Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation

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This is Master's in Business with Barry Ridholds on Bloomberg Radio. This week on the podcast, I have a fascinating and extra special guest. Erica Ayersbadon had a background in marketing where she worked at a variety of places from Fidelity to Microsoft, to AOL to Yahoo before she decided to take the role in twenty sixteen as CEO of Barstool Sports, trying to herd the various cats at the pirate ship

Don thank you.

Did I get your name right? I feel like Butcher, we did a great job. Oh well, thank you. So let's begin with your background, which doesn't really lend itself to how your career went. You study at Colby College in Maine and you end up with a degree in sociology. Was there any sort of career plan there?

No, I didn't really have a I loved college. I didn't really have a career.

Who amongst us hated college.

I made the most of it. I probably piqued.

And I know you at one point we're thinking about law school. I was, and I went to law school, and it's just like, how can I postpone? Right? That's exactly right.

Yeah, I didn't. I liked sociology because you could write. It was a lot of reading, and it was a lot of writing, and it was I liked the idea of studying people in groups. I had a really fantastic professor named Tom Morioni, who I found really really inspiring. I was a philosophy minor.

I you were, Yep, absolutely, I love philosophy. And the joke I tell is I never submitted my existential final paper because what's the point? Right? And I wish that was a joke, but.

It wasn't yea, but I took a bunch of I got an internship at Fidelity Investments when I was a junior, and it really gave me a taste for business, and I wanted to work in business. And at the time when I graduated, the economy was very good, so the fact that I had a sociology degree really didn't impede, I think, getting into business.

And you you end up in like what some would think of as kind of a dry legalistic part of Fidelity, the ARISA division, which focuses on retirement accounts.

It was very boring.

So did that motivate you to go to law school? Was that like?

Oh no, No, that made me become highly allergic to the concept of going to law school. I was bored. I you know, I made fifty thousand dollars my first job out of school, which for me was a lot of money.

Big money.

What you still think it's a lot of money nineteen ninety.

Eight, oh so booming economy. Fifty grand in the nineties for right out of college.

Yeah, that's pretty good.

That's probably double the starting So they were about thirty grand exactly.

So I you know, I I saw firsthand what it was liked or what I perceived it would be like to work in a law firm, and I saw firsthand what it was like to mitigate risk, and I realized that I hated both of those things.

So so not risk averse, not interested in the pickyune details and small you know it totally is.

You know. The interesting thing about having a career in business is the study show seven years post graduation, half of the lawyers aren't practicing. Yeah, they go into business. It's a similar sort of prep, just just sends you in a different route. So I know you in the book you write about wanting to come to New York City and being like, gee, this is a little intimidating kind of giant. So you end up in Boston, relatively close to family in Vermont and New Hampshire. Where was

Short Yeah, it wasn't far and most of my friends from college lived in Boston, so it also felt very safe.

Right. So you have a network built in at Fidelity. You're working with the legal group doing Arissa work. When an opportunity comes up on the Fidelity job board, for digital marketing. So you're doing boring and suddenly there's this new and exciting thing. What gave you the confidence to take that leap to something wholly different from your prior experience?

You know, in hindsight, it was probably fairly reckless. You know, I didn't have any money saved. The pay the pay for the marketing job was seventeen nine hundred dollars and I was making fifty thousand. But I was bored and I just didn't I was frustrated. I didn't like the feeling.

Of being that's a third. You gave up two thirds of your salary to take a job that had you were interested in and perhaps would open up a different career.

Correct, And I was like, hey, you know, screw it, I'm I'm going to go for it.

So you leap from that position? How first of all, how long did you stay at Fidelity in digital marketing?

I stayed another two years? Maybe three years?

Uh huh? Did you feel like you learned a lot?

Yeah?

Amazing?

Loved it amazing. So you think we think of Fidelity is like this big giants, dodgy asset manager. What was the digital marketing group? Like? There?

You know, the marketing and media group was interesting. It was run by women. Really, yes, it was run by women, and it was you know, at that time, radio and television and print were the top dogs. So what you saw was a company spending hundreds of millions of dollars to acquire custs.

Now, if I remember correctly, late nineties, cracks in the facade were already showing of you know, the monolithic radio TV advertising world.

Yep. And that's really where I got my first big break, which was I worked in the Internet and nobody cared about the Internet, which is why they hired me for it, because I was woefully unqualified to work. Give it to the kid, Give it to the kid. But I remember Fidelity. We paid thirty million dollars to have keyword Fidelity on AOL, which is, you know, in hindsight, a preposterous.

Equation, but it worked out.

But it worked out. So I really liked Fidelity because I saw how something operated at great scale. I saw something very serious. You know, the marketing of an investment firm is not to be taken lightly. And I was also given a huge amount of opportunity because nobody believed in, cared about or understood the Internet.

Huh, that's amazing. Even in the late nineties, it's one thing, if you say, hey, in the early nineties, this thing is kind of cludgy and it's got no consumer appeal. But by the late nineties it was a full on boom. I'm surprised. I guess that's the old pole gram line experts or experts in the way the world used to be. Maybe, right, So from Fidelity you end up at some pretty big firms. What was your next stop after Fidelity?

So after Fidelity, I also found eventually myself wanting to put my hands into things. At Fidelity, I could buy the plan. I was a media buyer, so I could buy what someone else proposed to me. I could negotiate it, I could manipulate it slightly so that it worked for our objectives. But I was really buying, and what I

But you found out it was all sales, right.

