The Herd with Colin Cowherd - Colin Cowherd Podcast - Fanatics CEO Michael Rubin on Biz Growth, Gambling Pivot

Episode Date: August 29, 2022

Fanatics CEO Michael Rubin joins Colin to discuss his strategy to take the world’s leading licensed sports merchandiser into gambling and NFT’s, why he got out of his ownership stakes in the Sixers, why he hasn’t sold the company, what sells in Europe that doesn’t work in the U.S., if he’s ever regretted selling a company, why he doesn’t want “yes” men around, and how he stays on the front end of cultural trends as he gets older. Follow Colin and The Volume on Twitter for the latest content and updates and check out FanDuel for the best wagering and daily fantasy action! #Herd   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform?

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You might have seen the skits, my basketball and college football journey, or my career in sports media. Well, now I'm bringing all of that excitement to my brand new podcast, The Clifers Show. This is a place for raw, unfilled conversations with athletes, creators, and voices that not only deserve to be heard, but celebrated. So let's get to it. Listen to the Clifford show on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more behind the scenes,

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It's America's number one sports book, incredibly easy to use, super super, safe, totally secure, super fast payouts in as quick as two hours. You're not going to get that anywhere. Also, same game parlay bets, live betting. It's the best. Hey, if you're new, just download the Fandul Sportsbook app. I did it in 15 seconds. Get started now. Sign up. Please use the promo code Colin so they know we sent you. Please use the promo code Colin, C-O-L-I-N. Fandul-Sports book app, sign up. You know, one of the things when I looked over your bio, And it probably speaks to a lot of who you are because lots of people drop out of college. And they're called people who struggle with math.

You dropped out of college very quickly. So I think it takes, you know, Bill Gates did. It takes a certain amount of independence and courage to do that. I couldn't have done that. I didn't have enough confidence. If you could, Michael, go back that week or that moment. And I don't know if it was an epiphany. But did something frustrate you?

Were there caps? Did you feel like you were being boxed in? You know, for me, I was always a terrible student. I was always an awful athlete, but I was good at one thing. I always loved to work. And any variation of business was like what I love to do is. Right. That was the way I competed.

And so I actually only went to college because I made a commitment to my mom and dad after I nearly went bankrupt a couple times in high school. Right. And my dad helped me once and said, look, I'll do this, but you have to go to college. So I went to college, the problem was by the time I got there, I was, you know, doing so well buying some closeouts. Like, yeah, this isn't for me. So, you know, I'm going to give them the money back.

I'm going to go full time in business. So you've expanded into spaces that some are obvious, like from the sports apparel, you move. And then you recently said sports gambling. And I thought, all right, how is he going to, you know, synchronize all these? So take me to the thought because a lot of your apparel stuff, you know, like lids. Like, and different, you know, I've watched Amazon grow. Like, I get it. When they went into the Washington Post, I was like, that's kind of a left turn, isn't it?

Now I get their strategy. So you go into gaming. How does it fit? Yeah, so I really think about what's a sports fan want. I think you really think about everything through the lens of your customer, the sports fan, what's in their best interest. I think there's really not another company today who's working to build a really end-to-ended digital sports platform. So you as a fan want to go to a business.

place, you know, can you one day watch live games? Can you bet on the games as you're watching the games? Can you, you know, buy the jersey of the player you like? Can you get a collectible from that, you know, whether it's a trading card, physical, digital and empty? You know, do you want to get a ticket for an upcoming game? So we really want to give the sports fan everything they want digitally in one place. I think that's a massive opportunity. We spent really the last 10 years building, I'd say, a really good experience for the sports fan with merchandise. And we woke up, We said, wait a second, we have close to 100 million sports fans, and they do a lot of other things digitally. How about if we could give them everything in one place?

And that's really the desire we have is to give the sports fan the ultimate digital sports experience for everything they want in one place. There's a lot. I mean, it's not legal to bet sports yet in California. That would obviously, and there's political reasons. And some conservative states may not lean into it. California is more left-leaning, but there's some politics behind it. So when you look at sports gaming, what any. Timing is so vital in all this stuff.

What inning are we in, in your opinion? Very early. I think we're in the second or third inning of sports gambling. What does it look like to you? Because in Europe, half time, in stadium stuff, my mom, European, I've always kind of... You've grown up with it. Yeah. It's in the culture.

