy and I'm very attracted to that. She's, she's feminine. She's beautiful and she's a go get her, but she has that masculine big dick energy that I'm very attracted to. And in this podcast, we kind of go everywhere. It's incredible what Barstool Sports has done. Yeah. And, you know, alongside Dave Portnoy, Erica and the team there, Erica's, you know, a large part of that, obviously heading up the business as CEO. And when she came on board, obviously we saw the explosion of Barstow sports. Both Lauren and I are big fans of what they've done, big fan of her, big fan of Portnoy and just think it's incredible the team they make. And she's somebody that, many people can look up to. I mean, she got her arms around this massive business and basically

just blew it the fuck up. I also really admire how she's created such a community with the people that work for her. She talks about it in this episode, how people don't want to leave the office. She said there's never a time of day that there's not people in the office because people are so obsessed with the mission and they just want to be a part of it all the time. It's contagious. And there's so many jobs that I talk to so many of you guys on DM or, you know, via email. And there's so many jobs where people don't want to go to work. But what Barstool has done is they created this environment where people want to be there. Yeah.

And I think like what's also so inspiring about at least for me personally is I love people who break the status quo and do things differently and in their own way. And they obviously do that over there. You know, I just love people that kind of set their own path, do with their own way, set their own standard and make shit happen. And so guys, we won't take up too much more time on this intro. I promise I wasn't playing with my balls. I was just adjusting so that I could do this intro and, you know, just get everything organized.

With that, Eric and Ardini, welcome to the skinny confidential, him and her show. And I got to go play with Michael's balls. This is the skinny confidential, him and her. So, yeah, I was just telling you off air, this one might roundabout different ways because you have a very eclectic career. This is a roundabout. I love stories like this. I love stories that are not predictable. I love people that are breaking the status quo and doing different things.

And so to start for people that are unfamiliar with you, like how do you start by introducing yourself at this point? Oh, I'm Eric Nardini. I live in New York. I am the CEO of Barstall Sports. I've been here five years. I have never loved a place like I've loved Barstall. It's been truly incredible.

It's like an honor to be part of this brand. Professionally, I have made my way around the internet since the late 9th. So I went to college in Maine. I was a big athlete about my junior year. And in college, I was like, shit, I haven't taken a single business class. All of my friends have big, you know, highfalut in interviews and internships. I didn't have any of that. I found my way to like the reception desk at Fidelity Investments and cut my hair short and like tried to be professional and wear terrible suits, which I did for a summer and then got a job in the legal department, thought I was going to be a lawyer. hated it, would go out every night, spent all day basically writing email diatribes of what my girlfriends and I did the night before, pre-social media, which is a miracle because otherwise I think generally be unemployable. And long story short, I went to work at a bunch of ad agencies. I worked on the creative, on a bunch of creative teams, on a bunch of media teams. The internet was just starting to become something. It was so nascent. This is 1998, 1999.

And that was really fun. I was very young. Nobody wanted to work in the internet. It wasn't cool. It wasn't established. Print media. Broadcast buying was very attractive. And I just happened.

I tripped on this thing and have spent the rest of my career. I worked for Yahoo. I worked for Microsoft. I helped launch a bunch of startups. I helped take a company called Demand Media Public. I was the CMO of AOL. I helped launch a direct-to-consumer music company called Backstage. And then I found my way to Barstool. So that's kind of, it's been a long and winding road for sure.

So at this point, like a ton of obviously competencies, but at the core, like would you describe yourself as a marketer at the core? In my heart, I'm a marketer for sure. I think what I understand how to do is take technology, which is the internet, content, monetization, and brand, and to put those four things together. It sounds like you're a visionary. Maybe. Sometimes I think I have visions. Sometimes I think I'm extremely tactical. And that's actually what I love about the internet is that you can't really be either. Like to execute a big vision, it's a lot of steps and tactics. Like I was just having a conversation with Barry Weiss. I'm obsessed with Barry Weiss. I love Barry Weiss. And Barry is like, oh, like she was describing her COO who's like her assistant and her COO. And she was like her assistant and her COO. Andy gets the coffee. Andy walks the dog or whatever. And I'm like, my job isn't any different, very, which is some days I'm a janitor. Some days I'm the mom of the office. Other days I'm trying to drive a vision. A third day yet I'm doing something entirely different. And I like that. I think that we're very

lucky to work in content. And I think we're lucky to have had everything upended by the internet where so much is possible. Why do you think that you're always on the pulse? It sounds like you're always on the pulse of what's going to happen. Is that something that is just natural? Is it something that you've, like, researched, read books about? Is it a medley? I think it's just like how I am and how Barstool is. You know, Dave Portnoy is the founder of Barstool Sports. Like, we don't have a playbook. It was interesting. I was just having this conversation of the strategy is that there's no strategy. Side note. If anybody did the pandemic right, it's Dave Portnoy. Oh, Dave Portnoy crushed the pandemic. I like, I talk about this all the time. My friends,

I'm like, if there is one person who did the pandemic right and created content that could only be created in the pandemic, like that was, he was the person. He, Dave got so big during the pandemic and it was so exciting to watch. I mean, if you think about it last, I guess it was two March, March two years ago, we shut everything down on a Friday. We were kind of late and stalling in the like whole everybody needs to go home. And to be honest, we kept barstool. open the entire pandemic. Most people who work at Barstool sports live within like a three block radius of Barstool and most people live together. So it's one large Petri dish. But what we did was we sent everyone home with a computer, you know, a camera and a microphone. And for Dave, this was really a signal back to how he started Barstool, which was by himself with a computer, You know, probably didn't have a camera and a microphone at the time. But we started the unboxing.

He started day trading. He really made the most out of every hour of his day and gained massive, massive, massive following as a result. He also wasn't the only one. If you look at Barstall Big Cat, like Big Cat, I think is one of the most phenomenally talented people we have. He created the Cat Cave Derby. So at 7 o'clock at night, he would run a, you know, basically toy horse racing. Derby where thousands and thousands of people tuned in. He created a fake football coach called Coach Dugs and was playing Madden to 300,000 people watching every night. So Dave as emblematic

and probably won the internet for the pandemic, there were a whole host of other people at Barstool who did the same. Yeah, I think like Barstool has been a known entity. Dave was known, but after the pandemic, it was like kind of undeniable. It was completely undeniable. You know, I think part of it also was he emerged in finance. I mean, Dave Portnoy over the course of the pandemic became the voice of a retail investor. That's pretty amazing. So I want to know what it looked like when you guys built the team. Like when you had a small, tiny team of like a couple, handful of people, how has that like evolved into this huge community of people that work for you that live together? So Dave started Barstow in 2004. And I would say he probably had, you know,

He had one guy, Paul Gelsinski, who we call Gaz. And then he had two, and then he had three, and then he had five. So by the time I showed up, which was in 2016, there were about 15 people. We moved half of them to New York. Opened an office. Dave and I were like with the contractors trying to open the office. Before that, we were working in coffee shops or Dave's apartment. And we got this one floor of a building in New York City.