But it was all sales exactly. So I then chewed through that as much as I could, and it was a great experience. You know, an agency is a great apprenticeship. It's a great place to cut your teeth. You know, you're on somebody else's dime, you're at somebody else's beck and call. You have to manage young people in very dynamic, ever changing situations. You have to travel a whole lot, a lot, a lot, and you have to be able to pitch. And that those were good skills for me to develop.

So you end up going from ad agencies to technology. You're at Microsoft, You're at AOL, you're at Yahoo. What was the order? How did those come about? And how different was that from the fidelity slash at agency experiences?

So you know, the same thing happened to me at the ad agencies, where then I realized, whereas I had realized at Filty it was just buying. At the agencies, I realized I was just planning. I was still taking somebody else's ideas and putting them together in an order that made sense and delivered against an objective. But I really wanted to go make the thing. And I think working for Microsoft, which was the first publisher I worked for, that was my big.

Break what division at Microsoft.

I worked for MSN, which is you know, in that day, which is hard to conceive of now. You know, MSN, Yahoo and AOL were it like they were the front doors to the Internet. That's how you got your email, that's how you got all your news, that's where you got your entertainment.

There was your landing page on I was going to say Chrome, but really it was Internet Explorer.

It was Explorer exactly. And I had built something when I was at the on the age side. I had built something for Volkswagen on MSN where I was figuring out how MSN Music you could configure a playlist, and I played it so that you could configure your cabriolet, which was the car the Volkswagen was launching, uh huh. And it was very you know, it was a rainy

Now, a prior guest I had Joanna brought Bradford was also at MSN, and I know you guys know each other. Is that where you.

Met That's where I met her?

Yes, you were working for her there.

I worked for a woman named Gail Troberman, who I write a lot about in the book, who worked for Joanne. But you know, I remember meeting Joanne. I I somehow found myself invited to an MSN client retreat that Joanne was running. And I thought Joanne was fabulous.

She was a force a nation.

She is a force of nature and she calls it like it is. And I really just wanted to work for Joanne. And then I did for the next twelve years. So that was great.

So at Microsoft, at AOL, and at Yahoo.

At Microsoft and Yahoo, and then I went to a company with Joanne pre Ipo called Demand Media.

Oh sure, I remember that.

And then I went out on my own to go be the CMO of AOL.

And then CMO is a big position, especially at a shop like AOL. Back in the day, they were, you know, the eight hundred pound gorilla. So Dave Portnoy is running this kind of regional blog that's picking up some traction, first out of Boston, later out of New York. It started out as a tear sheet he was handing out at train station. Yes, eventually it becomes a little more substantive. What on earth led you to think, I know, I'm going to leave these giant Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL and go

I always loved barstool, So when I lived in Boston, Dave was handing out the paper at the train station, until Dave figured out that pretty girls handing out of paper would sell more papers than Dave, especially sports right to a comedy. Ye right, So I had. I had seen Barstool first hand, from the ground up. Most of the guys I was friends with would send Barstool stories in text. That's how people read barstool. That's how guys read Barstoo. They would text it in their group chats.

Are you was sports junkie or have a sports You know.

It cannot be right, you know it's osmosis, and it was, you know, barstools run in the New England Sports Run, you know, kind of coincided with one another.

So you had the Celtics, you had the Red you have the Patriots. Like that was a great couple of decades.

It was not so much anymore. But I pursued every avenue I could to meet Dave. And I had a mutual friend. I had a woman in my what I would call my women's mafia, another Kolby Grad, a woman I really respected who the Charming Group had brought on to advise Dave. And I just said, Betsy, you've got to introduce me to Dave. You've got to introduce me to Dave. You got to introduce me to Dave. And finally she did in a coffee shop in the West Village,

So as I was reading the book and you tell the story, albeit a very abbreviated version, I got the sense that so turnin takes fifty one percent for a fairly modest valuation ten or fifteen million dollars. You don't so much say this, but the implication is, oh, and we're giving you money. You have to professionalize, go hire a real CEO, and we need to start seeing regular financials. And you guys got to grow up a little bit

That's not his that's the odd set of who right. For people who pay attention to Dave, you would see how that would never work. Now that said, they went through I don't know, fifty seventy five candidates before they got to me. I was the last. I was the only woman, and I was the last of a long line of sports dudes. But I think I think what made Dave and I work and click is a couple things. One is that Dave has this really great gift. You know.

Delegating is really hard and giving the control. Giving up the.

Control is hard. And Dave, to his credit, really wanted that and he had no ego in it. And I also worked really hard to gain Dave's t trust and I listened and I learned, and I watched everything I possibly could so that I understood what he was trying to do. And then I brought what I was capable of to that and kind of the alchemy created, you know, really really electric place.

And let's be blunt and honest, Dave Portnoy is incredibly entertaining, even if that persona is an exaggeration of who he is. But no one wants him doing the payroll of the healthcare.

Yeah, Dave doesn't want That's like, like.

I can imagine, letting go of that stuff is really easy to focus on what he does best, which is the creative side, the entertainment side, the larger than life talent and even just the silly thing like the pizza reviews, the one by pizza reviews, Like his personality is what's turned that into a huge success.

He's the biggest food reviewer in the world.

Crazy, right, isn't that. So we'll talk little bit about Barstool Sports next. I want to stay with your role as CEO. You describe yourself as the token CEO, and not only do you embrace that label, which some people said, oh barstool hired a woman, they hired a chick, Oh she must be a token CEO. You literally name a podcast token CEO. So first tell us about that label and why you embrace it as a way to take care of that.