And the culture is you can drink with your parents at dinner. My mom wasn't really beholden to some of the more rigid sort of, you know, cultural American realities. So I look at gambling in a stadium and I'm like, well, they're doing it in England forever and those fans are crazy. I mean, they call them soccer hooligans. Our fans actually, by and large, the nature of our fans, the behavior is pretty good if you look globally. So do you think it's going to be that easy and accessible for fans in five years, 10 years? I think, you know, I think very long term. I feel like, even though I'm getting old, I feel like a young guy, my lens is what's a fan want 10 years from now, 20 years from now, 30 years

from now. I think 10 years from now, sports gambling is completely mainstream in most places in North America. I think the experience will also be to matchably better. I think that's a great thing. And so for us, you know, we don't worry about how things start. We worry about how they finish. And this is, you know, this is a marathon. It's not a sprint. And we're going to make sure to create the best product for sports fans, the best experience. And we have, you know, huge strategic advantages. Today, we have more than 100 million fans to go to finance. addicts, you know, every year, and to be able to take that 100 million fans and not only service them with all their merchandise needs and all of their collectible needs, but also with

their sports gaming needs is a big opportunity for us, and one that I think we can, you know, service the fan better, do things better for them, and at the same time, have a better business model. So you owned a couple sports franchises. You moved out of that space. My guess was for the gaming purposes, am I right? Yeah, it just got, look, it got too complicated. Like, for me, when I, you know, We bought the Sixers together in 2011. I was the third largest shareholder of the team. It was a great experience. You know, I was pretty involved in the last several years.

And I think as Fanatics start getting much bigger, we were a $250 million company the year that I bought into the Sixers together with Josh Harrison, David Plitzer, who you were kind of the managing partners. You know, this year, you know, will be, you know, more than $7 billion in revenue. And just based on us now being in the collectibles business in a big way where we have deals with thousands of individual. athletes without starting to take bets on the Sixers by the end of this year. Neither one of those businesses really worked with being an owner of sports.

And it was great when it wasn't a conflict. And when I saw that it was holding back fanatics, it was immediately an easy decision for me to reach. People, I'm sure your cash fluid, a lot of people would like to buy fanatics. And you've held off on that. Are there almost DNA reasons? Are there independent reasons? People that don't sell are often people. people that want control, don't want to answer to people. Why haven't you? Because you would be,

and this sports now is where the global money, Michael goes. I mean, somebody once said to me, you know the Red Sox will be there in a hundred years. Liverpool. You don't know if a tech company is going to exist. Why haven't you? Yeah, for me, it really gets down to one thing, which is getting started. Like, even though we've gone from a $250 million business to, you know, I think next year we could be approaching potentially $10. million dollars in revenue. We're just starting. You know, you asked me what inning was sports gambling in. I'd say fanatics is, you know, we're in the first quarter of the game. I think we have so much potential ahead for us. There's so much to improve how sports fans are kind of service by us.

You know, there's so many things we're doing. We're, you know, we're cutting the speed of deliveries in half in our merchandise business. We're doing so many things to improve the collectibles business. We're going to market the category for the first time. In gambling, I think we're going to create a great experience for fans. So for me, it's not like there's a little bit of unfinished business. There's so much to do.

And that's a blast. Like, I'm so lucky. And I think our 10,000 plus associates, we're all fortunate to work in such a vibrant industry. Sports is a great, you know, industry said. It's a global business. It brings communities together.

And why would I want to, you know, kind of sell out when I'm, you know, in the beginning of the game? When you buy a company, you do your due diligence. Yeah. But there's probably, there's a secret to every industry.

Or you buy it and six months later, you're like, wow, collectibles. Yeah. What was the first moment when you were in the business and you went, well, that goes against my instincts? I'm surprised this is the business. Yeah. I'd say in the collectibles business, there are a couple things where they just defy gravity and don't make sense to me.

The first is, you know, tops, pinini, upper deck, all really good companies, all. all owned run by good people. You know, we bought tops earlier this year. But, like, I heard from so many customers about redemptions. Like, we hate when we get a redemption. You buy a box of cards and you get a redemption because, you know, it was too difficult to get the autograph on the card at the time they made it. And so I think the industry had worked that way.

We're not looking at this saying, you know what, that's not acceptable. Like, you know what? So many collectors, they hate it. It's a practice they're like. So we're saying, like, how do we eliminate it? And it's just like the mentality of like we need to do. better. You know, another example would be marketing. You know, the industry today spends less than 1% of revenue in marketing. Like, there's so much we can do to bring. I couldn't tell you

the last time I saw a commercial for it. And by the way, whether it's a commercial or whether it's more grassroots marketing, there's so little done to promote the collectibles industry, but it's grown and grown and grown. So like I look and say, there's so much opportunity to innovate the product. There's so much opportunity to market the product. There's so much opportunity to take better care of collectors, and yet the business has done great. So for me, it's like, if this business is doing this well, treating customers this way, you know, without innovating, without, you know, marketing the products, like the sky's the limit for what we can do.