And we said, we'll have this lease for five years. We have enough space that will last us for five years, which would have been this past year. And within six months, we had already outgrown that place. We didn't have a P&L. I wasn't sure how we were going to make payroll. We had to scrap it and bootstrap it. I mean, you guys know, like, every day it was like, how are we making payroll? What are we doing?

Who's going to work here? What's the next hire we're going to make? And we were lucky in that the group that started with Dave and came with Dave, you know, 99% of them still work. at Barstool. And then the second piece is we transplanted so many people here that they all gravitated to be around the office. And we have, we are very much of the internet, which means we're very much a 24-7 company. So, you know, if we're watching football and the game's 11 o'clock, it's on a Sunday night, like everyone's in the office on Sunday night. And I think one of the things that's really unique about us is just the energy and the pace. Like it's a very frenetic company. You can show

up at our office truly 24-7, seven days a week. And there's always someone in there. Oh, my gosh. Always someone in there. I've never heard of anything like that. That is so cool. We're so fortunate because you can't pay anyone enough to want to work like that. Like there's no amount of money that is going to motivate someone to sacrifice their life

to be part of something. The only thing that can create that is having something means something and having the work matter. And we have, we're just really fortunate in that we've attracted an incredible group of people who feel really passionately about what we're creating together here. It's a movement. It is a movement. Yeah. In a lot of ways of movement. Going back to 2016 and I have some context of this because of Betsy, our mutual friend, but I want to hear it from you. Like what initially, what was the calling to Barstow? Like, why did you feel so strongly that? Oh, I was obsessed. Like, I went and met the Chironin Group to raise money for backstage.

And they said, hey, you know, I was nervous for the meeting. I'd never met the Chironin Group. And they said, hey, we've just put money into this company you've never heard of. And, you know, it's called Barstall Sports. And I was like, oh, I've fucking heard of Barstall Sports. I pulled out the app, which, like, crashed immediately. Like, I pulled up my phone, pulled out the app, and then it was crashed. And I was like, here's everything they're doing right.

And here's everything that's wrong. And here's everything I think they're capable of. and I just wouldn't shut up about barstool. And I left really jealous, and I called Betsy Morgan. And I was jealous because I'm like, they're going to find a white guy with an MBA who's, you know, going to be perfectly, you know, probably works in sports. I think Dave would have eaten that type of person alive in about six months.

Yeah, 100%. And this company would not be where it was if one of those guys had come in the door. And a credit to you. You know, like I think it's credit to us. So I really, I was all over Betsy of like, can you introduce me to Dave? can you introduce me to Dave? And then Dave and I met with Betsy in a coffee shop in the West Village and spent an hour together completely hit it off. And I think we both left that meeting being like, this is it. Like we could build something really, really great together.

So what do you think, and I know this may be hard to talk about, what do you think the elements were that you brought to the table that maybe weren't there before? I mean, when I got to Barstool, there wasn't a P&L. They didn't, I remember. I remember, like in the interview process, I met with the editor-in-chief. And I was like, hey, like, you know, like, how do you guys do it? Like, when's the last time you talk to Dave? Do you have team meetings? Like, and he was like, oh, I got a text message last Christmas with my bonus from Dave. That's the last time we talked. And so I was like, okay, like, there's a lot of opportunity here. I think I had been places that they wanted to go. I think I had done things, made mistakes, made things happen, that they

wanted to do and to learn from. I had a lot of energy and I didn't want to change them. And I think what was interesting is in that interview process, you know, all the, you know, all of the guys from sports or entertainment or with MBAs was like, ooh, you got to change this thing. Like, there's something wrong with it or how are you going to fix this? And that was a big source of discomfort in the interview process because so much of it became about like, oh, like, like, like that Barstool was radioactive. And what I saw and felt was that Barstool was so brilliant and just refreshingly different. And it wanted to go places that fortunately I had come from just without the brilliance and that fire.

You know, I learned a lot from Yahoo. I learned a lot from AOL. I learned a lot from Microsoft. I learned a lot from an IPO. I learned a lot from a bunch of failed startups. and it was honestly the combination of all those things that I think made the alchemy for us to work. I think the biggest thing, though, is that Dave really wanted a partner. And I think what happens oftentimes is you bring someone like me in with a founder.

And the founder's like, ooh, I know it all. Like, I want to do it all. And there's a power dynamic. And we just never had that. I cannot stop talking about Rothi's shoes. I wear them everywhere. I get the white ones. They're the sneaker. They're so comfortable. But here's the thing. The main reason I'm obsessed is because they save me time. I'm running out the door. I slip them on. They're comfortable. They're not those kinds of shoes that you have to wear in. You know what I mean when you get those really uncomfortable

shoes? And it takes like 10 times before they're comfortable. That is not Rothies. I initially became very into them because I was searching for white sneakers online and up came these boat-looking shoes that were just very simple and chic. I'm a huge fan of white shoes. They're true to size. I order them and I become the biggest fan. I buy like literally five more pairs. Now I have them all over my house. It's so exciting that they're a partner of the show. I recommend the white ones because I am a white shoe type of person, but they also have black and cheetah print and they have like a sand color. they have a gray. So whatever you like, these shoes are it. They're plain, they're simple, they're to the point. They look good with everything. The best part about them, though,

Michael is always stepping on my white shoes. And I would get so annoyed before because they would ruin the shoes. But with Rothies, they're fully machine washable. So you can just throw them in the wash and you're good to go. They have all different tons of shapes, styles, colors. So you can always find the right one for you. Recently, they launched men's sneakers too. Oh, I got something for me now, huh? Yep. So Michael gets to be twinning with me. They're durable, they're washable. So when Zaz's throws pumpkin on your shoe, you can just throw them in the wash too. We have a code for you, as always. To help you welcome the fall season in style, Rathies is doing something special. That's right, you guys, they gave us the chance to share the super rare opportunity with our listeners

for a limited time. Right now, you can get $20 off your first purchase at rothis.com slash skinny. That's ROTHYS.com slash skinny. Head to rothies.com slash skinny to find you. your new favorites today. I'm telling you the white sneakers is where it's at. What you guys did with Call Her Daddy is crazy. Like, I mean, it's so cool how you guys did that whole deal. I would love for you to speak more on that and like mainly about what happened before Call Her Daddy existed. Were you looking for it? Did it fall in your lap? Did you guys have strategy on it? Most everything at Varsstool falls in our lap. Truly. Like, it's just the kismet and the, like accidents are, you know, it's so much of who we are. You know, I gave the example of Big Cat