I mean, I thought it was so rude, you know, people would say. I think people said it in conversation,

I remember when you got hired because I had been off in the distance. So I've been writing publicly and on a blogs and so three, and you know, suddenly a sports blog starts to get hot. I'm paying attention out of the corner of my eye, and I had the exact opposite. I'm like, if that frat house hired a chick to be CEO, she's got to be bad. She's got to really no sports. She's got to not take any crap from those you know, they're a bunch

Yeah, I think so. But anyways, it made me mad enough that I was like, Okay, well I'm just going to own this now that.

That's really and That's what I did. So you described the first meaning connecting with Portnoy. He's an outspoken founder, and he surrounded himself with all these wild personalities. By the way, the whole thing to me was very parallel to Howard Stern and surrounding himself with that crew. How did you find working with him and all the different personalities at Barstool?

Oh? I loved it. I will never love a job the way I loved Barstool. Really, I loved it. I loved every second of it. It was amazing.

What were the challenges with such a disparate, raucous crew, You.

Know, it's I was there almost a decade, So I look back on those early days where you know, I was stressed about payroll. They were offending someone by the minute. You know, I had to keep them very busy. I kept them very busy. But we stepped in it all the time. And the business was just very, very fragile, and it was you know, there were in the early probably fourteen of us in a one floor office and nomad and then there were sixty five people crammed in

So when you say the business was fragile when you first joined, the growth was explosive. They just got a big chunk of capital from an outside investor.

Why was it so fragile, Well, most of the capital went to the secondary so the business itself probably had I don't know, two million dollars. So we had to grow this business on.

Two million dollars is like a six month run if.

These days it's nothing. But we were incredibly cost conscious. You know, when I got to Barstool, there wasn't an office, we didn't have a P and L. There just wasn't any infrastructure. But it was this incredible luxury where I could build something from scratch and that's what made it so incredibly fun. And I built it from scratch with a bunch of people who were wildly talented but very underestimated. And never you know, no one ever had Barstools back.

Wow, sounds like a lot of fun. So let's talk a little bit about what you did to take Barstool from really a local bagtag group of maniacs that was growing rapidly and turned them into a real business. I assume part of the original investment the fifty one percent from Peter Churner's media group was, Hey, you guys have to get a real CEO. Tell us about the process after you had the interview with Dave Portnoy. How long was it before you became CEO?

Oh? I think I started working pretty immediately.

Like a day a week, a month, probably.

Two, you know. I think I went through two weeks of interviews and the recruiters had to be caught up and play caated because none of their candidates got the job.

But do they get paid. I think they get paid regardless, I hope, so nice nice gig.

Yeah exactly. But I started working pretty immediately because the charming group had invested, and they had had six months, you know, there in California. Dave was in Boston and then New York. And really what we set about doing is we had a very clear vision to grow. We had a very clear vision to make content and comedy, and Barstool is really a comedy operation dressed up as sports or dressed up as lifestyle, and we wanted to

Right, So, not only was social media functional back then, it was relatively easy for something to pop up on everybody's feed. As bulkanized as media has become over the past twenty five years, the twenty tens felt like something could still rise.

To the guilt stars you could break out, Like if you look today at twenty twenty four in music, you can't break out a star anymore.

Well, that's that woman Tail Swift seems to be done okay, right because she's been around. Right, I'm trying to think of who is the hottest new band. Then I come up with things like imagine Dragons and they're ten years old.

Is nobody, Yeah, there's nobody.

I'm trying to think of who else is new.

And Barstool is the same, which is Barstool is started by Dave in two thousand and four, and it's you know, it's a very old internet brand by Internet brand standards.

So I want to get into the transition of you landing as CEO and then this incredible five thousand percent growth that takes it like what I do? Well, what was I'm kind of curious what the first couple of months were like getting your feet wet, getting to know, really know the personalities not just from their content, and trying to impose some degree of discipline and organizational structure on what vanley Fair called a pirate ship.

Yeah, I mean it was chaos, and it was chaos. You know, it was chaos in the best way. I really believed that it was a highly volatile business and I did not want to go back with my tail between my legs. So I was like, we are going to make this work no matter what. So the first thing we did was to diversify the content and explode the amount the productivity. Everything at Barstool to this day is really monitored on productivity. The second was I created

As other platforms like YouTube, YouTube.

Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, you know, Sirius XM. Serious XM was one of the first big breaks for barstool. But I wanted to exist on every single platform out there, and I wanted to make the most of that platform. So I can remember going to Facebook. I write about this in the book. When I was you know, twenty sixteen, I had a meeting with Facebook that somebody gave to me as a favor, and the like sports guy at Facebook like pats me on the head and is like,

So you mentioned multiple lines of revenue and earlier used one of my favorite words, you said, the jankiest app. Ever, you would think that building an app isn't that hard in the modern era. What was the problem with the app and what did you do to fix that? Because you know, everybody walks around with the phone in their pocket. I think more people access I don't care, Instagram, TikTok,

Oh, the app was a disaster. I mean when I got there, I think they had an IT person part time, like fifteen hours a week or something.

So some high school kid working out it was a.

Really talented guy. It just so we hired him full time, and then we hired more engineers, and we hired product people, and you know, we made the app functional. You can watch video in the app, you could read a blog in the app, you could listen to our podcasts in the app. So, you know, a lot of it what we had all the right problems in a way where we had audience, we had content that people liked and responded to. We had a workhorse team where Barstool is

I love this quote, and we're going to talk about the book in a minute, but you wrote it was a heart attack every day for nine years. Yeah, that sounds kind of like talk about stressful but fun.