So, like, in a lot of ways, I feel like the business has done really well, you know, in spite of not being like, the companies haven't woken up and said, like, we're going to be like, you know, Nike is a product of marketing company that, you know, I think we all look and respect. You know, I think we take that same mentality into the collectibles industry and it's a massive opportunity. It's interesting. Do you, you know, Starbucks didn't do any advertising forever. It was just sort of, we do coffee or coffee shops or advertising. So as you touch on that, is there a company that you look at and you say to yourself, because there's different ways to do it, is there a company that to you, Michael, you ever look at and go, they are really clever? Yeah, well, first of all, I study everything. Like, I'm a sponge. Like, I barely made it out of high school. We just. I went to college for about six weeks.

I'm actually, people, probably people, someone said to me last night, do you speak in any other languages? I'm like, I barely speak English, okay? But you know what? I have a little bit of common sense. And so like, I'm a spun. So I'm always looking at like, what's Amazon doing? You know, how are they pushing the envelope from a customer experience perspective?

What's Netflix doing? What's Apple doing? What's Google doing? What's Nike doing? Like, you got to look at great companies and like, get ideas. I mean, you don't need to be the first to create something. what you need to do is figure out, you know, what I have is, you know, we work with the best sports properties of the world, Clistra 1,000 collegiate professional sports properties globally. And we have

this incredible IP that we're fortunate up to work with to be able to service sports fans with, but we got to do it better every day. Like, we need to go into this with the mentality. Like, what we're doing today, it's not near good enough. How do we get better? How do we do everything that we do a lot better for the sports fan? And so there's lots to do. When you buy, you create or you bought fanatics, we really start, really what happened was we had, we had, We operated five leagues, e-commerce businesses and my old company, GSI. And then we bought Fanatics and kind of changed the name of the company in 2011. Take me back to the beginning of it.

Was there an epiphany is probably the wrong word, but was there a moment when you said to yourself, wow, this is untapped. Like when I read your story, I thought, man, I can't believe there weren't thousands of business people going after this. Did you think to yourself, man, this business, people just don't understand. No, I had the opposite reaction. I'm going to be honest. In 2011, when I sold GSI Commerce, which is my first company in eBay, and then they said, hey, we don't want to be in the owned inventory business.

We bought Fennon X back for them. I actually said, you know what? I just watched two little companies, one in Seattle called Amazon, another in China called Alibaba, that have been literally decimating retail. I said, if I don't completely reinvent this business, we won't be here. We'll be irrelevant. So I actually had the kind of like the fear of death. By the way, the fear of death is a great motivator to make you figure out how to make things work.

Right. So we did exactly that. We said, you know, how are we going to make sure we have the best assortment? How are we going to make sure that we give the best experience to fans? How are we going to make sure we do things that other people can't do? How are we going to make sure that we just keep innovating to a way that, you know, unlike most other retail categories that have been, look, Amazon and Ali Pava, two of the best companies in the world, okay? And they do it because they're doing things for their customers that others can't do.

We took the same mentality and said, look, if we get laser focus in sports, that's a massive opportunity because this is a complicated business. It's skewery-intosh. We can have more than a million products today. When you focus on one thing, you can do it really well. And again, the great thing is 10 years into it, I think we're just getting started. Is the delivery system as difficult as it feels to an outsider? You know, it's, look, if you have more than a million products in our core merchandise business. If you make, you know, we're going to, you know, we print billions of trading cards a year, you know, it's pretty complex, but I'll tell you what, our focus, our tenacity that one business, I think gives us a chance to be really special and do things for fans that

others can't do. I'll tell you, again, if you just think about the first two businesses we started, whether it's, you know, our core e-commerce business, merchandise business, we're now going to cut the delivery speed in half, more than half in the next three years by replicating our inventory, by spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build out more distribution services. Because we want to get the merchandise to fans more quickly. And by the way, more cost-effectively. That's how we can do better for a fan. In the collectibles business, we're sitting here saying, you know what?

How do we eliminate redemptions? How do we market this industry for the first time? How do we build more innovative products? So everything we're doing, we're saying, how do we do it better? What we're doing? It's not near good enough. We've got to keep doing better. College football is back, baby.

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I like Utah minus two and a half to beat Florida and to cover. I don't see the playmakers for the gators. I think they're fairly pedestrian at quarterback Billy Napier's first year. And the Utes bring back several all-conference linemen on both sides of the ball. I think they control the line of scrimmage and control the game. Take the Utes to win by about a touchdown. If you've been thinking about joining Fandul, now is the perfect time to give it a shot.

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Terms and conditions apply. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque. Others say it's unleashing human potential. Either way, the podcast's Superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I'd put on 10 pounds.