during the pandemic of playing this fake coach called Coach Ducks. We now have a probably 350-pound guy from Florida who looks just like the Madden character. Oh, I've seen that guy. Yeah, Coach Ducks. So now he's a real person and he works for it. So so much of it is serendipity and so much of it happens just from like a spark. And I really love that. The Call Her Daddy, you know, Alex and Sophia at the time, I think probably had, you know, a handful of videos. They had a couple episodes. We're very good about watching the internet. We watch the internet 24-7. And we saw them and they were two beautiful women talking about raunchy sex on the internet. Like, that's magic. Can't believe it didn't work. Can't believe it didn't work. Yeah. So we got, you know, we reached out to them. Alex, I think. had been a smoke show. We reached out to them. They came in and had a meeting. We had a bunch of meetings with them. We had a courtship of, you know, would this work? Would they want to come? What would we do for them? What would they have to produce? And it was all very exciting. It wasn't a quote-unquote

strategy. We weren't like, ooh, we're looking for a sex podcast or we're looking for two gorgeous girls who have controversial things to say. It wasn't that. We knew we wanted to create more female content, we knew we wanted to create more entertainment content. I'm always looking to diversify no matter what we're doing, whether it's on the business side or the talent or distribution, you name it. The more things we can play with, the better off we are. And in that case, you know, they wandered into Barstool Sports. Two to three months later, we signed them and then we were off to the races. And so did you guys end up structuring the deal with Spotify? Was that strategy or did that again fall in your lap? So the Spotify deal, you know, so we obviously went through

during the pandemic. I would say the disillusion of the call her daddy relationship during the pandemic was also a very big moment for us. One, there weren't a lot of headlines and entertainment happening. So stories that came out of, you know, one of the things it's hard to remember now is like Barstool wasn't interesting. None of us were interesting. Barstall wasn't interesting to mainstream media four years ago or five years ago or even three years ago. And during the pandemic, nothing else was happening. We were like the only shop in town making shit happen. And so the other thing with Barstool is just a company that's really been radically transparent since the very beginning, right? The whole genius of Barstool is it's not

just what Dave initially had to say. It was Dave's journey in building Barstool. And it made you feel differently about what he had to say. Or it made you relate to what he had to say differently and the notion of being relatable and human and fallible. But, you know, the breakup of Alex and Sophia, the signing of Alex was, you know, mainstream news during the pandemic. We knew we had one year with Alex. I feel like she crushed that year. We crushed that year. And then, you know, the time came for the renewal and we, you know, I think she wanted to stay. I think she would say she wanted to stay. She was willing to give us a hometown discount for that. Spotify, you know, swooped in with a massive guarantee, which, you know, is widely reported. We don't really work

that way. Those economics were, you know, certainly well beyond us and were more performance-driven than guarantee-driven. But Spotify wasn't going to help her grow the brand. Spotify wasn't going to create licensing partnerships for her. Spotify certainly wasn't going to help her create merch. And I think there's a big open question about Spotify in general is can Spotify grow brands? It's a huge question. It's huge. And it's very, I don't know if they can grow brands or not. I know that they didn't call her daddy and will be interested to see, you know, I think Alex is phenomenal. Like if anyone can grow on Spotify, it will be Alex Cooper. So I don't think that also wasn't a strategy. It was like, hey, here's, here's a renewal. Here's the landscape. We went back and forth a ton on if we wanted to

compete if we could make it work. We ran, you know, I ran a lot of models on it. And then at the end of the day, it was like, hey, we're more comfortable doing what we know how to do if you want to go, you know, if Alex wanted to go get a big check and be exclusive to one platform, like power to her. That's not our strategy. Yeah, I think like when I think of Barstool, I think is like you guys build brand and IP and you stay along with that ride to see what those brands can become. Yeah. Correct. Yeah. And I think that's more exciting to me personally. But when you look at a Spotify, like obviously their business is to build Spotify's business. Correct.

Yeah. Coming from all these different backgrounds, now running something like barstool, but also coming from, I guess, like more mainstream traditional media companies. What do you think those mainstream media companies are doing wrong? And like, where do you think the opportunity is for people that are starting to get into this new landscape that honestly you guys are largely part of pioneering? Sure. I mean, I think there's so much wrong. Give us your scroll. How long?

It's a show. We've got some time. Yeah. All right. So, okay, things that I think are wrong. I think that in mainstream digital media and mainstream broadcast media, the people who work for those companies, there's too many of them. It's too hierarchical. If you are, you know, if you are waiting in line raising your hand to get a job at Fox, NBC, CBS, ESPN, AOL, YOL,

Yahoo, Microsoft, you know, you're working for a very big company. A slow company. Big, slow company. There is a lot of infrastructure. You're going to have a designated job. You have a salary band. You have an employee portal. There's all these trappings of security.

Compliance departments. Compliance departments. Big elevator banks, you know, a cafeteria, like all this shit. You know what I mean? If you want that, you don't want to be uncomfortable at work. Those being uncomfortable at work, being on the edge, being entrepreneurial, taking a lot of risk and having an employee cafeteria and an employee portal with benefits and Slack groups like don't necessarily go together. But I also think there, so I think the DNA of, I think the DNA is very different of the employee base. I think the second thing, and this used to drive me nuts at AO. well, which is nobody reads the product or watches the shows or listens to the podcast.

Or wants to wear the merch. Or wants to wear the merch. They're not fans of what's actually being produced. They're not fans of what's being produced. And when you're not looking at what you produce, what you produce is never going to truly break through and matter. And that's what I love about Varsal, right, which is, you know, Dave drops the Dave Portnoy show, you know, once a week or, you know, pardon my take or spitting chicklets or any of our shows. And everyone in the office is buzzing when the Dave Portnoy show drops because Dave's likely talking about somebody in the office. So it's alive. Like we're consuming the content we create. And that, you know, I find I have to yell at people like daily about stealing merch from the merch closet. Like people steal shit from the

closet all the time. I literally had one guy, Edwin, the other day. I saw him rip a shirt off a hanger to steal a sweatshirt to go, it was cold in the office, like to steal it and go wear it. I need a sweatshirt. I should be wearing a sweatshirt right now. You should be wearing a sweatsh. That is so cute. You do want to wear it, though. That's so true. Yeah. Like you want to badge it. And so when your organization feels the same way as your fan, anything is possible because there's zero distance. And I think mainstream media and mainstream digital media, they started to really orient themselves to the advertiser. or to the distributor.

And that's really dangerous because advertisers, you know, advertisers are like kind of blowhards. They're dictating their business by what the advertiser wants. We know what the consumer wants. The consumer wants to watch commercials about blah, blah, and it's like, no, they don't, you know. It's funny you say that because so with Dear Media, like obviously not the same scale, but when we started hiring, like there was people that were submitting resumes with much greater experience coming from different networks, audio traditional. But like honestly, 85% of the people that I hired were just fans of the show.

I'll learn and I'll figure it out. Completely. And they came in and they worked so much harder. Completely. So, so much more. And what we also found was like, we would go and look at all these networks. You'd have like 10 producers working on two or three shows.

Totally. We're like, we have one producer that handles like eight to 10 shows. Completely. I'm like, there's obviously like a huge disconnecture. How is this possible? And at these huge corporate companies need so many people.