It was amazing. I mean it was look, it was just very alive. It was a heart attack. Every day. It was a heart attack because you never you never knew where stuff was coming from. You like your head was on a swivel twenty four to seven at barstool.

Want to know how online they are and how quick they ought to respond and are they serious?

We work in sports. Sports happens on nights and weekends and on holiday weekend and on holidays, and the stuff that goes wrong at barstool goes wrong Friday afternoon at seven thirty or Friday evening. So I needed people who were bought into that. And if you weren't going to buy into that. You should just not come here.

And that's the brown m and ms with Van Halen, it's the same you know, they used to put we know, brown m and ms in the rider because they want to know someone has read to page ten of a fifteen page rider with all the complicated electronics and set up. If you're texting somebody on Thanksgiving Day, right because we're watching the Ohio Michigan game, and they don't respond, they're probably not yeah.

Right, they're not right to work here, and this isn't right for them, you know, speaking of Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving night, we always launched a Black Friday sale at midnight on Thanksgiving and we would work until four in the morning getting people's orders, getting orders out. If you don't want to do that, you should not work at Barstools Sports.

So here's the question. It's a heart attack every day, the app is janky, the Times is trying to cancel you. How do you morph that into five thousand percent revenue gains ultimately leading multiple sales of the company for half a billion dollars. That seems like quite a challenge.

Yeah, it was awesome. It was awesome. I think there was so much noise. There was so much noise that it made it almost became quiet, if that made sense. There was too much to pay attention to, so I really chose to only focus on Barstool. Everyone had an opinion, everyone had a criticism, Everyone had a sky is falling moment about this, that or the other thing. And there was such a cacoff any of all of that and more that it really made it quite almost peaceful in the inside, because.

I of the hurricane.

You're in the eye of the hurricane. And you know, I said it when I joined Barstool. I don't know if I wrote about it in the book, but I had a choice. I had a choice to either apologize to everyone Barstool had offended or try to placate everyone who didn't like barstool or had concerns about Barstool. And don't get me wrong, I did spend a huge amount of time doing that, but that wasn't why I was there, and that wasn't actually what I was very interested in.

So we have kind of a cancel culture that has reared its head, especially in comedy. Do you I think Barstool succeeded despite cancel culture or because of cancel culture? Was it the pushback to that?

It's a great question. I think Barstool always was aided by an enemy.

Having an enemy, you had to have someone to fight again, You had to have.

Someone to fight again, you had to have something else to find yourself by. And look, I think most most editorial people, business people, and certainly comics were canceled, and the only ones who did not get canceled were those that pushed back. And Barstool was very good at pushing back. We're very very good at that.

So how do you look at the media world today? Be it social media and TikTok, YouTube has kind of grown up, and even blogs have kind of become mainstreamed. What do you see based on all your experiences at Barstool when you look out at the world.

Oh, I think media is so interesting. I think media as most people in their fifties or you know, late forties fifties would say it's dead. You know, traditional media is does not have the hold. It is not defining, It is not definitive. Things do not have a clear beginning and ending. Everything is amorphous. Everything is living on different feeds and is so fast, like media has become so very fast.

I know, this is it new. I've read about this in the twenty late twenty tens. Eighteen nineteen twenty something went a little viral over the weekend on Twitter where this woman it actually comes from an insta video. She and her boyfriend each on their phone. She's like, oh, check out this video on instid and she sends it to him and they're both kind of shocked to see they each have completely different comments. It's not their video, they're viewing someone else's video, but because of the way

Well exactly the world. You know, everyone is in a bubble and they're speaking of cacophony like you only hear. You're just served more of what you're interested in, whether it's somebody's opinion, whether it's a piece of content, whether it's the next video, and it's a you know, it's a difficult, it's scary. I actually think it's quite scary.

Well, when when everybody lives in their own world, it's one thing to have separate opinions. Now everybody has separate facts. But that's that's a whole nother thing. So I mentioned Barstool was sold. Let's go over that. So you have the initial investment fifty one percent for about fifteen million dollars. Three subsequent sales. In twenty twenty, Penn National Gaming acquires thirty six percent for one hundred and sixty three million dollars.

Yeah, I mean it was amazing. I spent a year of my life on that deal. And you know, Dave and I knew when PASPO was repealed. When PASPO was.

Repealed, define passbo for people who am not.

PASPO was legalized sports betting state by state, right, so.

The Supreme Court case throws out correct something and then suddenly, well, bets.

Are on, Oh, bets, we're on. And so we knew we were always looking for an acquisition. So in the early days of Barstool, or at least early days of my time twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, the bet was that it would be a media company who would acquire Barstool. It was becoming more evident as time went on that it was not going to be ESPN or Disney.

Who were sports gambling.

Yeah, perfect, and so the avenue was sports gambling. So that the gun went off, and you know, we met with all different types of sports betting operators, and pen you know, came to the table and became the right partner at the time for Barstool, and so they bought you know, they were deliberate about it, where they bought a thirty six percent steak, and then I think two or three years later they would buy the balance of the company and that.

Was the remaining sixty four percent for three hundred and eighty eight million dollars. Now you don't mention in the book if you were incentivized with stocked. But I assume you're joining a startup, of course you want some ectently what led them in twenty twenty three to say, all right, we want the whole thing.