I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the I-Hard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A win is a win. A win is a win. I don't care what you're saying. Yep, that's me, Clivert Taylor the 4th. You might have seen the skits, the reactions, my journey from basketball to college football, or my career in sports media.

Well, somewhere along the way, this platform became bigger than I ever imagined. And now I'm bringing all of that excitement to my brand new podcast, The Clifford Show. This is a place for raw, unfiltered conversations with some of your favorite athletes, creators, and voices that not only deserve to be heard, but celebrated. One week I'll take you behind the scenes of the biggest moments in sports and entertainment, and the next we'll talk about life, mental health, purpose, and even music. The Clifford Show isn't just a podcast, it's a space for honest conversations, stories that don't always get told, and for people who are chasing something bigger. So if you've ever supported me or you're just chasing down a dream,

this is right where you need to be. Listen to the Clifford Show on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more behind the scenes, follow at Clifford and at TikTok. Talk Podcast Network on TikTok. Do you remember when Diana Ross double-tap Little Kim's boobs at the VMAs? Or when Kanye said that George Bush didn't like black people. I know what you're thinking. What the hell does George Bush got to do with Little Kim?

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Learn the hard way. Open your free iHeartRadio app. Search Learn the hard way and listen now. I, along with a couple other people, created the volume about 18 months ago. And I think I'm pretty good at delegating. I'm not a control freak. And I think a lot of it is I know I'm not really gifted in many areas. I talk. So my takeaway is hire good people and get out of their way. you have a lot more at stake than I do. Is it hard to delegate for you? So I got to say, first of all, your concept of hiring great people

and getting out of the way is generally a very good concept, okay? And for me, like, I think what's important for a CEO to know is what are you good at, what you're not? You sat and you told me like, hey, I'm good at speaking. I'm also good at picking great people and getting out of the way.

That's a pretty successful monitoring business. For me, what I know is like, there's areas that I'm really strong in and there's areas that I suck in, okay? The areas that I sucking, I don't get near. When you say to me, like, we have thousands of people that work in technology in my company. I don't spend any time because all it would do is confuse myself and confuse them.

Okay? I don't spend time figuring out how to deliver, you know, how to make fulfillment centers work better. But I can say, you know what, we need to deliver much more quickly to the customer and how are we going to compensate? And if you pick the right people, then you figure that out together. And so, you know, for me, I think we have, you know, some of the best talent in the world. We focus day and night about how do we get the best people around us. How do we keep growing the talent we have? How do we keep bringing great talent from the outside in?

I think at the end of the day, like, let's keep this real. We're not, like, we're not curing cancer, fanatics. Like, we're building, you know, great products for the digital sports fans. So it's all about the people that we have. And for me, I'd say, I am, you know, I think I'm a pretty decent leader knowing, you know, where to spend my time and where to not spend my time. And you know what? If it's an area like, you know, it's strategy, I feel like I'm pretty good.

I'll dig in and I'll peel the layers back and keep asking questions. I can be annoying. and just be unrelenting. And if it's an area where I can't add value, I'm never going to get in the way, but I won't even ask any question. I just get the right leaders. They say people who are on the spectrum,

and I think I'm certainly not a Dustin Hoffman and Rain Man, but I'm probably on it to some degree. And when you speak and say that, it makes me feel like that you're probably on the low end. You are strategic. They always say strategy is for those who feel they have a weakness. And so those people, I think I'm good at strategy because I know I'm not often great at details.

So I don't know your personality and I'm not here to make any genetic guesses. But when I hear you talk, strategy feels like a big component to you. Like you like it. You acknowledge tech. Most people don't want to acknowledge a weakness or a liability. You are. Well, first of all, I love to acknowledge all the things I suck at. That's fun for me.

I'm like, my personality is to be self-deprecating to make fun of myself. If you listen to, if you looked at my phone right now, I'm sure that my friends and I were, like, we're beating each other up every day, like just making fun of each other. That's just our personalities. Like, we're all self-deprecating. Right. You know, for me, by the way, there's a lot to make fun of.

There's a lot of easy things to give myself a hard time about. But look, you got to know what you're good at, what you're not good at. And you know, you got to build organizations around what are you not strong at. Like, you know, for me, if I try to get people to do exactly what I do what I'm good at, then we're, like, in the way of each other. Right. ratings for pro teams, NFL is better than college.

NBA is generally better than college. NHL better than the college equivalent. So that would lead me to believe with fanatics or a company like LidjuBot, that the pro sales are much greater than college, but you get these tribal fan bases, for instance, in the South, Alabama, Georgia. Would I ever be surprised how does... college merchandise sell compared to pro merchandise. You'd be surprised.

So college is the second biggest business. So NFL is one. College is two. College football or basketball or both? Just college together would be two because we're not looking at as, you know, even though you might say, Alabama is obviously a football school. Right.