Yeah. So right about how. And this also is with influencers and podcasters too. They're trying to appeal to the brands instead of the community. That's right. And I've never heard anyone say it that eloquently, but that is so true that that's happening.

I think what you guys have done that's so impressive to me is that the community you've built is just incredible. What are some pillars or like mission statements that you guys live by to like really cultivate that community? Recently I just launched the podcast, limited series called Get the Fuck Out of the Sun. And so many of the people on this podcast said one of their favorite. drugstore finds is versed. So I've told you all about the versed lip oil. It's absolutely amazing. If you are at a drugstore, you have to pick this up. It's the cleanest drugstore brand out there.

They're vegan. They're sustainably minded and they're hyper focused on bringing you results with proven ingredients. But here's the deal. It doesn't break the bank, which is great. The latest thing that they just launched and they sent me this to try and I've actually been using it on my neck and my face are the glow drops. Okay, so they're very glowy, illuminating. It's like this liquid. It's kind of almost like a serum, and it just makes you look really radiant. So what I would recommend with these is I put the versed glow drops on a beauty blender, okay? I put that on and then I put my foundation on top of the glow drops. So it gives you this really dewy, smooth, plump skin. And I found out in the glow drops, they have blackberry extract. So it's full of antioxidants. Definitely try it underneath your foundation.

you will be very, very shocked that it's from a drugstore. Get 10% off for first-time users when you shop at versedkin.com with promo code skinny. Verst already offers skincare products at prices your bank account appreciates, and now they're giving you 10% off for first-time users with promo code skinny. Available at versed skin.com, spelled V-R-S-E-S-D-S-K-I-N.com with promo code skinny. Check out the glow drops and the lip oil. That's what I would recommend. There's a couple things.

One is that someone who will work for free because they love a brand, I always want that person. Above the person with the resume. Always. That is honestly, like I tell people all the time, if I've done only one thing smart, it's hiring from the gut for people that are really passionate about what we're doing. 100%. And like, fuck a resume and what school you went to. I honestly, I don't know where one person is maybe bad. I don't know where one person in my company went to college.

Don't give a shit where they went to college. I don't even care if they went to college. Better if they didn't. Like, you know? So I agree with that. And I think that that that, that, I had a big watershed moment in my career where I remember being at AOL. And we had a CEO level meeting. And we went through every resume of everyone who had applied to AOL that week. And these resumes got ripped. Where did the kid go to? Where did the person go to school? Did they go to a private school? Where did they go to college? Were there any typos on the resume? What was their GPA? And I was like, ugh, this sucks. Like everyone who's brilliant. that I knew was foreign or an entrepreneur or just tripped into something editorial and became something great. So I agree with that 100%. I also am really wary of people who have spent a lot of time in a very traditional place and then all of a sudden like find Jesus and want to be like, I want to be an entrepreneur. Like it's never going to work. You're so right about that. I hate those people.

Yeah. We've had a bunch of those that have lasted like 15 minutes where it's like they don't know how to use Google Sheets. They don't know how to like manage their business over text message. We do a lot at our company over text message, which you may say is wrong or right, but it's like that's the pace that we're moving. And it's really hard when you've been spoon fed. And I think this about like people entering the workforce is like if you've had it easy and you have not had to dig and grind to get what you want, you're going to struggle at a very entrepreneurial place. Yeah, I think, And this is from my perspective. I think you probably maybe feel the same way.

I looked at all the existing structures and how they were conducting business. And I was like the only reason there's white space for us is because we don't want to do it that way at all. Right. Like I want to completely break the status quo. Completely. Because that way exists. And to me, like a lot of these systems are very broken and slow and lethargic and create environments without innovation. I was like, okay, if we just like throw that whole playbook out the window, maybe we crash and burn.

But there's a whole new way to do this. And it doesn't matter. matter. Like if you have, you know, you crash and burn all the time. We crash and burn daily. But I think to your point, crashing and burning and just being honest about it and being capturing those moments, the good moments and the bad moments, that's what builds a community. That's what makes you relatable. That's what makes people have affinity for you. You know, we look at it where our talent is really trying to be synonymous with something. So if it's Jared Karabas, Jared Karabas is our Red Sox guy. You know, most 28-year-olds on a Friday, Friday night have

something better, quote-unquote, better to do. If the Red Sox are playing, Jared knows Jared's on call for the blog. And Jared's on call for Twitter and Jared's on call for Instagram stories. And that is the difference of great talent, in my opinion, versus mediocre OK talent, which is if you're going to be something or stand for something, it means every goddamn time that the Red Sox are on or something's happening in entertainment or something's happening in the news or in lifestyle or whatever, you have to have a take. And you have to be ready to publish at that moment. And that's how we have created community because when something happens, people are going to turn their heads and look to so-and-so or such and such for a response. And that's what made

Dave very good, is that's how Dave built Barstool in the beginning. Dave knew that he didn't have the resources of the big guys. He didn't have any distribution. All he had was his sense of humor, literally a CMS and Twitter. And he knew that if something happened around Boston Sports or Boston News or Boston Media, that if he had a take right at that moment, it would grow him much faster than if he had to take the next morning or the day after or the day after that. And that's how you build community is you have to be very reactive. You have to have a point of view. And you have to be always there when someone's eyes turn to you or their ears turn to you. And I think that's really what separates people. It's like, who wants

to be there when it's inconvenient for yourself? Those are the people who will be most successful. I mean, I'm inspired by Dave's sex tape to make a sex tape with Michael. Why not? I know. I'm going to put chain on him. Yeah, you should. If this starts to slow down a little bit, I agree, and I'll be there. Let's go.

But, you know, I think we had Jillian Michaels on this show early, early on. And she was talking about just her career and having some longevity. And she was saying, like, you know, she's been a controversial character at times. But at least, like, whether you like or dislike or agree with what she says, disagree, it's authentically her. And she's like, you may hate me, but like this who I am. When I think of some like bars, so it's like controversy, this, that, but at least you always know where it stands and it stands and it's truth.

Yeah. And so it's like, okay, like maybe it's not for me and I don't like it, but like at least it's not bullshit. Yeah, correct. What advice do you have for people that want to disrupt an industry? Because that's what you guys have done. I mean, you're disruptors. Is there any like little tips or tricks that you would give to someone?

I think it's kind of to your point, which is, You've got to be okay being hated. You have to be okay with people being like, you suck. You're ugly. You're fat. You're stupid. You're wrong. You're this. You're that. The other thing. You have to be. Dion Sanders says it really well, which is like you have to wear your bull's eye and you've got to be comfortable wearing a bullseye. If you want to disrupt something, it means that you're going against the status quo. People don't like when other people go against the status quo. So you have to have very thick skin. And you have to have very thick skin. And you have to have. have to be able to not get lost when everyone else is against you. I think that's a really hard skill. I think people struggle with that. I think the second thing is, I think there are a lot of people who have like very lofty ideas of disruption. You know, I'm going to disrupt an industry. I'm going to create a new sector. I'm going to do this, that, or the other thing. You, it's not enough to have like a lofty business school ideal for disrupt. disruption. Disruption happens in the mud. And you have to, it's a grind. It's day in, it's day out, it's

constant failure, it's constant iteration, and without a lot of shine and starlight and accolades. So you have to be willing to slog through that. And then the disruption, it will start to happen in inches, and then it will move to yards or whatever, and then it moves to miles. Like disruption happens slowly and surely. And, you know, I look at, I look at Barstool Sports over the last five years. It's like, in 2016, we were just trying to figure out how to make money and, like, get the payroll going. And, you know, I was trying not to get kicked off Facebook live, basically. Like, and I was trying to, we were always getting shut down on Twitter.