There was a series of puts and calls in the in the deal obviously, and the bet that Pen was made was Pen needed a brand for its sports betting operation. They needed a partner who could drive audience, and they had a belief at the time of driving growth profitably whereby you could organically acquire customers. The single biggest cost in sports betting is the acquisition of betters. Betters are fickle, they're smart, They're going for the best deal or offer best odds.

They know math.

They know math, or at least exactly exactly. And Penn wanted to arrive with a brand, and they felt that Barstool could offer that to them better than they could

So this is three years or so in and then late last year they decide, you know what, we can't stick with Barstool. It's causing other frictions. They sell it back to Portnoy for a dollar along with a non compete, and if he sells it they get fifty percent. What led them to saying, all right, this isn't working out for us legally or financially.

Yeah, I mean, I think the marriage between Barstool and Pen was tough, right Penn. You know, one is that there's a publicly traded company, highly highly regulated sports betting is you know, at the time was so nascent in this country. And you know, if you think about it, they had all of these different state regulators, they had

I'm always shocked when I see an acquisition where it's obvious, you know, you want to get the good in the bad, and when you make an acquisition like that, it's warts and all. But nobody can ever accuse Portnoy of saying, oh, you really didn't reveal who you were. I mean, it's an open a book.

It was very clear who we were.

Kind of makes you wonder what they're thinking.

You know, look, I think I think they wanted a brand, and I think it was very smart to be honest with you. We you know, Barstool is the most engaging, fastest growing, covers more sports, with more level of interest, with a very young demographic or not very young, but you know, a twenty to thirty nine year old audience, like it's.

Which is tough to acquire, it's.

Impossible to acquire.

So was this Was this a win for PEN? I mean, net net, they spend a half a billion dollars. By the time they're done, it's probably closer to three quarters of billion dollars over those three years. Did they capture enough clients and or revenue to make this worthwhile? I mean, it's obviously a win for Dave, and it's obviously a win for Barstool. Did what was the Was it a break even for Pen? Was it all? Oh?

No, that's a great question. I don't think i'd be the right person to answer that. You know, I think there was an incredible database built with the Barstool Sportsbook fans. Two is I think we all learned an incredible amount. And three, you know, I think they you know, they'll go into twenty twenty four, twenty twenty five, twenty twenty six, obviously with ESPN way smarter than they went in with us in twenty nineteen.

Why did you want to write a book? It's so much work.

It is so much work. I wanted to write a book. I started writing the book after the first PEN acquisition, and I had enjoyed prior to that, a very fast paced, fast growing, highly consuming time at Barstool that was insanely creative. And when we started to become more and more integrated with PEN, I found my job becoming more and more about big company things versus exploring frontiers of the Internet, and I was kind of missing the creativity. So I started to write notes on my phone on the train

So it wasn't a group email.

Now.

I just like I emailed, just checking and check it, which was insanely dumb. But and then I created a podcast, a ten minute a day podcast, because it was easier, obviously to do one to many versus one to one. But I really had wanted to connect. And one of the things that kind of developed out of the podcast was I like to work. I like to talk about work. I like to think about work. I think about work all the time. I'm curious how people behave at work.

Hum, that's interesting. I want to ask you about the writing process working with a group of people, pirate ship or otherwise. It's a very collaborative, interactive process. I really love writing, but I find it's it's very much you're by yourself. It's very introspective and as creative as it is, it's so different than working with the group of people. How did how did you find that relative to the organized chaos, you would.

Yeah, it's I had the same I had the same experience barer where it's lonely, it's very intense. It's I find it very emotional, where it's like you have all of these things spilling out of you onto this page and you're feeling, you know, you're feeling through your fingertips. I found it hard to turn it off and turn it on, you know, when you're dealing with problems at work or the demands of the day, it's like, you know,

Only then you've done better than that. What's the old joke? I apologize for the length of the letter. I didn't have time to make it shorter, exactly. It's the secret is respecting the audience's time and cutting out anything that is in you know, muscle and sin you And that's hard, Yeah, a lot of hard. A lot of writers find that's their fail point because they fall in love with their own words.

I'm religious about it.

Yeah. Yes, So let's talk a little bit about the book first. I got to start. I love the title nobody cares about your career. Give us a little color on that.

Yeah, I think you know, we are struggling to find a book title. And Nobody cares about your career is a chapter in the book. And why I like it as a title is that it's true, like nobody cares about your career. You should do what makes you happy. You should give yourself to it fully, and you should make choices in your career. And I would argue your life that are good for you, not because you think it's what you should be doing or it's what you

You know, I have a chapter and an upcoming book about your responsible for your portfolio. I may have to steal this and change it. Nobody cares about your portfolio because really, what you're saying is, hey, it's and you. The whole back third of the book is this is your life, your career. You're the one who's gonna make it or break it. If you're waiting for the cavalry to come. You forget I got some bad news for you. So I really thought the title was great, The Ultimate

I think crushing it at work is loving your work. I think it's very in vogue right now to not love your work. I think it's popular. I think it's kind of coolting why quitting? You know, Lazy Girl Summer blah blah blah.

That one I haven't heard. Oh, okay, I'm.

Lazy Girl Summer is like, you know, I talk about this in the book, which is Lazy Girl Summer is like you just want to have better photos on your Instagram or better short videos on your TikTok about your weekend, and you know that's what you should be living for. But I really believe that work is, you know, and I write about this, is that work is tuition. It's

Right, that's interesting. I've been through all those since you brought up education, Let me skip ahead. Learning is everything. That chapter totally resonated with me. Learn something from everyone, Just shut up and listen and make learning a game. Tell us about why learning is so important to somebody young and new in their career.