You know, we're looking at the sales of, you know, a university, you know, for the university. Not on a kind of per support basis. Obviously, we know what drives what. But I'll tell you, college is our second largest business and it's growing like crazy. It's the fastest growing business that we had. Wow. Why do you think that is? Because it wasn't where we started.

We started in the pro business. I think we made more progress in pro sports early, and we kind of playing catch up in soccer and college today. To be honest, the biggest sport is actually soccer. Second biggest sport for us would be the NFL. Third biggest sport would be college, kind of long term. Today, it's still NFL one, college two. But I think long term for us, soccer should be our biggest business.

Internationally, are there things that sell here and not other places? Like, is there something in Europe that stylistically just doesn't work here? I'll tell you something right now. Lids is opening hundreds of stores in Europe for the first time. And there's so many fans of the product we sell that, you know, we sell so much, you know, baseball caps in Europe. They're not fans of the teams, they're fans of the product. And so that's a great opportunity for us.

You talk about like, you know, if you go, if you set outside of Lid store and say, hey, why are you buying that? It's going to be like, because that's a cool product. I like that product. It's fashionable. I enjoy wearing it. It's not because, hey, I'm a dad. diehard fan of the, you know, St. Louis Cardinals, as an example. The great thing about our

business is things change every day based on how does a player perform? How does a team perform? If I looked at today's sales, you'd see there's always things emerging, always things falling apart. I guarantee you when Kevin Durant came back and said, hey, you know what, I'm going to stick with the nets. I'm going to make this work. His jersey sales would have immediately blown up, okay? And leading into that, they would have done poorly because people like, hey, is KD going to play in the nets or not? And so that's the great thing about this business, you know, great moments, Bad moments, great wins, bad losses, that drives the whole business. I tried to, years ago, into an MLS team, and I just couldn't afford it.

And I tried L.A.F.C., but it was Tony Robbins and magic and all that kind of stuff. It was interesting. You owned a hockey team in NBA. The NBA is a very unique business where there are a handful of agents and a handful of star players that really run the league. The NFL is about the shield. Tom Brady will retire tomorrow. The ratings will go up. We watch it. We gamble on it. Basketball has always been player driven. Hockey isn't necessarily. The end of baseball is a front office driven.

When you own that NBA team, because I've always thought they report that a lot of NBA teams don't make money and it's when you buy and the stars you have. If you looked at the NBA when you were an owner and said, hey, I would tweak this. I would tweak that if I was Adam Silver. Was there anything as an owner you were ever frustrated with? So first of, I'll tell you, I believe the MBA is incredibly well positioned strategically, very global business. You know, when you talk about kind of, you know, it's kind of run by stars, I don't look at it that way. The way I look at it is I love to have a partnership in whatever we do. And whether it's with the 10,000 plus associates at fanatics, whether it's, you know, when we were up until recently when I was, you know, an owner of the Sixers, yeah, you're in partnerships with, you know, the people who, you know,

play the game. It's the same thing in the NFL. I think that's a healthy mentality to say, you know what, I've used respect and admiration for my players. I want to work with them. I want to have a great relationship with them. I think it was an edge. Like to me, I look at, you know, our best two players today, Joel and Beating James Hardin, you know, our team has a great relationship with those players. I have a great relationship with those players. I think those players have done a lot to help the Sixers position as well as as possible. Look at James Hardin, who just played for $14 million less because he wants to figure out how to win a championship in Philadelphia.

He didn't come to us and leveraged us. He came to us and said, hey, I want to take money off of my contract so I can get better teammates around me so we can have the best odds to win a championship this year. So to me, if you have the right mentality, if you know how to work with people, how to work I think that's an advantage. You know, some people may say, hey, you know, they don't like that people have so much power. I deal with powerful people every day and, you know, my job is to have a great relationship with those powerful people and figure out how to work, whether they play it on the court,

whether they're partners of ours, whether they're owners of ours, whether they're commissioners, whether there are fans. I mean, you got to treat everybody the right way, and then you get a good outcome. When you do acquire a company, you know, it's labyrinth of attorneys and accountants, you see more of a buyer than a seller. To me, you feel like, I don't always sell anything. Yeah, you feel like a builder and a buyer. Again, it's a personality thing. Have you ever sold anything and regretted it? Even a car. I had an old BMW. I sold it. I regret it in an hour later. First of all, I don't have the personality to ever look back.

And, like, the only thing I want to do when I look back is learn to get better. I don't, like, what's done is done. Like, by the way, if I go out and I screw something up, all I want to do is learn from that L. Okay? I don't want to go back and say, like, oh, my God, this is going to eat me up. But first of all, I'm trying to think, because I think of one thing that I sold that I regret, and I literally do not have one example of it. Okay.