Like a compliance standpoint. Compliance. The stream never worked. Like, you know, we were just trying to make it work. And now. flash forward, you know, at a conversation with Dave today about having security. Like, that's crazy from where we were five years ago. And that's not that long of a time. But we weren't thinking about, oh, when Dave's a big celebrity, we were just trying to make

ends meet and to make a blog and to make a few podcasts and to do a couple of video shows. And so for me, it's like if you really want to disrupt something, you have to believe in it. You have to be willing to be hated for it. And you have to be completely maniacally focused on very small progress. When you and Dave go out to a restaurant and you're having drinks, do people come up to you guys all the time? Dave, all the time. So is that what you mean by security? Like he needs a bodyguard?

That'd be kind of funny. Like dress the bodyguard up with something like really outrageous. Did you see this weekend with like Jake Paul and the robot? Did you see that? No. It was amazing. That's a whole other thing. That's a whole thing in a robot.

I mean, but like talk about knowing how to grab a tag. attention. Right. I didn't see it. What happened? He's got this giant like robot. He's got like this robot that follows him around. Is that a guy in a suit?

Yeah. Is that a guy in a suit? I don't know. I wasn't there. So we'll see. So does he need security for when he goes out or you mean in the building? Yeah. I mean, Dave gets anyone now like, you know, you get wreckage.

You know, I think the thing that I love about Barstool Sports is how approachable people are. When, you know, people feel like they know Casey Smith. people feel like they know Ryan Whitney, who's the star of spit and chicklets, or Riggs, who's our golf guy, or Dave. There's no qualms. You know, if Ben Affleck was walking down a street, you would have pause before you went up to Ben Affleck and was like, oh my God, Ben, huge fan, blah, blah, blah. Congrats with J-Lo, whatever. Dave, you don't have any qualms because you feel like you know Dave. You see him eat pizza every day. So the way we, there's no distance there. And intentionally, you know, our guys and women, they take every photo. They do, you know, they're real people. And they're, they understand the honor and the responsibility of their stardom. But it's also getting, you know, we go to a rough and rowdy. We got to get in the rough and rowdy and out of the rough and rowdy in this kind of a mob scene. And if you got to get in and out in under two minutes, like you need a little help getting there. So we've just gotten very big.

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Oh, you got to go to our app. Oh. Got to go to the one bite app. Does it tell you exactly? Yeah, by rankings, you can give your own pizza review. Where do you think the best pizza is? I am not a pizza expert. Dave's a pizza expert. Dave would say Vezzo. Oh, no, sorry, Dave would say John's a bleaker. I like Vezzo pizza. That's the one right down. I know. Yeah, we've been to Vezzo. Better than Ruby Rosa. Yes. But I'm obsessed with. New Haven pizza. New Haven pizza. You've got to travel for New Haven pizza. New Haven has the best pizza in America. If you don't get me pizza before we leave, I'm going to die. I will get it. So here's where I think going back to the conversation of disrupting, I think again, like lofty

ideas, like that's not the approach. But for people that are starting out, like, I want to do it my way and they start to get that pushback from the market. Like I remember early on your media, I would say, hey, we're going to sell this way. And I'm like, I don't really care about the CPM. Like you want to work here. And every audio agency is like, no, we're not doing that. It'll never happen. And in a very, like, rude, aggressive way. Fine. Obviously, it's shifted things of change. Yeah.

But when you're talking to young entrepreneurs and they start to get that pushback, like, what do you tell them? Because there's a lot of young people listening to show. Yeah. You've got to, you know, you've got to have a little internal like, fuck you, I'll show you. You know, I remember I had an early meeting. The first summer I was at Barstle. So it was probably July 2016.

I went and had a meeting with one of the big social net. works. The guy like legitimately did everything but like pat me on the head and was like, good luck with your like little dinky regional sports blog that like you could, I could see on his face like, why am I taking this meeting? Why am I taking this meeting? And it few, I had so much fire leaving that meeting. I still talk about it today where I'm like, I will show you. I will. And so you have to have a little bit of like I will I will show you. The other thing is you just need one break. You just got to focus. You need one break. You need one chance. For you guys, you got your first podcast. And then you get the second one. And then you get the third one.

And then when the media agencies are like bullying you around the rank, you can be like, nope, you can't buy these three shows unless you do it my way. So it's like building your own leverage. You got to get the one thing. The last thing, I want to say by name, but this person's, we were at a podcast network. And like that led to the idea of doing something. different. And I don't even like to call it a network because I think it's IP in brand. But the last thing that's Nassil said to is like, good luck in the podcast space. And I think about that a lot of them. Yeah, you stay in the podcast space. Yeah. And I just, I think like I do agree. I think you have to have that kind of like thing where it's like I'm going to go and prove to myself and others like, I can do this.

Yeah. You need to be, you know, we had our 18 year anniversary for Barstool last week. Wow. Which is amazing. And Dave had this blog or in a post where he, showed the cover of the first paper. And he, you know, said, thank you to all the stooleys and all the fans and everyone who's been with us. And then he said, thank you to everyone who said we couldn't do it because you mattered almost as much too. Wow. That's cool. And it's true. That is so cool. I would love to know selfishly how you set up your morning routine because you like I feel like you have to set the tone of your day. You're busy. Is there something that you do every morning or do you just roll out of bed? I like the worst. No, to be honest. Be honest. I want to

I feel like I always get these panels of like female executives and everyone's like, I get up at 4 a.m and Peloton and then I go to Soul Cycle and then I like take a shower. Who wakes up at four. I wake up at the last possible minute. I like inhale coffee. I'm late. I always forget things. I love the honesty.

It's like a mess. So I don't have. I wouldn't say that I'm like a big routine person in general. I don't think I take like good. enough care of myself in general. I think I'm always like, I'll sacrifice myself first for whatever has to be done. And I kind of like a little bit of chaos, to be honestly, like he keeps my brain interested. So for me, I think the big things are every morning, the only thing I do do pretty religiously is the first three emails or texts or something I do in a day is I try to help

three people. Could be personal, could be work, but I'm like, okay, I'm going to start my day with doing three good things. And then I can go to whatever it's the problem du jour, the crisis from the night before, the prep for the thing coming ahead. So that, I do that. I'm pretty maniacal about my calendar. Like I really care about my calendar. Like do you have driving time? No. Is it color coded? No, but I am like, I like to be booked from the very beginning to the very end. Like I want to make the most out of every inch of time that I have. So what time does that look like? So it's like I'll start emailing or texting people probably as early as like seven, I think,

like seven. I'm like. She's like, oh God. Yeah, starting to think. Today it was early. I was on at 630 today because I had an idea about something. Barstall starts probably like 9.45 to 10.30 is when like the barstool machine starts going.