Yeah, you know, my parents are teachers, so we whether my brother and I wanted to or not, we were going to be learning. Like we didn't grow up with a television. You could like play sports or stack would or read a book those or do chores. Those are the four options in my house. But I really believe that learn that you can learn something from everyone. You know, I talk a little bit about my first internship job at Fidelity, and you know what, the people I could

That sounds very humble, which is not the word that comes to mind when you think barstool sports. Humility doesn't kind of pop into your mind. But what you're really describing is something that's very humble.

You have to be humble. You know. If I had gone into barstool and been, you know, like King Kong to the thing and like beat my chest and been like I know how this is going to work, this is how we're going to do it. I have it all figured out, they would have kicked me out immediately because none of those are true, you know, And a lot of what I write about in the book is like your insecurity is one of your greatest strengths because.

Explaining because if you can be humble, and you can recognize that while yes, you know a lot and.

You are capable of a great deal, you have a lot to learn, you have a lot to assess, you have a lot to intuitively feel and ascertain. It enables you to still pursue your vision and pursue your accomplishments, but while gaining insight from others. And in that process of gaining insight, you will create trust and you will create you know, a tighter connection with people. And I think that's sometimes where people miss out, and it's you know, look,

Zoom, especially for young people. You learn and through osmosis through not just mentorship, but just being in the thing.

In the mix. You just got to be in the mix. So, you know, I think this book is really about get over yourself. Get over your ego, get over your insecurity, get over whatever you think you're great at or you're terrible at. Put yourself in a situation where you can gain as much information as possible, put that into your quiver, and go out to battle.

Let's talk about failure. There are a bunch of quotes in the book about why you should why failure is the best teacher. I like foling down is the best way to get good at getting up. But you literally start a chapter fail, seriously fail.

Explain Yeah, I think failure is good, you know, like I've failed all the time. I still fail all the time. And the thing about failing is everyone is human. They're going to fail, you know. And let's until we all work with robots and chat GPT, Like, there's going to be failure in every enterp you go after, work, life, family, you name it, health, whatever. And the problem I see is if you do not get comfortable failing, you start to calcify. And when you calcify, you become quite brittle.

If you're not failing, it really means you're too risk averse.

You're not taking any chances Yeah, you're not.

Trying like it not everything is bad on the ball and you make it to first exactly. Sometimes you got to swing and that means you've got to strike out. Ye. Actually right, people, people have the wrong attitude about failure. My pet theory is what the reason Silicon Valley is as successful as it is in the United States, is such an entrepreneurial nation is the penalty for failure in Europe is pretty egregious. You fail in the United States,

It's the American dream.

There is no scarlet letter for failure. But old Europe has a very different attitude about that.

Yeah. I think failure is really, really, really important. And look, there are big failures and there's little failures. If you're learning and trying things, you're going to fail every day. Think about an athlete. You know, you play a game for sixty minutes and you don't kick every ball the right way, you don't make every pass the right way,

Jordan quote I've succeeded because I've taken so many last minute shots that I've missed. I've missed eleven thousand. Where the line is is great, but I want to bring it to you. What failures can you identify in your experience that ultimately led to a more positive outcome.

Oh, I mean so many. I fail all the time. I made so many mistakes at barstool. I made so many mistakes at every job before I went to Barstool. I'm making mistakes at food fifty two literally as we speak. So you know, and I think the types of mistakes are. You know. The good thing about mistakes is it gives you this this ability to trust your gut, which is also what I talk a lot about in the book. So you know, my mistakes have been I struck the wrong partnership. I knew what was wrong, but I did

There are two related quotes that I have to ask you about, and they both seem to be about sports, but I wonder if they're really not. The first is the Great Ones play Hurt, which is right from the cover of the book, from the subtitle. I mean, obviously we understand what that means in sports, but how do you relate this to your professional life?

Yeah? I think I love that line. I think it's just a great line. I trademarked it, but did you really I did the Great Ones play Hurt.

That has before.

Wow, that's amazing, Like a trademarking machine. I'll trademark anything, but it's just too stupid, but I do it. The Great Ones Play Hurt is about resilience and you know when you see it on the on the football field or you see it in in athletics, there's a heroism to it, you know.

So so it's exhaustion, injuries.

Ships are down, you know, it's you're you're you're somehow held back or coming from behind. And what it really is about, it's about will, and it's about perseverance, and it is about an inner strength that that propels you to go further than you buy, you know, passing observation, think you could. And so I think what's important at work is I think a lot of times people just row in the towel and they say, eugh, we're behind, or.

You're frustrated, and that's it.

You know, my arm's tied behind my back or you know, this is stupid how this is done, and then they give up. And the reality is is that because work is full of humans, work is flawed. People are flawed, businesses are flawed, industries are flawed. Things change and you have to be able to persevere through that even when hurt. And the great ones.

Do that really interesting and then the sort of related quote that you know again another thing that resonated with me. Your environment will always be relentless.

Yes, explain, I am a big believer in this one. So it's osmosis. We've actually talked a lot about it. Where your environment is relentless. If you surround yourself or find yourself in a job, or in a social circle or wherever with a bunch of people who are not motivated, negative, pessimistic, complacent, comfortable, even if you are the biggest spark of life or the biggest amount of drive, they will get to you. It will, it will, it will assimilate into you. And

A ton of insight and a ton of She's a three dimensional chess player and.