By the way, I've sold things like I had a, you know, I'm 100% locked in building FNAX right now. So I had business shopperner that we sold to FedEx. a couple years ago, I felt great about it because it allowed me to focus more of my energy on fanatics. I'd love to build. Like, I'm a true entrepreneur at heart. It's fun.

It's sport for me. Again, I remember I start by telling you, I sucked at sports. I sucked at school. What was I good at? I was good at. And so you got to gravitate to what you're good at. So, like, you know, the only time I would sell something is if I thought, like, you know, I got it wrong.

It wasn't working. I sold GSI Commerce for $2 million dollars to eBay in 2011, which is the first company I started because I felt that was the best thing for the company. And I really thought that I had a massive opportunity if I reinvented fanatics, which was this little business that they didn't want. And it was great for me that I was able to, they didn't want the business and said, hey, Michael, would you be willing to buy this? And I had this big vision.

It was completely different for what it was. But I guess there's sellers and there's builders. I'm a builder. The sports uniforms, I like the Dodgers home uniform clean. I like the Knicks home uniform with the piping, the orange and blue. It's clean. My least favorite uniform ever was the mid-80s, the Vancouver Canucks, wore something that was black with a V. It looked like something your grandpa would wear to Thanksgiving and people would talk about it for like two hours.

Like, he picked the wrong sweater. Are there things ever in the merchandise business? You're like, how does that sell? It goes against your instincts. Definitely. I like clean. By the way, not like every year. Like every month I'll look at something and be like, this isn't good enough.

We need to do better. I'll give you an example right now, and I'll look at some of the championship products that we'll make. I'll be like, this is the same shit we've been doing for dozens of years. Like, no, we have to do better. But you know what? That's our job. Like, right now, we've kind of, we've made the experience better, but we haven't, like, we're not good enough. Like, we need to make better product, faster delivery, more innovation, more breath.

Like, yeah, I look at all, I look at stuff all the time. We be like, it's not near good enough. Yeah. I like, I think the Baltimore Ravens, that uniform feels like Baltimore. It feels like it's got a little chip on it shoulder. When you were a kid, who was your favorite team? Definitely, Sixers. Not even a question.

So you buy your favorite team. Yeah, look, I was fortunate. I grew up in Philadelphia. It's actually a great story. I don't think I've ever told this story before. So I grew up in Philadelphia, born and raised, lived my entire life there, including still now. And the guy that owned the Philadelphia Sixers was my next door neighbor, Ed Snyder.

I lived on a lot of late. Yes, he lives in Montecito now. Yeah, he lived in Montecito until I passed. away a few years ago. It was great, great, great, great man. And in 2011, I sold Fanatics. I think it was March 28th of 2011. And Ed Snyder called me. He said, hey, I want to come over and came over the bottle of champagne. He said to me, hey, Michael, you know what? First congratulations on selling your company. He said, you know, you should buy the Sixers from me. He said, I'm selling the team. I said, you know what? This team loses a lot of money. You know, I'm like focused on Fanatics.

you know, I don't want to spend my time of this. I thought they were going to sell the team for $400 million, and, you know, you had to come up with $400 million and it was losing 30, $40 million a year. I didn't do any work. I said, now I'm not interested. He says, you know what? I don't, you know what?

I like you too much. I don't want you to buy the team. Okay? Then Josh Harris and Dave Blitzer bought the team, and they were looking for a local partner. And that's where I met them. And I realized they didn't actually pay $400 million dollars. They bought for $280 million.

And by the way, they were able to borrow whatever was $135 million. It was like, instead of being a $400 million dollar check, It was like maybe $130 or $150 million check. And in addition to that, the team wasn't actually going to lose $40 and $50 million anymore. It was actually on a path to making money. And I realized, you know, I wasn't educated. But for me, it was fine because Josh and Dave were incredible partners.

I was fortunate to work with them. And for me, Banatics is the massive opportunity. I mean, this is a company today that I think can be, you know, potentially the most valuable company in sports, one of the most valuable companies in technology. As I said, I feel like we're in the first quarter of the game. It's like I am a lot. in the laser focus. Like I'm working at this, you know, 16, 18 hours a day, seven days a week,

you know, probably 51 weeks a year. When I look at fanatics, I say to myself, man, this is, wow, gaming, merchandise. Because I believe this to be true. When I was a kid watching television, I didn't understand how everybody didn't like sports. Everything was scripted. I don't understand. I don't understand it. Like, it's the only thing. It's incredible. How do you take your ownership of a sports team. Can you transfer it and go, man, this is something I learned from the NBA. Do you take lessons from businesses or does stuff not cross over a lot? It absolutely crosses over. I think my entrepreneurial mentality, my kind of pretty like, you know, kind of down to earth, relatable person, by the way, that relates well to players. Everywhere I go, I'm, you know, seeing people and,