I like to be booked. usually I don't like an hour long meeting. I like a half hour meeting. Oh my God. Can we stop with the hour long meetings? I hate an hour long meeting. There's no need to talk to anybody for I tell people all the time. One thing I've learned doing this podcast and Lauren and I talk about it all time is like I can get someone's almost whole life story in an hour, 45 minutes hour. You can't even just how much you're covering. Then you're like, I got to finish this. I also think a call. Let's do a 15 minute call. Sometimes 20 minutes, we can't do 30 minutes. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, totally. You've got to get to the point. That's what I love about New Yorkers.

Yeah. New Yorkers are very efficient. We'll sit and drone on. Yeah. And it's rude. Like you want to be like, how are you? And then it's like, who do you know? I hate that shit. Yeah.

I love the no one hour meeting. Yeah. I'm like, what do we want to do here together? What is like a day in the life of what you're doing workwise? Like, is it a mix every single day? Every day is different. There's no two days like. So like what was Monday?

So Monday of this week, that was yesterday. So let's say Monday of. Monday of this week is we had a board meeting. So I had a two-hour board meeting. I probably had, I recorded my podcast before to get that out of the way. Which we were listening to this morning. Oh, really? Shout the podcast name out too. Oh, that's the token CEO. It's my podcast. So we did that. I had a couple calls. I had a partnership call. We had, we had had a big weekend. We had two fights this weekend we had Rough and Rowdy, which is our pay-per-view on Friday night. We were part of the showtime. Jake Paul fight on Sunday night. So there was some recap work to be done from that.

Got out of the board meeting, did four to five other meetings in person in the office, left the office like 435, did calls and emails on the train. And then it's like rinse and repeat the next day. What do you think that the traits are that make you an effective CEO? When you start to think about the core competencies and traits, what do you? you think that is? Of a modern CEO? Yeah, that's a good way to it. I think a modern CEO is very different than a traditional CEO. It was funny. I was having this conversation with someone about it today. I think a modern CEO needs to have a very hands-on grasp on most parts of the business. Not every part. You're not going to be good at every part,

but you should have, the modern CEO has a good tactical grasp on how the pieces work. I think The modern CEO is very approachable. Doors open. Not behind the big glass door, door shut. There's no executive wing. You're not protected or flanked by a bunch of gatekeepers. I think accessibility is really, really important. I think being able to relate to people is really important.

I feel so grateful that, you know, the average age at Barstall is 30 years old. That's the average age. I could not spend more time with 20-year-olds. I love people. in their early 20s. Love it. So I like to spend time with like the bottom rung folks because they're doing the most interesting stuff and they are the least packaged, the least culture, you know, they're the least, they've been put through the machine the least. So they're the most raw. And they've got, and they're just interesting. I just like young people. I think the

modern CEO needs to have vision and guts and be able to take risks. and be accountable to failure and success, and then to move right on. I think people who tend to bask too long in failure or, you know, celebrate too much around to win are annoying. And it's just, it's unlikable. It's not an attractive quality. Neither is attractive. And then I think you have to be an extremely good, extremely fast communicator.

I would totally agree with that. Some of your traits. Well, no, no. I think like the reason I want, like, one, self, wanted your perspective, but two, like, this is the difficulty in my opinion of the modern school system. These are not what they're teaching you. No. Like nobody, when I went, I mean, I was, I went to University of Arizona, the Harvard of the desert. Oh, you did? We were doing a big Arizona bowl there. I was just there. I saw that. Yeah. And like, Tucson's gorgeous. Tucson's wild.

It's a wild place. It's awesome. Yes. But I just think about like, it didn't prepare me in any kind of way for what I'm doing now. I kind of had to stumble along and figure different things out. And I think about people coming up through the school system, which is why, like, that you said modern CEO, because they're not, this is not what they're telling you. Oh, no, no. I mean, I think that the school, my parents are in education. Like, I think the school system is, I think the university system is very broken. I think parochial school is very, I, you know, one is, I think real world experience really matters. I think anything really rewarding is, comes from an apprenticeship. I feel like my career is just an apprenticeship.

Like I have just had my hands in as many things as I can have my hands in for as long as I can remember. And that has made me able to identify things, helps me understand patterns. It enables me to harken back to like, oh, God, I was in something similar. So I think the apprenticeship nature of work is really, really important. I think school, and in particular, it's almost like the better institution, the worst it is, is like conditioning you to network and it's pedigree and it's group think and it's less about standing out. I think what's happening around PC culture and academia, like people are afraid to be themselves and they're becoming so scared and in such a shell that it renders them

incapable of this connection that is required to be effective in business. And if you are afraid to take risks in business, you're fucked. And I think the other thing is that if you are scared to be yourself, no one will really ever follow you or be loyal to you. And I think, you know, if anything that I love about our company is like, we never said we're perfect. In fact, we've said pretty much the opposite. We've fallen our way to success. We've also owned when we've been really brilliant. And, you know, I think the other thing about being a really good leader, not just a CEO, could be anything, is you have to be blunt. You know, I think, you know, I was having this conversation with this VC kid the other day, a Stanford business school kid. And he was talking about

how nobody wants to upset the apple cart in the VC world. Like these guys, you know, make a lot of money. it's very calm. Everybody talks in a soft voice. You know, it's not controversial. It's not high stress. And they're horrible giving feedback to one another because to do so would be upsetting. It would be it would be hurtful or it would be jarring. And like, we are so blunt at barstool. If we think someone's a fucking idiot, we're going to be like, that was so stupid. I had a sales guy mess up on something so royally. this week. I sent one of the nastiest emails I've sent probably in five years. What's the email? Tell me what the email is. It was basically like, what the fuck were you thinking? Like, why do you think you're above the company? How could you operate the arrogance to operate

outside this scope was just like the hubris in that is staggering? Like, how are we entrusting you with this job? Like, those are horrible things to say and hear. But there was a really bad mess up. And that needed to be set. And I think that's the other thing is that in school right now, like we're getting, you know, I'm biased. And like, I think we're getting a little bit of freight. We're bubble wrapping. We're coddling.

Yeah. And I don't know. I mean, like, whether it's just like this or not. Like I come from the generation, like screwed up. You get like slapped upside the head. Like, what the fuck are you doing? I got spanked all the time. I think there needs to be a little bit more of that.