She's got it all yeah, I knew that that was relentless, and I knew she could take me and morph me into places that I could not get to myself. And that's choosing an environment. A person can create, and a person can create an environment.

And the really interesting thing about that is there is a ton of academic literature that supports exactly what you're describing. And it goes just beyond the attitude to health outcomes and exercise and smoking and divorce. And it's crazy that if a certain percentage of people in your immediate thirty group of people get divorced, the odds of your divorce goes up sure, or certain health outcomes, or.

It's cancer, heart disease.

It's insane, but it you know, the environment you select for yourself.

Yeah, it's important, Yeah, it really is.

So let's talk about vision. You talk about having a vision and sticking with it, make it audacious and plausible.

A vision is really important, and I think most people, I think a lot of people fall down for themselves and fall down at work because they do not have a vision and of it.

Let me interrupt your sex. When I started that chapter, I was like, Ugh, here comes some vision board nonsense. And by the end of the chapter, I'm like, oh, okay, I totally get what she's saying. She's dead on you. Totally won me over.

That's awesome. You know, I agree with you. Vision is one of those like, ugh, like high falutin words. It's you know, fuzzy and like wrapped in caush, squishy so squishy word. But what I mean by vision is you need to articulate something new you want to be or someplace knew you would like to go. And the you in this case could be yourself, it could be your family, it could be your team, it could be the project

It's becomes purposeful and now you have an objective beyond exactly just the mundanity. Is that a word?

Yeah, it's like the lemmingness of it all.

Interesting. So towards the end of the book there's an interesting discussion, but I want to have you articulate it. How do you decide when it's time to go? On? What determines when, for better or worse time to go.

It's time to go? You know, this is a hard one. You know, I've always been really sensitive. I was always very insecure that I would run out of a job. When I lived in Boston, there was a point in time where Austin started to feel kind of small, and I worried that with every job that I got that there would be less jobs for me to get in the future, Which.

Well, isn't that true? As you work your way there's a million people in a law firm, since you want to be a lawyer. At one point, there's a million first year associates. Yeah, and then there's only so many middle associates, and then by the time you get to the top of the pyramid, it's one to ten ratio of partners exactly worker bees. So that's true in most fields right exact, the better you do the less choices.

Yea, the better you do, the less choices. And so what I always really wanted was that for every job I took, that it opened the door to five new jobs, and it created new opportunity, and that was very That was very important to me, and I think that that's important for people at work. And I think a lot of times what happens at work is you just get caught up in the who did what to whom and who screwed up on what and why, And that also

That environment sounds relentless. It is so well. By the way, when I first read that quote, I thought you were talking about the competitive nature of the world, not necessarily who you'd surround yourself, But both turn out to be true.

It's true.

So given that what ultimately led you to the decision to join food fifty two, tell us a little bit about it. Your new gig and how did you transition?

Yeah, so sorry, And I missed your question on the last one at all. So one of the funny things I think about this book is it's being written by someone who is in the midst of her own career and making mistakes every day and making choices every day.

You can you hear the train whistle off?

Yeah?

I do exactly know what's coming.

Yep, that's right. So you know, I think, for me someone you should always be scaring yourself. You should always be putting yourself in an environment where maybe you know seventy percent of the stuff for sixty percent of the stuff, but you don't know forty percent of the stuff. And I was very eager. You know, the year twenty twenty three,

You get to double it.

Yeah, we crushed it. You know that barstool will do three hundred million dollars in revenue?

Is what is that what they're up to?

Now?

That's a serious agari.

Yeah, it's a big media company. And I was looking at my own career and myself and saying, God, I've exited this company twice in a year, and we're going to do three hundred million dollars in revenue. Dave owns the pirate Ship now, which is exactly how it should be. This is the right ending to this story, Like, this is the right he's got this. I did what I came to do, and I was I always I like to work, so I you know, I wanted to still work.

And if you had to pick something that was one hundred and eighty degrees from barstool, a woman co founded home and food site, I mean it's pretty much it, right. That's so, what has it been like teeing up? This is new? You started?

Yeah, brand new, you know, it's funny. Yet I had gotten approached by a lot of companies and sports and a lot of sports betting companies, and they're done kind of men's lifestyle, and I was like, look, if I'm going to do any of that, I'm a stake. Barshool's the best. Like, there no chance I'm leaving Barstool if I want to work in sports.

And so I see even if like an ESPN or the athletic definitely like a you don't want to be involved in a big, corporate owned institution like that.

I don't think anyone. I don't think any company in sports could replicate what we created at Barstool.

Well, they wouldn't want to replicate it. They would want to.

Be they want to choose. Yeah, they'd want to morph that into their But you know that to me is I feel very loyal to Barstool. So I'm like, I just that would feel disingenuous, I think. But it is radically different. It is, you know, and it's a different company. It's been around since I don't know the you know, twenty fourteen. It's been through a lot of eras, it's had a lot of different management teams, so you know,

All right. So before we get to our favorite questions that I ask all of our guests, I got to throw one curveball question at you about the book because I honestly don't know the answer to this. Who is the book written for? Because as I was prepping and doing the research for this, Oh, this is a book for a bunch of young women in their careers. But by the time I'm through this, that wasn't my takeaway.

Yeah?

Is that?

Is that a fair question? Very?

Uh?

But I mean it's a it's a it's list a debate.

Yeah, but in your mind, who who was the target audience when you began and how might that have changed when you finished it.