you know, we're all helping each other build. And I think it's like the same mentality I use in sports, with the Sixers was the same mentality I use in business of Fanatics and vice versa. And by the way, I learn all the time from each business. I'll learn about players who will call up and say, hey, Roob, how do I get on the homepage of Fanatics or how can we do things together with Fanatics? Because they're interested. They want to build their brands. I'll learn other people who aren't in the rest of you see who are the hard workers, who are

the lazy people, who have certain priorities, who don't care about things. You learn so much from each of the businesses. And I think for me, it was a, you know, being part of the Sixers for 11 years, it was a great education, it was great experience. The only regret I have is we haven't won yet, and that's a failure. Like every year you own a sports team, if you don't win the championship, you failed. And if you look at it any other way, you're a bad owner. Okay. Like literally, by the way, you have a 3% chance to win a championship, and that's your job. And if you don't do that job, you're not doing your job. You failed. And so for us, 11 years, we didn't win, and that's something, like,

I think, look, we have a championship contending team today, but we haven't won yet. What crushes you more? A bad earnings reported fanatics or a playoff elimination game in the the NBA. Which one do you not? That's a great question. Um, both are crushing. I mean, I don't like, I don't like, I don't like, I don't like, you lose all the time when you lose, I pick up and I'm like, that was yesterday's news. Let's go. You know, I don't, I'm not looking back. I'm only saying, how do we get better? How do we go for it? But I've had, I've had many of both. So fanatics is B to C. It's a business to a hundred percent consumer business. Okay. And we don't want to do anything. We say, people call us all the time and say,

hey, do you want to buy this business, a BDB of a business? No, we are a business to consumer, digital. If it's not digital, if it's not consumer, we have no interest. All right. Gaming is business to consumer. Yeah. Why does that attract you? Why does B2C attract you?

Yeah, you know, for me, it's really about being able to service the digital sports fan, wherever they want to be serviced. Eurofan. Yeah. For me, I've got to tell you, when I think about Fanatics in the future and I could potentially watch live sports, bet on them, get the jersey from the player I like, get the training card of the digital NFT, get a ticket to an event on one place. That's like an incredible experience. So for me, what we have is one brand and one fan base that we can do so many different

things digitally with them. But the most important thing we need to do every day is say, how do we do it better? It's not good enough what we're doing. How do we improve? How do we innovate? Because, you know, I still say like, yeah, we've made a lot of progress and, you know, $250 million last year. I think we could be, you know, approaching $10 billion next year. It's not, you know, It's not good enough. What keeps you up at night? I'm the worst sleep in the planet. I said to my girlfriend this morning, like,

I literally need a sleep doctor. Like, I could sleep three hours and then I wake up. And no matter how many times I say, don't look at your phone, I look at my phone, I start responding to text messages, responding to emails, then I look at news, what's going on in this world? You can obviously tell me a pretty competitive human being.

I like to win. I don't really believe in losing, even though it happens to the best of us. So, you know, for me, what keeps me up at night is we're growing quick, not having the wheels come off the bus. not doing, you know, dumb things, self-inflicted things. You know, I want to make sure we're making the big decisions.

Look, we're going to fail. You have lots of failures. Every day in a couple you fail. I want to fail fast. Like, you know what for me? If I'm going to fail, let's do it fast and move on. Let's not have a slow pain for failure. Let's do it fast and get it out of the way.

One of the vagaries or one of the problems with being rich and powerful is that people are often afraid to confront you or disagree with you. How do you ensure that when you walk into a room, room. Yeah. Your lieutenant are willing to say, Michael, I think you're completely wrong on this. Yeah. So first of all, I love that. And I create that culture. That's a bad leader who doesn't, you know, create the relationships with their leaders where they know they have to come and say, like, people come and say, this is the dumbest idea I've ever heard. Like, I'll come up and say, I got a great idea. And if any of my trust people who know me to work with me, if they can't sit by

me, if someone was a yes man, they're out. Like, I have no interest. You talk about somebody, I have no interest in working with is yes people. I want people who are going to make us better, challenge us. And I, every day, you know, we debate stuff. That's like, that's our life. Whether, you know, bantering with my friends, bantering with executives, that's who I am. It's also my personality, pretty, you know, I'm like pretty, you know, down to earth rather than to, you know, guys build a decent size business. Yeah. So the best ideas I get are being in groups of people and listening and kind of sponging it. Where do your best ideas come from? We must be like kindred spirits, because I would have given you exactly the same

answer. I would have told you it's from getting really smart people of different backgrounds around me and then being a sponge and I'll contribute and we can all learn from each other. So people say to me all the way like, someone just said to me last night like, you seem comfortable anyway. I'm like, I could go in the roughest neighborhood in the world and enjoy talking to people and asking questions and learning. By the way, watching what the wear and what fashion trends are developing. You know, what do they want? What do they need? How can I help them? How can they help me to being, And with any type of sports fan, like, that's how I learn. Like, I'm a sponge.