Like calling people. out a little bit. Because what happens is, you know, you go into the real world and the real world doesn't care about your feelings. Like, the world's going to go on being the world. And if you're coddled like that, you're just going to get washed away in a sea of people who are tougher than you. Yeah. And it just makes you stick into the same. It makes you stick to sameness. And then you just end up, I think, very unfulfilled. And look, like, I think you've got to give as much love as you do. You know, it's the carrot and the stick. But it's also like, I love that sales guy. Next week, I'm going to tell him, I love them. The intention isn't to be harmful. The intention is for everybody to be

better. Who do you think is doing it right right now? What are some influencers that you look at content creators, websites that you are like, they get it? Obsessed with Barry Weiss. I'm obsessed with Barry Weiss. I think Barry Weiss has it. I think you have it or you don't have it and she's a woman who has it. I think she's endeavoring to do something very bold, which is to marry traditional. journalism with kind of like punk rock fringe journalism and to put them together. I think that's very interesting. And she's honest about what she doesn't know. I think that being honest about what you know and what you don't know is such a huge part of success. So I think she's very interesting to watch. I think a lot of people who've left mainstream media and gone to substack are interesting to

watch. I think there is like a phenomenal amount of talent on TikTok. Just phenomenal. treasure trove of talent. You know, anything from, and that's what's so amazing about social media and the internet. You know, like, I did a thing probably six months ago on the, like, paint kid. Did you hear about, like, the paint kid who was mixing fruit in paints and he was making TikToks and he worked for some, you know, he worked for Sherman Williams or something and they fired him. Oh, yes, yes. Yes. They fired him for, you know, using materials from work when he shouldn't have. Oh, come on. When in reality, he was the single best. marketing vehicle for that paint on the planet. He then got plucked, he got fired,

and then got hired by another paint company and is now making his own line of paints. Like, that to me, it's awesome. That is so cool. So cool. So like that's a small example, but like people who, people who take the camera and the phone or a CMS and are able to share and then create an audience by virtue of what they have to say or what they have to show, I think are very interesting. I think that those people are interesting. What about podcasting? What do you think of the space podcasting? I would love to know your opinion on it. I think podcasting was a loser in the pandemic. I don't think anybody talks about it, but I think podcasting took a massive, massive hit. It was such a darling. It was the new future media. But when

people stop commuting and spending all day in a cube, the need for something only in your ears changed. I think that that also is a problem where like all the live audio products have been born. You know, Spotify has one. There's a lot of articles today about how Amazon is creating one. Facebook's creating one. I don't really know the use case as much now as I would have said in 2019 of like, oh yeah, it's going to be audio. It's going to be audio. It's going to be audio. It's going to audio. Now, I think that the merger of audio and video content is so exciting. That's why I think you guys are right, which is, it isn't a podcast. It's just IP. It's IP and brand. It's IP and brand. I think there are so many bad podcasts and irrelevant podcasts. There's also so many

genius podcasts. So I think it's an incredible, it's an incredible source. of IP. I think it's a really great way to discover if somebody has depth. Definitely. Yeah, can you hold an hour long conversation or a half hour long conversation is frigging hard. And you guys see this probably all the time. And someone comes like, yeah, you can do 10 episodes. But what does this look like in a year? Totally. Two years. Is this like, do you want a brand deal? Okay, you want to do that for like a month or two? Fine. But like how do you actually carry this forward and keep people's attention for a long period of time? I think you're going to see the shakeout of influencers, right? As people start to look for like, who are you?

you really? Yep. And that picture of you in an outfit in the street or like kissing your boyfriend on the beach. Yeah, that's that's okay. Yeah. But it's, and especially with the rise of like this next generation and TikTok, it's like, show me who you really are. Correct. What's your real opinion? Yep. I agree with that. Yep. I agree with that. I also think that, look, there's such depth. There's such depth to podcast. And there's also such a low barrier of entry. That's an amazing. that that's amazing. The other thing I really believe is that to the question about, to your question about like who's doing it right, people who don't think their talent are the people in my opinion who are doing it right. Where, you know, in our world, it's kind of, you know, Michael,

to your point is like, the producer is the editor, is the videographer, is like, and the talent is all those things. You know, we kind of got into like this place at barstool where every guest that Dan Katz and PFT Commenter got on part in my take, one of them DM'd. They DM'd all their guests. That's how we've gotten literally almost everybody. You have to get into your DMs. You go follow the celebrity you want and you DM them. If I could tell you how many people at basketball sports do not do that and they just like call up and call Kelly and bitch at our talent person about getting them guests.

Like that's the difference. And so people who can do that, I think are people. I love what you say about talent. I mean, listen, every, like, Hollywood agency is probably going to hate me for saying that. But honestly, like, I'm like, oh, like, whenever I get that pitch for the M.G for the big name celebrity that wants to come in and do a show. And they say, oh, make sure you hit the points of the product. Make sure you discuss their book. It's like, no, just come on and be a compelling person on the podcast.

I'm talking about even signing the show. I don't want some guarded celebrity conversation where I hear a 5% sliver of who you are. You want a million dollars to do a show because you're a name somewhere else. And I want to tell them like, hey, nobody on that. the internet gives a fuck. How I built my blog 13 years ago was, was I saw that there was nothing in the market that was uplifting other people. So all the bloggers were just showing their outfit or their nail polish color. I'm like, no, but I want to know what your morning routine is and what her nail polish is. Sure, all pepper in my own shit. But I want to make sure I can

bring up other people. And how I would get those people is I would go on Twitter and I would DM them, tweet them, DM them. I probably did 100 people a day and two would respond. Of course. But you get those two and then you can leverage the next two. Yeah, exactly. And then you get those four and you can leverage someone bigger the next day. I think you're so right about dropping into people's DMs. People just, they don't do it. Yeah. It's crazy. Yeah, it's funny. It's like when you outsource the real, you know, it was like when we used to have a lot of customer service issues in our store, it was like me and KFC and Dave, like, we responded to customer complaints about merch orders. Do you know what I mean? Like, when you outsource the things that bring you closer to what's going to make you big,

which is a guest, or potential can help bring you audience or what satiates your customer, if you can stay in touch with those two things, you're in pretty good shape. If you think you're above those two things, it's going to be very hard to succeed. I agree with you. I hate the agent pitch. If the, if the personality or person does not want to get in a room with us, like, we won't even take anything. And if it's not their main thing, if like, hey, I'm doing this because podcasting's hotter because like YouTube, someone's started subchannel. And like, don't worry, like my team's going to manage and here's my entourage of eight people. The internet reads that bullshit so quick. And they know it's just horses. And they don't,

they don't pay attention. They don't consume it. Yeah. There's definitely a new kind of celebrity emerging, which is exciting. Very. Yeah. It's, it's changing. Things are changing. Yep. What are you consuming? I would love for you to leave the audience. with books, podcasts, Netflix series. Oh, great. What are you consumed? Maybe social media accounts.

Okay. So I consume a lot of varsal sports, obviously. I like the D'emilios. I'm very interested in everything, D'Milios. I am a geek for, like, period documentaries on Netflix. So I just finished the Pirates, the Lost Pirate Kingdom. Amazing.