I think this book is for anybody who cares about what they do all day, which I realize is kind of a nothing answer, But I do think this book can speak to you if you're motivated, you care, Maybe you're stuck, maybe you lost your way, maybe you want to change and you're four or you're twenty. I think, on its face value, it looks like a book for

Good but I think it does a nice job at that time. Thank you, So you must be very proud of this, especially this is your first book. It is that that's a tough book. Yeah, that's good item. And I'm going to get to a couple of questions that I think you'll find interesting relative to the book. Let's jump to our favorite us, starting with what has been keeping you entertained these days? Be it podcasts or Netflix? What are you streaming now?

I love content, so I know who I'm talking about. I watch a lot of content. I'm trying to watch this documentary called carter Land on Jimmy Carter. Have you heard about this?

I've heard of it, I haven't seen it.

I watched it on a delta flight. I cannot find it. Last night I downloaded Max. I looked up Hulu, I was on Paramount, I was on Netflix, I was on Amazon. There actually is a problem, and discovery of specific.

Discovery is the biggest challenge in such a problem, and nobody does it well nobody.

So I was trying to watch that last night. I ended up watching Explained by Vox. I don't know if you've watched that.

I know Fox does these explainers.

Yes, it's like a great little series, Like twenty four minutes we watched plastic surgery, cults and fairy tales.

Huh, that's really interesting. Like what did they say about cults? Because I have a great book. If that interesting?

Was very interesting, Just the dynamics, it's all. It's all the same fundamentals of how a cult is created.

So this guy named Will Stohrer was a I want to say, a journalist out of Australia and he used to embed himself like all the wackiest cults. So it was the flat earthers, the Holocaust deniers like And what's surprised in the book was not that these people are all nuts. It's that something very fundamental early in their building of their personal model of the universe is a skew and everything built on top of that, is it.

It's funny because that that was my take. I was like, oh, politics is a cult.

Yeah, well it's very tribal. But anyway, if you're at all interested that, I thought, Uh, Heretics of Science by Will Stone. Oh that's a great fascinating all right, So you mentioned those two any other streamers. You're a big podcast person, Adam big Pot.

I mean to listen to the barstool podcasts.

Still you haven't broken the habit yet.

Now that's enough for me.

Huh, that's really interesting. So normally here I ask about your mentors. Obviously Joanne Bradford is going to come up. Tell us about who helped shape your career.

Oh, so many people. I was really really fortunate. Joanne was an incredible mentor. I worked for her for twelve years. Wenda Millard, who was kind of the opposite of Joanne at Yahoo. She's been an incredible, incredible mentor I have a really great women's mafia where you know, women who are older than me, women who are younger than me. So I feel very grateful. I've been able to learn from most pretty much everybody.

That's great. So I mentioned that other book. Let's talk about some of your favorites and what you're reading right now.

I'm reading a book right now called The Girl Who Smiled Beads, which is about the Rwandan genocide. So I was in Rwanda in February. Loved it, loved it, loved it. So I'm reading a book about the genocide. And then I'm very late on this novel called A Little Life, which i'm also reading.

Someone else recommended that.

It's supposed to be amazing. It's like a group of friends in New York City.

Huh. Interesting. And our final two questions, and the first one is, you know, perfect for the book. What sort of advice would you give a recent college grad interested in a career in either media contents management today?

I would give anybody graduate from college the advice just to get a job and to work your butt off, and it really doesn't matter so much those first couple jobs. What industry it's in or where it's located. I think I was always a little bit scared when I was not a little bit. I was scared when I was in my twenties to like jump out of the nest. And if I were to do it all over again, I would have moved to California in my twenties and worked my butt off and then come back to the

When you don't have a mortgage or kids in school, you could take a risk and if you fail, you'd try over.

Cares which you can still fail and that, you know, that's a big message of the book. Anyone can fail. Everyone does fail all the time, but the reverberations of failure start to affect other people. You know, the older you get.

When you have a fifty year professional horizon, you know you want to make mistakes earlier one through ten, not year thirty through four.

That's right.

The consequences are there. It's not just we had fun with a whole lot of vocabulary words. It's not just the resiliency, but the ability to recover and shake it off. Yeah, you don't get that when you're fifty five sixty five in a career. I think that's great advice. Our final question, what do you know about the world of media content marketing today? You wish you knew in the late nineties when you were first getting started.

Ooh, that is a great question, Barry. I think I'm so grateful to have worked in content and media and to have tripped into this Internet in the late nineties. I don't think I would have this ride if I were to jump into this now, or the luxury of that much change. So, you know, I think media content consumption consumers is they're just so fragmented and I it's deafening the amount of fragmentation. Things that used to be

You know, there is a discussion taking place about the death of the Internet. I don't know how much of that as an exaggeration, but the bulkanization process that you're describing, it's real. And you know, back in the day there were three networks. You'd go to the off and there would be water cooler conversations about the broadcast show last night. Every word in that sentence is anachronistic. None of those things. There's no more water coolers, there's no more broadcasts, there

Well, and to your earlier point, you and I could have, somehow, in a miraculous fashion, watched the same thing last night. But what you saw and what I saw will be dramatically different.

And that's the challenge of an algo driven media world, is that no two people are seeing the same thing anymore. Yeah, crazy, Well, Erica, thank you for being so generous with your time. This has been delightful. We have been speaking with Erica ayers Badon. She is the author of Nobody Cares About Your Career, Why Failure Is Good, The Great Ones, Play Hurt, and other hard truths. If you enjoy this conversation, well check out any of the previous five hundred and chain we've