That's literally, I say, if you watch anything I've ever said, I'm a sponge. My first impression when you walked in is you dress like a young fan and you're 50. And so that's impressive to me because I believe in your business, you have to relate to these guys. Yeah. Okay, not me as much, right? So you dress as a billionaire, you dress like a fan. I don't know if you ever thought about that. You are in young businesses.

You know, 75-year-old guys don't wear as many baseball hats. You go to a match game. Everybody's got one on. So do you force yourself tech, music, people? How do you stay young and twitchy with culture? Because the world we're living now. It's so fluid, Michael. Like, every 15 minutes, there's new tech.

Yeah, so first of all, I think you need to be authentic to yourself. Like, I dress the way I want. And by the way, when someone will say, hey, you have to wear this to this. I'm just like, I am who I am. I don't give a shit. And, you know, if someone doesn't like me, you know what? You got to be authentic. You got to be who you are.

The biggest thing I like, I do love having all different backgrounds around me because that gives us the opportunity to learn from different people and take different perspectives. But look, I have a young mentality. Like, I don't like, I generally will say, as a stereotype, and I'll probably feel bad saying this, I don't like being around old people in general because it makes me feel old versus I like to be around young people that I can learn from, grow from,

I won't go to Palm Springs because of that. Yeah. I feel old. Park City people ski. And everybody in L.A. loves Palm Springs. And I'm like, I don't play bridge. It's old people. I go once a year for Coachella.

Well, that's the young. That's right. Nobody in the 80s there. No, I think that's a real thing. I could have been the oldest person in Coachella at the show. Finally, I remember interviewing Phil Knight one time and I asked this question. My producers like that is such a pithy, silly question. But when you can have anything, you know, the old saying, oh, what do you get somebody that has everything?

You could have any piece of sports memorabilia you've wanted. I'm not a sports memorabilia collector. I don't have a press pass I've ever had. But is there anything? Like if somebody told me what could I have? I say, give me Muhammad Ali's gloves against Foreman and Zaire. That to me was one of the first moments as a kid. I was watching a JP Patch's morning show.

This is a product that I don't have. This is something you don't have. It's my first memory of me knowing sports is a cartoon on a Saturday morning, breaking in and said, Muhammad Ali's beat George Foreman. This is a cartoon show in Seattle. And to me, it was the first moment. I was a huge Ali fan.

It was the first sports moment. I was like, well, I'm really into this. I did a book cover mimicking a Muhammad Ali shoot. So that to me would be the sports thing. Do you have one? That I want that I don't have. You don't have. Yes.

What is it? This is so easy. What do you think I want that? Okay, let me guess. Dr. J's the uniform when he did the dunk over Michael Cooper or the...

That's a good guess but you're off by about 30 or 40 years. I want a 2020, 2020, 2003, Sixers Championship ring. Those are hard to get.

You know, that's why I want it. Because you know, I want the shit that's hard to get because that's what makes it interesting. You can't even find that on eBay. It's not currently available on the market. You know what? But you ask me what I want. That's what I want.

Well, it's been great for me. Thank you so much. I learned a lot. This is really, really fun for me. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel help an acapella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal but encouraged. It's the enhanced games.

Some call it grotesque. Others say it's unleashing human potential. Either way, the podcast's superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I'd put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A win is a win. A win is a win.

I don't care what I'm saying. Yep, that's me, Clifford Taylor the 4th. You might have seen the skits, my basketball and college football journey, or my career in sports media. Well, now I'm bringing all of that excitement to my brand new podcast, The Clifers Show. This is a place for raw, unfilled conversations with athletes, creators, and voices that not only deserve to be heard, but celebrated. So let's get to it. Listen to the Clifford show on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more behind the scenes, follow at Clifford and at TikTok podcast network on TikTok. Hey, what's good, y'all? You're listening to Learn the Hardway with your favorite therapist and host,

Kear Games. This space is about black men's experiences, having honest conversations that's really not safe to have anywhere, but you're having them with a licensed professional who knows what he's doing. How many men carry a suit or armor? signals to the world that you not to be played with. And just because you have the capability that does not mean that you need to. Listen to learn the hard way on the IHard radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHart podcast. Guaranteed human.