Basically, American Democracy was created by the Pirate. It's like amazing. Ooh, I want to watch that. It's awesome. I watched one on the Ottoman Empire before that. And then I was doing the Egyptian Empire. So I'm like a dork for like stories in ancient history. And Netflix has done, I think, an incredible job of it.

Like they've really nailed this, what would you call like edutainment? Like it's educational. It's entertainment. There's some drama piece. There's some historians. They've done an amazing time. Because some of the old history channel ones were like two. It was too cheesy. Yeah, it was either two cheesers or too educational. And I was like,

oh, who cares? Okay, so I'm into that. I, who else do I follow? I like to follow a lot of different people. So in my Twitter feed, I have like a lot of very liberal news. I have a lot of conservative news. I've got, I like cult cult, culty type people. So I may not under like gaming. I'm not particularly into gaming. I'm not a gamer, but I think what they talk about is interesting. I think Black Twitter is fascinating. I'm into, what else am I into? In terms of books, like the last book that I read that I really loved was Norma Kamali's book. Like, I'm invincible. Invincible. She's amazing. I'm obsessed with Norma Kamali. I don't read a lot of books anymore. I think that's kind of disappointing. I'd like to read more books. You're busy. You got a lot going on.

Yeah, I'm busy. You got an excuse. I like Instagram. I'm very, like a student of Instagram. I'm very interested in Instagram. Same with TikTok where it's just like a lot of like roving through. So nothing really sticks. But I like to just see what like what what is the the internet's so weird. It is so weird. It's like what are people talking about today? The internet's wild. It's just wild. Yeah, it's awesome. I'm going to read Norma's book. That's a great recommendation. If someone were to start with your podcast, what's the episode that you would tell them to start with? Oh, that's a great question. I think the Norma episode of my podcast is great. So plug to Norma, she's amazing. I mean, her story, she's 77 years old, and one, the woman looks like she's 50 or 40, and

two is the way she's managed a very disruptive life is truly inspiring. And then in terms of token, I don't know. We've had a lot of good episodes. I'm still figuring out. I created the podcast during the pandemic because I was the first two weeks of the pandemic. I made this stupid rule in my head that I was going to email at that point in time, we had 250 employees. I was going to email everyone who works for barstool so that they would feel connected because it was very alienating and it was very disruptive. So I would do like the A's through D's on Monday and then I would do the E's down the line and it became like, it was just a pain in the ass and I was like, what am I doing? And then it was all the replies and I was like, I'm getting lost in all this. And I was feeling

myself like personally going crazy because I was, I just felt disattached. And we had had a culture where everyone was in the office all the time. Like we did not do Zooms. We didn't do conference calls. Like everything was in person. So that's why I created token. And then I was, you know, tired of getting, I was really ticked off that every time I tried to go tell the barstool story, it would get washed in someone else's editorial opinion. In what kind of way? Like they would change your words? I had had, we were looking at a feature in Forbes and met this great writer and she was really jazzed up to do the piece and we're going to let her in. And, you know, a month later, the reporter came back and it was like, ooh, my editor hates Barstall Sports. Like, we can't do the story.

There will never be a positive story on Barstall Sports. And that was very frustrating to me. It was like we had also gone through. That happens to you guys a lot. It happens all the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We had done the HBO piece. So HBO Real Sports had done what was ostensibly supposed to be about the Barstle business became entirely about the cult of Dave Portnoy.

But it's good press. I mean, it's haters are your marketing team. Yeah, that's my thing. It's like, go write all the negative shit you were right. It's just bringing more people to me. I had an instance early in the pandemic, which I'll even like drag up. But this like this writer was going to come in and like, like, I was going to write a disparage piece.

I'm like, that's fine, right, whatever you want. But I'm going to go on my podcast the next day and call you out by name and say who you are and be like this and I'll address it. They never ran anything. But I think like what I love about what you guys do, that happens and you can address it right to way. Completely. I wanted that for myself.

Correct. Yep. I agree with that. Yeah. There needs to be no reality show that's contrived by producers. You can just have your own platform. Your life is your reality. And I was feeling like content.

I mean, you guys know, this because you live in this world and your content people, it's just kind of like seeps into everything. I never wanted to be in content. I don't think I'm particularly good at content. I don't think you can be a company anymore without having a content component. Completely. Completely. Like I think you have to be a marketing content. Even if you're a product company, like you have to kind of be all things or else you're just missing a part of the world that exists around you. Yeah. Content is storytelling. And it's the old way of doing that where you buy an ad or you do press release. Like we still deal with companies that want to do press releases. And I was like, who needs a press release? Yeah. Part of the reason I think

modern media, not modern, like traditional media is dying is because a lot before you relied so heavily on it to dictate like who you were in the market. Yeah. And now like they can put that out. Yeah. Now people are like, oh shit. Who am I? Yeah. But you can also say like that's bullshit. Yeah. Yeah. I don't agree with that. And I'm addressing you. Before you'd be like, oh my God, this one or two publications or outlets controlled the mainstream public narrative of who you were. Completely. I think they're going to die because of it. At least the model is going to die. Yeah. I mean, the model is over. It will take a long time to die.

Sure. It'll take, it'll take a, you know, generation. 50, 60, whatever, how many years. But it's on the decline because they don't control public opinion like they used to. Yeah, it used to be like you drop a rock into a pond and the ripples to slowly move. And now there's rocks and ripples everywhere. And it's very choppy. And if your head isn't on a swivel and you're not adept at it, and you don't know. who you are, it's easy to get lost in that. And certain journalists and editors aren't used to being directly answered and put in the spotlight from a company the size of Barstool. So now they're like, oh shit. Yeah. Pimp yourself out.

Where can everyone find you? Where should we start on the Barstool app? Oh, okay. So you should get all the Barstall app. So you should get the One Bite app. I'm getting that. Today I'm going to get yourself some pizza. One Bite.

Everybody knows the rules. You can get the Barstle sports app. You can get the Barstall sports book. So if you're in a state with legal, legal betting, you can find me at E.K. Nardini. You can find token CEO at token CEO. You can listen to me wherever you find a podcast. That's it. You are a wealth of knowledge.

I want you to write a book called token CEO. So I can just read all your tips and tricks. I feel like I should have a better routine. I'm going with a better routine for you. Yeah. Next time you can come back. You're like, I meditate for 15 minutes. I do an eye cream.

Yeah, no, I have nothing good. No, I like your morning routine. Red wine and going. You're a hustler. Thank you for doing this. Thank you guys for having me. Of course. We are doing a giveaway as always, and no, it's not for Michael's Balls.

We are giving away, Get the Fuck Out of the Sun, available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target, where all books are sold. It recently was turned into a podcast. You guys have to subscribe. We have a limited series going on, and it is the top of the top skin gurus. To win a copy of Get the Fuck Out of the Sun, all you have to do is tell us your favorite part of this episode with Erica on my latest post at Lauren Bostic. And with that, we'll see you next time.